Mathematics for the Million (after Hogben) ?

This is a Festival review of How I Came to Hate Maths (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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8 October (Tweets embedded, 15 December, 22 April 2015)

This is a Festival review of How I Came to Hate Maths (Comment j’ai détesté les maths) (2013)

Amazon sellers hit by nightmare before Christmas as glitch cuts prices to 1p http://t.co/IV29NIiUK8
— The Guardian (@guardian) December 14, 2014

Except as far as the first part of the film is concerned, the title How I Came to Hate Maths is somewhat misleading*, for we actually spend much time with people who are studying, or employed in, higher-level mathematics…

Contrariwise, some seem to have complained that the film is not what it does not seem to try to be, which is a sweeping account of how mathematics affects our lives and what mathematicians might be like : one, in particular, with an unusual dress sense and a striking scorpion fashion-accessory (pictured below), speaks very potently about what mathematics is and what the prize that he has gone to India to be awarded means to him.

Cédric Villani, who won a Fields Medal in 2010

He, and another Frenchman, who teaches the subject, both also touch upon (as the start of the film does) the changes in presenting it that brought about what the appropriate generation would know as The New Maths, when textbooks such as that of the Midlands Mathematical Experiment were being used (for some reason, Sarah Dillon, in her review for TAKE ONE, seems to interpret this development as a specifically French one). The film makes clear that The New Maths was not, as it might be in another subject, a change in emphasis or on techniques used to understand concepts, but redefining, at much greater length, such things as what one might mean by a straight line.

What is equally clear was that there were winners and losers, in, respectively, those who related to this approach, and those who found themselves excluded by it, but also that the change itself is still not viewed, all this time later, as having been self-evidently right, but having been partly influenced by forces and paradigms outside what is essential about mathematics itself. For those who get to study mathematics in depth, those matters may be less material, and it is with them that we spend most of the film.

Some mathematicians have religiously defended maths as being on the arts side, as if to defend it from being tainted by the sciences (by not being seen as creative). One mathematician, however, was keen to stress how studying the patterns created by dripping honey onto toast, as both one moves in relation to the other and the speed of the falling material changes, is actually relevant to laying cable on the sea-bed, so that it falls smoothly and does not make those convolutions.

Maybe we duplicated our attention unnecessarily in seeing two ‘retreats’ / summer schools for mathematicians (please see comments below as to whether the film could have been ‘trimmed’), in one of which they even made seating plans so that each person sat at table with every other person at least once (hardly a higher-level mathematical task since, once a program had been devised, the names could just be slotted in each time) – and maybe it would have been nice to have heard more interesting comments from those working for organizations such as Google® than appreciation of the topology of a favourite (commissioned ?) sculpture…

In reviewing the film, Sarah Dillon takes issue with the time devoted to high-speed (or quantum) trading, as if this is somehow peripheral to the subject of mathematics, although a former academic mathematician, Jim Simons (who set up Renaissance Technologies), is at the heart of what has been happening with computer-driven decision-making. Dillon claims that :

The film loses its pace when it moves away from this world [that of ‘higher-level mathematics research’] in order to address the role of mathematics in the global financial crisis. Whilst this is clearly an important contemporary moment in the story the film is telling, the film spends too long on it – cut by about fifteen minutes it would have been a good end to an otherwise perfectly balanced piece.


Just on the figures and with a run-time of 110 mins (and, as remarked elsewhere, The Queen’s Building at Emmanuel College does not, in its lecture-theatre, have the most comfortable seating in the world), that would mean cutting it to around 95 mins. However, Dillon must be mistaken in thinking that the film’s financial focus took it this much out of her ideal proportion – for, although she may have had a stopwatch on it, fifteen minutes would seem more like the total ‘spend’ on that topic, not the amount by which it could have been shortened. The Tweet embedded now at the top of this review is meant to suggest further why such things matter to us all...

Market Turbulence: Wall Street’s Whipsaw Week Shows Global Economy’s Flaws http://t.co/TqSvkKPzql
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 10, 2014

That said, as long as one credits the meaning of the world economy, and that global trends ought, because governments subscribe to its having significance, to be allowed to crush the lives of millions who are not at fault, quantum trading in commodities, futures, etc., will continue to have the potential to cause chaos. Couple that with the incident that occurred on 6 May 2010, which has been trivially called The Flash Crash (and which no one in the film seems to be able to explain in detail), and it must be right to question what high-speed trading has led us to, and what it might lead to again : in something of the order of 30 minutes, 10% was lost from the value of the Dow Jones, only to be gained back within the day.

Trader charged with manipulation that contributed to 2010 "flashcrash" http://t.co/aIT7M2alOC pic.twitter.com/aWm2Ydypiw

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 21, 2015

Some human decision-makers would have ‘held their nerve’ and traded their way out of the position, others, seemingly along with the automated trading that was going on at phenomenally high frequencies, would have ‘cut their losses’ – and all over what, as no one even identifies market insecurities as being responsible to so-called positions collapsing? These are the Modern financial instruments, and does not a film about mathematics fitly ask some questions about this, when mistakes in super-string theory, not even mentioned, do not damage people’s pension-funds ?

People who like to talk about Google sometimes speak of its algorithm (as if that explains anything, when there are countless algorithms in how it is put together, not just one). With trading, we are essentially talking of the effects of one program going through the contingencies, which have been dictated by the program-steps, over and over at enormous speeds, coupled with that other programs doing the same, each at the same time, and in a process of not necessarily predictable feedback, shifting their stances / responses. Possibly a massive game of crying wolf, such as unautomated trading could also give rise to, but where one could never go back to who cried it…

The calm tone of acceptance of Wikipedia®'s article also makes for alarming reading !


Post-script

For his Movie Evangelist (@MovieEvangelist) blog (up to Day 9 of 11 so far in writing up the Festival), Mark Liversidge wrote this review, which, at two paragraphs, is rather on the short side :

Although Mark is certainly right that it is a kind of anthology, in that it begins with maths teaching and rarely, if ever, returns, one has to ask Where (in the film) is it suggested, let alone stated, that it intended 'to come close to helping those in the “normal person, hate maths” understand why maths is so cool to those of us in the other camp' [word missing, but Mark divides the world in two : 'those people like me who are good at it and enjoy it, and normal people who hate it'].

But what if the film actually is what it says, an anthology of reasons (such as high-speed trading) to hate maths, not like it... ?


For there was also, as well as implicating mathematics in the minutiae of trading, mention of how those algorithms had been written to automate lending criteria - although it was less that automation was inappropriate, but that human oversight both of the parameters, and of the resultant body of lending within a portfolio of risk, was defective.


Unless (as some will boldly still have it) one discredits such banking as one of the factors in this world economy of ours, the point is likewise : another instance of giving over the task of making decisions about risk to a program, and not seeming to check it or its ongoing performance, as if computers will necessarily do what we would have wanted.


End-notes

* And it is far from obvious that it conveys the same message as the original French title, Comment j’ai détesté les maths.


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

From the archive : Dry white, best served lightly chilled

This is a Festival review of Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010)

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6 October

This is a Festival review of Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010), written 16/17 September 2010 - in the days when one submitted one's response to Cambridge Film Festival's web-site in its style, and hoped that it would appear...

AVENTURES

This is a spirited and very funny romp, variously parodying and paying tribute to, amongst other things, everything from Spielberg to the phenomenon that is TOMB-RAIDER and the INDIANA JONES and JURASSIC PARK films, and it was a really brilliantly enjoyable choice for the start of the festival this year.

The title and the write-up in the festival booklet would lead one to expect no less, not least with the resonance that the French word ‘aventures’ has (I think that it is lacking in our similar English word), and that incongruously added to the heroine’s double-barrelled surname, which flagged up (if one translated it, even if one knew nothing (as I did) of Jacques Tardi) that we were to be prepared for the incredible passing calmly as the plausible (which some find convenient to call ‘magical realism’).

Besson brought his own kind of magic aplenty (which, for me, was already in the air – and very welcome – with the recent screening here of the delightful animation THE ILLUSIONIST), together with a mix that included a slightly gauche (but nevertheless engaging and helpful) nuclear physicist from the pre-Christian era, and an enjoyment of SFX that was only occasionally marred by what were (possibly quite deliberate) slight defects in the execution.

(For example, the heroine mounted a creature (not just a camel) bareback in a (successful) attempt to bring it to heel, and the seemingly unintended blurring that accompanied her return to earth with it subdued (and in harmony with her) could have been a way of undercutting our temptation ‘to believe’ too deeply in what was, essentially, a fable, charmingly distilled from the whole project’s origins in and indebtedness to the world of the illustrated page (and maybe to such films as DRAGONHEART and the trilogy of LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy). I have no doubt that some of the elements and themes were also more closely linked to that pictorial world than I, without other knowledge of it, could identify or fully appreciate, but such is the stuff of taking something from one medium to another (as with the Tati homage).

The film’s quirkiness and Egyptian theme were nicely set by the opening title-sequence, which turned out to be projected onto and panning across an obelisk that, when the edge was reached, at once brought us into focus on a familiar scene and set us in Paris. The Paris of 1911, as the initial and familiar technique of voiceover announced some important characters to be introduced to us in succession. And so their lives interacted (or, in the case of one who was asleep, failed to at that time), and brought us, via the (sometimes) hesitant character of Andrej to the start proper, with the artefact-exploring activities of the person to whom reviews traditionally like to refer as the eponymous female lead.

In the stereotyping of the villains who enter the tomb, one might be able to escape imputing the French-speaking racism towards its African empire to anything other than the plot and its time. (They come complete with an evil eye and other deformities to signal their standing, and with a brazen greed that one knew could not be leading them to their good, much as one knows that all sorts of grasping in Bond plots will (albeit with his hand to assist in it) work against their ultimate aim – and there was a delightfully typical Bond-type moment at the end of this sequence).

However, one could just as easily see a likely reference back to the cultural politics of the time of when Harrison Ford first had adventures as Jones on the screen. In that regard, but still in the spirit of parody, it could have been a deliberate unsettling of our (would-be?) more modern mores regarding (at least talking openly about) the supposed features, attitudes or beliefs that we (want to) believe link with cultural origin.

The pace of the film was, to my mind, perfect, and the little jokes of repetition with the prison scenes, the way that the action moved from place to place and character to character, and the (apparent) rootedness of the piece in its era (at least until the clock’s hands go momentarily awry) all served to echo this concept of time with which we tend to engage as a timepiece that we consult from day to day, but which Besson’s vision prompts us to approach more closely and in a different way. For that reason, I found the allusions to other forays in this field as different as BACK TO THE FUTURE, GROUNDHOG DAY and Scorsese’s (maybe overlooked) AFTER HOURS) to be undisguised and telling.

On another level, the film even embodied a challenging form of extreme (if unplanned) piercing that I had thought only to be the stuff of my very recent imagination until I saw it here: that was some surprise for me, as was the way in which it was introduced brought about a slight misdirection as to that person’s ‘life-status’ was (if I may call it that, since it has a bearing on the whole). In showing us how that had arisen, in a semi-tragic flashback (on account of the implausibility factor, which is one that is familiar from the other films already mentioned), there was a telescoped mockery of the development of lawn tennis that I was by no means alone in finding quite hilarious at the same time that I knew that it led to someone’s being maimed.

There is much more to say, and I know that ADVENTURES would repay my early viewing, but don’t think that I can make the re-run. As usual, those who left at the titles missed something, an amusing scene from the subplot that eventually (and briefly) brought Andrej and Adele together, and a flashback to a part of the film that we knew we were being taken away from, despite its being partly unresolved. It showed a possible ending to an unwilling alliance (on one side at least) that was not without its precedents, but which, for some reason, most put me in mind of the closing scenes of ‘Whinfrey’s Last Case’ in Michael Palin and Terry Jones’ series RIPPING YARNS.

What that extra snippet didn’t do was in any way to undermine the demise of one pair of highly linked characters, and their fate stood, in juxtaposition to the ‘happy ending’ of Adele being reunited with her sister. That being said, Adele was soon faced with a scheming peril that may (or may not – I am a little hesitant, unlike some heard leaving the screening, to detect scope for a sequel here) serve to end her affirmative approach to life (or, at least, until some time as her own mortal residue might be recovered.) In her case, we probably trusted to her resourcefulness to overcome, and, in the case of the inter-title peril awaiting the killer, maybe did not much care.

Life, death and our attitudes to both have been familiar parts of Besson’s work as far back as SUBWAY, with its choice of tone in ending that led (for those not wanting something else, and who would, for that reason, be deeply unhappy with where BRAZIL leaves us) to a quiet acceptance of what has gone before as life that was lived and worth living whilst it was (and as long as it could be) lived. It is not a heavy note, but it could set one thinking, if one looked beyond the jokes, whilst at the same time, relishing them greatly.

Some of those jokes themselves are not without an import or filmic referent (e.g. pairing the Jurassic period with the Isle of Jura (not, though, really known for anything other than its deer, whisky and George Orwell’s inhabitation), claiming a different historical specialism acts as an excuse not to help and to avoid being detected, and a chain of command that delegates down and down with an ever-diminishing deadline). Others humorous elements are more free in their inventiveness, and, although I am unsure whether there was a definite nod to another recent feature, the spontaneous laughter brought about by seeing the policeman, reluctantly teamed with a hired killer and in costume of the latter’s specification, suddenly viewed from behind was full and infectious.

Yet, for me, it is this theme of mortality and what it is to try to catch at life (for oneself or for others) that I will take away. It also engages nicely in theme with a radio adaptation of Faust that I hope to catch at the weekend (as well as with the revival of The Makropoulos Case in London at English National Opera). The newly resurrected, going off to explore and enjoy France’s capital, have a connection with that ready acceptance of mortality, and enjoying what one has whilst one has it, that struck chords with the South American tradition of enjoyment of bones and skulls, and, maybe, with what we miss in Hallowe’en (itself a key moment in Goethe’s great two-part play).


AJD


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

Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 Part III : Informal interview and punting with Jesús Monllaó, director of Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013)

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4 October (updated 15 November)

Jesús Monllaó brought his first feature, Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013), to Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@Camfilmfest / #CamFF) on Day 9 (Friday 5 September 2014) as part of this year’s Camera Catalonia strand - on the following morning, @THEAGENTAPSLEY and he met again, and ended up going punting...

The Q&A in Screen 2 at Festival Central : Jesús Monllaó (left), Director of Son of Cain (2013), Ramon Lamarca (centre), curator of Camera Catalonia, and composer Ethan Lewis Malby (right) (please see below) - image by, and courtesy of, David Riley

* Contains spoilers *

This is a follow-up piece to an account of the previous night's Q&A


Middle game (continued)

As we walked to Clare to take the punt out, we talked a little further about a point that had arisen during the Q&A the previous night, when Jesús had said that Nico would next be seen in charge of a huge corporation – which was the suggestion that some people are just ruthless and evil, whereas calling that behaviour psychopathic or sociopathic invokes illness.

In commenting for this account of our chat, Jesús has written : What I tried to convey was that Nico appals us, whereas I consider him a perfectly adapted being to an utterly aggressive and competitive society. Calling him ILL just diverts the real debate.

The chat went along the lines of whether with other conditions, such as bi-polar disorder, it is justifiable to speak of them in those ways, and there was found to be common ground in experience that it is, leaving just how helpful it is, when, even if many people who have a psychopathic condition do not kill, there is no treatment, except perhaps in the very much longer term, for those who do.

For Jesús, at any rate, it helps to ask this question, and to resist a world that seeks to pathologize everything (and so the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM-V, was mentioned). For his part, Jesús was not aware of the rather ambiguous novel Engleby by Sebastian Faulks, which was briefly described to him, and he, in turn, referred to a novel in Spanish, Los Renglones Torcidos de Dios by Torcuato Luca de Tena (seemingly not available in English translation).


Fluid, transitional stage

After equipping the vessel with crew, cushions, paddle and punt-pole, the following images are all by, and courtesy of, Vicky Monllaó...

Not quite the classic view of Clare Old Court,
as King's College Chapel is not visible next door

The punting guests were unavoidably told the old, old story about Queens' Mathematical Bridge - of the gift, of taking it apart to see how it worked, and not being able to put it back together (as it had been)

(Insulting, of course, to undergraduate engineers, and appropriating the word 'mathematical', when, if anything, it should be non-mathematical...)

At The Mill Pond, Jesús and his family were told how the building, now occupied by a faux-Italian restaurant-chain, used to have the working water-wheel from this former mill as a feature

(Anyone remember Sweeney Todd's there in the early 1980s, with its line of descriptions of items on the menu that ripped off and insulted the patrons over the years ?)

Heading the other way from Clare Bridge*, towards Trinity Hall and Trinity

The Bridge of Sighs - a name that connects the otherwise unrelated way into The Ducal Prison (Venezia), one route into St John's cloister-style nineteenth-century accommodation (the college uniquely boasts two bridges, for no obvious reason), and a bridge over a road, so not even over water (Oxford)

The atmospheric - if slightly dead ? - little stretch of water (as just sides of buildings within John's on either side, and barely a plant clinging on) between those bridges...

Endgame

All too soon, the pleasant time on the Cam was over, and thoughts turned to directing the guests to the station for their onward journey…

Jesús does not play chess profesionally, only sometimes as an aficionado, but, when asked about how real the positions in the games were, he said that a chess master had worked with them as an adviser, and they are all famous matches – except in mirror form, because (curiously) there would otherwise have been some form of copyright for reproducing them, requiring payment of a fee.

On the right, composer of Son of Cain (2013), Ethan Lewis Malby (ELM, as he calls himself on his web-site), who has written compositions from DrumChasers to anthems for the FA and for UEFA - image by, and courtesy of, David Riley

Fighting for Ethan Lewis Maltby to score the film had been on the level of someone known to him whom he wanted to write the music, but who was not in the sphere of the backers. As Jesús himself achieves success with Son of Cain, and works on his next film in pre-production, it is clear that he is proud of Ethan’s work, and that fighting for his artistic vision should become easier…


End-notes

* The oldest bridge on the river, dating back to 1641.


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Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 Part IV : Punting-lesson with Hammudi al-Rahmoun Pont*, director of Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)

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3 October

Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 Part IV : Punting-lesson with Hammudi al-Rahmoun Pont*, director of Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)


* NB contains spoilers (but only about punting) *

Principles of punting

* Stand stably on the back-board of the punt – unfortunately, climbing up and down from there in the first place is one thing that makes the punt most unsteady (as does anyone moving position, unless they keep low)

Balance is crucial, but not difficult to achieve

* Be aware, at all times, of overhanging trees (however decorative)

This is where the Cam turns a literal corner between St John's and Trinity

* Likewise, have regard for people in the way, especially those who clearly have no idea how to punt, and steer out of harm’s way

The punt behind is the danger here - unless it changes course, the only way is down, or into, the left-hand side of ours

Adjustment of our position averts the likelihood of being knocked on the side

* Drop the pole, into the water by the side of the punt, as vertically and quickly as possible

To begin with, dropping the pole in its optimal position will feel awkward, and require care and concentration

* Push through the pole as straight as possible, using the side of the punt to push along – it is effective, even if it makes a rough-sounding noise

In this position, the vagaries of not pushing straight, and then ending up having to adjust, mean that bumping against the side-wall is not unlikely (unless a conscious move is made towards the centre of the river)

* Except when avoiding a hazard, steer once the pole has been dropped in and pushed through, using it like a rudder, which simply needs to become second nature – for a large adjustment, pulling the pole through the water from side to back steers it one way, whereas lifting it out from the side, dropping it at the back, and moving it around to the front brings it the other way

Being in a good position to begin with (nothing behind, ahead clear) make being able to push and make any adjustment afterwards much easier

* NB Be aware that, at some points, the river is very deep, so one will have almost no push once the pole comes in contact with the bottom

* At other points, the end of the pole will engage with mud – unless it comes free on a first pull, and with a twist, leave it, as going back for the pole is what the paddle is for



* Other than having a brilliant teacher (four pupils, no dunkings) and admiring the view (when safe to do so), there are no other rules of punting - except getting through a gap in the traffic safely when one can (rather than the niceties of being on one side of the river, not least when scenic willow boughs are less lovely to punt through, and some spots are always deep or muddy)

It's tough teaching - you just need to relax, amongst the detritus of someone else's enjoyment, and relish your pupil's moves

The Wren Library, Trinity College

One can testify that Cambridge's Pint Shop provided a very acceptable alternative to Guinness®, for our Catalan punter, as a reward for his studious efforts on the Cam !


End-notes

* OK, the name is Hammudi al-Rahmoun Font, but it is fun for the Freudian slip to evoke 'bridge' and 'punt'...


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Was sagst du, Mensch ?

This is a Festival review of People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag*) (1930)

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2 October

This review is of a screening of People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag*) (1930), which was a special event at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF) on Friday 5 September at 4.00 p.m.

The naturalness of director Robert Siodmak’s People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) (1930) beguiles us, and persuades us that what we are seeing might be true – an effect that is part of the immediacy of Neil Brand’s (@NeilKBrand’s) and Jeff Davenport’s live accompaniment.

Even for those of us who could construe the German in the slide at the beginning, and learn that what we were about to see was around 90% complete (some 1,800 metres of a known length of around 2,000 metres), nothing seemed to be missing, and the restoration was so clear that it did not leave us distinguishing different parts of the footage.

After the event, what one is left with is the impression of the morals and activities of the weekend in Berlin, spent by the lake at Schildhorn, and one has to pinch oneself and say that this presentation of life (outside of the candid shots of contemporary Berlin) is no more truthful than a newsreel of the day : that is the power of cinema, and of exposures that were not only clear, but insightful and affecting, that they can speak to us to-day when care has been used to present them alongside themes that match their moods, but had a feeling if not always of energy as such, then of being alive.

That, too, is something that we would come to associate with screenwriter Billy Wilder, whether in Some Like it Hot (1959), or Sunset Boulevard (1950), and is as good a reason as any to be interested in this film…


Over at TAKE ONE, Mike Levy has more observations about the film / performance...




End-notes

* Might we still write Menschen am Sonntag, or would it more often be Leuten - without the full sense that these are real, human people ?


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Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 Part II : Q&A with Jesús Monllaó, director of Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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1 October

* Contains spoilers *

Jesús Monllaó brought his first feature, Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013), to Cambridge Film Festival (@Camfilmfest / #CamFF) on Day 9 (Friday 5 September 2014) as part of this year’s Camera Catalonia strand (curated by Ramon Lamarca, pictured left below in front of the film-poster, with Jesús on the right, in a shot taken by colleague David Riley)

Ramon Lamarca and Jesús Monllaó before the poster of Fill de Caín,
by and courtesy of David Riley

Opening gambit

Before the 34th Cambridge Film Festival’s screening of Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013), Ramon Lamarca kindly introduced @THEAGENTAPSLEY to Jesús Monllaó that evening : if you have read the review, you will know that comparisons had been drawn with Good Will Hunting (1997), and with the suspenseful Alfred H., and not be surprised that they were pleasing to Jesús (who has since had a chance to read the review in full and liked it).

After a good-natured meeting of minds and sharing of humour at the busy hub that is Festival Central (in its home every year, for 11 consecutive days, at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturhouse)), and before parting, the hope was expressed that the audience of Screen 2 at Festival Central would take the film well. So that proved, with a full house, and almost everyone both seeming engrossed, and then staying for the Q&A.

If you have watched such a vibrant film for review purposes on even a 15.6” laptop screen, you want to see it again projected to see what it looks and sounds like – as Jesús had said, knowing which City he was in and that he some people would have seen through his trickery with the plot, he hoped that they had enjoyed the journey :

Spot on, because it does not matter at all that you know what unfolds (but do not read much further on, if you have not already seen it – or do not mind spoilers), and, second time around, one could appreciate both the construction, and the full range and subtlety of Ethan Lewis Maltby’s score. (One says ‘appreciate the construction’, because (as the review envisaged) one could view Son of Cain with a murder-mystery mindset* first time through, or when watching again, to see how what happened had been set up.)

Jesús Monllaó answering audience questions with Ramon Lamarca,
by and courtesy of David Riley

Interviewed first by Ramon Lamarca with composer Ethan, Jesús was on fine form, engaging expansively with questions, and wanting others to have credit for their work (please see below). He told us that he had had some resistance, but had insisted on Ethan to write the score, their having met when Jesús was studying the art of film-making in Canterbury more than a decade ago.

And it turned out that choosing a Mahler adagio (the fourth-movement Adagietto* (in F Major, Sehr langsam) from the Symphony No. 5), for the night scene with the family in the car, not only coincidentally accorded with where Ethan’s interest in music had first been sparked (by hearing Mahler in live performance), but also with Ramon’s love for the composer’s works… As Jesús told us, he had originally wanted to use the Poco adagio, marked Ruhevoll, from the Symphony No. 4 in G Major, but the cost of using that track had been prohibitive (and led to using the Adagietto, as more affordable).


Love was in the air generally, indeed, because Jesús (as other directors have been keen to do this year) wanted to stress that 90% of what mattered most had been done by other people. Though, equally, he had found that, having acquired the rights to the original novel, he had to fall out with its writer, Ignacio García-Valiño, on account of the offensive e-mail that he wrote on being shown the first draft of the script (and which, Jesús told us, he still has).

Happily, though, he later related that contact was re-made with the novelist, who saw the film in April 2013 and loved it, publicly writing so. In the event, Ignacio died fourteen months later : the fact he saw his novel filmed and liked it, despite the former confrontation, gives us some comfort now that he’s gone.


Back with the music, we heard from Ramon’s questioning how the texture / density had been ‘stripped back’ for all but the last ten minutes, paring down instrumentation – sometimes, as Ethan told us, by removing an instrument during mixing that had originally been recorded as part of a larger ensemble recorded, but edited down in this way. In this connection, Ethan was asked about the use of harmonics, bell-like sounds and a high-pitched part that might have been a high soprano or an instrument (he told us that it had been a guitar-sound), and said that each film-project requires him to determine the palette that he is going to use at the outset.

Ethan Lewis Maltby, far right, during the Q&A,
by and courtesy of David Riley

Usefully, which we might not have otherwise aptly appreciated, Jesús said that he had taken away all the recorded sound for the last seven minutes, leaving just the score, where Ethan had had full rein to break through, as the closing scenes unfold – one’s lips are sealed, but there is chess at their heart…


Later, as there was a Festival dinner-date for Jesús to make, and a departure for Brighton in the afternoon, it was agreed to meet The Agent at Corpus Christi the following morning for a more formal interview.


Middle game

Just after the appointed hour, the two indeed met and then headed to the corner of Pembroke Street, where Jesús’ wife and young son were finishing coffee at Fitzbillies.

At mention at the table of the idea of taking a boat on the river, an offer was made of a punting-trip, and so began their adventure on the Cam…

Now continued here

Saw Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) at @camfilmfest ? In a pre-punting chat, director JesúsMonllaósaid that Andrew is a rook, Julio a knight...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 9, 2014

End-notes

* A curious word, mindset, and one which seems fitting for Nico… ?

** Afterwards, Jesús shared that he had wanted the Mahler not only because he liked it, but also as the kind of music that the character in the original novel listened to : I wanted to pay homage to the novel with little details that would connect both media.


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

Interview with Mark Brown : One in Four magazine and beyond...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 September

Mark, starting first with One in Four magazine, of which you were founder and editor, and which folded earlier this year, following a short statement made to subscribers...

Shortly afterwards, you elaborated on that statement in a piece in The Guardian, which was then commented on by Ruth McCambridge in Not For Profit Quarterly.


1. Is there anything more that, at this remove, you wish to say about the reasons why One in Four ceased publication ? (If appropriate, please point to accessible places where you have already said something more than in the sources above.)

After all, the announcement did come soon after the publication, in the editorial of the Summer 2013 issue, of the magazine’s five-year mission. On the other hand, in a statement when an issue had not appeared on time, you told readers that the depressive experience of having a diagnosis of Bipolar II had been responsible : ‘The autumn issue of One in Four eaten by the editor’s depression’. (McCambridge took the opening words of your statement as the title of her piece, So, what kind of a monster eats a mental health magazine ?.)

One of the things about running a magazine is that you always have to talk about it as if it is eternal and will continue forever. Projects like ours live hand to mouth and nothing is ever certain.

In the magazine business, publications begin and end all of the time. It's a ruthless area where the continuation of a magazine depends solely on its profitability.

With One in Four, the revenues available to continue it dropped as the effects of austerity became further and further ingrained. While the individual subscription rates were rising, the bulk subscription rates flatlined.

For the final few years of One in Four, the magazine was overwhelmingly me; and me in a way that wasn't contributing to the bottom line of our company. We cut the costs of the magazine, trimmed all wastage and made it cost neutral - as long as my time wasn't factored into the equation.

Where once I might have been able to continue the magazine, knowing that it was in some way contributing to the continuation of our company and indirectly towards my own wages, we ended up in a situation where One in Four was a great project as long as I and everyone else (apart from writers) gave our time to it for free. This coming at a time where the importance of doing activity that paid was becoming more and more important.

After six or so years, I ran out of energy and steam. When you have limited resources, you fill in for missing resources with your own time and effort. This is always a risky strategy as once you run out of yourself; that's it.


2. Supplementary question :

A #mentalhealth policy pledge I'd suggest: 'No person in UK will fall into poverty as a result of #mentalhealth difficulty' #lab14
— Markoneinfour (@MarkOneinFour) September 22, 2014

Whatever one thought of it, it seems hard to believe that we once had a Social Exclusion Unit (which then became, before its abolition in 2010, the Social Exclusion Task Force)… However, that fact makes this aim that you stated in The Guardian having had for One in Four seem even more relevant :

We wanted to alleviate some of the isolation people with mental health difficulties feel.

Politics apart, but just thinking of the increasing pressures on NHS Trusts to reduce budgets, by losing in-patient beds and cutting services, was it a more realistic expectation that a publication that editorially implied a psychosocial (or other non-medical model) of mental health, e.g. by using a term such as 'mental health difficulty', could be of interest to bodies in the third sector, rather than Trusts ? If so, what would that realization have had you do differently at the outset ?


3. As its issues appeared, one thing that one noticed about One in Four is that, compared with the first ones, they no longer exactly fitted this description (taken from the oneinfourmag.org web-site) :

One in Four is a glossy full colour quarterly 32-page quarterly magazine written by people with mental health difficulties who lived through it and found ways around it. It’s the perfect guide to getting stuff in your life sorted.


Therefore, in terms of how One in Four looked, and, in particular, thinking of that word ‘glossy’, how later issues no longer had the same paper or feel. And, without checking, it seems uncertain whether ‘full colour’ continued to be an apt description…

Were these early signs that what the magazine had hoped to be, i.e. sold ‘in bulk to NHS trusts’, had not happened, and thus that there was not the expected funding for it to be as described. And do you think, in turn, that factors to do with appearance and feel could have impacted on the saleability of One in Four, to potential subscribers as well as to contributors (or advertisers, though the impression that was that advertising revenue was not likely to be significant) ?


To be honest, I don't think that anyone who subscribed to the magazine was hugely fussed about the full colour and glossy bit. One of the reasons that we chose the idea of a glossy lifestyle magazine was to set it apart from either bland and ridiculous corporate brochures on one hand and photocopied ‘anything-you-fancy-putting-in-can-go-in’ photocopied newsletters.

We thought that there was a big gap where something well written and well produced could go. Bringing the idea of mental health out into the open; both in terms of making something that anyone could read, but also in terms of wrestling back the media power over mental health representation a bit. We wanted, as much as possible, to place mental health stories in professional standard settings to show that a) it was possible and b) it was better than the more traditional ways of covering mental health such as ‘the tragedy narrative’, ‘the overcomes adversity narrative’, ‘the everything’s going to be terrible forever narrative’ or the ‘jesus christ them mentals are coming’ narrative.

It was, and still is, an approach that should be taken.


Advertising revenue was never really on the table. There isn’t a notion of people with mental health difficulties as a market to be sold to. If you open a disability magazine, you’ll see adverts for a whole range of disability adaptations and services. There isn't the equivalent for mental health. We took on an ad sales executive for a bit, but I don't think we ever got any bite from an advertiser that we didn’t already know and who wasn’t already operating in the mental health field.

As I’ve written about elsewhere, it was always going to be a risk attempting to make One in Four stand on its own feet financially without any outside support. In some respects, our glossy approach was a double-edged sword. For everyone who was glad that there was a new, fresh way of looking at mental health that you could leave on your coffee table with your other organs of note, there was someone else lining up to have a pop at us for being slick profiteers, looking to turn a quick buck from the misery of others. People equated glossy with inauthentic, something that riled me then and riles me now. People always vastly over-estimate how expensive printing is, while vastly under-estimating how expensive actually getting what you’ve printed into people’s hands is. And the thing is, it doesn’t matter whether you run your magazine off on a photocopier or get it printed on glossy paper, it mostly costs the same to send it to people.

By the end of One in Four we had worked out the print costs so that every additional 1,000 copies of the magazine would cost about £160, as long as we were printing over 1,000. If we could have delivered the magazine in consignments of 1,000 to NHS trusts, we could have charged pennies for them. The problem was : without the bulk orders to make things work, posting individual copies to subscribers was, and is, extremely expensive.

In the first couple of years, we had people complaining that we charged £10 for a year-long subscription, claiming that it should be free. By the end of the magazine, we had put up the price of a subscription to a whopping £12. For the people who believed that the magazine should be free for ideological reasons, the fact that we were producing it at all was an affront, and that it was glossy sealed our fate as moustache-twirling top-hatted capitalists.

So, as I say, the glossy bit never proved to be the definitive you'd imagine.


4. I know of one countywide mental-health advocacy service that subscribed to benefit its clients. However, were such organizations doing so, too, not the norm, even in an area that is the territory of voluntary-sector organizations such as Turning Point, local Mind associations, or Speaking Up! ? Outside advocacy, was the purchase of copies by this sort of charity, to give free to those with whom they came in contact, as good, or even better ?


Yes, there were organizations that purchased the publication to give, free, to members or visitors, but there were never enough. The problem that many organizations had was that the magazine was an actual magazine, not a brochure or a bit of location-specific health promotional material. The thing with a magazine is that it's a thing that you read that’s full of lots of different stuff, like a buffet for your mind and eyes. The key is to having a variety of dishes that combine together well, but which can also stand on their own. This is not the model that organizational comms use to think of ‘mental health promotion'. It’s all about message, message, message.

The thing that we didn’t really grasp initially, but really grasped as the project went on, was that One in Four didn't provide any glory for the organization that bought it in. It didn’t come from them, it didn't have anything specific to them, it didn’t promote them. It was great that organizations thought ‘We’ll buy this in, because it’s good and something different to what we would produce’, but there weren’t enough that thought like that.


5. As mentioned, your colleague and you obviously had intentions and expectations for One in Four, and maybe some sense of what unexpected turns of events might be (to help you plan for What if…) : now, do you see it essentially in the unforeseen that the origins of the demise of the magazine lay – and how that then impacted on what you felt personally that you could achieve (or still desired to achieve) ?

And, with the end of One in Four, is there scope to keep any content available to read through what remains of Social Spider (whatever that may be) ?


In the final two years of One in Four, One in Four became less and less of Social Spider’s overall activity. It went from having one full-time member of staff, one part-time staff writer and me spending a lot of time each week on it, plus a designer and an on-commission ad sales manager, to being just me and a voluntary designer. We always paid our writers, though. Maybe not as quickly as we, or they, would have liked. But we always paid.

In an effort to make One in Four sustainable, we essentially diversified our work around mental health and the other kinds of projects that we do. Since we brought One in Four to an end, Social Spider - as a small social enterprise - has never been in ruder health.


6. Turning away from what has happened with the magazine, what, at its best (as we mentioned above a time when depression swallowed an issue), has it meant to you to be its editor – both as a person, and in what it has enabled in your life outside work ? In particular, I gather that you worked from an office, so what did going there to work on One in Four give you ?


Social Spider has always tended towards the lowest possible overheads. It’s been based in other people’s offices, in the basement of the offices of an upmarket sex-shop, and currently lives in a three-desk office above The Mill, a community run space in Walthamstow. For me, I tend to work wherever I am, via the wonders of plugging in laptops and being on a mobile. I actually moved to Social Spider from another social enterprise that Social Spider was getting free office space from originally. At the point I moved to Social Spider in 2006, I had been editing a creative-writing web-site for three years, and doing creative-writing projects.

One in Four was amazing. A pain in the arse. But amazing. It’s given me the perfect excuse to spend my days talking to people with mental health difficulties, exploring what life is like and thinking about how it might be possible to make the way we deal with mental health as a society less shitty.

And, make no mistake, it is shitty. And shitty for lots of reasons we haven’t even begun to address yet.

Outside of work ? There’s an outside of work ?

In some respects, the whole experience of launching a national project that I made up, and then becoming the reluctant front person for it, has been the making of me.


7. Then, as now, you could be seen Tweeting content from conferences in the UK, and perhaps you are still running some of the training courses in topics, such as effective use of social media, that you did before. Are you in a position to say yet what else you may be doing ‘behind the scenes’, or is too early ?


8. Some will know your comments quite well on Twitter, but, for others, can you place what the magazine was about in relation to what often gets abbreviated in Tweets (maybe unhelpfully ?) to #socent – can you say what it is about a magazine as a social enterprises that makes it distinctive, and what are its strengths and advantages, as well as its likely drawbacks ?


When we were doing One in Four, I always tried to stay on the side of impartial journalism over committed journalism. This meant that we got some flak for covering the facts of the introduction of ESA [Employment and Support Allowance], rather than advancing opinion that it was wrong.

Looking back, one of the things that I wish that we could have had with One in Four was more investigative journalism. But that was out of our reach, I think. I still think we need more journos covering mental health, and that more of them should be people with direct experience...

I really do think there's a huge space that a strong press should occupy in mental health, but that's a very different project to One in Four. I don't ultimately think that there's a commercial model that could sustain both news reporting and investigative journalism in mental health in the UK. At the minute, even with the bloom of mental-health-related stories in UK media, we're only getting the surface of stories, not their core :

A lot of the time in this country, we (me included) have thought we've been doing journalism, when we've been doing comment. Good, but the thing is that I don't see anyone anywhere who can put up the cash for the journalism needed to capture, and hold to account, events in mental health.

I wonder whether we'd see more attempted legal take-downs of mental-health bloggers if we could find a bit of money to finance journalism. At the minute, bloggers who do proper journalistic work, digging and covering stories, are vulnerable to the more powerful taking legal action, and there are a lot of mental-health-related stories that need exploring, but very few homes for them ‘to land in’ and that pay for the work.

Journalism is expensive, because it requires people to go to places, talk to people, find things out… It is out of reach for mental health in the UK at present, because we're blighted by a lack of historical context in the way in which we present current events, because, again, we have no press. And, if you're lucky enough to get the email 'Would you like to write about mental-health issue X ?', no one will stump up the cash for research.

Plus, there are very few people in the UK who know the mental-health ‘beat’ as journos to the level needed to link across stories : I mean, when was the last time that you saw a mental-health-related story that came from a top, high-level source, and was built on research ? Although I know a fair bit these days about mental health in this country, because I used our own money to find stuff out when doing One in Four, writing about mental health for public consumption has only ever been a small bit of what I do to pay the rent.

Money = time to get stories right, whereas, a lot of the time during the life of One in Four, our company and I very nearly couldn't pay the rent. I sometimes wonder who has contacts close to where decisions are made in mental health, and what it would take to turn those contacts into stories…


9. At the time of our previous interview (which has had more than 700 page-views), we looked at what you called The New Mental Health, which tied in with a first-ever trip outside the UK to Australia. I think that it was to a destination in the Republic of Ireland that you recently made another return-flight to give a talk.

How can you tie in these book-ends of speaking engagements both to what has been happening to your experience of life, and as you have seen it affecting the lives of those being told, for example, that they are ‘under-occupying’ property, even if ‘the spare bedroom’ is needed, say, to house dialysis equipment ? And how, if at all, have your ideas about The New Mental Health changed in the intervening time ?

10. Thank you for your time, Mark. Is there anything else that you would like to say in conclusion ?


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