Stockholm’s under-belly of punk

This is a review of We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013)

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7 May

This is a review of We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013)

Maybe skip this section if you are less interested in punk attitude, more just in the film…

Perhaps Swedish punk, rather than imports from the States and the UK, were factually what a thirteen-year-old girl, whose elder brother had been into punk, would be listening to in 1982*. However, in the light of visiting three of the four Scandinavian countries (Finland excepted) around this time, it does seem unlikely – and knowing what, for example, German and Norwegian speakers have said about songs in their language not working, and so singers / listeners choosing English for their lyrics, more so.

Language and lyrics are a part of We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013), so it is a shame that the sub-titles do not always seem plausible – is the heckling, in Swedish, really as frank and harsh as the words Communist cunts render it ? (Likewise, unless there were a family tradition of the usage, would a girl her age saying ‘Screw dessert !’ to her mother, in a tussle over going out, seem unnoticed ? (Instead, the mother just replies to the effect that the estranged father, the girl and she will not ‘screw dessert’, but the girl will help her make it, and it will be nice.))

Maybe upping the stakes in translation was intended to make the teenagers’ rebellious nature seem stronger (since they are punks), but the apparent mismatch with context and with people’s reactions seems to suggest that it was an ill-judged strategy. The mother laying down the law, for example, takes no visible offence at the word ‘screw’, when she surely would, since she is dictating what her daughter will do, if it is inappropriate : one is left wishing that one knew in what register the exchange really took place, rather than in the version overlaid by ‘the translation’.


Do join here, if you skipped the section above

All this is by the by[e] for some, but the Swedishness of everything makes it impossible to tell how much, if anything, of the punk scene is real, rather than invented – a matter of intrigue to some**, but one which may not bother others at all… (Though, when a group of girls try to do a stage routine, in the school concert, to Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’, we are spot on in time for 1982.)

We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013) reminds a little of another recent film, The Rocket (2013), but also – inevitably – of The Commitments (1991) (let alone, in its wake, The Sapphires (2012))***. Yet, as commented, it distinguishes itself from these others by having a different heart, a different pull, from that, say, of Sitthiphon Disamoe in The Rocket, as Ahlo, a ‘fixer’ – although the overwhelming feeling is likewise that of people being brought together (where this film ends****).

The school concert, mentioned in passing above, is where Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) realize that they have overlooked, and underestimated, Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) – we have already seen the pair (under the catty pressure from fellow students at the lunch table to conform and look like them) refuse to normalize. At this stage, we may not realize that Bobo is female (jazzer Bobo Stenson is definitely a man), because the other two appear to be addressing Klara and Bobo as if one of them is male*****.

In a beautifully casual way, they have formed a band – essentially Let’s play, because this band [Iron Fist : possibly a reference to Sweden’s Soviet past ?] is crap, which is a fairly earthy punk attitude, if ever there were one… Hedvig, initially, fits in because maybe, Klara and Bobo conclude, they could use her – not knowing, as we do not, where her engagement will take them. That emergence of Hedvig, responding to them as they respond to her, and with God thrown in for good measure, is the joy of the film.

As to the dynamic, with Bobo sometimes more serious than her often frivolous mother’s friends (happily playing Spin the Bottle at a party), she can sound quite alarmingly sage when she makes a reasoned assertion. Yet one can easily believe that this tempering of and firing off each other is why Klara and she have been friends for so long, as complementing each other, rather than as opposites. (It is not for nothing that a larger girl is not unusual in being a companion to a slender one.)

Having said this, although the film is a good and thoughtful one, it does take a while to bed down, just at the time when one wants to start feeling part of it and perhaps has started to despair of being able to do so. Call that a tease, if you like, but it cannot be the full intention, since the film relies not on alienating us, but on engendering an interest in and affection for the efforts that Klara, Bobo and Hedvig are making.

So an audience needs to be patient with the film, allow it the odd uneven moment (even when it has established itself), and be taken along by Klara’s energy as a driving force for much of what happens, but also Hedvig’s quiet rebelliousness mixed with good sense, and Bobo’s envious uncertainty.


End-notes

* Maybe, though, with the Swedo-centric nature of the featured music, we have a reflection of cultural bias in Sweden to the home grown (one that certainly helped Fredrik Gertten with legal obstacles to releasing Bananas !*, whose story is told effectively in Big Boys Gone Bananas !* (2011)).

At any rate, the libertarian picture painted in this film, mainly of Stockholm, but also of outlying areas (with a debate about whether one is a mere suburb or a city, and whether the inhabitants of another are (sic) ‘retards’), extends to adult sexual promiscuity and drug usage, but firmly not to minors consuming alcohol – and, contrary to the translation’s hutzpah, the three girls do not seem brazenly defiant to their parent(s).

** Not least viewers of films such as those of Shaun Jefford and Don Letts – respectively, Beijing Punk (2010), and Punk : Attitude (2005).

*** However, it is only really the sense of striving that feels similar in the former, and the latter, strong though the music is, lacked any cohesion beyond the loose notion that the group of performers should (be encouraged to) play soul because they were ‘black’ – there is precious little, beside (and between) the set-pieces, to constitute a story, just a few links.

**** That said, the credits are artfully integrated into the closing moment, and you will not want / be able to miss them…

***** Yes, those subtitles (again) seem to interpose a little difficulty, because the person responsible for bringing them to the screen has not only paired them, but brought them up contrary to our expectations, so that they make us confuse who said what to whom…




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Charity begins - in Ireland ?

This is a mini-review of A Thousand Times Goodnight* (Tusen ganger god natt) (2013)

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6 May

This is a mini-review of A Thousand Times Goodnight*(Tusen ganger god natt) (2013)

* Contains spoilers *


A division was called on the motion 'This Film is Not a Good Film'


Nos

* Lovely shots of the beach in Ireland

* Arty tricks with light at the beginning (which remind of K-PAX (2001)'s tag-line beam of light)

* The whole mystery of the opening scene, with the near-masonic pre-burial - though a mystery sought for in vain elsewhere...

* The girls are convincing sisters

* A cute kitten (a device as favoured by The Movie Evangelist (@MovieEvangelist))

* Some of the photos from the Kabul trip

* A role for Maria Doyle Kennedy (one of the people who rescued The Commitments (1991)), but blink and you miss it - sure some scenes cut there along the way !



Ayes

* Too many lights crystallized as out-of-focus dots

* Much wooden dialogue / delivery

* Flagging up that it is Afghanistan by the descending words on a building KABUL BUSINESS CENTRE (or some such)

* Accents from Binoche and Coster-Waldau that nearly wander as much as her character travels the globe

* Editing that cuts off several scenes rather abruptly, and not as if to move 'the action' along with a pace

* The closing resemblance to Jennifer Saunders, let alone the wild, bearded stereotype of marine biology

* She is patently not taking photographs with those Canon EOS 5Ds - at best, she shows how to snap a lens onto a body

* As if she would (but she is thoughtless...) only realize on the plane that her daughter might want to photograph Kenya whilst there, not giving her the chance to try out the camera

* As plausible as The Bride's rising from a coma (in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)) that she should recover both so quickly and with so little damage from that blast

* How a family could possibly have survived in tatters this long, given how old the daughters are 

* The clunky Skype-type scenes with Jessica (whoever Jessica really is)

* We also need to believe that Jessica just commissions photographs of someone about to become a suicide-bomber, no questions asked - let alone the ridiculous belief that it matters very much that those particular people were killed or maimed, whatever the real target was

* That the said 5D and its lens are so robust that photographs can be taken after the blast - even more robust than Binoche, really

* Any notion that the camp in Kenya, declared safe, was going to be safe

* That the hut used as a shelter really afforded the photo-opportunities whose results we see

* The clear similarity to te main theme of In a Better World (Hævnen) (2010), which may not have the billing, but... could be a better film


QED The Ayes have it !



End-notes

* What Romeo and Juliet has to do with it is anyone's guess - director / co-writer Erik Poppe likes the sound of the words ?

It could easily have been A Thousand Times Goodnight (2013) to the film... Sooner Friar Lawrence any time !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 6, 2014

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Dennis Russell Davies conducts Pärt, Glass and Adams - Cambridge, Sunday 27 April 2014

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1 May

Dennis Russell Davis was brought back to the rostrum at @CambridgeCornEx at least three times after his programme of Pärt, Glass and Adams.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 27, 2014

Whatever the three composers whose works were on the bill on the evening of Sunday 27 April at The Corn Exchange in Cambridge (@CambridgeCornEx) may have in common (Arvo Pärt, at least, rejects the description of ‘minimalism’ (let alone ‘holy minimalism’, which he considers nonsense)), there is probably more about the music that each one writes that makes him distinctive :

Below, is a review, which follows on from the introductory posting Minimalists - or Rhythmicists ?, and there is also an edited-down version of the first half of the review here...





When large orchestras, such as from Russia, have visited The Corn Exchange in the past, the stage has seemed crammed, and this time was no different, with what seemed a massive orchestra (at full strength, there are fifty string-players alone). A little of a pity that more had not turned out to witness this spectacle and hear their impressive ensemble, but still a creditable attendance of around six hundred heard two major works by Philip Glass and John Adams, and something more modest from Pärt – as maybe the man himself may be, although works such as Passio are on a larger scale.



Arvo Pärt – These Words…

According to Universal Edition, this piece for string orchestra and percussion was composed between 2007 and 2008, and it was a commission by the Léonie Sonnings Musikfond in Denmark. (The same source says that Pärt has been awarded the Léonie Sonning Prize, the most important musical distinction in that country.)


About the piece itself, the person who wrote that entry (Eric Marinitsch) goes on to say :

As its textual basis Pärt uses the human foibles mentioned in the old Church Slavonic prayer from the Canon to the Guardian Angel, while the title derives from associations between this material and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.


Whatever that may mean, it is to be noted that, just before the scene with the play performed by the theatrical troupe, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius says to him I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine. (Act 3, Scene 2). With the connivance of the leader of the players, Hamlet had interpolated the text with material designed to bring out guilty behaviour in Claudius, and then afterwards, when Hamlet confronts his mother Gertrude, she says O, speak to me no more! These words like daggers enter in my ears. No more, sweet Hamlet. (Act 3, Scene 4).


As for the work, it began with a chord full of suspense, and, after the sound of a triangle and a bass-note, the strings sometimes played piano, as a sequence was given first by what sounded like a xylophone* and then a different one by a bass-drum, before the opening material returned. Still with a feeling of suspense, a swaying sweep of the xylophone and another note from the triangle led to a statement of the same sequences, seemingly both hesitantly and thoughtfully, after the string writing had moved up and down in chords.


Yet although a triangle had been seen struck earlier, the bell-sound that next entered could have been a tubular-bell (it had more of the lasting, resonant note that characterizes a desk-bell), and preceded a progression that had an oriental feel to it, if not how it grew in intensity. Then a moment’s pause, cymbals and the bell and then a bell sounding a tone lower marked a new section, in which the interval given by the two bells recurred before a pizzicato motif with a rumbling drum-noise – a moment of haunting eeriness, which gave way to a bowed sound, and then the two bells again, the noise of the second of which held in the air.

After another pause, beats on the bass-drum led to further powerful writing for the strings, which again drifted away to a pianissimo. In what followed, heralded by triangle and xylophone, the latter did not so much interject, as juxtapose the feeling of its presence (in the spirit of Pierre Boulez) : the writing was moving as if we were tracing a very slow, but clear, life-sign, and the music conformed to its own measure. The string-sound swelled again to something fuller, and then diminished. Momentarily, for no more than a bar or two, the material took on a different rhythmic stress, and then ended, with the sound of the bell.


What is so important with a piece such as this is that a gesture of a bell or something like it should feel germane and organically have its own poise, otherwise one is just going through the motions of playing it. Davies fully knows that, and has worked with orchestras, this one included, in such a way that the atmosphere that Pärt appears to be seeking is wholly present, such that a large group of strings can bow together, and yet play piano, so that one has the density of the string-texture, but not the immediacy of the string-sound.

Those new to these composers may not have experienced this kind of sound-world before, but it was a good choice to open the concert, rather than, say, Pärt’s better-known Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, which would have been too intense to fill this role.



Philip Glass – Cello Concerto No. 2 (‘Naqoyqatsi’)

The fourth film on which Philip Glass worked with director Godfrey Reggio, Visitors (2013) has just been released in the UK.

Glass has also turned the score for the previous film, Naqoyqatsi (2002), in which cellist Yo-Yo Ma played prominently, into his seven-movement Cello Concerto No. 2, subtitled Naqoyqatsi. Dennis Russell Davies (the conductor in this concert) has recorded the work, conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and with the same soloist, Matt Haimovitz.

As with the Adams work in the second half, the movements have titles, but one wonders whether they may be more for the convenience of players, conductors, concert arrangers and the like to refer to the piece’s constituent parts, rather than just by bar-numbers, because, in both cases, there seems to be relatively little emphasis on elucidating the word(s) chosen. (In the case of Glass, of course, the cues for the film would have given rise to a need for titles, which may have (partly) survived : contrast this with how one refers to the works of artist Mira Schendel, when almost everything is sím titulo).)


1. Naqoyqatsi
The work opened with strings and ‘parping’ horns, before going down a level for the solo entry, which was marked by the intensity of drums and cymbals, and the weight of the cellos and double-basses. It was clear straightaway that the combination of instrument and cellist brought about a lovely sound, and the solo part developed to encompass a variety of moods, including, most obviously, yearning. The opening motif recurred, but now against material of shifting tonality, and, in a tutti section with contributions from tubular-bell, the modulations were thrilling. A short section for the cellos alone, before joined by the basses, led in what is almost a trademark of Glass’ music, where he does not literally inscribe a circle with complementary pairs of descending triplets, but feels as though he does (for want of a better term, circle-sounds). The movement came to an end as the cellos played at the bottom of their register, joined by basses and brass, and percussion.


2. Massman
In the opening of this movement, Glass used an alternating pattern, which modulated, before the cello gave us a short motif, and then a shorter motif, parallel to it, and the strings then played this material under the writing for cello, where Haimovitz had sharpened notes in his part, and with a tremolo effect. With the combination of interjective tutti and a climax in the percussion, the feeling that was conveyed was a little like a trudge, and, when Glass had quarter-tone writing high in the cello’s solo register, the percussion was given an oom-pah effect : we momentarily felt as if it were a further parody of one of Shokstakovich’s ‘ironic’ parodies. Another high-energy tutti section, rich in brass, brought in those ‘circle-sounds’ again, but with a slightly sickening feel to the sound of the soloist. Together with brass and strings, and a fleeting evocation of Viennese style, the movement ended, the cello at the bottom of its register.


3. New World
With some beats from the tam-tam, the soloist had a suggestive phrase that had the quality of a gypsy fiddler. For the first time seeming like a solo cello with an orchestra behind him, Haimowitz’s part ran the gamut of evoking tuning the instrument and the tradition of solo cello music of Bach, but also harmonics, slide-notes, and ghostly tremolos by the bridge of the instrument.


4. Intensive Times
Tutti passages, with a prominent place for wood-blocks and snare-drum, led to a haunting theme in the ‘peachy’ register of the brass being taken up, and to the accompaniment of struck cymbals. As the movement developed, there was a feeling of varying between driving inevitability and harmonic uncertainty, but which gave the impression of bedding down before the end.


5. Old World
Another movement that opened with solo cello in a high, aetherial stratum, a phrase then emerged with which the harp chimed with a descending interval, and the movement had a similar feeling to it to that marked New World, but exploiting a rising interval.


6. Point Blank
The opening theme had a bouncy, but sinister, aspect, with a slightly coarse rasp from the brass. Yet, as it developed, Glass seemed to pitch a descending minor third against the cello’s rising major third (?), and with a lurking snare-drum rhythm. Tutti sections followed, and, in turn, gave way to writing for Haimowitz that seemed to demand intense slurring and sawing. More ‘circle-sounds’ followed, but which appeared undercut by sneering descending writing for brass and strings. At a moment when the cello seemed to be reaching out, it felt constrained, as if required to limit itself to Semaphore against the brass and the percussion. The movement then ended, meditating on one note. [Around when, unfortunately, Haimowitz’s C-string (?) broke]


7. The Vivid Unknown (described by Davies as ‘the epilogue’ when the broken string was being replaced)
The movement, in its opening, had a very expansive theme for solo cello, which, whilst it generally strived upwards, had downwards motions. As cellos and basses contributed ‘circle-sounds’, the cello had a vivid outpouring, only brought back to earth by a pure sound from the violins. The bassoon, always there in the general texture, was given the special feature of a weighty contribution, which gave way to more solo material. The bassoons then contributed, with a rising interval (a third ?), and, on beats from the tam-tam – in conjunction, with the other percussion ¬– the concerto came to an end.


The filmic origins and nature of the concerto may have meant that the movements were necessarily of a more delineated kind than, say, in the work by John Adams (which followed after the interval), because several began with the soloist introducing thematic material, or in a different character from what preceded. In any case, it was clearly a score that Davies knew very well and was involved with, if possible, even more fully than with that of These words….

Haimowitch, whose hesitations about the idea of the work, when being invited to premiere it, could be read about in the programme, gave a highly engaged performance, and, as he says Glass had licensed, played the repeated matter in a manner as he saw fit, varying it according to context and his artistic judgement. (Haimowitch has recorded it under Davies, about which one can read here, and also listen to samples of tracks.)

All in all, with Pärt and Glass, a good first half, and one that introduced a post-modern approach to compositions that explore the dimensions of a small chosen realm in depth, but without much of the vividly atonal or even twelve-tone approaches that many composers of the last forty or fifty years have embraced :

This, if anything, sets these composers apart, but in a different way from that of other practitioners such as, from the world of choral music, Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen or John Rutter, whose works are characterized by being much more highly tonal, and less rhythmically emphatic, than those of Adams, Glass, and Pärt.


Harmonielehre original version ?

John Adams – Harmonielehre

Not uniquely so, but the title of the work is that of a text by composer Arnold Schoenberg (from 1911), which roughly means Lessons in Harmonc Writing, whom Adams describes as representing ‘something twisted and contorted’ (this from the composer of Gnarly Buttons). Contrary to Adams’ claim that, as a pupil of a pupil of Schoenberg’s, he had respect for and even felt intimidated by Schoenberg, what he writes – at length – in the programme suggests something different :

That he built an image of Schoenberg of his own, as a god or ‘high priest’, and that then Rejecting Schoenberg was like siding with the Philistines. Adams has built a Schoneberg-shaped altar, according to his notion of Schoenberg, and then refused to bow down before it, citing the aural ugliness of so much of the new work being written. Yet the real Schoenberg wrote, for example, the incredibly beautiful and moving Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31…


Anyway, Harmonielehre is in three movements, but the first has no title (as to titles, please see the section on Glass’ concerto, above). It seems that the second movement has some connection with what Russell Hoban, making a Spoonerism, called Blighter’s Rock, because the programme reports that a dramatic dream broke a fallow period and gave rise to the piece – the link with The Fisher King (made famous, if not by T. S. Eliot’s notes to ‘The Waste Land’, then at least by Terry Gilliam’s film of that name in 1991) being that of woundedness, impotence even in some versions of the Arthurian story, and sometimes with a second wounded figure, the father.

As the programme tells us, Quackie is just what Adams and his wife were calling their daughter Emily at the time of composition (in the mid-1980s), and Adams had another dream, this time with her floating through space with Meister Eckhardt, a German mystic and philosopher, born in 1260. (As discussed, whether such titles and anecdotes add anything to a performance may be a matter of personal experience.)


1.
The work has an energetic, rhythmic opening statement, with tubular-bells. As in These Words…, one could hear xylophone, and brass and woodwind instrument playing high up, with plucked second violins, and also glockenspiel. The movement was one of contrasts, with bowed and plucked strings, and then with some string-players playing very long, slow notes against others with jabbed notes of much smaller duration – an exciting, bright mix of sound, which reminded of Adams’ A Short Ride in a Fast Machine, before it gave way to a moment of quiescence, against which we had the bubbling sounds of the xylophone and the luminous ones of the glockenspiel, before struck cymbals brought about a pause.

A full string-sound from cellos, double-basses and brass, with the material then passed to violas and violins : a questioning tone and a high string-sound gave a resemblance to a heavenly choir, before the direction moved down to a pulsing, with arpeggios from the strings, and solid bass-notes. In both texture and depth of sound, there was still an other-worldly sense, an almost Brucknerian sound-mood (with hints of Mahler) in the string-writing, and with the harp evident. Momentarily, Adams gave us raindrops, in the form of high notes, falling on this Alpine mood-meadow, and then the brass of tuba, trombone and horn came through. This rich and luscious feeling, changed, as the pitch descended, to sustained string-notes – the initial impression was given by some ‘snarky’ bass-notes, but overall it was one of rhythmic plasticity, with contributions from triangle and tubular-bells.

Then the tense opening motif returned, and gained in intensity, with huge rhythms from tam-tam, and the bass-drum a-booming. The moment dissolved, and re-formed, heralding anxious string and brass sounds, with high notes in the latter. Finally, fast-paced snare-drumming and tubular-bells (coupled with harp) broke through the sonority, followed by hammer-blows on the bells that brought about a close.


2. The Anfortas Wound
With grave notes on the basses and cellos, before the woodwind joined in, with the cellos playing in unison, we found ourselves in an andante in an uncertain place, where one of the five busy percussionists could be heard bowing a crotale and then seen wafting it, so that it resonated in the air.

Tonality was now quite unclear, and harmonies were straying, with brass-notes adrift amongst the bell-sounds, as a crescendo slowly built and then, as in Bartók’s mirrored ascent in the Music for Percussion, Strings and Celesta, fell away again from its zenith. The harps were given prominent rhythmic patterns as the harmonic centre, in the strings, began rising, tension being added by pizzicato playing, and by the percussion, whose bass-drum led another crescendo. With a momentary slap of the strings and a screech, the tuba-players fitted their huge mutes, and the bowed crotale was sounded again.

The tubas were just as quickly unmuted, and with anticipatory sounds from the strings, let off blasts, which signalled bell-sounds, and low notes from cellos and basses. Several times before the end, the orchestra seemed to die away, but revived – a sort of inversion of classical works that seem to have ended with a loud full close, but for a few more chords to declare insistently the approach of the real ending.


3. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie
Once again, we were in that alpine meadow for a while, with high notes from the harps, and with ambient percussion. Through it, though, came a soaring feel amongst the twittering of piccolos, and there was again a remembrance of Fast Machine, but this time inversely, a sensation of (harmonically) slowly dropping.

Mounting tension, fed by a tap-tap beat on a block, and high violin notes performed in a slicing motion (as if for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)), was intensified by agitated writing in very short note-values, evoking Fast Machine further with chords from the brass as if receding on a railway, and then that sinister type of horn-tone that The Matrix (1999) uses for the sentinels. With pulsing drum and glockenspiel, the energetic impulse in the ensemble rose, fell away again, and climbed back up – to end on a brief open sonority.


End-notes

* One says ‘xylophone’, because the sound did not appear to resonate, but it may have been a marimba…


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@THEAGENTAPSLEY's Tweet review of a cinematic event (without actually watching it...)

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30 April

Much of a crowd, @tobytram @CamPicturehouse ? @THEAGENTAPSLEY was put off by the sound of it being Max Ernst rehashed (plus Glen Baxter)...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 30, 2014

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He’s bad at taking off clothes ; she wants it fast and for her to be passive

This is a review of Exhibition (2013)

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30 April (updated 4 May)

* Contains some spoilers - major ones are marked in advance *

This is a review of Exhibition (2013)

Exhibition (2013) is centred on Liam Gillick and Viv Albertine, and, respectively, they are called H and D (for some reason). Only once, when she calls out to him from the other side of a locked door, do we seem to hear her say ‘Aitch’, and when she is later addressed by others, as she passes by the wine merchants or bar outside which they are standing, one could swear that they call her Lynn…

No matter (even if their label is maybe intended to tell us as much as if one were M, the other S). Albertine has no real history of appearing on film – and it shows. That said, it may partly be an encouragement from director / writer Joanna Hogg that is responsible for the fact that she is rarely convincing except when we are concentrating on her physicality : it is fictionalizing again, but maybe it is Hogg’s attempt to make raw and real a life together that, in this place*, has gone on for eighteen years.

We first see Albertine lying on a shelf (the pane frosted by her breath, maybe pretending to be a cat), then, at the end, around the corner of the room, and under the table, as a child might hide behind what overhangs. In between, there is acting, there is the certain kind of incoherence that comes with a ultra-realistic depiction and / or with shooting improvised scenes, and there is being a plausible artist : taking these in reverse order, it is fair enough that, as we are observing D, we should observe her doing a sketch of herself in the mirror, where the mirror becomes more and more central to the frame, and we never see the sketch. Yet, just as On the Road (2012) largely failed to establish Sal (Sam Riley) as a writer just by his saying that he was one, there has to be some basis for believing that D could have some sort of creativity to be an artist (whereas it is not almost until the end that we learn what sort of artist, and can feed that back into what has been shown).

As to improvisation, the scene, for example, where she does not want H to go out conveys only through elements of the dialogue why she is saying in a repeated, but largely ineffectual way, that it is too late** for him to go. One may be intended to infer more about her passivity from that (a passivity that has her, humorously fake a faint as a way of getting away from visiting friends – H and she almost seem to have no other friends, and she seems, from what he says, to have no other way of getting out of stifling situations – and which is the stuff of late nineteenth-century Russian literature, rather than twenty-first century Knightsbridge and Chelsea), but that is rather working, once the closing titles have rolled, to do the film’s job for it, when one could just as easily put it down to someone’s lack of experience (or ability).

In any case, the broadest difference between D and H, other than that she is all stripes (with a change of them, albeit limited) to his wearing black, is essentially that they have arrived in a none-too-unfamiliar rut of not being able to initiate sexual contact, and which they nevertheless try to do by buzzing each other on the intercom feature of the phone : at one point, she is seeking reassurance of his love, another time he is, unasked, offering it, but they seem to be out of sequence with each other.

Similar enough that they can have lived so long in this place (and both almost always wearing black sandals, even to go to their friends’ place), in this way, but at what cost ? Made similar to fit in, but it is his true nature to be excessively angry that someone has parked in his ‘private’ space, to the extent that he becomes Basil Fawlty and says that he should erect railings with a big sign on them saying ‘FUCK OFF’ – hers, whilst all this is happening, is to stay, but not really meaningfully interpose another viewpoint, and leave us with the impression of not much. (After all, if someone could cope with taking leave of friends early, he or she would not resort to pretending to have been unconscious.)

The crux of it all is where they live. Forgetting the little yellow vehicle, where he goes to, why, and for how long, and just concentrating on H’s words to D to ‘Enjoy it whilst you still can’, one interpretation might be that he has gone off for good to do whatever it is that he previously said that they should sell the house to do now that they can. He scarcely seems to have been anywhere more than overnight, and her almost petrified patrol around the place, making sure that all is locked, maybe leave us in doubt whether she is more afraid of him coming back in some state late at night than any other intruder : maybe she is like this at all such times, but it seems as though she does not know this experience (over-acting ?).

Very proud to reveal the UK poster for Exhibition, the new film from Joanna Hogg - in cinemas & on demand 25 April. pic.twitter.com/fat0HNbWf0
— Artificial Eye (@ArtificialEye) April 4, 2014

It is the closely observed feeling herself through the slot in the stool, inverting it, finding a way to rub her crotch on it that Albertine’s contribution has life – in its own way, and given that Nymphomaniac (2013) was meant to tease with its sterile sex (except really when Stacy Martin meets Jamie Bell), Exhibition is far more erotic. We may have to invent an explanation for how elements of D’s sexual apparatus are handily by the bed (unless H knows, and watches, if awake), and what they evoke if not pornographic imagery where the women, whatever else they wear, always wear heels, but there is no doubting the power of that scene.

The ultimate interpretation is that, for all that D tells a friend on a video-link that the couple who lived in the property before (the designers ?) lived there till they were eighty, she is not going to do anything to oppose H directing them to a sale (and just saying that she could not be there – obviously, the estate agents can – when people are talking about making changes is a last-ditch piece of passive resistance).

We will never know what the sale is for, just that the only things that she preserves are sex on her terms (even if it means physically offering herself to him when he desires it, but with the turn-off of not being mentally or spiritually present), and likewise talking to him about her work. The scene, real or dreamt, at The National Gallery nicely imitates Woody Allen, in such films as Stardust Memories (1980), with H trying to interview her on a stage, but she will only allow him to be a companion, my companion. At the same time, she watches them both from the audience, where the film, all too rarely, breaks out of the mould of depicting trivial action and inert interaction, showing them together in symbolic form.


* Interpretative spoiler *

As to an under-text, perhaps D has never wanted children (and has just been unable to conceive anyway), and sees herself in relation to fetishism, embodying a role in performance, and being observed. H certainly alludes to the fact that they have no children, not without some emphasis.

Perhaps pushing the sale through, as Lopakhin ‘saves’ the cherry orchard by having it cut down, is a bittersweet way of revenging himself on whichever it is of her involuntary childlessness, or choosing her career in art***. Certainly, an element of seeing the outside from the inside, complete with a manufactured soundscape that has some troubling elements (alongside bells that suggest a Sunday morning), stresses the presence of the property, and inevitably, as with the Chekhov, makes one wonder what life will / can be like without it - even if D has been offered an exhibition (about which H both tries to reassure and say that he knows best)...


End-notes

* It may not exist, but just be an amalgam of an exterior view (also seemingly seen from inside out), various interiors, and other looks out of windows. It suffices that it exists for and to us.

** * Contains spoilers * Perhaps not a recollection of a psychotic episode, but certainly reliving the fear of violence and / or the involvement of the emergency services.

Probably not unrelated to H's angry conversation with the man who has left his car in H's parking space - and how D relates to it. In her own difficult moments, she extricates herself by fainting, the exact opposite of his head-on attack. Keeping / selling the house is their time of testing ?

*** Their friends, horrified as they contemplate the house for themselves, say that they are artists, and it is a house for artists, but it is largely unclear what H’s art could even be.


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Did Hewitt succeed – or did The Art of Fatigue intervene ?

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29 April

This is a review of a concert performance, given at the Faculty of Music's concert hall in West Road in Cambridge (@WestRoadCH) and in conjunction with CRASSH (The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities), of Bach's The Art of Fugue by pianist Angela Hewitt

It was clear from what Angela Hewitt said in what was billed as a Symposium yesterday* that she has approached Bach’s The Art of Fugue (Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080) as a problem, which therefore implied that it needed to be solved**.

The nature of the problem being that she thought that, without adjustment in playing (she did not name anyone’s recordings), it can sound (or does sound) boring, a word that she must have used at least half-a-dozen times to describe a straight way of playing a passage as written, as against what she preferred (and which she then demonstrated).

In fact, the problem described may only exist because of attempting a performance, from start to seemingly unintentional finish***, in one go : if one did not try such a thing (as it is no more self-evidently desirable than with Book I or II of The Well-Tempered Clavier (Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, BWV 846–893)), would there be a problem ? A recording is one thing, and one accepts its limitations – unless the quality of the recording itself deteriorates, it is invariably the same. Yet there are not a few who like that feature of a recorded symphony or concerto – and, knowing one recording of a work, are disappointed when a concert sounds different.

That accepted, certain things had emerged from, or been confirmed by, the Symposium (and by clarifying a point with Butt that had arisen in an answer to a question at the end) :

1. We do not even know for sure (because programmes for, for example, the concerts of the Collegium Musicum, in Leipzig, do not survive) whether Bach ever gave wider performances of either Book of the Well-tempered than those reported to have taken place in a teaching context : as Butt agreed, he may have done, but we do not have documentary proof. What we do know is that, after his death, they were not published for another fifty years, around the beginning of the nineteenth century.

2. We do know, however, that the mighty achievement of writing the Mass in B Minor (BWV 232), another two hours or so of glorious music, did not lead to the opportunity for Bach to hear it realized – indeed, we do not seem to know for sure why he wrote it, although scholars have speculated about that question, as well as identifying earlier music that he adapted to the task and revised for the purpose.

3. There is accordingly a pattern of lengthy works, all of which were assembled over the years (as was the case with both Books of the Well-tempered), and part of the answer about why Bach wrote / revised them lies in this : he died at the age of 65 (in 1750), and must have been all too aware, throughout the preceding decade, of that principle of putting his house in order.

Coming back to performance, both knowledge of life-time performances (which we know definitely in some cases, such as the two Passions) and Bach’s expectations about how The Art of Fugue and the Mass in B Minor might be received in the future (and the debt that we seem to owe to Mendelssohn that we still have the latter), we probably know even less in the latter case than in the former, but the obstacles to mounting a concert rendition of one work (whether with a huge choir, or a voice to a part) are different.

With The Art of Fugue, if one sticks to one keyboard instrument, whether clavichord / harpsichord, organ, or piano (or even fortepiano, one supposes), the obstacles are different, and they came to the fore in seeking to proselytize about this work in events either side of the weekend – different from those if one arranges it, as, say, wind quintet Calefax’s saxophinist Raaf Hekkema did with his group, for an ensemble, and different from if one breaks the work with an interval.

In Cambridge, in this same venue, Richard Egarr (director of the Academy of Ancient Music) has certainly played a Book of the Well-tempered (on the harpsichord) in an evening’s performance, and also a selection of three of the six Partitas (BWV 825–830) in a lunchtime concert, but maybe not with much of a pause between the first and second sets of twelve Preludes and Fugues.

Can it be argued that inherently, if one wants, as here, to perform The Art of Fugue on a piano, there must be no break ? If, as Hewitt suggested, one is proselytizing, which one was not solely doing****, the needs of those new to this work – whatever the overview(s) have given to them – do not obviously require a very lengthy period of uninterrupted fugal and canonic writing.

For one is also preaching to the converted, who have come not to be persuaded so much, but to appreciate an interpretation, and not to wish to find fault, with global or specific matters. Having said which, Hewitt used (as she previously had) the word ‘swing’ to describe her approach to Contrapunctus 2, and, in full, the effect was more that of Jacques Loussier than of Johann Sebastian – with which one could cope as an aberrational belief that adding (accentuating ?) syncopation is the only way to play this part of the whole, although it seemed rather unlikely.

This performance at eight o’clock to-night ended at a quarter to ten (it had been preceded by a short version of the overview, for those who missed the Symposium) : by the time that Hewitt came to play the four Canons, which she had placed before the final Contrapunctus (and in her own order), she was, regrettably, very clearly flagging, because there were slips and stumbles in her playing.

That said, Hewitt did not let herself be put off, even by a significantly askew sequence of notes in the right hand that jolted one into full attention. Yet the test of endurance, of ninety minutes of playing, that she was making of herself must put the viability of the endeavour in doubt, for she really seemed to need the support of the front edge of the piano when she took applause :

That objection is not answered by Hewitt building up stamina yet further, but by stopping to question the purpose of playing through without a break. As the ancients said, but for a different reason, Cui bono ?

Here, it is the law of diminishing returns that tends to apply, because, if the audience can tell that the performer is tiring (and Hewitt, understandably not wanting the tensions of a page-turner, nonetheless seemed let down by her technological solution*****), he or she gets their sympathy for the feat attempted, if not their patience and toleration for the faults. Here, they were not just slips, but places where Hewitt sounded lost as she played what she read.

The opening of Contrapunctus 7 seemed wholly undigested (before its resemblance to fugues around 5 to 7 in Book I became apparent), whereas, in Contrapunctus 3 and 12, it felt as though the performance was suddenly on the hoof : in performance, Egarr has given notice, with his very expressive face, that something in Bach’s score has pulled him up, but not that it is any more than a pleasant surprise, rather than conveying musical uncertainty as to where it is going next.

At the end of the work, something seemed really awry. It eventually became clear, after the event, that the part had been reached where, in the MS, the music runs out without the Contrapunctus otherwise concluding. Before that, it had been clear enough when Hewitt started the first of the Canons, yet, in between, there somehow seemed to be too much material to account for four Canons and the closing Contrapunctus******.

As Bach’s end that is not an ending was awaited, one Canon or Contrapunctus finished in a way that other members of the audience could be heard saying had sounded like an attempt to improvise a conclusion in Bach’s style – whatever happened, it seemed out of place, and was perhaps the result of the technological aid.

Until we reached the Canons, and passing over the question of Contrapunctus 2, Hewitt seemed on course to manage what she had set herself. Necessarily, one did not always agree with her other choices. However, the whole concert could have been so much better but for the feeling that she was weary (and that two glasses of water had proved insufficient), and that the sense of the weariness (and the mistakes attributable to it) was passing itself over, to disrupt one’s own concentration.

A noble enterprise to perform The Art of Fugue straight through – but can one believe that even Bach required it ?


End-notes

* In fact, an introduction to the work and interview with Hewitt by Bach scholar John Butt, followed by Hewitt’s overview, with examples.

** And even revealed that she had initially been using a swear-word to refer to it, surely The Fart of Fugue, or The Art of Fuck (although she did not actually say what).

*** Then closing with the Chorale Prelude that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach added to his father’s work when it was published under his direction, Vor deinen Thron tret’ich hiermit (BWV 668).

**** Some of us have known recordings of this work for more than thirty years (even if, in the light of the Symposium, it can be understood that a recording such as that on Deutsche Grammophon's Archiv label, by Kenneth Gilbert, is of the work before Bach’s revision for the press).

***** In the Symposium, it was all too clear from what Hewitt said that she temperamentally could not have tolerated a person turning for her, and she said that the complete score, with her markings, was on her iPad®, with a pedal to change pages.

****** Unless, maybe, Hewitt had actually announced that, in departing from the order given in the programme, the Canons would come after Contrapunctus 12, and thus Contrapunctus 13 and 14 followed them (and with an arithmetical error in thinking that the part before the Canons had been Contrapunctus 13.


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Forty-eight, going on fifteen

This is a review of A Story of Children and Film (2013)

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26 April (updated 28 April)

This is a review of A Story of Children and Film (2013)

Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) came to Cambridge with his film A Story of Children and Film (2013) (@ChildrenandFilm), which he told us that he had not been intending to make after – as he described it – six years making, and two years editing, The Story of Film : An Odyssey (2011).

The film was here both in its own right, and to introduce a series of films – The Cinema of Childhood – that has been curated by Cousins and by Filmhouse (@Filmhouse) (which was sourced with the assistance of Neil McGlone (@NeilMcGFilm)) and which has been showing since at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) (of which there are reviews here of Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949) and Bag of Rice) (Kiseye Berendj) (1998)).

Cousins had previously been at The Arts for the showing of the last part of Odyssey (which had been screened in full in preceding weeks), and of his new film What is This Thing Called Love ? (2012), and had been an agreeable and interesting guest.

This time, as well as eloquently introducing Children and Film and explaining how it had come about and how personal its genesis had been, Cousins was not making special pleading for the way in which he had constructed the film* : he had simply realized, in looking at the filming that he had done (in his home and with the camera in a static position) of his nephew and niece, that the patterns of behaviour that they showed, as they got used to the camera and, together and singly, played, gave him a way of being reminded of the roles for children in the best films that feature them, rather than those that impose an adulthood on a child before its time :

As he suggests at http://dogwoof.com/childrenandfilm/filmmaker, Cousins contrasted the sweet perfection of Shirley Temple (Curly Top (1935)) with the young girl who puts on a family entertainment with Esther (Judy Garland) in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), and who is allowed to make mistakes and be out of key, as, of course, many a child would.

At the same time, Cousins is not singling out St. Louis as a film that we would necessarily go to, but wants to introduce us to examples from all around the world from Senegal to Sweden, and also reminds us to look again at others that we may already know, such as Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), and even Spielberg’s E.T. : The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).

Punctuated by returning to the Cousins’ flat for more development of what is happening with the relatives on screen, but looking first, by paying a homage to where Vincent Van Gogh lived in Provence at the end of his life, at the world that the painter created in his work as he interpreted his surroundings, Cousins wants to remind us that making a film is projecting a visual and aural view of the world (and the poetic element in what he said to us was patent). Those views, and real life in Cousins’ home, do provide a contrast and a structure – if we can take them on their own terms, and accept, when he tells us, that he did consider other structures to this film, rather than using the original one, but found that nothing worked as well.

Children and Film, though it has a shorter running-time and is a very different type of film, is as demanding of us as Slavoj Žižek is of us in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), because Cousins does not slacken his pace or his use of terms to describe the camera’s movement or position, and ideally one needs to see the film several times over to take in all that he is not only saying at any one point, but to absorb the action in the clips, and the information such as the film’s name, translation and where and when made.

An excellent reason to order the DVD from Dogwoof (@dogwoof) (available from 28 April), but, in the meantime, the list of films featured can be found here :


http://dogwoof.com/childrenandfilm/about.


The film was also reviewed here by Amanda Randall (@amandarandall5) for TAKE ONE (@TakeOneCFF) at Cambridge Film Festival in 2013


To correct an omission

Those who know Cousins' camera-work will be well aware that he is a skilled cinematographer, but the quality of the images, their framing and composition, when he had travelled on to the Isle of Skye is beautiful : a real treat where it comes, because what has gone before has been the footage captured in the flat and clips from his chosen films, even if the opening, which seems a while away now, had been in Provence. (Whether he had linearly been contemplating the possible significance as a frame for this film of his niece and nephew at play, and had developed detailed ideas by the time of his time on Skye, really does not matter, for, in a sense, this is a story just as even any memory that we have is, a way of telling to the world what happened.)


End-notes

* Cousins had the large sheet on which he had worked out the connections between films with him, which those daring enough to approach afterwards were able to see close to.


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So great that you're quitting ? : A review of Les beaux jours (Bright Days Ahead) (2013)

This is a review of Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) (2013)

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24 April

This is a review of Bright Days Ahead (Les beaux jours) (2013)

So great that you’re quitting

Bright Days Ahead (an uneven translation of Les Beaux Jours*) (2013) is in French, but, however well made, it has more of the sensibility of Hope Springs (2012) than of the best of French cinema : when the producer of Hope came to Cambridge Film Festival, he said that Meryl Streep had suggested making the footage at the end, and, although it had not been planned, it was then found possible to do it. The ending of this film strongly reminds one of it, though with very little feeling that matters have been resolved.

The reason being that Hope shares with this film the topic of healing the damage caused by one’s partner’s behaviour – though here the damage seemed to have been skin deep**, whereas in Tommy Lee Jones’ (Arnold’s) case (and contrary to the optimism in the title’s fictitious place name) it brooded over Meryl Streep (Kay) for almost the entire film. Hope is not a great film, and one can be cynical about the motives behind making it, but it still moves Days Ahead out of the brightness, and into the shade.

Another point of contact is a coastal location. Places in New England became the title resort in Hope, and, at least when we are outside and in it (when we are inside, it could be anywhere), the Nord-Pas-de-Calais is a vivid backdrop to Days Ahead, right from the title sequence, which is made to appear written onto the black of a bascule bridge. Straightaway, it is apparent that getting around is dependent on avoiding the times when tides make it favourable for vessels to navigate the channels and the bridge swings up. In no way apparent, for all the amenity of the location, is why Caroline (Fanny Ardant) and Philippe (Patrick Chesnais) are there at all.

In any case, despite Le Week-End (2013)’s reliance on the deus ex machina of Morgan (Jeff Goldblum) to get Hanif Kureishi’s lumbering plot to go anywhere, once it has established the characters of Meg (Lindsay Duncan) and Nick (Jim Broadbent) (but with no real prospect of development***), it shows far more about relationships and those near retirement than Days Ahead even thinks to do. For it goes straight for showing an affair, but often half-heartedly, so that one can care too little whether it survives, and too much how toxic its effects might be.

The real moment when there is everything is the illicit possibility of penetrative sex in Caroline’s car, and where, however close we seem to get, the windows are ever interposed between them and us – when that idea is shied away from, we suddenly step back and see where we had got lost from in awareness, the car in plain view and with people about their business.

Ageing the lead actress Ardant backwards is a well-worn trick, and even passionate moments seen in the store-room (to bolster up the notion of romantic rejuvenation) simply do not make for sustaining the conviction of amour fou such as KST’s in Leaving (2009) (or even of her bit-part as Virginie Rousset in Bel Ami (2012), where she, too, glows and visibly unfolds from knowing the favours of Georges Duroy (Robert Pattinson)) : here, the feeling on both sides is too tepid, even to the extent of stating to one’s lover that the preference is for sleep rather than continuing the time together, and Julien (Laurent Lafitte), too, is just beautified over time to suggest his strengthening appeal.

Throw in ‘getting to know’ the members of the Les Beaux Jours club in a way that is managed hardly better than in Ronald Harwood’s adaptation of his superior stage-play as Quartet (2012). In Days Ahead, there are stock follies such as a wine-tasting where someone takes snorters or people unused to potting are let loose on a wheel and produce a deformed piece of clay, and the cheery message that we are invited to share that sniffy Caroline comes to value her new friends might give some a sense of warmth. Yet it is essentially a diversion from the fact that nothing is really going on, except at the level of cliché, and, whilst that may be fine for Fanny Chesnel’s novel, it is too thin for a film that seeks our approval.

Ultimately, the plot throws us back on Philippe and who he really is in relation to Caroline, but sadly the action has concentrated so much on her both that we do not know, and also that we cannot credit what, in the circumstances, would cause him to accommodate her needs. Hope, whatever we may think of its insights, does at least focus on that question, rather than trying to tack it on at the end.


That said, New Empress Magazine's reviewer found more going on here, and more of merit, but making none of these references


End-notes

* Surely not meant to resonate with the title that Beckettt gave to his play Happy Days when he translated it into French… ?

** And, to be susceptible to rapid repair thanks to a few jokes at the expense of a hotel run by a budget brand, and – at the cost of incredulity as to how Philippe got there, and what happened to Caroline’s car – to hitching a lift as the young Dylan or Kerouac might have done.

*** What does happen at the end smacks less of ‘going Godard’ than of the fantasy Paris of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).




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Minimalists - or Rhythmicists ?

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22 April

The composers on the bill at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange (@CambridgeCornEx) on Sunday 27 April are usually (nay, invariably) referred to as members of the school of Minimalism.

Dennis Russell Davies, interviewed on Tuesday afternoon’s edition of Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) ‘In Tune’ (@BBCInTune) (available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04153wl for seven days from transmission), pointed out that the composers in the series of three approaching concerts at London’s Cadogan Hall, from which the programme in Cambridge has been derived, all know each other – with Arvo Pärt having looked to Michael Nyman as an example before the disssolution of the Soviet Union led to The Baltic States becoming free (Pärt is Estonian).

Nevertheless, although Nyman took the term from art history*, and, it seems, first used the words ‘minimal music’ in a review in The Spectator in 1968**, it seems to have lost its connection both with other movements in the arts, and with evidently fitting the music to which it refers : does a work by Frank Stella, for example, bear any significant resemblance to the way in which a composition by John Adams works ?

If there is any common element in the work of composers that is described as minimalist, it is never as distinct as John Cage’s unavoidable 4’33” or unconventional in the way that his ‘prepared piano’ is. Instead, it tends to treat a theme as an ostinato or a ground bass might be used, for its rhythmic possibility, and the same is as true for Steve Reich, with the fringe effects caused by two or more players (who gradually become more and more out of synch and cause interference), as when a repeated motif in a work by Philip Glass modulates in relation to the parts of the other instrumentalists.

More here (the long version - easy-read one to follow soonish) as a review of Sunday’s concert…


End-notes

* Whereas it had initially been applied to Black Square (1915), a famous painting (of the infamous kind) by Kazimir Malevich.

** In relation to various compositions that had been performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA – @ICALondon).

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