More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
25 March
First thoughts after just seeing the film, to be added to, revised, etc., as time and reading other comments permit
* NB Contains spoilers *
Preamble : I do not know about US mental-health or criminal law, but I do know about sections 37 and 41 of the Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended), where it used to be that, before the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office would receive psychiatric reports and decide whether someone could fully or conditionally be discharged from section. Such people had been found to have committed a criminal offence, but, because of their mental-health condition, were being held in hospital, not in prison.
What we are shown seems similar, though it is implausible that Pat’s mother could just turn up, sign a document, and take him home there and then (or, equally, that it would not be known beforehand that police officer Keogh had been allocated to supervise Pat (Bradley Cooper) in the community) : in the UK, the 1983 Act would only allow Pat’s mother to take him off even a non-criminal section by giving 72 hours in which the consultant could object to it on the basis that he would be a danger to himself or others.
As I suggest, a far cry - even if perhaps necessary to a plot where Pat's father does not even know that it is happening - from seemingly just 'bowling up' and getting Pat signed over...
Pros :
1. Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal (as Tiffany Maxwell) of someone with mental-health issues as straightforward and open, genuine, and not excusing what, in Pat, did not have to be that way.
2. That Pat (Bradley Cooper) responds to her, albeit just initially just by talking about medication at her sister's dinner table, because they share something.
3. That Tiffany is shown throwing back in Pat's face his hierarchy of craziness, where she is ‘worse than’ he, because she ended up being highly promiscuous for a while (after her husband has been killed when helping another driver), and where, as she tells him, he throws back in her face what she has trusted him with in friendship.
Cons :
1. Bradley Cooper’s portrayal (as Pat) of someone with mental-health issues who cannot control himself, and lacks compassion, tact and understanding, because he is the one with the history of undiagnosed bi-polar disorder, and the implication might be that those traits or behaviours are part and parcel of the diagnosis.
2. The notion that regular therapy would not only be available, but provided, in a medical culture so rooted to medication. (The therapy gets conveniently forgotten, once Pat encounters Dr Patel at a football game, as do the charges and consequences of what happens there, because the film presents him as doing nothing other than rehearsing with Tiffany and collapsing.)
3. The suggestion from Pat that he can recognize OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder*) in his father Patrizio just because he likes the remote-controllers in a certain arrangement, which is a regression even on Jack Nicholson's character in As Good as it Gets. Pat has been in a psychiatric unit for eight months, and so should know better, because (as suggested at point 5) he has got close enough to people to understand how they tick and feel.
4. The whole film, of course, has a bit of a feel that, just as Jack Nicholson in that other film 'just needed the love of a good woman to take him out of himself' (i.e. Helen Hunt), so Pat just needs to accept that he loves Tiffany and wants to care for her.
5. Danny (Chris Tucker) is shown as engaging, but with recurrent fixed thought-patterns that prevent his engagement with others. Nonetheless, Pat and he have a friendship, which must mean that Pat is capable of getting beyond his self-centredness(contrary to what point 1 in this list suggests. Danny has a pretty understandable desire to escape from the unit at Baltimore, but, when he is legitimately out (prior to which Pat, somehow, has been finding time to write to him), he is suddenly transformed into a with-it guy, making Pat jealous by demonstrating dance-moves with Tiffany - the transformation would have been interesting to know more of.
6. Putting points 4 and 5 in this list together, the message appears to be that mental ill-health arises from self-obsession, and that learning to focus one's attention on the needs and feelings of another is all that is needed as a cure. Which is about as true to the world of such conditions as bi-polar disorder as films like Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) are to psychiatric practice or Marnie (1964) is to breaking through a neurosis by finding 'the key'.
Watch this space !
End-notes
* Some people seriously believe, as someone with the condition once told me, that it stood for Obsessive Cleaning Disorder.
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Sunday 24 March 2013
Saturday 23 March 2013
Kristin at the Harold Pinter Theatre I
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
24 March
I admit that I went to see Old Times, not because of Rufus Sewell, or because of Lia Williams, but Kristin Scott Thomas, who played Emma so beautifully in the same director’s, Ian Rickson’s, production a few years ago (since when The Comedy has become The Harold Pinter Theatre). (Quite apart, even if IMDb ratings disagree, from her striking roles in In Your Hands (2010), Leaving (2009), In Your Hands (2010), The Woman in the Fifth (2011), and I’ve Loved You So Long (2008)*.)
I have seen this play before, and the role of Kate has its difficulties. Moreover, Williams and she have their work cut out by a schedule that has them alternating who will play it, and who her friend Anna, from one performance to another – even, when there is a matinee, within one day, and, on a few days, ‘the actresses playing the roles of Kate and Anna will be decided on the night of the performance with a coin toss’ ! I’m not sure whether it’s gimmickry, but it will have me seeking a time to see KST as Anna.
Anna is the part that Pinter’s first wife, Vivien Merchant**, played – I knew that she had appeared in it, her last of his, but had assumed / misremembered her being Kate – and, to my eye, there are facial similarities between her and KST. (Likewise, I found a still of Pinter appearing in the play as Deeley, and his Kate was Nicola Pagett.) Getting back to the actresses swapping the roles, they obviously aren’t a pair, being mistaken one for the other, in the way of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but it is an interesting thing for the freshness, the dynamics, of the staging to do it.
Talking, before the performance, to some people sitting near me, I explained about how Old Times confuses or blends memory, imagination and reality, and how alliances are tacitly proposed by one to another against the third. However, they shift, so that the characters also employ challenges to each other’s recollection, status, even the words that they use, and sometimes outright intimidate. These skeletal remembrances of my last encounter with the play were to hand, but not, even if it had been wanted, the detail of the unfolding.
Afterwards, waiting at the stage door, I talked to a couple who had not known the play before, but read good reviews, knew some of the films, and wanted to see KST. As we chatted about it, there was a convenient centre-ground that what really happened is down to interpretation***, resulting from my clarifying that the silent tableau acted out at the end is what Anna told us about earlier, with the unknown man in Kate's and her shared room, and his head in Kate's lap, etc.****.
As our discussion progressed, the intriguing suggestion arose that Kate and Anna are perhaps the same person : what if they were, with the visit of Anna as some sort of psychological way of interpreting the things in Kate that Deeley could relate to better, if she took the form of Anna ? The play was first put on in 1971, and Pinter had had that affair with Bakewell in the decade before, so maybe he knew all about, as the case might be, splitting up his affections between two women, or having a publicly visible wife and another with whom he had an unacknowledged intimacy.
If so, I cannot see the situation with Merchant, Pinter and Bakewell, although credited as the origins of the later play Betrayal, being any more than the germ of it or (of Old Times) : this is not Pinter working out his angst and anguish, and actually puts me more in mind of Beckettt’s aptly titled Play, another two women and a man, seemingly being tortured or interrogated about their past. Play was from 1963, and Beckettt and Pinter not only knew each other, but were friends (with a shared love of cricket, too).
The text supports this notion, because, at the close of a long speech towards the end of Act Two, Deeley says (talking to Kate about Anna) :
She thought she was you, said little, so little. Maybe she was you. Maybe it was you, having coffee with me, saying little, so little.
He wants both women, now as then (if there really ever was a then), so much is clear, and there he resembles Man in Play. Beckettt achieves a distillation of the essence of an affair by having the three voices speak parts of each of their story, one at a time and seemingly unaware of the others, literally disembodied (they are in urns), and, in the way that they are presented to us as spirits, compelled for eternity to tell their wrongs, they remind of the Inferno of Dante (beloved of Beckettt). In Pinter’s play, he muses on the uncertainties of memory, of identity, of remembering – or thinking to remember – another person and / or an event, and this production does justice to that aim.
I have already mentioned that Kate is on stage often enough with nothing to do. Scott Thomas did this perfectly, embodying this Kate who gets talked about, and who seems, if not other worldly, sometimes a bit emotionally distant – so much more dramatically stirring the flare-up, when she talks, in several chunks of text separated by silences and pauses, about Anna (who has no further words in the script), seems to gel with this notion that Anna is no more than she, killed off by having Deeley come to her room.
But perhaps Deeley, too, is Anna / Deeley, because Kate first describes Anna :
Your face was dirty. You lay dead, your face scrawled with dirt, all kinds of earnest inscriptions, but unblotted, so that they had run, all over your face, down to your throat.
Then, after a pause marked, in the same speech, she continues addressing Anna, but talks about Deeley :
I dug about in the windowbox, where you had planted our pretty pansies, scooped, filled the bowl, and plastered his face with dirt. He was bemused, aghast, resisted, resisted with force. He would not let me dirty his face, or smudge it, he wouldn’t let me.
The unclean face, the repetition of ‘dirty’ (albeit as a verb), and the vivid reminder of the description of Anna’s in ‘smudge’, they all suggest some link. Anna is said to be ‘lying dead’, with its finality, and Deeley’s response in the immediately succeeding words, proposes a solution to Anna and being in London (the explanation of the apparent opening present day) :
He suggested a wedding instead, and a change of environment.
Slight pause
Neither mattered.
The succeeding, closing words of the play, still from Kate, amount to a denial of Anna’s ever having existed :
He asked me once, about that time, who had slept in that bed before him. I told him no one. No one at all.
There has been a fair amount of barbed comment from Deeley to her, such as this exchange (about Anna’s possibly fanciful claims regarding her home and husband) :
Anna : He’s not a vegetarian. In fact he’s something of a gourmet. We live in a rather fine villa and have done so for many years. It’s very high up, on the cliffs.
Deeley : You eat well up there, eh ?
Anna : I would say so, yes.
Kate related (if Anna weren’t the side of Kate that she killed to become Deeley’s wife) Anna being dead, then, in almost magically-sounding way abouttaking Deeley to where she lived, ‘When I brought him into the room your body of course had gone’, then putting on his face, and his proposal : Deeley has substituted for / become Anna.
Seen from his perspective, the closing tableau of a sobbing Deeley, seeking attention or comfort from the women in turn, then, as Kate sits on her bed and Anna lies on hers, sitting in the armchair embodies a possible, but difficult, choice between the quiet Kate, who likes to go for walks, and the Anna who says (again, not convincingly) that she likes parties, the Tate and concerts.
As if as a provocation to Deeley, who claims to have been watching a film in an empty cinema in when he first saw Kate and spoke to her outside, Anna asserts that Kate hustled her out to ‘some totally unfamiliar district and, almost alone, saw a wonderful film called Odd Man Out’(the same film). After these words, a silence is marked, and then Deeley abruptly says ‘Yes, I do quite a bit of travelling in my job’, which Sewell reinforced by an angry look at Anna and tone.
We will never know what is going on amongst this apparent three any more than they, if they are three, do themselves, or what Deeley’s job and travelling are really about. As with all good art, what matters is how this play makes us think about what we see, remembering what Anna said :
There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.
Three slight hesitations with the performance. First, when Deeley takes a second brandy, what Sewell is (meant to be) doing with his gyrations across the sofa on which Anna is sitting from behind it was beyond me. Later, I felt that he allowed the pace to go a little too slack in, I think, the long speech where he confuses the women, or in a sustained exchange with one of the others, when he is centre stage. And, finally, there is supposed to be a long silence, after lying across Kate’s lap, and before very slowly sitting up (the sitting up was not slow either), but that may be Rickson’s direction.
Now on the blog : when KST played Anna instead
End-notes
* I throw a veil over Bel Ami (2012), not because KST isn’t good, but because she had been miscast as an older woman, who, through childlike desire and infatuation, gains a glow of someone more the real age of the actress.
** Curiously, to judge from the write-up of Pinter in the back pages of the programme, you’d have thought that he lived with Antonia Fraser for a while before marrying her, not that he’d already been married and a father, let alone had an affair with Joan Bakewell…
*** Perhaps one of the starting-points for Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, precisely about interpretation, with (in the production that I saw) another three characters, Nils Bohr, his wife, and Werner Heisenberg, circling each other - and their relationships - like particles in an atom.
**** That speech, in context, shows what I first thought about the play when I read it, because there are pages of script leading up this point when just Deeley and Anna are talking (usually about Kate), and some stage business is needed for the listening Kate. (Between them, Rickson and Scott Thomas (and, no doubt, Williams) did this immensely well.) As she remarks, it’s almost as if she is dead or cannot hear them, an intensified form of what happens – as here – when some long-lost friend of one partner is being asked by the other what he or she was like then.
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24 March
I admit that I went to see Old Times, not because of Rufus Sewell, or because of Lia Williams, but Kristin Scott Thomas, who played Emma so beautifully in the same director’s, Ian Rickson’s, production a few years ago (since when The Comedy has become The Harold Pinter Theatre). (Quite apart, even if IMDb ratings disagree, from her striking roles in In Your Hands (2010), Leaving (2009), In Your Hands (2010), The Woman in the Fifth (2011), and I’ve Loved You So Long (2008)*.)
I have seen this play before, and the role of Kate has its difficulties. Moreover, Williams and she have their work cut out by a schedule that has them alternating who will play it, and who her friend Anna, from one performance to another – even, when there is a matinee, within one day, and, on a few days, ‘the actresses playing the roles of Kate and Anna will be decided on the night of the performance with a coin toss’ ! I’m not sure whether it’s gimmickry, but it will have me seeking a time to see KST as Anna.
Anna is the part that Pinter’s first wife, Vivien Merchant**, played – I knew that she had appeared in it, her last of his, but had assumed / misremembered her being Kate – and, to my eye, there are facial similarities between her and KST. (Likewise, I found a still of Pinter appearing in the play as Deeley, and his Kate was Nicola Pagett.) Getting back to the actresses swapping the roles, they obviously aren’t a pair, being mistaken one for the other, in the way of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but it is an interesting thing for the freshness, the dynamics, of the staging to do it.
Talking, before the performance, to some people sitting near me, I explained about how Old Times confuses or blends memory, imagination and reality, and how alliances are tacitly proposed by one to another against the third. However, they shift, so that the characters also employ challenges to each other’s recollection, status, even the words that they use, and sometimes outright intimidate. These skeletal remembrances of my last encounter with the play were to hand, but not, even if it had been wanted, the detail of the unfolding.
Afterwards, waiting at the stage door, I talked to a couple who had not known the play before, but read good reviews, knew some of the films, and wanted to see KST. As we chatted about it, there was a convenient centre-ground that what really happened is down to interpretation***, resulting from my clarifying that the silent tableau acted out at the end is what Anna told us about earlier, with the unknown man in Kate's and her shared room, and his head in Kate's lap, etc.****.
As our discussion progressed, the intriguing suggestion arose that Kate and Anna are perhaps the same person : what if they were, with the visit of Anna as some sort of psychological way of interpreting the things in Kate that Deeley could relate to better, if she took the form of Anna ? The play was first put on in 1971, and Pinter had had that affair with Bakewell in the decade before, so maybe he knew all about, as the case might be, splitting up his affections between two women, or having a publicly visible wife and another with whom he had an unacknowledged intimacy.
If so, I cannot see the situation with Merchant, Pinter and Bakewell, although credited as the origins of the later play Betrayal, being any more than the germ of it or (of Old Times) : this is not Pinter working out his angst and anguish, and actually puts me more in mind of Beckettt’s aptly titled Play, another two women and a man, seemingly being tortured or interrogated about their past. Play was from 1963, and Beckettt and Pinter not only knew each other, but were friends (with a shared love of cricket, too).
The text supports this notion, because, at the close of a long speech towards the end of Act Two, Deeley says (talking to Kate about Anna) :
She thought she was you, said little, so little. Maybe she was you. Maybe it was you, having coffee with me, saying little, so little.
He wants both women, now as then (if there really ever was a then), so much is clear, and there he resembles Man in Play. Beckettt achieves a distillation of the essence of an affair by having the three voices speak parts of each of their story, one at a time and seemingly unaware of the others, literally disembodied (they are in urns), and, in the way that they are presented to us as spirits, compelled for eternity to tell their wrongs, they remind of the Inferno of Dante (beloved of Beckettt). In Pinter’s play, he muses on the uncertainties of memory, of identity, of remembering – or thinking to remember – another person and / or an event, and this production does justice to that aim.
I have already mentioned that Kate is on stage often enough with nothing to do. Scott Thomas did this perfectly, embodying this Kate who gets talked about, and who seems, if not other worldly, sometimes a bit emotionally distant – so much more dramatically stirring the flare-up, when she talks, in several chunks of text separated by silences and pauses, about Anna (who has no further words in the script), seems to gel with this notion that Anna is no more than she, killed off by having Deeley come to her room.
But perhaps Deeley, too, is Anna / Deeley, because Kate first describes Anna :
Your face was dirty. You lay dead, your face scrawled with dirt, all kinds of earnest inscriptions, but unblotted, so that they had run, all over your face, down to your throat.
Then, after a pause marked, in the same speech, she continues addressing Anna, but talks about Deeley :
I dug about in the windowbox, where you had planted our pretty pansies, scooped, filled the bowl, and plastered his face with dirt. He was bemused, aghast, resisted, resisted with force. He would not let me dirty his face, or smudge it, he wouldn’t let me.
The unclean face, the repetition of ‘dirty’ (albeit as a verb), and the vivid reminder of the description of Anna’s in ‘smudge’, they all suggest some link. Anna is said to be ‘lying dead’, with its finality, and Deeley’s response in the immediately succeeding words, proposes a solution to Anna and being in London (the explanation of the apparent opening present day) :
He suggested a wedding instead, and a change of environment.
Slight pause
Neither mattered.
The succeeding, closing words of the play, still from Kate, amount to a denial of Anna’s ever having existed :
He asked me once, about that time, who had slept in that bed before him. I told him no one. No one at all.
There has been a fair amount of barbed comment from Deeley to her, such as this exchange (about Anna’s possibly fanciful claims regarding her home and husband) :
Anna : He’s not a vegetarian. In fact he’s something of a gourmet. We live in a rather fine villa and have done so for many years. It’s very high up, on the cliffs.
Deeley : You eat well up there, eh ?
Anna : I would say so, yes.
Kate related (if Anna weren’t the side of Kate that she killed to become Deeley’s wife) Anna being dead, then, in almost magically-sounding way abouttaking Deeley to where she lived, ‘When I brought him into the room your body of course had gone’, then putting on his face, and his proposal : Deeley has substituted for / become Anna.
Seen from his perspective, the closing tableau of a sobbing Deeley, seeking attention or comfort from the women in turn, then, as Kate sits on her bed and Anna lies on hers, sitting in the armchair embodies a possible, but difficult, choice between the quiet Kate, who likes to go for walks, and the Anna who says (again, not convincingly) that she likes parties, the Tate and concerts.
As if as a provocation to Deeley, who claims to have been watching a film in an empty cinema in when he first saw Kate and spoke to her outside, Anna asserts that Kate hustled her out to ‘some totally unfamiliar district and, almost alone, saw a wonderful film called Odd Man Out’(the same film). After these words, a silence is marked, and then Deeley abruptly says ‘Yes, I do quite a bit of travelling in my job’, which Sewell reinforced by an angry look at Anna and tone.
We will never know what is going on amongst this apparent three any more than they, if they are three, do themselves, or what Deeley’s job and travelling are really about. As with all good art, what matters is how this play makes us think about what we see, remembering what Anna said :
There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.
Three slight hesitations with the performance. First, when Deeley takes a second brandy, what Sewell is (meant to be) doing with his gyrations across the sofa on which Anna is sitting from behind it was beyond me. Later, I felt that he allowed the pace to go a little too slack in, I think, the long speech where he confuses the women, or in a sustained exchange with one of the others, when he is centre stage. And, finally, there is supposed to be a long silence, after lying across Kate’s lap, and before very slowly sitting up (the sitting up was not slow either), but that may be Rickson’s direction.
Now on the blog : when KST played Anna instead
End-notes
* I throw a veil over Bel Ami (2012), not because KST isn’t good, but because she had been miscast as an older woman, who, through childlike desire and infatuation, gains a glow of someone more the real age of the actress.
** Curiously, to judge from the write-up of Pinter in the back pages of the programme, you’d have thought that he lived with Antonia Fraser for a while before marrying her, not that he’d already been married and a father, let alone had an affair with Joan Bakewell…
*** Perhaps one of the starting-points for Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, precisely about interpretation, with (in the production that I saw) another three characters, Nils Bohr, his wife, and Werner Heisenberg, circling each other - and their relationships - like particles in an atom.
**** That speech, in context, shows what I first thought about the play when I read it, because there are pages of script leading up this point when just Deeley and Anna are talking (usually about Kate), and some stage business is needed for the listening Kate. (Between them, Rickson and Scott Thomas (and, no doubt, Williams) did this immensely well.) As she remarks, it’s almost as if she is dead or cannot hear them, an intensified form of what happens – as here – when some long-lost friend of one partner is being asked by the other what he or she was like then.
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Friday 22 March 2013
Woody took me with him, money or no
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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22 March
Starting out, and even with Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen collaborated with Mickey Rose, as he did on the screenplay of Take the Money and Run (1969) (though not the direction). He has talked about working with Rose and also Marshall Brickman, and said that he liked the variety doing so gave him (Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) is a later piece of co-authorship with Brickman).
Stardust Memories (1980), coming after the ill-received sombre drama that was Interiors (1978) and Manhattan (1979) (co-written with Brickman), almost mercilessly mocks these ‘early funny films’, but here we can see how well elements work, such as faultless delivery of the punch-line and of the joke built on leading up to incongruity. The recent film documentary of Allen drew the attention of those who did not know to how he began, as a gag-writer, and Rose and he know how to construct them : after 15 minutes, Virgil Starkwell (Allen in a voice-over) was in love with Louise; after 30 minutes, he had decided not to steal her handbag.
But there are many other things in play, with references both to cinema literacy, and even James Joyce (with 16 June, the Bloomsday featured in Ulysses, the date of a big bank robbery cum fake film, complete with a sort of, if possible, even more crazy Erich von Stroheim) : Allen effortlessly makes films that come afterwards, such as Stir Crazy (1980) or O Brother, Where Art Thou ? (2000), seem just lumbering, keeping in one groove, whereas Rose and Allen have leapt on to a new theme and feel for that part of the film.
In this his, if you include the strange film that is What’s Up, Tiger Lily ? (1966), second feature, his camera angles are already inventive, he as his own leading man and Janet Margolin as Louise parody their own domesticity as gangster and moll (Louise saying ‘You know, he never made the ten most-wanted list. It’s very unfair voting – it’s who you know’), and a quick moment when the side-effect of a drug-trial has Virgil turn into a rabbi for a few hours, with clever cutting between the onlookers and the subject, is – along with the mock-documentary story-telling (Virgil’s parents being interviewed about him, both disguised with Groucho glasses that sport bushy eyebrows and moustache, plus a patently plastic beak-like nose) – where he comes back to, in 1983, with Zelig.
The film is funny and fresh, and it was a delight to catch up with Allen and his cynical take on romance, where the love is in the early days of fascination and attraction, and irritating habits and silly misunderstandings make it wear thin. We simply do not ask whether Louise, an unlikely laundress, would seek out Virgil, who turns out not to be a cellist with the Philharmonic (but a failed bank-robber), because we are having too much fun !
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22 March
Starting out, and even with Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen collaborated with Mickey Rose, as he did on the screenplay of Take the Money and Run (1969) (though not the direction). He has talked about working with Rose and also Marshall Brickman, and said that he liked the variety doing so gave him (Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) is a later piece of co-authorship with Brickman).
Stardust Memories (1980), coming after the ill-received sombre drama that was Interiors (1978) and Manhattan (1979) (co-written with Brickman), almost mercilessly mocks these ‘early funny films’, but here we can see how well elements work, such as faultless delivery of the punch-line and of the joke built on leading up to incongruity. The recent film documentary of Allen drew the attention of those who did not know to how he began, as a gag-writer, and Rose and he know how to construct them : after 15 minutes, Virgil Starkwell (Allen in a voice-over) was in love with Louise; after 30 minutes, he had decided not to steal her handbag.
But there are many other things in play, with references both to cinema literacy, and even James Joyce (with 16 June, the Bloomsday featured in Ulysses, the date of a big bank robbery cum fake film, complete with a sort of, if possible, even more crazy Erich von Stroheim) : Allen effortlessly makes films that come afterwards, such as Stir Crazy (1980) or O Brother, Where Art Thou ? (2000), seem just lumbering, keeping in one groove, whereas Rose and Allen have leapt on to a new theme and feel for that part of the film.
In this his, if you include the strange film that is What’s Up, Tiger Lily ? (1966), second feature, his camera angles are already inventive, he as his own leading man and Janet Margolin as Louise parody their own domesticity as gangster and moll (Louise saying ‘You know, he never made the ten most-wanted list. It’s very unfair voting – it’s who you know’), and a quick moment when the side-effect of a drug-trial has Virgil turn into a rabbi for a few hours, with clever cutting between the onlookers and the subject, is – along with the mock-documentary story-telling (Virgil’s parents being interviewed about him, both disguised with Groucho glasses that sport bushy eyebrows and moustache, plus a patently plastic beak-like nose) – where he comes back to, in 1983, with Zelig.
The film is funny and fresh, and it was a delight to catch up with Allen and his cynical take on romance, where the love is in the early days of fascination and attraction, and irritating habits and silly misunderstandings make it wear thin. We simply do not ask whether Louise, an unlikely laundress, would seek out Virgil, who turns out not to be a cellist with the Philharmonic (but a failed bank-robber), because we are having too much fun !
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Saturday 9 March 2013
Bonding ? Schmonding !
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9 March
Time for a rant - a rantlet, for lack of time...
Yes, I am happy to originate a term, but I will not adopt one that makes no connection with - no sense to - me, such as male bonding:
1. 'Bonding' was what superglue was supposed to do, when one bought an expensive, fiddly little tube of stuff that did precious little for one's sanity, when it went everywhere but the target, made one fear for sticking one's fingers together for eternity, and ultimately stuck nothing to nothing.
2. Moreover, there is no such thing - as far as I am aware - as female bonding, so the implication is that men are just useless at opening up to each other on any real or emotional level, and need special sessions.
3. There's the Pratter hashtag (God knows why they are called that !) #EverydaySexism - is referring to 'male bonding' that ? Yes, just like man flu, it is.
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9 March
Time for a rant - a rantlet, for lack of time...
Yes, I am happy to originate a term, but I will not adopt one that makes no connection with - no sense to - me, such as male bonding:
1. 'Bonding' was what superglue was supposed to do, when one bought an expensive, fiddly little tube of stuff that did precious little for one's sanity, when it went everywhere but the target, made one fear for sticking one's fingers together for eternity, and ultimately stuck nothing to nothing.
2. Moreover, there is no such thing - as far as I am aware - as female bonding, so the implication is that men are just useless at opening up to each other on any real or emotional level, and need special sessions.
3. There's the Pratter hashtag (God knows why they are called that !) #EverydaySexism - is referring to 'male bonding' that ? Yes, just like man flu, it is.
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Sunday 3 March 2013
Morten and Eric
This piece is about Shining Night : A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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3 March
This piece is about Shining Night : A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen (2012)
Eric Whitacre and Morten Lauridsen are huge names in the sacred choral music tradition in America.
To-day, on a Sunday afternoon, the latter is in Cambridge, conducting a rehearsal just now before a screening of Shining Night (2012), a new film about him at 4.00, complete with a Q&A with the director and him. (Later, the concert for which the rehearsal.)
There may be more relevant and compelling things to ask in the wake of the film, but my question, as presently envisaged, is:
If you agree that certain composers have a distinctive voice or sound, is it fair to characterize that as their harmonic language, and, if so, what are the elements in your harmonic language are of which you are aware, and, if not, how would you describe what makes your compositions yours ?
Michael Stillwater's film gave an affectionate appreciation of Lauridsen the man, the composer, and the participant in rehearsals where his work is being performed, as well as of Waldron Island in Washington, where he lives part of each year, looking across to Canada. Certain messages, apart from the power and cohesiveness of the work, came across very clearly :
* Lauridsen is almost a poet in his approach to composition, as well as a sociological and historical scholar in putting the texts that he sets in context
* Indeed, as he revealed in the Q&A, he reads poetry every day, and begins every class at university with a poem (and the opportunity for others to share poetry)
* He is quite aware of musical language, and so, in setting O magnum mysterium, says that he did not want anything to interpose itself between the text and the hearer
* He alluded to a wealth of notes 'discarded' to get 'the right ones'
* The natural world and the silence of where he chooses to live are supremely important to him
* The sense, as he later confirmed, of being a private person, but one who feels deeply for history, for those who will hear his compositions, and for those who sing them, having deliberately made Lux Aeterna within the capability of choirs of competent singers, rather than just highly skilled ensembles
* Having to pawn one of his two instruments or his typewriter to get by, he had not had things easy in early days
Initially, Lauridsen answered questions from two members of the music society at Queens' (his hosts that day).
When I got to ask a question, I asked whether being front of the camera and talking about himself had felt intrusive - in a very long answer, he was quick to say (and quite defensive in saying so) that he is used to talking in public as a university teacher. However, the fact remains that there was at least one moment that Michael Stillwater had caught on camera in his documentary where Lauridsen looked choked by what he was remembering or talking about.
What I had wanted to know was whether Stillwater had had to do anything to make the experience easier for Lauridsen, especially at those moments, but he wanted to suggest that he was not even aware of the camera.
He said that, when he had responded to Stillwater's approach to make a film, he had freely invited Stillwater to film him in rehearsals and performances, first in California, then in Scotland, but it sounded as though he hoped that he would not have to be filmed on his retreat in Washington, in an unquestionably beautiful location that Stillwater's cinematography showed to good effect (despite the limitations of the digital capture of certain qualities and characters of light).
Stillwater was equally clear that he had felt - rightly - that, in effect, the heart of the film would have been missing without Waldron. Good for overcoming both Lauridsen's reluctance, and for making the presence of the crew a happy one for other residents !
As for whether one is with those such as Giles Swayne who do not regard Lauridsen as 'a real composer', I believe that how one views his work is a matter of opinion, but that his conviction and integrity when it comes to what he views as important in life and in his work (inseparable as they may be) come across and deserve not to be denied.
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Friday 1 March 2013
Am I celebrating Royal Assent for the Mental Health (Discrimination) Act 2013 ?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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1 March (updated with Tweets, 2017)
Well, no...
Despite the mental-health charities waving flags, I do not think that it has changed very much - or in the right way - for most people, and this is why :
1. How many people will ever be a company director, and is just removing bars relating to mental health, without regard to safeguarding shareholders and those with whom the company may do business or interact, the right approach ? Limitations on being fit to act as a director that do not stereotype mental ill-health, but reflect the fact that it and many other criteria might make staying a director inappropriate, should have been considered.
2. Some can now serve on a jury, itself not an everyday calling (many enough are never asked), but - across the board - not someone on a Community Treatment Order. That is still wildly discriminatory.
3. Of the groundbreaking areas, being an MP is the thing anyone is least likely to do. Rather than just doing away with the previous law, the law should have been revised, so that an MP is as capable of carrying out parliamentary and constituency duties over time as a company director.
Three roles that affect almost no one in ordinary life, and this is a triumph ? No, it is just repealing legislation, rather than considering what should have been passed in its place ! It paves the way for no new and better legislation to deal with the real issue of discrimination in mental health in the slightest.
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1 March (updated with Tweets, 2017)
Well, no...
Crediting @TimetoChange, an Act in 2013 won significant victory for the rights of those subject to #mh diagnoses :https://t.co/iR5pFbNqGo
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 6, 2017
Mental Health (Discrimination) Act 2013 may not be the shortest Act of Parliament, but...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 6, 2017
It comprises 4 sectionshttps://t.co/ff80eqlbVs
By comparison Mental Health Act 2007 amended Mental Health Act 1983 :https://t.co/yxiVPjWeUg
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 6, 2017
2007 Act : 59 sections, 11 Schedules
QED ? https://t.co/LPgU2pM1di
Despite the mental-health charities waving flags, I do not think that it has changed very much - or in the right way - for most people, and this is why :
1. How many people will ever be a company director, and is just removing bars relating to mental health, without regard to safeguarding shareholders and those with whom the company may do business or interact, the right approach ? Limitations on being fit to act as a director that do not stereotype mental ill-health, but reflect the fact that it and many other criteria might make staying a director inappropriate, should have been considered.
2. Some can now serve on a jury, itself not an everyday calling (many enough are never asked), but - across the board - not someone on a Community Treatment Order. That is still wildly discriminatory.
3. Of the groundbreaking areas, being an MP is the thing anyone is least likely to do. Rather than just doing away with the previous law, the law should have been revised, so that an MP is as capable of carrying out parliamentary and constituency duties over time as a company director.
Three roles that affect almost no one in ordinary life, and this is a triumph ? No, it is just repealing legislation, rather than considering what should have been passed in its place ! It paves the way for no new and better legislation to deal with the real issue of discrimination in mental health in the slightest.
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Wednesday 27 February 2013
The road to wherever
This is a review of Lore (2012)
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28 February
This is a review of Lore (2012)
* Contains spoilers *
Lore (2012) is a film that, along the way of the journeys that we see made, shares beliefs current at the time of the fall of The Third Reich. In the case of Lore's family, neither parent is an ordinary German citizen, because he is a high-ranking SS officer and she appears implicated in unethical medical experimentation, and Lore is in the Hitlerjugend: occasional near-religious fervency for Hitler, and a disbelief in the American reports and evidence of atrocity, are the stuff of utterance in these times, when the idea that Holocaust denial could be legislated against seems impossible.
The film is not those beliefs or utterances, but they are an integral part of the travel that is encompassed from the Schwarzwald, in the far south-west, to the Baltic north of Hamburg to an island akin to, but not, Föhr, where we leave Lore. (Not before, as elsewhere, a tactile quality in the rich mud has been experienced, and the otherness of crossing by causeway to this island has vividly been shown.)
Lore, as the eldest of five, has been put in charge of getting her brothers and sisters up to the North because her mother, having denounced her husband to him as a Feigling (coward) proudly strides off to deliver herself to the forces of occupation - one of the first striking moments for Lore is when, having raced after her mother and caught her up, she finds her mother already so resigned to what she is doing that she appears to have nothing to spare for Lore and the family after those parting instructions.
What follows is the journey, the confrontation with death, brutality and violence, and it is almost all the time just the passage of the five siblings, plus Thomas when he joins their number and (and as long as) makes himself useful. Director / co-screenwriter Cate Shortland and Saskia Rosendahl as Lore brilliantly show her teetering at the edge of whether she should associate with Thomas, as an assumed Jew, or feel sexually excited by him and his touch, just as, in her fascination for the various corpses, she challenges upbringing that she should not have curiosity, and should not harm others or steal.
This fractured sense of belonging in and relating to a world that is no longer the same Germany, but even split into three zones that they have to negotiate, is there in the cinematography of the characters, with part of a face here, maybe not in focus, a focus that varies through the shot to lead to a disjunction, or a conflict between the scene and the figure in it. By contrast, the sensual, even visceral, quality of nature is fed into every frame in which it alone features, in panorama and in close detail, touches reminiscent of great masters such as Tarkovsky, but with more of a sense of urgency, though none less of integration into the narrative.
The film shows a quest, and we have to decide - as does Lore - why, for what, and what matters, because all that she knew before and trusted now seems unreliable. What does happen next matters less than that Lore has made this journey and unlearnt much in the process. Getting to where we must leave her, having been allowed to be part of that transformation (although we always knew that we stood outside it), we leave her as herself, as Lore
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Tuesday 26 February 2013
Confusions and confabulations
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27 February 2013
Are you up Ship Creek without a handle, or otherwise struck with the word-blindness of such as Dogberry and Mrs Malaprop ?
After I had bothered to buy myself a nice copy, Joyce put me off reading Finnegans Wake (famously lacking an apostrophe) by the appalling pun egg and beacon, and I resolved to read no more and sold it again. However, in common with those as distant in time as Laurence Sterne and John Lennon (his Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write), I have an interest in how words are power, words can urge and rouse (the famous example in Julius Caesar, but also give the game away that some who profess things are little better than parrots, in the vein of Harry Enfield's series of sketches about what the bloke down the pub said.
Some writers (the likes of Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker and Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, with his Russian argot) have imagined the language of a future age, and, with a public heading to lower levels of literacy, it is quite conceivable that an aural understanding of language will lead people more astray, as with the example that I gave previously on these pages of I can't be asked. But can we predict them... ?
Can we set computers to work out what will sound so like something else that people will, at least, be uncertain, as with It was off my own back / bat (where the latter is more likely to be right)? Or, with a tone-deaf sense that says that Adele's Skyfall song (and its execution - it's well and truly dead, but, sadly, a zombie), will it be somewhat contrary, so that people think that x is the right course of action in the last risotto ?
Whatever happens, whilst there is life in me, I will fight that panino is the singular, and that adding a second plural ending - I would have had us do as we do with cappuccino, and treat it as an ordinary anglicized word that I order more than one of by adding the ending -es, so I would want And two ham-and-cheese paninoes, toasted, rather than the smart dick who confused everyone with the unnecessary introduction of panini. I wait, a hope as yet unsatisfied, for coffe-houses to be offering me tramezzini...
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27 February 2013
Are you up Ship Creek without a handle, or otherwise struck with the word-blindness of such as Dogberry and Mrs Malaprop ?
After I had bothered to buy myself a nice copy, Joyce put me off reading Finnegans Wake (famously lacking an apostrophe) by the appalling pun egg and beacon, and I resolved to read no more and sold it again. However, in common with those as distant in time as Laurence Sterne and John Lennon (his Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write), I have an interest in how words are power, words can urge and rouse (the famous example in Julius Caesar, but also give the game away that some who profess things are little better than parrots, in the vein of Harry Enfield's series of sketches about what the bloke down the pub said.
Some writers (the likes of Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker and Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, with his Russian argot) have imagined the language of a future age, and, with a public heading to lower levels of literacy, it is quite conceivable that an aural understanding of language will lead people more astray, as with the example that I gave previously on these pages of I can't be asked. But can we predict them... ?
Can we set computers to work out what will sound so like something else that people will, at least, be uncertain, as with It was off my own back / bat (where the latter is more likely to be right)? Or, with a tone-deaf sense that says that Adele's Skyfall song (and its execution - it's well and truly dead, but, sadly, a zombie), will it be somewhat contrary, so that people think that x is the right course of action in the last risotto ?
Whatever happens, whilst there is life in me, I will fight that panino is the singular, and that adding a second plural ending - I would have had us do as we do with cappuccino, and treat it as an ordinary anglicized word that I order more than one of by adding the ending -es, so I would want And two ham-and-cheese paninoes, toasted, rather than the smart dick who confused everyone with the unnecessary introduction of panini. I wait, a hope as yet unsatisfied, for coffe-houses to be offering me tramezzini...
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Monday 25 February 2013
Argofuckyourself - Best Film at the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards
This is a review, and commentary on the reception, of Argo (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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25 February
This is a review, and commentary on the reception, of Argo (2012)
for those of you who were irritated by my last tweet, here, again, are my thoughts on Argo: bellacaledonia.org.uk/2012/11/15/mar…
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) February 11, 2013
After the awards last night, Mark Cousins has followed up that Tweet to-day with a host, giving names of Iranian films :
Post-Argo, gr8 films abt Iran: the Boot,Bag of Rice,A Moment of Innocence,The Apple, The Cow,Taste of Cherry,Close-up,20 Fingers,The Runner
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) February 25, 2013
...The Wind will Carry Us,Don,Crimson Gold,The White Balloon,The Circle,Koker Trilogy,The House is Black,Blackboards...
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) February 25, 2013
...a Separation,Divorce Iranian Style,Bashu,Gabbeh,the Jar,Nargess,Sara,A Simple Event,Two Women.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) February 25, 2013
great Iranian women directors: R Bani-Etemad, T Milani, M Akbari, S Makhmalbaf, F Forakhzad, N Karimi, P Derakhshandeh.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) February 25, 2013
All well and good from Cousins, though few are likely to have the time to explore this area in as much detail. But I want to go back to the criticism that he has levelled at Argo, and see how his very specific experience of the Iranian country and people have a bearing on what he has written.
As far as I recall, the three main ways in which Iranian people are portrayed are :
1. At the US embassy, which, I believe, included some original footage from the Carter years
2. The scenes leading to and at the bazaar
3. The laughable (and invented) attempts of the Revolutionary Guard to foil the escape
I simply do not know of what relevance to these portrayals 'In 2001, [...] I stayed for three weeks in Iran, mostly in villages and in the hills, but in the big cities as well. Though it is often in our news media, I found myself in a terra incognita. Where were the crowds punching the air?' or 'Several years later [...], I went back to Iran, and I went back again, for much longer, to make a series for Channel 4 on the history and poetics of Iranian film. On these trips I made friends in Iran, smoked the sheesha, walked the streets, spent hours in Tehran’s traffic, went to the Jewish cafes, saw how ardent and brave many of the young people were, saw how most didn’t identify with their current government, how Iran is not its government or Mullahs, saw how restless and urgent for reform the country is. Mostly, though, I felt the welcome of the people.'
The film is set in 1980, and it is historical fact that the US embassay was stormed and hostages taken and escaped. The fact that the people whom Cousins met, 21 years later, did not behave in that way cannot belie what did happen. The bazaar business was almost certainly invented, but it is still an invention about 1980 - is it a plausible one, given making a thriller about the escape plan, that people on the streets would behave as shown ?
As to the risk of being caught, in fact, no one knew that the six who had been hiding out, thanks to the Canadian ambassador, had ever been in Iran, and the film fictionalizes the reassembly of shredded photos of staff, so none of what is shown, with the possible exception of the scrutiny of the apparent Candian film group's credentials, happened at all. It is meant to make what happens exciting, but chasing the plane down the runway is clearly the stuff of fiction - as if a commercial pilot would not have stopped !
Does the film claim to depict the Iranian people, or some of them at the time of real events when feelings were running high, or is it, as Cousins says, a Great Escape ? He seems to be the one with the conflict :
The film gripped me and moved me and I hated it for this. Affleck is talented, liberal and a nice guy – I met him recently. And yet he has made a film which chronically under-imagines, or mis-imagines Iran. I looked into its whirring thriller machine to try to glimpse even moments of truth about Iran, its people, subjectivities, lives and street scenes, but saw none.
Affleck is 'a nice guy' - how could he have made a film like this ? Where I have greater issue with the menace of those on the look-out for people getting out and make a muck-up up of what the film shows as evidence of conspiracy, because, for all their cunning (with the patching together of the photos), they are disorganized and bumbling : as a stereotype, one would have every reason to find that offensive.
And Cousins does not seem to acknowledge that faking a Hollywood production to help some people get away is such a preposterous <i>true story</i> that it cries out for making into a film, not some other film set some other time to put Iran across in a less negative way than suits 1980, and, if it is set then, then it will have to be against the background of what happened then...
And, for good measure, you can find out how Kevin B. Lee demolished the film, with much emphasis on Iranian buffoonery and American superiority.
STOP PRESS
Iran to sue Hollywood for 'distorting image' of Islamic republic gu.com/p/3ecq2/tw
— The Guardian (@guardian) March 12, 2013
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Friday 8 February 2013
'She's a heffer': Katie Price slams Kelly (according to Yahoo!®)
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8 February (updated 21 February)
Interesting that :
Kelly is just Kelly, but there may be other Katies
Simon Heffer is a writer, and Heffer's a bookshop
If one can accurately use a word that, according to Wikipedia®, may mean A young cow before she has had her first calf, one cannot then spell it
What does one judge of Ms Kelly Ann Parsons (now that Jordan / Price insists on us looking at her) ?
And what about the story... ? How many weeks were their agents and they in negotiation :
1. To find, in principle, the person to agree to slight Kelly B. ?
2. To fix a price for full participation, i.e. putting one's name to anything ?
3. To determine where the story would be placed, and what the opening gambit and subsequent developments of the story would be ?
I don't know why, but I find these details much more interesting than the initial slam !
Yesterday, although with a bit of a delay, Huffington Post reported that Kelly replied by calling Katie 'rude' and 'sad', so there's probably more to come...
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8 February (updated 21 February)
Interesting that :
Kelly is just Kelly, but there may be other Katies
Simon Heffer is a writer, and Heffer's a bookshop
If one can accurately use a word that, according to Wikipedia®, may mean A young cow before she has had her first calf, one cannot then spell it
What does one judge of Ms Kelly Ann Parsons (now that Jordan / Price insists on us looking at her) ?
And what about the story... ? How many weeks were their agents and they in negotiation :
1. To find, in principle, the person to agree to slight Kelly B. ?
2. To fix a price for full participation, i.e. putting one's name to anything ?
3. To determine where the story would be placed, and what the opening gambit and subsequent developments of the story would be ?
I don't know why, but I find these details much more interesting than the initial slam !
Yesterday, although with a bit of a delay, Huffington Post reported that Kelly replied by calling Katie 'rude' and 'sad', so there's probably more to come...
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Tuesday 29 January 2013
Twitter and Facebook: making language a dying art? (a report from Varsity)
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29 January
This story is carried by Varsity, but, since I do not go near Arsebook, I must post my comment here:
When, more than thirty years ago, there was a Cambridge Collegiate Examination (CCE), the only applicants who did not have to take an 'essay paper' were those studying English : I have no idea when the CCE was abolished, but, before then, colleges could bear writing ability in mind prior to interview.
Are these the days that Dr Abulafia harks back to ?
Actually, what is bizarre is that, first with text-messages, then with the Tweet, we so readily acceded to the reintroduction of the telegram (for the character-limit tends to relate to some sort of cost).
What Dr Abulafia, to be an historian of such matters, would really need to show is that use of telegrams by the classes that could afford them made them as dull as he makes out the so-called social - nearly said 'facial' ! - media have made recent undergraduates*...
End-notes
* I like the alleged exchange between Cary Grant and a reporter (in which you will have to imagine the question-mark, because I do not recall how it was styled in a telegram) :
HOW OLD CARY GRANT
OLD CARY GRANT VERY WELL STOP HOW YOU
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29 January
This story is carried by Varsity, but, since I do not go near Arsebook, I must post my comment here:
When, more than thirty years ago, there was a Cambridge Collegiate Examination (CCE), the only applicants who did not have to take an 'essay paper' were those studying English : I have no idea when the CCE was abolished, but, before then, colleges could bear writing ability in mind prior to interview.
Are these the days that Dr Abulafia harks back to ?
Actually, what is bizarre is that, first with text-messages, then with the Tweet, we so readily acceded to the reintroduction of the telegram (for the character-limit tends to relate to some sort of cost).
What Dr Abulafia, to be an historian of such matters, would really need to show is that use of telegrams by the classes that could afford them made them as dull as he makes out the so-called social - nearly said 'facial' ! - media have made recent undergraduates*...
End-notes
* I like the alleged exchange between Cary Grant and a reporter (in which you will have to imagine the question-mark, because I do not recall how it was styled in a telegram) :
HOW OLD CARY GRANT
OLD CARY GRANT VERY WELL STOP HOW YOU
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The Language of Mental Health
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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29 January
I hope that I may be excused for using this Tweet to illustrate a point or two*...
First, for good or ill (and from such things as having mental health services and a Mental Health Act), the words ‘health’ and ‘mental’ are linked, but it is typical that, when we mean mental ill-health we might write mental health, and vice versa.
It might be personal to me, but I hate – I almost cringe – this idea that mental distress should be linked with suffering. Not that people do not sometimes have a very painful, tortured time with voices or with depression, but just that one of the things that people believe, because they are inclined to say (or think) Bloody pull yourself together !, and why make it easier for them to say that those who have mental-health issues are suffering self-indulgent martyrs ?
Interlude : I was at the One in Four conference four years ago, where the topic was that of this posting, and I just wonder how far we have come on, because it is my belief that even the mental-health world is not united in its use of language. You may not have spotted, but I have already used Mind’s preferred term, of mental distress, and one that those who have had contact with services sometimes use, of mental-health issues - Mind’s misses out the emphasis, still so prevalent, on health, whereas the other phrase focuses on the issues. Then again, the preferred words in One in Four magazine are mental health difficulty…
So, there is no common language, which does not make communication any more straightforward, and the word depressed can mean, at one end, someone willing to undergo ECT not to be so numb and to feel something, and, at the other, someone a bit weepy because cooking dinner did not turn out right.
Back at our Tweet, the final thing that I wanted to say is that, when we wish that a friend with measles gets better soon, we do not look for – though it might be needed – some moral improvement.
However, I am not so sure that this sense is not imported into the language of mental health, because, on the sly, there is a belief that there is some sort of malignancy or turpitude in having a stay in a psychiatric unit, even if it is at the level of It’s all right for some ! from disgruntled colleagues or the like. (Talking, instead, about recovery does not make things any more palatable, for me, but creates more difficulties.)
We are urged to talk about mental health, by campaigns such as Time to Change, but do we have the words in which to do it that are not already laden with cynicism, connotation and criticism… ?
End-notes
* Not to pick at the writer of this Tweet, but at what the instinctive choice of language tells us all about this subject
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
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29 January
@timetochange Important to illustrate how many people suffer with mental health andthat you can get better.
— Tim Grant (@DigitalTimGrant) January 29, 2013
I hope that I may be excused for using this Tweet to illustrate a point or two*...
First, for good or ill (and from such things as having mental health services and a Mental Health Act), the words ‘health’ and ‘mental’ are linked, but it is typical that, when we mean mental ill-health we might write mental health, and vice versa.
It might be personal to me, but I hate – I almost cringe – this idea that mental distress should be linked with suffering. Not that people do not sometimes have a very painful, tortured time with voices or with depression, but just that one of the things that people believe, because they are inclined to say (or think) Bloody pull yourself together !, and why make it easier for them to say that those who have mental-health issues are suffering self-indulgent martyrs ?
Interlude : I was at the One in Four conference four years ago, where the topic was that of this posting, and I just wonder how far we have come on, because it is my belief that even the mental-health world is not united in its use of language. You may not have spotted, but I have already used Mind’s preferred term, of mental distress, and one that those who have had contact with services sometimes use, of mental-health issues - Mind’s misses out the emphasis, still so prevalent, on health, whereas the other phrase focuses on the issues. Then again, the preferred words in One in Four magazine are mental health difficulty…
So, there is no common language, which does not make communication any more straightforward, and the word depressed can mean, at one end, someone willing to undergo ECT not to be so numb and to feel something, and, at the other, someone a bit weepy because cooking dinner did not turn out right.
Back at our Tweet, the final thing that I wanted to say is that, when we wish that a friend with measles gets better soon, we do not look for – though it might be needed – some moral improvement.
However, I am not so sure that this sense is not imported into the language of mental health, because, on the sly, there is a belief that there is some sort of malignancy or turpitude in having a stay in a psychiatric unit, even if it is at the level of It’s all right for some ! from disgruntled colleagues or the like. (Talking, instead, about recovery does not make things any more palatable, for me, but creates more difficulties.)
We are urged to talk about mental health, by campaigns such as Time to Change, but do we have the words in which to do it that are not already laden with cynicism, connotation and criticism… ?
End-notes
* Not to pick at the writer of this Tweet, but at what the instinctive choice of language tells us all about this subject
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The shame, the stigma, of mental ill-health
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29 January
Of course it's shameful to be :
* dangerous
* self indulgent
* lazy
* a risk
* unemployable
* a nuisance
* untrustworthy
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29 January
Of course it's shameful to be :
* dangerous
* self indulgent
* lazy
* a risk
* unemployable
* a nuisance
* untrustworthy
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Saturday 26 January 2013
The Vermeer girl
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
27 January (updated 10 February)
When Russell Hoban published his novel The Medusa Frequency in 1987, the dust-jacket bore an enhanced version of Vermeer’s painting Head of a [Young] Girl, as here
The painting was not referred to as Girl with a Pearl Earring*, because it was not called that then – Tracy Chevalier did not publish her novel, using that description, for another twelve years – but so popular has the title become since the book (1999) and the film (2003) that even the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where the painting ‘normally’ hangs (it’s not there when Hermann Orff, in the novel, goes to see it), is using it in favour of the name employed by Hoban (or Girl in a Turban and variants thereof, although Orff also does call her The Vermeer girl.
Looked at objectively, yes, the earring is there, but to assume (as the description does) that it is not one of a pair seems over-precise or even fanciful (as if the other side of the girl’s head-dress or even head may not be there, because we cannot see it), and, in comparison with the turban, the earring is not the most obvious thing in the painting, unless you are Chevalier and want to make it the centre of a mystery and a story concerning it, of course. (And several easily available images show her wearing earrings (plural), too.) Historical novelists do such things, after all.
Of course, a model for the painting might only wear the earring that can be seen, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t hold out to wear them both – just this once. I forget what Hoban has Orff say about the painting, but it is notable, amongst Vermeer’s work (it is thought to date to around 1665, ten years before his death), not only for not having a background, but also for having the face and upper body appear in complete darkness, save the light that we can see reflected from the young woman.
However, other models appear with not just jewelry, but pearls, such as the Woman with a Pearl Necklace (thought to be slightly earlier), which she seems to be holding out for someone the other side of the window to see (unless she can see her reflection in a mirror to the left), who also has earrings
So does the Portrait of a Young Woman (thought to be a couple of years later), but she has more elfin-like features than our Scarlett Johannson lookalike (but the same dark background)
Other than cashing in on notoriety, then, is there any real reason to have renamed with a title that does not exclusively describe the Hoban / Chevalier portrait, just because the latter writer gained attention by using it ? Could we imagine retitling the later works of Gorky to which André Breton helped him give names – I think that One Year the Milkweed and The Liver is the Cock’s Comb might have come out of that collaboration, but maybe they did not know best, and some marketing people could find even better names, which would have people search out these canvases worldwide.
We already have Duchamp’s La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même more conveniently known as The Large Glass, and then existing in multiple forms thanks to Richard Hamilton’s work and Duchamp’s endorsement.
On that precedent, artists who have sometimes used names, as Roni Horn has for drawings, that do not say very much, or others who, worse, insist on pieces being just Untitled, could have official titlers who go around after them, fixing them with names for good PR…
Post-script
Of course, it has been known to be done before, but not in this Chevalier-type way :
1. The sitter is Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of Francesco
2. Thus the punning Italian title, La Gioconda (which is La Jaconde, in French), because the feminine form of the surname means one who is jocund
3. The form of address 'my lady', madonna, came, at that time, to be contracted to mona (though, nowadays, monna)
4. Therefore Mona Lisa - and not a historical novelist in sight, coming up with a new name, based on earrings...
End-notes
* Though, rather foolishly (I feel), the official Russell Hoban web-site does use that name.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
27 January (updated 10 February)
When Russell Hoban published his novel The Medusa Frequency in 1987, the dust-jacket bore an enhanced version of Vermeer’s painting Head of a [Young] Girl, as here
The painting was not referred to as Girl with a Pearl Earring*, because it was not called that then – Tracy Chevalier did not publish her novel, using that description, for another twelve years – but so popular has the title become since the book (1999) and the film (2003) that even the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where the painting ‘normally’ hangs (it’s not there when Hermann Orff, in the novel, goes to see it), is using it in favour of the name employed by Hoban (or Girl in a Turban and variants thereof, although Orff also does call her The Vermeer girl.
Looked at objectively, yes, the earring is there, but to assume (as the description does) that it is not one of a pair seems over-precise or even fanciful (as if the other side of the girl’s head-dress or even head may not be there, because we cannot see it), and, in comparison with the turban, the earring is not the most obvious thing in the painting, unless you are Chevalier and want to make it the centre of a mystery and a story concerning it, of course. (And several easily available images show her wearing earrings (plural), too.) Historical novelists do such things, after all.
Of course, a model for the painting might only wear the earring that can be seen, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t hold out to wear them both – just this once. I forget what Hoban has Orff say about the painting, but it is notable, amongst Vermeer’s work (it is thought to date to around 1665, ten years before his death), not only for not having a background, but also for having the face and upper body appear in complete darkness, save the light that we can see reflected from the young woman.
However, other models appear with not just jewelry, but pearls, such as the Woman with a Pearl Necklace (thought to be slightly earlier), which she seems to be holding out for someone the other side of the window to see (unless she can see her reflection in a mirror to the left), who also has earrings
So does the Portrait of a Young Woman (thought to be a couple of years later), but she has more elfin-like features than our Scarlett Johannson lookalike (but the same dark background)
Other than cashing in on notoriety, then, is there any real reason to have renamed with a title that does not exclusively describe the Hoban / Chevalier portrait, just because the latter writer gained attention by using it ? Could we imagine retitling the later works of Gorky to which André Breton helped him give names – I think that One Year the Milkweed and The Liver is the Cock’s Comb might have come out of that collaboration, but maybe they did not know best, and some marketing people could find even better names, which would have people search out these canvases worldwide.
We already have Duchamp’s La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même more conveniently known as The Large Glass, and then existing in multiple forms thanks to Richard Hamilton’s work and Duchamp’s endorsement.
On that precedent, artists who have sometimes used names, as Roni Horn has for drawings, that do not say very much, or others who, worse, insist on pieces being just Untitled, could have official titlers who go around after them, fixing them with names for good PR…
Post-script
Of course, it has been known to be done before, but not in this Chevalier-type way :
1. The sitter is Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of Francesco
2. Thus the punning Italian title, La Gioconda (which is La Jaconde, in French), because the feminine form of the surname means one who is jocund
3. The form of address 'my lady', madonna, came, at that time, to be contracted to mona (though, nowadays, monna)
4. Therefore Mona Lisa - and not a historical novelist in sight, coming up with a new name, based on earrings...
End-notes
* Though, rather foolishly (I feel), the official Russell Hoban web-site does use that name.
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Friday 25 January 2013
Jean-Luc and François meet Ben, Alice and Steve
This is a review of Sightseers (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
24 January
* Contains serious amounts of spoilers – watch the film first ! *
This is a review of Sightseers (2012)
What did I expect from Sightseers (2012) ? Well, the Twitter name Mr Wheatley kept appearing, along with Catherine Bray reporting that she had seen the film five or more times, and I had tantalizingly seen the poster, so I was aware that a caravan was involved, and knew the faces of the principals (well, maybe not one of them as what wasn’t covered by a hat bore a frown and a beard). I knew nothing else, which is the way that I like it – except that (I forget how) I was prepared for a few deaths…
Those principals (Alice Lowe and Steve Oram), I now know, had written the screenplay (with additional material from Amy Jump, whose name was all over the credits), which need not be unusual, but seems to be, and which appeared to have led to a very full conception of who Chris and Tina (together, Christina ?) are, and how they will behave towards each other and react with others.
I was very much reminded - and still am - of À Bout de Souffle (1960), not because Tina and Chris are as stylish as Jean-Paul Belmondo (Michel) and Jean Seberg (Patricia), but because of the common enterprise (though I did, also, think of Thelma and Louise (1991)) – someone with whom I shared this comparison called Tina and Chris ‘plonkers’, but saw what I meant.
The more that I think about it, the more binds me to the notion:
* Both men kick off the chaos, and the women fall in with it
* In Godard’s film, the shooting of the policeman is imprecisely shown (Michel spread-eagled, his hand on the gun, the shot, and the policeman falling into a ditch), so that we cannot be sure how it happened – Tina, though, is present when Chris reverses over his first victim, and maybe is almost initially convinced by his sobs that it is an accident that has ruined the visit to the tramway museum
* In both cases, there is something ludicrous about what happens – Michel running across the fields like a long-legged hare, and the pathetic details of the man under the caravan and his shaking hand
* The women fall in with it for very similar reasons, and Patricia just as much knows that Michel is wanted for murder as Tina does that Chris has killed, but both women are doing it to please the man and as part of finding out whether they love him
* In one case with a caravan, both films feature dangerous overtaking, though Michel’s is more than anything part of his general frustration with others’ driving, rather than to beat a rival to a pitch
* The separate development of the stories apart, with no sense that Chris is exhausted by what is happening (only irritated that Tina has herself taken to killing, and in ways of which he does not approve), the films converge again with the choices, depending on their feelings for the man, that Tina and Patricia make
* Patricia uses the number that she has been given to report Michel, and is not expecting his response that he will not run any more – nonetheless, just before he dies, he is still calling her a louse for what she did (and so remains, to the last, an unreformed child, loving or hating things and people depending just on how they please him)
* Chris is with Tina on the edge of the viaduct, waiting to jump, and he does, but she looses his hand, and he makes no attempt to grab hers and pull him with him
Are these the choices that we make in life ? To run with a man and help him steal cars as long as one loves him, whatever else he has done, and to embrace casual slaughter of others, but maybe hope to pass all the blame onto the person who is dead and cannot contradict what is said ?
Yes, in the Godard, there is a death, but as I have hinted at, what happens in uncertain, although the consequences are not, with detectives somehow knowing who Michel is, reports in the papers, and then the more and more crazy banners and announcements that proclaim that the police are closing in. All of this, and the brisk and casual manner of the film (with the very long bedroom scene at the heart of it), makes for a jumpy but light-hearted quality, because Michel, despite keeping an eye on his pursuers, seems focused on getting his money and escaping to Italy with Patricia.
The feeling about the deaths, largely, in Sightseers is that they are passed off casually in a way reminiscent of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), although there is no attempt to disguise the bloodiness of the bludgeoning of victims 2 and 3. As with the Godard, we have the reports on the radio that alert Tina and Chris to what is happening, and likewise form part of the texture of the narrative (Michel’s photo is in the paper and so he can be recognized, and a description of Chris and Tina is also given).
So much for the comparison, although I think that there is a compelling case that the similarities cannot be there just by chance. Sightseers begins with Tina’s mother playing on her alleged weakness like someone out of Little Britain, and acting as a sort of Cassandra-like oracle by declaring to Chris I don’t like you ! and calling him a murderer. Later, whether sprawled for attention at the foot of the stairs, or surrounded by the remains of a Chinese take-away and by tonic and gin bottles, she punctuates the supposedly romantic trip.
Tina, with her nutty knitted bra and split-crotch panties, gets a disappointment when Chris feigns sleep on her, and it is only a couple of times what she might hope for (to judge from the rocking of the caravan, drawing fascination from the bystanders, when they first dive into bed). She is a confusingly entertaining mixture of innocence and its opposite, and, because of the matter-of-factness of the killing, it can be the backdrop to not so much the furtherance as disintegration of their relationship, as, another night, Chris gets drunk, rather than being with her.
We never really know who Chris is, or Tina, but that is not the point – whether he is ever telling the truth, e.g. about his job, injection-moulding, or Tina being his muse, the string that we saw being wrapped around pins at the beginning and mapping out their course is what we see unfold. And, with Tina, did the dog really die that way, and, if so, was it an accident, or a petty act of revenge ? Chris + Tina = Christina = two sides of the same coin… ?
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