Wednesday 24 April 2013

The 100 best romantic movies ? (according to @TimeOutFilm)

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24 April

It all started with Catherine Bray (whom The Agent Follows on Pratter)... :





Catherine Tweeted :




Stupid Apsley looked at her 1 to 10 (as previously Tweeted), since she had been one of Time Out's 101 'experts, including the folks who make their living from giving movies a critical mauling', and Tweeted Catherine :






Skipping a few more of Apsley's irritating questions, we move on to :








So, if it were all democratic - with a lot of great strictness thrown in - what did the 100 list really mean ? :








And what about those 'romantic' films. For what it's worth, Apsley has this to comment :






So Apsley got thinking... :

Ten free choices for each of 101 voters, so 1010 selections to be whittled down to a ranked list of 100 by, where possible, weighting the choices according to preference.

Obviously not a scientific experiment to which a test of significance need necessarily be applied, but assume, for argument's sake, that one in every two or three list of ten choices would be a duplicate : 505 discrete selections, but how skewed might the voting get if, say, 1st place carried 15 points, 2nd place 13 points, 3rd place 11 points, and then allocating a range of 10 points to the remaining 7 positions?

Could it possibly be that a relatively very small number of the overall 101 voters, choosing the same film in 1st place, might out-vote a larger number ranking it, but putting it lower down their list ? If so, democracy would mean that those with 'a passion for' a film within their choice of 10 would vote down (or, even, out) a greater number putting it, say, 8th...


No doubt more than one way to analyse these data-sets and arrive at a 1 to 100, then...


For example, Annie Hall :


* Richard Gere (who didn't choose it) only voted for 2 films

* Sally Hawkins put it 7th

* Frances O'Connor put it 4th

* Sara Pascoe put it in an unranked list

* Christopher Walken - as Gere

Summary : 3 out of 18 Actors voted for it



* Dave Calhoun (Time Out) had it 1st

* Kate Muir (The Times) put it 5th

Summary : 2 out of 18 Critics voted for it



* Judd Apatow only voted for 3 - this was the 3rd

* Richard Curtis put it 1st

* Aside - Gideon Koppel's choice for 1st was Carry on Camping...

* Jamie Travis says 4th [and, for my money, wisely names Hannah and her Sisters as 9th, which I didn't notice in anyone else's list]

* Penny Woolcock goes for 2nd

Summary : 4 out of 21 Film-makers voted for it



Conclusion

Overall, out of 57 people in these three lists who could have voted for Annie Hall, only 9 did, with 2 x 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 2 x 4th, 5th, 7th and an unranked.

To me, though Annie Hall is a great film (if not, in my view, really a romance), it suggests that the voting must (if 57 / 101 is a representative sample - I can analyse the other three categories...) be too diffuse for the votes of many to count for anything and / or that the weighting gives an unrepresentative result.


Taking this on :

Of the Film industry insiders Of whom there were 20), Shira MacLeod rated it 3rd, and Louisa Dent 2nd, but no one else named it. 2 out of 20


There were 13 Cultural heroes* : Lauren Cuthbertson put it 6th, Robyn Hitchcock 3rd**, Tim Key voted (but didn't rank it), Tom Odell said 5th, and Isy Suttie 4th. 5 out of 13


Finally, 11 Writers, of whom Moira Buffini listed it, chronologically, penultimate, Joe Dunthorne put it 6th, and Jack Thorne 1st. 3 out of 11


Those new categories make, all in all, 10 out of 44, with a further 1st, 2nd, 2 x 3rd, 4th, 5th, 2 x 6th, plus 2 x unranked.


Added to the categories above, 19 out of 101 (more respectable) :

1st x 3 (Critic, Film-maker, Writer)

2nd x 2 (Film-maker, Film industry insider)

3rd x 3 (Film-maker, Film industry insider, Cultural hero)

4th x 3 (Actor, Film-maker, Cultural hero)

5th x 2 (Critic, Cultural hero)

6th x 2 (Cultural hero, Writer)

7th x 1 (Actor)

Unranked x 3 (Actor, Cultural hero, Writer)


With the new categories, around one in five named Annie Hall, and that got it 4th in the 100 list. How much that is down to the weighting, with 8 out of 19 in the 1st to 3rd positions, is anyone's guess...

And, of course, if the three voters who declined to rank their choices had not done so, that might have made things different again !



Afterword

And what about Dr Zhivago (1965), ranked only no. 96 - to the digust of someone who commented on Time Out's pages ?

Well, I guess that there couldn't have been many votes, and, out of their 10 choices, this is what I find:

* No Actors voted for it

* No Critics voted for it

* In Film-makers, Gillies MacKinnon put it 7th, and Shirin Neshat 8th


Just over the halfway point (57 from the 101 who made some sort of selection), only two picked it - how many more secured Dr Zhivago its position at 96 ?


No Film industry insiders or Writers, and just Bella Freud from Cultural heroes (5th), so 3 votes out of 101, nothing higher than 5th place, gets 96th place.

Fourth place overall secured by 19 votes, 96th by 9, so where anything came in that list of 100 could be depend on the weighting given by - or lack of weighting - one person who chose the film...

Highly scientific (or democratic) ? Maybe a much-higher place was won for a film with, again, just three votes, because it had all its votes in positions 1st to 3rd


Comments, especially from @TimeOutFilm, welcome !



End-notes

* Bella Freud is to be valued for listing Subway (1985).

** Hitchcock came up with The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985).


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Tuesday 23 April 2013

Video: Woman shocked to see tiger in public toilet (according to AOL®)

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23 April

Of course, a tiger in the petrol-station, or in the woman's bedroom, would have been unremarkable*.

After all, Esso still seems to like tigers (though, I am quick to say, I do not have any idea what it does to forestall their extinction - nearly said 'secure', but that was just  a confusion of seeking and stopping), and many a home has a Tigger, either a fluffy version, or built into a photograph-frame.

As for this toilet tiger, it couldn't have been a bothersome sort, because there is no claim that the woman was hurt ('mauled' is the preferred term), but just that she was shocked by seeing it. Perhaps she was under the faulty impression that they are extinct...

Mean of someone, then, to go and proof her wrong by attracting it inside the WC, but you know what these activists are like !


End-notes

* Oh, the perils of what T. S. Eliot (to be specific) liked, I think, to call specificity !


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Sunday 21 April 2013

In Praise of Baxter

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21 April 2013



Dear Bruce Baxter

Forget it, Susan Tomes !

You have always been the best, but your new all-Mozart recording is just blinding.

The music critic for The Times called it revelatory, but, for me, its effect is very shiny and totally chic - not at all redundant.

I know that you treasure these epistles, and I am more in awe of you than ever, but I remain your number-one fan



Juliet


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Saturday 20 April 2013

Film reviews : Pretending to know more than one does... ?

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21 April

I have blogged elsewhere how slips in what a reviewer, say, of films writes might make one think that he or she did not see (all of) the film in question. From which one might infer that I think that the minimum that one can expect, if the reviewer did not watch the whole film, is for him or her to say so.

What, though, about a film whose screenplay is not original, but adapted from a book or a play (most higher-budget films are such films) ? Can the reviewer meaningfully comment about the adaptation if, say, he or she has not read the book or play ?

In asking which, I recognize that, with such a film, it is one thing to criticize an infelicity or the implausibility of a character or part of what he or she does, another to locate the reason for it with the various film-makers (screenwriter, director, actor, etc.), without seeming to stop to ask Was this in the original, and what would deviating from that, if possible, have meant – and how would it have been done ?

If, of course, without having read the original book or play and not admitting not to know it, one wrote a review that gave the impression that one had, or that the infelicity or implausibility was squarely that of the film-makers alone, would one be pretending to know things that one did not ? If so, is the temptation for a reviewer to do it to seem convincing in that capacity, authoritative ? :


In the House (2012)

Anyway, let me get on to Francois Ozon's intriguing story of the unusual relationship between a 16-year-old pupil, Claude, (Ernst Umhauer) and his teacher (Fabrice Luchini).

The teacher sets his class the task of recounting what they did the previous weekend and Claude begins a sequence of writing about the home life of a classmate (Bastien Ughetto).

At first, this amounts to viewing through a window but to make the work more realistic he inveigles himself into his subjects' lives.

Gradually, the essays become more sinister and the teacher effectively becomes a voyeur, demanding richer writing from the boy who becomes his 'protege'.

Ozon has adapted Juan Mayorga's play without losing a theatrical feel to the movie (there are only three sets in the film; school, the classmate's home and the teacher's house).

In The House benefits from outstanding performances: Umhauer shows a superb streak of underlying malevolence while Luchini does a fine job as a teacher whose initial apparent naivety may be a cloak for uglier motives.

Courtesy of Neil White (@everyfilmdteled)


I am pretty sure that the Mayorga original has not been read. For one thing, the Amazon® search that I did when I was interested to find the source material suggested that it is not available (not, at any rate, in English, but instead under the name El chico de la última fila (which IMDb gives me)).

However, the reference here is vague enough to suggest that it might be known, but which of us knows whether the play has 'a theatrical feel' to lose ? I suggest that this is an inference, without reference to whether Mayorga wrote in, for example, a naturalistic, post-modern, or Brechtian mode (or a mixture of any one of these and others).

As I have already blogged, the locations are constricted and claustrophobic, but one cannot simply suppose either that the play proposed them, rather than using some other approach or device, and there are more than the three mentioned : near and at the basketball court, outside and inside the cinema, in and around the gallery, and, fleetingly, Garcia's house and a bus.


Here's another take on the film and how it has been constructed:


For a film maker to turn his gaze back on his own narrative can be risky, and exploring the nature of writing and the creative process risks alienating the viewer if not handled well, but François Ozon has a solid track record in handling such matters. In The House creates a world of moral ambiguity within which its characters’ motivations are always reasonable, if not always rational, and events are allowed to spiral gently out of control (or further into control, depending on your perspective). While the genitalia and breast themed artworks on the wall of Jeanne’s gallery suggests that absence of morality becoming more prevalent in contemporary society, the motivations of Germain and Claude are more timeless and satisfyingly shaded in grey. The script by succeeds in having its cake and eating it, cocking its nose at trite genre conventions while successfully weaving them into the plot.

In The House thrives on its relationships: between Germain and Jeanne, the couple whose relationship becomes defined by their reactions to Claude’s work; between Germain and Claude, as the line between fact and fiction blurs and the definition of their pupil and mentor relationship blurs with it; and between Claude and the mother of the family at the centre of his writings, Esther (Emmanualle Seigner), defying the age gap between the two to give an additional layer of uncertainty and ambiguity. These relationships are all sold by uniformly excellent performances from the cast, especially newcomer Unhauer, and it’s a step up from the almost forced frivolity of Ozon’s last film, Potiche. There’s just a couple of unfortunate notes, including the insistence on every French film featuring Kristin Scott Thomas feeling the need in some way to draw attention to her English roots (here a reference to Yorkshire), and the ending, an extra portion of cake too much in the having-and-eating-of-cake. But if I had to mark the efforts of Ozon and his cast, they’d be looking at a solid grade this time around.

Courtesy of The Movie Evangelist (@MovieEvangelist)


If Ozon is the 'film maker', what does he make is film of or from ? Can he be credited with the work - the 'risky' turning 'his gaze back on his own narrative' - when it seems unlikely that Mayorga, with his experience, would have been excluded from participation in the adaptation ?

At the moment, that is just a guess on my part - but is it likely, even if I gather that it happens often enough, that Ozon would simply adapt the play for the screen without seeking Mayorga's input ?

And the ending, whose closing shot The Evangelist tells me that he simply does not like ? - the grammar of the film implies that what we see is and has continued to be what Germain and Garcia are looking at, but that may not be so. Is it any better (or worse) if it is (a) in Germain's head, (b) a deliberately boggling kaleidoscopic depiction of the varieties of life that we can (happen to) see into, or (c) Garcia projecting his imagination onto the world as a creator who has Germain in thrall ?


To be continued



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Thursday 18 April 2013

Hey, Cinephiles ! I'm a Philokinotologist - are you ?

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18 April



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Wednesday 17 April 2013

Goldberg and McCann ride again

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17 April



The pair who turn up and sometimes threaten more with innuendo, and what they don’t say rather than what they do, bear these names in Pinter’s The Birthday Party. The Homecoming has the unseen figure of MacGregor, who – so Sam claims at the close of the play – had Max’s wife in the back of the car as he drove.

In Old Times, the Gaelic name is McCabe, mentioned only in the sequences when Kate and Anna seem to inhabit another time and place – or another place and time to inhabit them. But who is McCabe ?

The play’s dialogue accustoms us to the possibility that, for example, we may never be sure whether it was Anna’s skirt that Deeley, with her compliance, looked up – or says that he did.

Anna’s eventually agreeing with him that it was she does not, in itself, signify that it did happen. Yet it does come immediately before Kate’s unleashing her fractured and furious speech about Deeley and Anna, with which the dialogue ends, and leads to the tableau with which it concludes.

The names McCann and McCabe share, to some extent, in euphony, but more so in the fact that they betoken an Irish, rather than a Scots, origin (on the rule that the prefix ‘Mc’ is one, and ‘Mac’ the other). If that rule is valid and if, as it seems, Deeley is an Irish name, could we posit that McCabe is really he ?

The Homecoming’s MacGregor is the only person not referred to by his or her Christian name or a pet form of it (Teddy, Lenny, etc., but just Ruth), although it is shortened to Mac. That pattern seems true in Old Times, because (in Act 2) the other names that Anna uses are Charley, Duncan and Christy – in Act 1, Anna had suggested Jake (whom Kate said that she does not like), or ‘Charley…or…’, and Anna then named McCabe, when Kate asks whom she meant.
Managing, the second time, to break in to whatever is happening between Anna and Kate again in Act 2, Deeley claims that Christy ‘can’t make it. He’s out of town’, and Kate says ‘Oh, what a pity’, before, after marking silence, the three talk together ‘normally’ again.

Prior to Deeley’s words, she feelingly and tellingly said about Christy (after saying that she liked him best, and Anna said that he is ‘lovely’) :

He’s so gentle, isn’t he ? And his humour. Hasn’t he got a lovely sense of humour ? And I think he’s…so sensitive. Why don’t you ask him round ?


Even a fondness and admiration for another man twenty years ago – or is it now ? – seems to have been too much for Deeley, too much of a threat, as Anna (after Deeley’s eruption) seems to perceive herself to be:

(To Deeley, quietly) I would like you to understand that I came here not to disrupt but to celebrate.

Pause

To celebrate a very old and treasured friendship, something that was forged between us long before you knew of our existence*.


The description of Christy does not seem to match Deeley’s nature and behaviour, and, with it, comes a portrayal of a time when men friends of Anna’s would be invited around, by Anna, to where Kate and she lived. (That is, if we believe the play’s opening dialogue to the effect that Kate had no friends other than Anna, and in the light of Anna’s saying Would you like me to ask someone over ?)

If he is not Deeley, McCabe is, at any rate, a mystery in Act 1 : in the scenario of the 1950s at its end, Kate says that she will think in the bath about Anna’s hesitant suggestion of asking McCabe, so not the definite rejection that Jake gets. Yet, by Act 2, we have :

Kate : Is Charley coming ?

Anna : I can ring him if you like.

Kate : What about McCabe ?

Anna : Do you really want to see anyone ?

Kate : I don’t think I like McCabe.

Anna : Nor do I.

Kate : He’s strange. He says some very strange things to me.

Anna : What things ?

Kate : Oh, all sorts of funny things.

Anna : I’ve never liked him.

Kate : Duncan’s nice though, isn’t he ?


As two women discussing men whom they know might, they turn briefly to Duncan, having more or less agreed that they do not like McCabe, and then to Christy, whereupon Deeley makes his successful interruption.

In context, then, is that intervention made in genuine fear, because he – McCabe – has heard himself rejected, and it seems that Christy might be asked to come to see Kate in his stead ?

Couple that with how Anna eventually validates Deeley for maintaining that he had a liaison with her**, and Kate’s words to Deeley about Anna’s feelings for him (events which he gives the impression of not quite remembering, not quite crediting, and which Anna does not even attempt to deny), and, with a consequence reminiscent of the unfolding of an Ibsen play, the trap has snapped shut.

For Anna, despite being the one for whom Deeley felt a real attraction, is not the one whom he chose to marry, and he had gone along with allowing Kate to efface the memory and reality of Anna :

He asked me once, at about that time, who had slept in that bed before him. I told him no one. No one at all.


That links back to when, just to Deeley, Anna had been denying his saying that they had had prior contact and having been at the party. Deeley said that afterwards

I never saw you again. You disappeared from the area. Perhaps you moved out..


In negating what Deeley proposes, Anna does not challenge him identifying her as that woman, but simply says No. I didn’t. Deeley then asks where Anna was, and, before he appears to drop the subject, she says Oh, at concerts, I should think, or the ballet.

By doing so, Anna lamely resuscitates the impression of a social whirl for Kate and her with which she launched herself into the play, whereas it seems just as plausible that, at some point, Anna’s world had revolved around The Wayfarers Tavern – despite her protestation I wasn’t rich, you know. I didn’t have money for alcohol., which Deeley rejects by saying that men, himself included, bought her drinks.

Knowing that Deeley is Kate’s husband, Anna maybe does not want to remember, and she does not appear able to parry Deeley’s claims now that he has her alone. He, for his part, almost certainly takes advantage, either of embellishing a real situation, or – if Pinter leaves us thinking it amounts to anything different – fabricating an account so far back that Anna cannot easily and definitely contradict him.

If Deeley is McCabe, any disappearance of Anna could not even be on a figurative level as Kate’s narration of Anna being dead or Anna’s of a man in the room who is sobbing and puts his head in Kate’s lap : that silent closing scenario, with the three of them, is like the dumbshow in Pericles or, more famously, in Hamlet, which sums up what dare not be spoken, but they know as truth, remembered truth.

In writing this, I find myself back at Beckettt’s Play, with Kate, Deeley and Anna linked as are his voices, doomed by an inextricable past…


Postlude

What a bastard relation to appreciating a play reading a text and thinking that one understands it is ! I say this, having just re-read Landscape, from 1968, and feeling an effect from it - an effect so different from a production, a performance, not least with Pinter, where the cumulative effect of the stage-directions Pause, Silence or even Long silence cannot be experienced on the page.

Such a crooked teaching that encouraged one to approach plays - and poems - as texts, when they are merely notated in writing, and live outside it !

My copy tells me that Peggy Ashcroft and Eric Porter were first broadcast on the radio in it, and then, in 1969, Peter Hall staged it (Ashcroft again, but not Porter). That figures. Is it conceivable that Pinter did not hear and know Beckettt's radio play Embers, broadcast first in 1959 ? And this play and also Silence, how they feed into the mood and nature of Old Times


End-notes

* Was the friendship, though, long before ?

** Of which he tells Kate, after telling alone Anna that this is his recollection, with the apparent intent of demeaning both Anna (for being the woman whose skirt he was allowed him to look up) and, by association, Kate herself for letting him become her husband when his interests were not in her, despite his story, with homoerotic mentions of Robert Newton, of meeting Kate at a screening of Odd Man Out.


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Despatching Thatcher - who always had cost in her arsenal to justify cuts

This is a review of Ken Loach's documentary The Spirit of '45 (2013)

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17 April

This is a review of Ken Loach's documentary The Spirit of '45 (2013)

In reassuring me that there was no expectation of a delay in my journey using The Tube, Transport for London's notices called 'Baroness' one whom some recently have been referring to as 'Lady' - who knows what the protocol is, but it seems more than a little odd that no one knows what to call Thatcher.

Certainly not, to my mind and the title of a recent waste of the medium of film, The Iron Lady. More like, if a noisy band hadn't got there first, an iron maiden, choking and skewering to death those whom she despised : just look at the footage from the time of the miners' strike in Ken Loach's excellent The Spirit of '45 (2013).

In London, this seems a day like any other, apart from those notices - just imagine a horrible world where everyone around you wore a black arm-band !

Which takes me, by an inevitable association, to the tomb of The Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral - about him, as about the snuffed-out promise of Prince Henry (i.e. the elder son of James I (of England)), there was no doubt what was felt. Yes, even in the seventeenth century, people were not as free as we now think ourselves, but there was a lively press, and a spirit that would lead to a monarch on trial for crimes against his own country...

Not that the chummy trio of Cameron, Clegg and Osborne need face any more than tha ballot-box, but they are fools if they think that their self-minded and motivated support of their cronies builds this country, rather than their wealth and interests, and that it will all go unforgiven, let alone unnoticed !


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Sunday 14 April 2013

In the clouds

This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)

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14 April 2013

This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)

* Spoiler warning : assumes a knowledge of the film, so best not read without one *

Follows on from A cloudy prospect


As a re-viewing reminded me, there are even clouds in Warner Bros' corporate title, and there are probably many more than the other ones that I did spot, which include the striking ones reflected in water (impossibly and Dalíesquely) on the beach when Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) fatefully first meets Dr Henry Goose (Tom Hanks)

Clouds are transient things, a fact that Hamlet exploits (and even artist Alexander Cozens in his illustrated treatise, A New Method of Landscape), but I do not yet know what role they play in David Mitchell's novel, on which this film is based.

Yet there are, just as clouds pass overhead, communications between :

1849 and 1936 - Adam Ewing's journal (read by Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw)), plus the effects on history of Tilda's (Doona Bae's) and his joining the abolitionists

1936 and 1973 - Robert Frobisher's compositions (heard by Luisa Rey (Halle Berry)), and letters to Rufus Sixsmith (James D'Arcy) (read by Luisa Ray, and passed to the mother of Megan), and it is through Sixsmith that Rey becomes aware of the report on the Hydra reactor at Swannekke, plus the effect of her exposing the attempt to discredit that form of power by allowing a nuclear catastrophe

1973 and 2012 - What Isaac Sachs (Tom Hanks) was writing on the plane could not physically have survived its being blown-up, but his words seem to resonate; in 1973, Luisa Rey was friends with Javier Gomez (Brody Nicholas Lee), and, in 2012, Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent) is reading Gomez' script, heading north on the train; later, Cavendish writes of his experiences at Acacia House, and a film is made at some point (Tom Hanks)

2012 and 2144 - Yoona-939 (Xun Zhou) shows Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) a device on which a short segment of the film based on Cavendish's writing is looping; a recording of Sonmi's broadcast, and the account that she gives in captivity (taken by James D'Arcy), form part of the archive on her

2144 and 2321 - A venerated form of some of Sonmi's words is kept sacred by the Abbess (Susan Sarandon), and read to Zachry (Tom Hanks) when he consults her, and Sonmi's image is represented both in the valleys, and on Mount Seoul

In short, a series of nested what ifs




I touched previously on what significance 'the doubling' of parts might have : in fact, if IMDb is to be trusted*, six actors play a part in all six time-strands, although those of Hugh Grant, though instrumental, are minor ones (and some of those played by, say, Doona Bae, are far less significant than that of Sonmi-451), which is surely no accident.



To be continued



End-notes

* Since, as seems accurate, Jim Broadbent is not credited in that from 1973.


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Saturday 13 April 2013

Soft targets for scorn : Who gives a stuff about homoeopathy* ?

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13 April

Honestly, I'd really far rather that people such as Simon Singh, who campaign about homoeopathy, would consider the rights and wrongs of electro-convulsive therapy* (ECT), or even psychosurgery : that's keeping it within the so-called sphere of medicine (borderline butchery ?), but one could migrate to hammering many an alternative therapy, whereas homoeopathy seems to have an abiding fascination, which is what this posting concerns itself with.

To keep with ECT : it's odd that human-rights campaigners, journalists and the like want to stress the inhumanity of measures used against, say, Iraqi detainees to break them (whether or not to get information from them), but those - equally detained - under the Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended) seem to be have some different sort of emotional or moral status as victim, compared with military prisoners or officials of deposed regimes. Maybe I'm just weird in finding that curious...

Actually, I don't think so, because it actually seems easier (possibly as a result of documentary : but, then, who makes the documentaries, and why about that ?) for people to contemplate the ethics of the waterboarding or mock execution of a captive in (or brought from) a foreign country than what might happen, say, to an Afghani in a UK psychiatric unit, deemed to be in an unshakeable depression and (irrespective of consent) to need ECT to save his life or for some other reason under the 1983 Act.



And where are we with our headline issue, homoeopathy ? Well, isn't much criticism - dressing-up of the criticism aside - just saying either You're gullible pricks to believe in this crap (various royals included, I believe***), or You are exploiting gullible pricks who believe in this crap - and it matters because it is done 'on the NHS' ?

So what irritates me is the arbitrarily focused smugness of those who say that this is all crap and we're not such mugs as to believe in it, or to want it to continue :

Nothing better to get angry about (such as the mental-health or other humanitarian issues already mentioned) ?

Or just making a fuss because it's an easy battle to win, when most people grasp that the practice is one of repeated dilution, and don't need much stoking to concur that it should not happen at public expense.

Frankly, with the waste that is everywhere in this world, from unnecessarily upgrading phones or laptops (or PCs) just because people can, or have to****, is stopping homoeopathic treatment going to save anything sigificant in terms of money or lives ? Is is really such a huge topic that Pratter needs to be full of condemnation of it, whether in ridicule or rhetoric ?



Unless homoeopathy is banned by law (and might go underground ?), it will continue privately, so the people who were involved in the NHS have an incentive - called losing their job - to work for a private institution, or set up on their own. Net result what ? What savings, and what change ?

Maybe worthwhile in itself, but why not highlight the horrible and cruel isolation and poverty in which many with mental-health conditions have to live ? The lack of befriending or other support schemes, the lack of concern that poor diet, lifestyle and even the long-term effects of medication have on, and reciprocally so, physical health, the battles to be awarded and survive on wlefare benefits, etc., etc., ?

Honestly, Splatter, I really can't think that it matters any great amount, when such degraded lives are all around us, that a few people are being prescribed overdiluted extracts - don't mock or barrack this practice of low significance when people are living and dying in obscurity. If you choose to, you prove that your own mental and personal satisfaction in what you do outweighs the demands of your humanity, your integrity, and your intellect.



End-notes

* How can something as damaging, as brutal and little understood as to its mechanism of effectiveness (when effective), be called 'a therapy' ?

** Most people who Tweet so much about it can't even spell it - they write homeopathy, when they'd probably pounce on someone not putting homoeothermy...

*** And some might know, far better than I, how there came to be a Bristol Homoeopathic Hospital.

**** Because applications and web-coding becomes ever more (gratuitously ?) complicated, and not (or no longer) supported by the only operating that will run on a computer because of its specification, whose functionality is otherwise perfectly good.


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Monday 8 April 2013

Kristin at the Harold Pinter Theatre II

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 April

In the last performance of Old Times at The Harold Pinter Theatre (formerly The Comedy, and home to nine or so previous Pinter productions), I saw Lia Williams as Kate (Deeley’s wife), and therefore Kristin Scott Thomas as Anna (Kate’s friend) (Rufus Sewell was Deeley).

I was partly encouraged to do so by what Lia had said to me at the stage door before Easter, when she had come off stage from being Anna : that Kristin and she looked very different, and that, with her dark wig, I wouldn’t recognize her. It sounded fascinating for these very clear portrayals one way around to swap over, and for Kristin to be not ‘dark’ as Anna, as the opening word of the play would have her, but blonde, and to imbue the other woman with character, form, shape…

This way around, the play was different from the start : KST was standing, as Lia had done (according to the stage directions), looking out of the window at the back, but she was audience right, not left, and Lia, on the sofa, was on the one audience left, not the other. As the interaction between Deeley and Kate proceeds, the gestures, the blocking of the two on and around the stage, were quite different, not mere mirror-images*, and, as I made comparisons, I contemplated that memorizing the roles, even for Rufus, would be made more distinct by such partitioning, lest (a word that Deeley thinks not often heard) he should suddenly mistake Kate for Anna, or vice versa.

At the moment when the text directs Anna to turn ‘from the window, speaking’, the full presence of Kristin burst onto the stage. Knowing the play anyway, it had been a striking moment with Lia, but it was if suddenly she had always been in the room. Her movement, her energy, her grace were fantastic, and the relief in which Lia’s Anna was cast enlivened one’s appreciation of what they each had done – this suited KST down to the ground, the enthusiasm tempered by, but seeking to cover, the uncertainty that Deeley seeks to exploit by his interjections.

Sewell seemed a different Deeley, hard to characterize, but maybe a bit more bluff at the outset, a little more active on his feet, but no less drawing attention to himself when (as he did in both versions) he leant forward, put his mouth to the brandy-glass, and, in one swift bending move backwards, downed a very good measure, before trotting over, naughtily, to the brandy bottle.

As the sort of man that he is, wanting to stress how travelled he is, how much he enjoys his job and how important it is, this larger-than-life Salmon Fishing in the Yemen sort of woman (KST’s role in it, that is) is a threat to him – that is, at any rate, how he responds to her, trying to knock holes in her recollections, what she says her life in Sicily is like, etc. KST’s Anna stood up very well to this treatment, not by ignoring it, but by posture, movement, expression, and she got, by it, the lion’s share of the laughs that were not already on the face of the script.

It is clear enough to me, more so as I think back on Saturday night, that the tailoring of how Lia and Kristin played each part, and how their Rufus responded to them, must have been worked out in wonderful detail all along. What a marvellous piece of theatre to have gone to such trouble to create the play twice over to fit with this fascinating experiment of switching over !

Lia’s Kate was, I guess, much more how I tried to imagine her when I first devoured Pinter plays in several afternoons at the time of studying The Caretaker for ‘A’ level, that acquisitive sort of juvenile desire to know as much as possible about something (thankfully, not from the Internet, then, but from Pinter’s own words, though largely not words enacted on stage or screen) : she lived that sort of distance, that inwardness of Kate that makes her awkward, makes them, much as the bare situation invites it, end up talking about her in the third person.

That feature of the play, both when Deeley is first seeking information about Kate (following Anna’s exuberance about the lives / life that she says that they lived in London), and in the time when, after Kate has gone for her bath, they have moved together for Deeley to show Anna the bedroom, is more than just a feature : it is the bedrock that both are drawn to use Kate as the only thing that they have in common, whether as offensive gesture or defence, and to propound the Kate that they assert that they know, however much at odds with that of the other.

Lia’s Kate seems to invite being fought over in a quite other way from that of Kristin – Kristin was quiet, as Kate has to be in words when they are allocated to the other two, but not in a way that did not let us into her movements, expressions, smiles, be they only the adjustment of a limb, a calmness of the face, or the radiance of her pleasure. Lia, by contrast, had a more stark take on Kate, one that burnt oh so slowly right up to the final sets of blocks of words that she delivers to close the dialogue.

That approach seemed to work better as what Woody Allen would always have described as a ‘passive aggressive’ interpretation, but, at the same time, Kristin came to those utterances from a different place, and so, perhaps, we were more shocked by these words*, and the sense of enigma had a contrasting origin :

But I remember you. I remember you dead.


It is quite apparent to me that the play can unfold in very unlike ways, and yet still be close to the conception of the text, and not, I suspect, exhaust it.

More here on what seeing this production twice now makes me believe…


End-notes

* In the first viewing of the play, before the tableau, Anna (Lia) is at the foot of the bed that is audience left, after being pushed off the end by Kate, whereas Lia’s Kate stood over Anna.

** Just after Anna has said to Deeley :

Oh, it was my skirt. It was me. I remember your look… very well. I remember you well.


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Sunday 7 April 2013

Lessons from Merz

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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8 April

On my fourth visit to the Kurt Schwitters exhibition at Tate Britain (Schwitters in Britain), I shall probably conclude having looked at everything, and might even manage some time with the ‘Kurt-inspired’ installations by Laure Prouvost and Adam Chodzko.

Four visits ? Yes, because, unlike those of the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at (Tate) Modern (Lichtenstein : A Retrospective) these works, in my experience, need time to be appreciated, and also space. As a Member of Tate, I have my admission free and at will, without the need for a ticket, and I can accordingly pace my viewing. (With the Arshile Gorky exhibition at Modern, I misjudged a little, and needed to travel down for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday of its closing weekend.)

What I have learnt (so far) is :

(1) One can have no appreciation of the pieces in Room 5 (Hand-held sculptures) from photographic images (I have seen such)

(2) In fact, without having them endlessly rotate on a turntable (not least because some are fragile, or, maybe, unstable), I believe that filming some of the works revolving would have benefited the typical visitor’s appreciation of, for example, Chicken and Egg, Egg and Chicken, Untitled (The All-Embracing Sculpture) and Speed (all dates to come)

(3) There are various reasons, some to do with the effect of shadow on Schwitters’ constructions (both on canvas and paper, and these free-standing ones), and others to the fact that he has, for example, vividly painted planes of Chicken and Egg, Egg and Chicken that are not – almost necessarily with a three-dimensional object (although there is more to it than that) – visible at all times

(4) In fact, the moving image as an interpretive element is under-represented in the show (whereas the installations both use film) – we do not, I assume, have footage of Schwitters reciting the Ursonate or any other of his poems, stories, etc., which is why we have the well-known three-by-three grid of photographs of him performing the former (plus audio)

(5) I have not yet done more than pass through Prouvost and Chodzko’s parts of the exhibition, but it does beg the question why their work, even if it is a response to his, is part of the show about Schwitters – how interesting are commissions from 2011, as against, say, some reactions in artwork that are contemporaneous to his time in Britain (seven years, after all), or even reporting Hirst’s inspiration to go to art college because of Schwitters’ collages ?

(6) What we do have, which I suggest is more of archive interest, are the photographs of the Merz Barn that were taken in situ by the team led by Richard Hamilton, and we have an almost excessively full chronology* of the failure to save the remains of the Merzbau, and of the near-failure to preserve the Merz Barn, both before and after the Hamiltonian survey

(7) I criticize the inclusion of a film-loop of those photos for several reasons : (a) they include rulers whose scale is never made explicit, (b) it is also not clear what the – often enough – poor-quality images (usually too dark) depict, because there is no over-arching shot of that wall of the Merz Barn, except in the course of the loop (which, of course, one cannot consult), and (c) a large-scale quality image of the wall as it can now be seen in Newcastle-upon-Tyne would show far more (or one could even have had a touch-sensitive one that would project a choice of images, being various levels of close-up or one of the ones from the survey)

(8) There are two large plaster pieces (a little like columns, as displayed, but resembling shapely newel-posts, or legs), which, I understand, were found in the Merz Barn, and which are ‘displayed’ in oblong Perspex boxes, placed against the wall, so that one side is invisible – unlike the four Perspex cubes that contain the hand-held sculptures, one cannot even walk all around them, and so film of them being either rotated or circled would give more sense of their curves, their construction, and their continuity with the smaller pieces

(9) But enough of all these observations for how the Schwitters show could have been better or different, because so many visitors (typically for a gallery) are doing themselves no favours by appreciating the works on canvas, wood, cardboard or paper without standing back from them

For I believe that Schwitters used the bus-tickets, say, or newspaper clippings, pieces of packaging, corrugated card or paper, gauze or net purely for their visual effect – if, after we have seen a shape mutedly through a piece of net, we will not see it close to, and we will not see the composition by knowing that that part of it is paper, that part oil-paint on the paper, that part a piece of stone adhered to the surface

(10) The exhibition contains some examples of his use of pointillist marks in landscape and abstract work, but, again, we do not get the best from Seurat by being so close that we see what the painting is made of, but not how the technique is meant to work and be viewed – same with painters such as Sisley or Pissarro

(11) As to the materials that Schwitters used that derive from reproductions of works in national collections, there are some cases (Room 3 contains some) where one is quite clearly meant to see that he is transforming or subverting a representation of an identifiable original, which is entirely consistent with the assertion that he made in 1919 :

The word Merz denotes essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes, and technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials


(12) Schwitters goes on to make his meaning quite plain – and I like it that he talks, along with paint, about things as if there is a harmonious democratization :

A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint


(13) For this reason, I reject the curatorial interpretation put on his use of a copy of G. F. Watt’s Hope in c. 63 old picture 1946 :

The inclusion of an advertisement for Dr Scholl’s Foot Comfort Service brings the lofty symbolism of the original painting, positioned upside-down and overlaid with scraps of paper so that it is barely recognizable, down to earth


Well, if Watt’s painting is inverted and so overlaid maybe it is not meant to be recognizable, and could there, therefore, not be any ‘bringing down’ except in the recognition of a student of art history ? As to the advert, I see no greater significance in the wording than in that of many a scrap used in other collages (‘Merz’ itself is an appropriated fragment, after all) :

The person who looks at a bus-ticket in one and ponders its provenance might as well be in London Transport Museum as the Tate, because I believe that Schwitters’ eye is good, a self-reinforcing belief, because I stand back from his paintings, find a harmony in them, and that, if I put my thumb up to remove a detail, the painting is no longer balanced – it is interesting to get close and see how he achieved it, but just doing so is mistaking means and end


All in all, although some things could have been done differently, I am glad to have had this exhibition to visit, and, when I am not hearing inane comments on Schwitters or his art from other visitors (which makes me run a mile), or avoiding their proceeding to a painting that had looked ‘free’, or even their deciding to stand in my way, I can fondly hope that people have the chance to get to know his work better.

Not everything works as effectively as the select few that really do sing, but almost all have something to say, and it is a joy to become aware of his works of portraiture, landscape, and – in the flesh – sculpture.

Viva Kurt !


End-notes

* I refuse to say ‘time-line’.


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Saturday 6 April 2013

‘Let’s abuse each other !’ (Waiting for Godot, Act I)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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6 April

If – God forbid ! – I were to wish to express the notion that the Prime Minister is a bad man, motivated by self-interest, how might I say it to Cameron’s face ?

I can’t emphatically say the natural You’re evil !, because the first syllable, with its diphthong, is hard to control at any volume when making sure that the message is abrupt and clear, so I might resort to three sharp, distinct jabs, You are evil !, and then add to it, You are selfish and evil ! (or vice versa).

But how cowed by this will he feel, because he can just brush off the adjectives, knowing that he is a pure and noble breed¹ ?

Think of when you are in the car, or cycling, or on the pavement, and someone else using the road does something stupid. You might serenely and calmly turn your countenance to the fact that you have had – as the case might be – to brake suddenly, softly murmur How stupid…, and resume your assumed walk through life with the Buddha.

More likely, I suggest, is that you will react differently, and not resort to our earlier formulation, You are stupid !, at all, but to the You stupid x !, where – probably depending on the level of your non-Buddha-restrained frustration, indignation or even anger – x might be man, woman, etc.², sod, bastard, twat, prick, and so on³.

At this point, it is worth noticing that many adjectives that, according to this pattern, occupy the place of our own ‘stupid’ are bi-syllabic, such as ruddy, bleeding, bloody, sodding, fucking, useless, hopeless, etc., and can therefore be rattled through and over : they have their weight, but as a qualification to our chosen engine of conveying, e.g. You priceless fucker / shite / wanker. (One can, of course, say (probably if relevant) You bald git !, and there is, in great, fat, dumb, proud, crass, etc., a whole battery of monosyllables, but the stronger qualifying words seem to be polysyllabic.)


OK, so what is this exercise – even if some may find it fascinating – of considering condemning Cameron all about ? Well, I want to look at the words of insult that some of the bloggers on mental-health regard as taboo because they stigmatize those with mental-health issues. For example the terms lunatic, psycho, mad, crazy, loopy, demented, and psychotic.

If someone gets called a fucking psycho, that is one extreme, and it may constitute any number of things from a drunken mate approving a reckless act of violence to, say, the critical characterization of a risky piece of driving. (We use words in context, and, in the first example, this may be part of the mythology of the mates’ behaviour, and so not be understood anything other than positively.)

There is a stage further, though, such as in the arena of taunting or threatening – or even administering – violence to a person who is known (or believed⁴) to have a mental-health condition. That reinforces a message that (beautified) goes along the lines We don’t like you or want you around because of who you are, what you do, and what it means for you to be here where you are not welcome.

However, I believe that some words have been denuded of any real malice, unless they are deliberately used offensively : I would suggest that, with enough energy, being called a pretty table-leg could, if anyone wanted to say it, be invested with and convey disregard, disdain, and disgust.

Or take this, from Soda Pictures’ booklet for New British Cinema Quarterly (where Eryl Phillips talks about making – planning to make – Gospel of Us, a three-day theatrical event to tell Christ’s Passion in and around Port Talbot) :

The ambition of the piece was bordering on madness – to attempt a film of it all was either a mid-life crisis or just lunatic


At least two of the words or phrases ‘mid-life crisis’, ‘madness’ and ‘lunatic’ explicitly suggest poor judgement through mental ill-health, but does that, in itself, make it insulting as such to those with that experience ? I’d draw the line in favour of those things being OK, whereas to have written this would be different, I think:

The ambition of the piece was bordering on demented – to attempt a film of it all was either a psychotic episode or sectionable

The insult, there, is to belittle psychosis (by likening it to the feelings of alienation from one’s life that usually fall short of needing even medication), to draw the vague word ‘demented’ (usually meant to signify dangerous violence, and attributed in the popular imagination and vocabulary to mental-health conditions) into the mêlée of meaning, and to cheapen the real and highly threatening and frightening matter of being sectioned by mentioning it in the context of a film that would be hard to make.


What I am hoping is not so much to have demonstrated that when Jon Snow, in writing about the Philpott case, called Philpott 'a lunatic', it was not stigmatizing the whole mental-health community, but to have started a debate about whether that word (and others, some of which I have mentioned, or even given in examples) can ever be used, or must always be pounced upon...


End-notes

¹ In what turn out not to be Paul Weller’s words, but those of Ray Davies (David Watts).

² Or, as my father was wont to say, ‘individual’.

³ Enterprising individuals** might learn a whole string of them, or play a sort of melody, on a scale of them, in increasing and receding severity, such as :

man shit jerk sod cunt drip bum twat .


⁴ A sort of guilt by association or mistake, as in Max Frisch’s Andorra.


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What would you do with an extra £600 (which you won't get) ?

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6 April

Not quite sure how democratic the Diberal Lemocrats are, so here is my comment on Lynne Featherstone's disingenuous question :


Well, if people in a job all got their salary up front on 6 April (rather than every week, fortnight or month throughout the year), or equally those on welfare benefits, they would be in a completely different position to make prudent capital outlays, such as not having to pay interest on paying insurance by instalment.

No one, though, will get £600 in a lump sum, so it's a rather stupid question to ask what anyone would do - let alone whether, overall, other changes leave them worse off !


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Wednesday 3 April 2013

Epiphany : Questions in a comment

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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3 April

I am taking this space to start respond to various questions posed in a comment on Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain II

I have now watched Turner Prize Video artist Elizabeth Price wins and BALTIC Bites - Elizabeth Price, and they should inform my answers



(1) I am unfamiliar with Beckett. If I were to listen to Words and Music, or watch Quad, what influences would be mirrored by Price?


(2) Did it not feel odd to spend so much time on the recreation with the burning furniture?

I can't say that it did.

After all, how do you convey the notion, the terror, of a fire without showing it, and the whole work is only around 20 minutes.

I don't even think that it could be mistaken for a re-creation. At that time, I believe less had been appreciated about how different substances in furniture burn, and how a source of fire might ignite other items.

I took the footage used by Price to be from filmed combustion tests, where the nature and spread of fire was being analysed. I have already commented on the use of two panes : for me, Price located, in this material, the bewitching, hypnotic quality of fire, as against, elsewhere, the destructive one.


(3) With Choir and with the information on the church architecture interspersed, did the fire seem like a sacrament?


(4) The description of the parcloses reinforced an absent focus on the parishioners. How did the film make you feel?


I take it that these belong together.

I watched the film twice through in succession, and therefore knew how CHOIR related to the other two parts of the film the second time.

In my vocabulary, a parclose is merely what I would call a rood-screen or, in other church traditions, an iconostasis (although, in that case, not serving to separate the choir from the rest of the church, but designating, by opaque panelling decorated by holy images, a place limited to the priest).

I am not sure how describing any of the church architecture stressed an absence of parishioners, since there was no one in this part of the film (unlike the distorted moving dancers / singers of the second part, into which the clicks, beats and handclaps drew us).

As I realized that the second section was moving towards giving detail of a fire in which people had been trapped and died, I felt uneasy. We did not see them. We saw the aftermath, and heard from those who had been outside. They were traceless, numberless dead.

They could have been trapped in the choir of a church, and, with no way out (except, perhaps, smashing the windows and climbing out), burnt to death.


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