Planning Cambridge Film Festival 2014 : #CamFF - Work in Progress

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

24 August

Soon on the blog, @THEAGENTAPSLEY's Festival Planner (content sometimes more in hope than actuality)... #CamFF pic.twitter.com/K6SqxCu7KP
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 24, 2014

Thursday 28 August

6.00 Peter Sellers : The Early Shorts (1957) : Emmanuel (90 mins) - Catch one film before...

7.00 The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (Opening Film) : Screen 1 (93 mins)

10.00 Magic in the Moonlight (Opening Film) : Screen 1 (97 mins)


Friday 29 August

12.30 Night Moves : Screen 1 (90 mins)

4.00 The White City (2014) : Screen 2 (running time not advised) If not on Sunday at 1.30...

6.00 Children of No Importance (Lamprecht) : Emmanuel (95 mins)

9.15 Cherry Tobacco : Screen 3 (97 mins)

11.00 House of Wax (Retro 3-D) : Screen 2 (86 mins)
or - when announced
11.00 TBC : Screen 3 (?? mins)


Saturday 30 August

11.00 Peter Sellers : The Early Shorts (1957) : Screen 3 (90 mins) - To catch the others...

1.30 Life of Crime (2013) : Screen 3 (94 mins)

4.00 I Believe in Unicorns (2014) : Screen 3 (80 mins)

6.45 Free Range / Ballad on Approving of the World (2013) : Screen 2 (104 mins) But if it drags...

7.30 Ida (2013) : Screen 1 (80 mins)

10.00 In Order of Disappearance : Screen 1 (116 mins)
or - decide on the night
10.30 Inferno (Retro 3-D) : Screen 2 (83 mins)
or - decide on the night
10.15 TBC: SCreen 3 (?? mins)


Sunday 31 August

1.30 The White City (2014) : Screen 1 (running time not advised)

4.00 Oh Boy (2013) (German) : Emmanuel (88 mins)

6.30 Home from Home (2013) (German) : Screen 1 (225 mins) But if it falters...

8.45 War Story (2013) : Screen 2 (90 mins)


Monday 1 September

1.30 A Most Wanted Man (2014) : Screen 1 (121 mins)

4.00 Four Corners (2014) : Screen 1 (114 mins)
or - decide on the day
4.00 In Order of Disappearance (2014) : Screen 2 (116 mins)

6.30 Under Milk Wood (1971) (Dylan Thomas 100) : Screen 1 (88 mins) If not on Tuesday at 1.00...

8.30 Finding Fela (2014) : St Philip's Church (119 mins)
or - decide on the day
9.00 Before I go to Sleep (2014) : Screen 1 (92 mins)
or - decide on the day
10.00 Love is All : 100 Years of Love and Courtship (2014) : Screen 3 (70 mins)


Tuesday 2 September

11.00 Under Milk Wood (1971) (Dylan Thomas 100) : Screen 1 (88 mins) If not on Monday at 6.30...

1.00 M : Screen 1 (1931) (117 mins)

3.30 Last Call (2013) : Screen 2 (91 mins)

6.00 How I Came to Hate Maths (2013) : Emmanuel (110 mins)

8.30 Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy (2013) : Emmanuel (127 mins)


Wednesday 3 September

1.30 Iranian (2014) : Screen 1 (105 mins)

4.00 Eastern Boys (2013) : Screen 1 (128 mins)

6.30 Stations of the Cross (2014) (German) : Screen 2 (104 mins)

9.00 Tasting Menu (2013) : Screen 2 (85 mins)

11.00 Short Fusion : Life Lessons : Screen 2 (79 mins)


Thursday 4 September

11.00 Night will Fall (2014) : Screen 1 (75 mins)

1.30 Le Jour se Lève (Daybreak) (1939) : Screen 1 (93 mins)

4.00 German Short Films (German) : Screen 1 (~70 mins) (all 2013) Will have to miss the end to get to...

6.00 Still the Enemy Within (2014) : St Philip's Church (112 mins)

8.30 Under the Lantern (1928) (Lamprecht) : St Philip's Church (129 mins)
Stay for this - or head to Festival Central for...
9.00 We Are Many (2014) : Screen 1 (104 mins)


Friday 5 September

1.00 We All Want What's Best for Her (Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013) (Camera Catalonia) : Screen 1 (105 mins)

4.00 People on Sunday (Lamprecht) : Emmanuel (73 mins)

5.00 Energized : Screen 1 (91 mins)

8.30 Hosting Q&A for A Curious Life (no date advised) : St Philip's Church (78 mins)

10.30 The Mad Magician (Retro 3-D) : Screen 2 (72) If possibly back in time...


Saturday 6 September

1.00 Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (Lamprecht) : Screen 3 (74 mins)

2.30 Fiction (Ficció) (Camera Catalonia) : Screen 3 (107 mins)

5.00 Amour Fou : Screen 1 (96 mins)

7.30 Tony Benn : Will and Testament : Screen 1 (running-time not advised)
Not likely to finish in time for...
9.00 West (Lagerfeuer) (German) : Screen 2 (102 mins)


Sunday 7 September

1.00 Othello (Otel.lo) (Camera Catalonia) : Screen 2 (69 mins)

4.00 A Poem in Exile (Camera Catalonia) : Emmanuel (77 mins)

5.30 Set Fire to the Stars (Dylan Thomas 100) : Screen 1 (90 mins)

8.00 Surprise Film : Screen 1 (?? mins)


All of the above translates here into what was actually seen / missed and done...


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

Why complicate things when they can be simple ? ~ Mar Vidal

This is a Festival preview of Tasting Menu (Menú degustació) (2013)

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

19 August

This is a Festival preview of Tasting Menu (Menú degustació) (2013)

Chances to see during Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) 2014:

On Wednesday 3 September only at Festival Central (please see the note on screenings below) and for general admission only at 9.00 p.m. (Screen 2), because the screening at 11.00 a.m. (Screen 3) that day is a Big Scream screening*

Also screening (as are some other Festival films) at Abbeygate Cinema, 4 Hatter Street, Bury St Edmunds IP33 1NZ (abbeygatecinema.co.uk) : Tuesday 2 September at 6.45 p.m.

A night of enchantment, misunderstanding, and phone-calls

Sommelier :
It’s slow in the mouth and offers serenity and peace. (Slight pause.) I hope it helps you to calm your mind, and to remember and enjoy a moment of beauty.


This description of a white wine, from Tasting Menu (Menú degustació) (2013), could – if shorter – almost serve as the tag-line for the film : what is any good film (or painting, play, piece of music), if not giving us the space to experience something ?

And what might Chakula be, a restaurant with just thirty covers, if not a microcosm of – or metaphor for – life ? (Just as, in its own way, the Mumbai of The Lunchbox (Dabba) (2013) also enchantingly showed how food, and how it is delivered, together have the power to forge new connections.)

Imagine the inviting – though sometimes flirtatiously fleeting – appearance of food and how it is keenly appreciated. Mix it with an ensemble cast that plays, say, the variety of characters in luxury accommodation who commit Murder on The Orient Express (1974) (although this is no murder mystery, it has secrets and intrigues), or who meet as Peter’s Friends (1992) (though no one is exactly Peter, telling them sombre news), and you have some of the principal elements of Tasting Menu’s recipe…

What the film’s atmosphere adds to this, not least in some of its incidental music (which complements the more extrovert opening, with The Divine Comedy playing Neil Hannon’s song ‘I Like’, one of two of their tracks used), is the sense that things are happening magically this night.


First Japanese guest :
It’s like a biscuit. A crunchy biscuit. (Pause.) It’s so delicate. Airy. It looks dense, but is light.

Second Japanese guest :
It reminds me of a summer evening. (Slight pause.)When the rain makes way for a little chill in the air.


A far cry, then, from a delicious breakfast simply comprising a plate of baked beans and, separately, some dried-out toast, such as is served to the somewhat enigmatic Countess just before her doctor – by telephone – approves her going to Chakula for the evening. Others will prove to have their own stories, which do not take the overt form of the jar of ashes that she takes with her, but their past is no less symbolically present as each course of the meal is served :

We do not engage with every guest, but each featured person brings his or her own ingredient to tasting the cuisine, in the form of his or her personality and experience. This individuality is reflected in the camera-work, as it revolves around the dining-area, the preparation-area and the kitchen, bringing out orchestral flavours and colours, and as changing perspectives open up on the setting, and the evening.

At the time of the credits, and in advance of their long-standing dinner reservation at Chakula, we heard failed communication between Marc (Jan Cornet) and Raquel (Claudia Bassols) – voicemails where the speaker improvises, guessing at the other’s meaning (and what the other is doing), both imagining the other being busy… As a couple, they centre our attention, with Marc doubting that Raquel will come – and stuffing his bow-tie into his pocket as she spots him.


Although predominantly light in spirit, with an opening scene during a chat-show, where chef Mar Vidal (Vicenta Ndongo) is introduced as one of three of the world’s top chefs and interviewed about the allure of the restaurant and its final meal, there are various reasons why one cannot merely equate Tasting Menu with having a ‘feel-good factor’. For there are darker, even threatening, tones sounded – with mounting hysteria about who the eccentric Walter Reilly (Stephen Rea), who is sparing with his words, might be, why Raquel’s editor Daniel (Timothy Gibbs) has come to the restaurant, and what might have become of the desserts. (Just momentarily, with that question, Mar’s response to what she hears evokes gourmet night in Torquay – during the employment of Barcelona’s most famous waiter…)

At this stage, Mar, as well as general manager Max Barney (Andrew Tarbet), is on edge for various reasons (partly do with the two competitive Japanese guests, and whether they (and the waiting-staff) can bear Mina’s (Marta Torné’s) unsoothing chatter). However, everything to do with the meal itself has been running to clockwork (apart from one party arriving late), and everyone has been aiming for the best night ever…

That said, at times it feels as if Oberon has sent Puck amongst the diners (in the form of one of the waiters), causing mischief with misunderstood glances and misdirected messages. The Countess (Fionnula Flanagan), too, mixes up the action, sometimes making overly much, in a would-be worldly way, of what she hears (though, then again, she may be prescient).

In pointed dialogue between Raquel and The Countess, at one point we hear the words Welcome to the human race !, and it is part of the feeling of awkwardness of people trying to feel who they are in relation to each other.

It can still be a splendid night, but not without some contributions from unexpected quarters, and also some upset and some realizations.


This is just one of six Catalan films (Camera Catalonia) that can be seen at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) - Thursday 28 August to Sunday 7 September (both inclusive). Three others are reviewed here, and What is Catalan cinema ? is also about the Catalan strand at the Festivals in 2012 and 2013...



Note on screenings, etc. :

NB The allocation of films between the three screens at Festival Central can always change (as can, if one is coming from a distance for a specific film, the programme as a whole) : if the audience for a film scheduled for Screen 3 (the smallest screen, around half the capacity of the largest, Screen 1) proves greater than expected, it may end up being swapped, so there could be a change in the exact time of the screening, too

In the programme (for which that is a link to the where the PDF file can be downloaded - printed copies are available at Festival Central and all good local outlets), some slots are also marked 'TBC', and popular screenings may be repeated : announcements are on Cambridge Film Festival 2014's (@camfilmfest's) web-site (please see link, above), as they are of alterations to the programme or the allocation between screens


End-notes

* The Arts Picturehouse's club exclusively for parents / carers accompanied by babies under one year old.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Inside his mind : Iago in the midst

This is a review of Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)

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

19 August (corrected 20 August)

This is a review of Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)

Chances to see during Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) 2014:

Only one screening presently scheduled (please see the note on screenings below), at 1.00 p.m. on Sunday 7 September (Screen 2)


The Moor is of a free and open nature
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so;
And will as tenderly be led by th’nose
As asses are.

Act I, Scene iii, 390–393

Sometimes the strength of a film lies in the resonance with which it reminds you of your other viewing – and reading.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, composing a story, in essay form, that touches on the life of the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes (Pierre Menard, ‘Author of the Quixote’ (‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’)), imagined how someone (in this case, the fictional Pierre Menard) becomes as Cervantes, partly, at first, by living in exactly the same circumstances as Cervantes and then ends up recreating, word for word, parts of his most famous oeuvre (so, maybe, Borges mocking - amongst literary and intellectual fashions and factions - the Laplacean theory of determinism (as well as the writer(s) whom academics consider the model(s) for Menard) ?) :

In a similar way, this film invites us to consider whether Othello is a flawed tragic character, distant from our lives as a character in a play by Shakespeare (whose fictionality is celebratedly emphasized by claims that it relies too heavily on a stolen handkerchief*) – or whether the pressures that cause Othello to believe Desdemona unfaithful (and kill her) can be made to act on a Moroccan amateur actor (Youcef), who has been cast in that role for the film that we see being shot (though nothing explains the manner of the direction).

Yet it is no mere framing device, nor no piece of Brechtian alienation technique (Verfremdungseffekt, in the original German), to have cast and crew alike visible to us, but, rather, something that enables us to feel inside the depths of the Shakespeare story : seeing what happens to Ann (Desdemona) and Youcef, a real-life couple for two years, as they play the lead roles is enhanced by seeing how constructed film is as a medium, where, say, the people who hold the sound-booms must also play their part, and this approach is at the centre of why the film has been made. (Otherwise, it would be a much longer Othello, shot on the black, curtained stage-set, and looking like a filmed play (please see below).)

The direction that we see of Youcef, Ann and Kike (as Michael Cassio) on camera may not exactly be Peter Brook (or the play’s adaptation that of Steven Berkoff, or Charles Marowitz), but it is experimenting with the actors and their performances, seeking the life in the latter, trying to find engagement with the text (a word that we see so often in the sub-titles, signifying Action !) : unlike this dynamic process (which is also at the much lighter heart of another Catalan film shown at Cambridge Film Festival, V.O.S. (2009)), we are also reminded that, when we watch a film, it is a finished, duplicated artefact, which will be the same to-morrow as next week (if we choose to watch it again after this evening’s screening).

Otel.lo is, at times, painful to watch, because it goes beyond the stories that we hear about how directors get the take that they want (such as were circulating about the love-scenes had been shot in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)) and into the immoral manipulation and lies of Dangerous Liaisons (1988), yet it is worth doing so because of how immensely it enriches our sense of the operation of jealousy, flirtation, attraction – as real, living feelings and behaviours.

However, as the film develops, and the cast is being put upon, one is in mind of Gloucester, sightless on the heath in King Lear, saying ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport’ (Act IV, Scene i)**. Or of Samuel Beckettt’s ironic mimes Act Without Words I and II, with their characters being prompted from without, as well as tempted, seduced, and disappointed.

Linking with texts such as these, and entering into the world of the film, actually widens our appreciation of what happens on screen : scenes with the actors in character become as real as, or more real than, when Ann and Youcef talk singly to camera, with the director asking them questions. Here, unlike the effect of Polanski’s Venus in Furs (2013) (whose ‘staginess’ seemed to negate one’s interest, and to make one question the purpose of the film over the original play), laying bare the artifice heightens the drama.


It may be, as the title’s rendering suggests, a low-budget production that is depicted (for it is a modest team), but, as those who experiment with their cinema- or theatre-going will know, a big budget is not a guarantee of greater satisfaction. For example, another Catalan film that screened at last year’s Cambridge Film Festival, The Redemption of the Fish (La redempció dels peixos) (2013), was made on almost no budget, but the film is beautiful, using natural light wherever possible, and without no compromise over quality.

Though running at just over an hour, Otel.lo is complete in itself and not (unlike last year’s micro-budget film The Cherry Orchard (2013)) one that shows preparation for a performance that we do not see : performance and the production are integrated, at all levels, and one simply could not desire the intensity of Otel.lo for longer. As has been suggested, it is meta-textual in a way that is highly thoughtful, and it is sure both to arouse interest, and to provoke differences of opinions about what its core-values are.


Othello :
Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body ?


Iago :
Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.
From this time forth I never will speak word.

Act V, Scene ii, 297–300

This is just one of six Catalan films (Camera Catalonia) that can be seen at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) - Thursday 28 August to Sunday 7 September (both inclusive). Three others are reviewed here, and What is Catalan cinema ? is also about the Catalan strand at the Festivals in 2012 and 2013...



Note on screenings, etc. :

NB The allocation of films between the three screens at Festival Central can always change (as can, if one is coming from a distance for a specific film, the programme as a whole) : if the audience for a film scheduled for Screen 3 (the smallest screen, around half the capacity of the largest, Screen 1) proves greater than expected, it may end up being swapped, so there could be a change in the exact time of the screening, too

In the programme (for which that is a link to the where the PDF file can be downloaded - printed copies are available at Festival Central and all good local outlets), some slots are also marked 'TBC', and popular screenings may be repeated : announcements are on Cambridge Film Festival 2014's (@camfilmfest's) web-site (please see link, above), as they are of alterations to the programme or the allocation between screens


End-notes

* E.g. Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693).

** Yet, later in the play, Edgar (who had providentially met Gloucester) feigns other identities to lead his father to what the other thinks is the edge of the cliffs at Dover – Gloucester is persuaded to believe that he has survived pushing himself off the edge, and that his life thus has a meaning.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Overlooked in all the care

This is a Festival review of We All Want What's Best for Her

(Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013)

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

19 August

This is a Festival review of We All Want What's Best for Her

(Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013)

Chances to see during Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) 2014:

Presently, on Thursday 4 September at 6.15 p.m. (Screen 1), and on Friday 5 September at 1.00 p.m. (Screen 1) (please see the note on screenings below)


This film concerns itself with the sort of overlooked type of person who does not – or fails to – make a full recovery.

In a very polished way, which never feels like imitation, it seems closest to the frailty and fragility of Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978) (in particular, the pale, almost monochrome shades, into which the significant colour in the film erupts). Yet we are in an underlying family ambience that (not just because of the three daughters that all three films share) more closely resembles that of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) (but with maybe a hint of Dorrie’s (Charlotte Rampling’s) less-manic moments of insecurity from Stardust Memories (1980) to heighten the sororial bitchiness of Hannah (Mia Farrow)).

We quickly learn that Eugenia (Geni) had had a serious road-traffic accident around a year before the start of the film, and we were immediately placed in her world in the opening shot, with no mise-en-scène, as she walks through a door on the left of the screen into a plush ante-room. She asks, and is told that she can go straight in to see the doctor – then we are in there with her, and looking at her, with a full view of the doctor kept back from us.

Maybe Geni (Nora Navas) is actually on time for the appointment (and, as one goes off, she reports to the doctor that she is using alarms on her phone to tell her where she should be), but what we notice most is that she seems too serene, almost over-eager to please : from what happens later, just with the long slow sweep past the city through the taxi’s window as she slumps, it is clear that she had been pretending, and that the doctor does not seem to have looked behind appearances. (So, if Geni says that ‘The important thing is the knee’, that is what the doctor hears and has noted.)

Yet we will see her family require Geni to pretend according to their pattern (at which point, we are sharply reminded of the subjective element in the title’s What’s Best For Her), and we also see how uneasily their encouraging phrases, which aim to re-frame her experience, fit on her lips. So, as she repeats her husband Dani’s (Pau Durà’s) words, we feel them become as dust, or meal, in her mouth :

All this is non-negotiable

I must make… an effort


Compared with Rust and Bone (2012), another (but very different) film about what happens after a trauma (to Marion Cotillard as Stéphanie), it is a bourgeois life in which Geni is living (typified by the flat, and its easy interiors and choice in art). However, in terms of what she is experiencing, looking interestedly at advertising in the surgery for a medication that seems to be an anti-depressant (Happiness is in the little things), her problems seem out of place and unwelcome there (and they are arguably greater than those of Stéphanie) :

Geni’s world / family seems to have a work ethic that does not begin to understand duvet days, and it is one whose pressures, although not always explicit, are inescapable. The assumption, which is everyone’s starting-point (both for themselves and on the others’ behalf), is that you can get back what you had. Which includes, as we hear when Geni’s more similar sister suggests a thoughtful, individual exercise at New Year (to round off the previous twelve months for everyone), not only that her father expects a return on the therapy that he has bought for Geni's sister, but also, in how the exercise gets subverted, greater disrespect for what therapy says, does and is for.

You do not need to have a notion of the recovery model in UK mental health to notice the number of times people say to Geni that 'You used to...’, and, at such times, there is something about Navas’ mouth that registers a barely visible disquiet. (At other times, we see her disassociate from that with which she simply cannot cope.) Navas is on screen almost without a break, and looking properly at what her look says pays dividends for feeling the richness and depth of how the film explores this situation.

In the event, when Geni is trying to follow up a lead for a job via someone known to her other sister (whom everyone must think of as mature and responsible), we and she have suddenly have Mariana, waving and laughing at Geni in the interview. Afterwards, though, Geni closes down all of Mariana’s (Valeria Bertuccelli’s) suggestions for renewing contact, but it is about feelings from the past that the rest of the film’s short internal timescale addresses.

This is a powerful film, sharply edited and clearly shot. It has a different trajectory and premise from the highly honest Chilean film Gloria (2013), but it, too, shows a person looking for what matters, and causing us to admire – but also fear for – her.


This is just one of six Catalan films (Camera Catalonia) that can be seen at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) - Thursday 28 August to Sunday 7 September (both inclusive). Three others are reviewed here, and What is Catalan cinema ? is also about the Catalan strand at the Festivals in 2012 and 2013...



Note on screenings :

NB The allocation of films between the three screens at Festival Central can always change (as can, if one is coming from a distance for a specific film, the programme as a whole) : if the audience for a film scheduled for Screen 3 (the smallest screen, around half the capacity of the largest, Screen 1) proves greater than expected, it may end up being swapped, so there could be a change in the exact time of the screening, too

In the programme (for which that is a link to the where the PDF file can be downloaded - printed copies are available at Festival Central and all good local outlets), some slots are also marked 'TBC', and popular screenings may be repeated : announcements are on Cambridge Film Festival 2014's (@camfilmfest's) web-site (please see link, above), as they are of alterations to the programme or the allocation between screens


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

The Catalan strand 2014 : Parts I and II

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

19 August (updated 20 August, 4 September)

The author of What is Catalan cinema ?, otherwise known as @THEAGENTAPSLEY (reviewer of films, amongst other things), is now at liberty to share four links to reviews of films in the Catalan strand of this year's Cambridge Film Festival (@CamFilmFest), or #CamFF 2014 - please find below !


But, if you require less detail, read these paragraphs, for there is a quiet, gentle theme that meanders through all of these films, in their different ways :

* A woman who nearly died in a road-traffic accident last year (We All Want What's Best For Her (Tots volem el millor per a ella)

* Some amateur actors who have been invited to act together the main roles of Othello in a film (Otel.lo)

* A restaurant on which unrelated people converge for what is – for reasons not truly given – its last evening (Tasting Menu (Menú degustació)), and


* A teenage male devotes his energies to chess, but does his behaviour indicate that he needs a psychological intervention - and can one reach him through chess... ? (Son of Cain (Fill de Caín))

Respectively, she is married, they are a couple, there are at least three couples, and, lastly, we have 'a nuclear family', but the theme is only incidental to the couples, which is how the past informs where we are – and, more importantly, what we expect from the present.

For good or ill, the connections, decisions, mistakes and suspicions of the past come into view, or are brought there, and shape the immediate connections, decisions, mistakes and suspicions…


Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)

Showing as follows :

Only one screening presently scheduled (please see below), at 1.00 p.m. (Screen 2) on Sunday 7 September

Tasting Menu (Menú degustació) (2013)

Showing as follows :

On Wednesday 3 September only at Festival Central (please see next paragraph) and for general admission only at 9.00 p.m. (Screen 2), because the screening at 11.00 a.m. (Screen 3) that day is a Big Scream screening* - a sold-out screening on the night

Also screening (as are some other Festival films) at Abbeygate Cinema, 4 Hatter Street, Bury St Edmunds IP33 1NZ (abbeygatecinema.co.uk) : Tuesday 2 September at 6.45 p.m.

We All Want What's Best For Her (Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013)

Showing as follows :

On Thursday 4 September at 6.15 p.m. (Screen 1), and on Friday 5 September at 1.00 p.m. (Screen 1)


Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013)

Showing as follows :

On Friday 5 September at 7.50 p.m. (Screen 2)


Two more reviews to come... However, at least one (that of Fiction (Ficcion)) will not be until after the screening - on Saturday 6 September at 2.30 p.m. (Screen 3) - so you might like to read what TAKE ONE's (the Festival's in-house publication's) Rebecca Naughten has to say



Notes on screenings

NB The allocation of films between the three screens at Festival Central can always change (as can, if one is coming from a distance for a specific film, the programme as a whole) : if the audience for a film scheduled for Screen 3 (the smallest screen, around half the capacity of the largest, Screen 1) proves greater than expected, it may end up being swapped, so there could be a change in the exact time of the screening, too

In the programme (for which that is a link to the where the PDF file can be downloaded - printed copies are available at Festival Central and all good local outlets), some slots are also marked 'TBC', and popular screenings may be repeated : announcements are on Cambridge Film Festival 2014's (@camfilmfest's) web-site (please see link, above), as they are of alterations to the programme or the allocation between screens


End-notes

* The Arts Picturehouse's club exclusively for parents / carers accompanied by babies under one year old.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

Gustav Metzger, Damien Hirst, and being a butcher

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

18 August

The cinematic reference is : White Heat – or White Star ?

BelstonNight Works booked @THEAGENTAPSLEY as a delegate to White Heat, the Symposium on Gustav Metzger. See you ? http://t.co/eOgB1wdfyn
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 10, 2014

At the end of it all, whatever the merits of Kettle’s Yard’s (@kettlesyard) Gustav Metzger retrospective Lift Off ! in Cambridge (which runs until 31 August 2014), is one just left with ideas of responsibility and redundancy, and with exhibits that could be reliably reproduced by anyone following the instructions / principles involved ?

Called in briefly at @kettlesyard for some of Gustav Metzger's traces of oscillating fibres, liquid crystal projections and a steam bubble !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 10, 2014

One wanted it to amount to more than The Science Museum in a gallery, but the overlap is really less than when, in his quest for understanding, Peter Diggs goes to look at Klein bottles in Amaryllis Night and Day (a novel by Russell Hoban*), and ends up meeting both the man who made them, and, much more, what they signify to him and his situation. Or, in another Hoban novel* (Angelica Lost and Found), an imaginary creature in the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto learns how, by travelling to a space of contradictory appearance, to become real and occupy human form – only to be haunted by art, and visit others with it, that unnervingly revisits that space.

Hoban (who died at 86 in December 2011) was full of life, and with an irrepressible interest in science and technology (as this writer touched upon in Russell Hoban at 80, a festschrift [http://hoban2005.co.uk/] from February 2005), so he could just as easily conceive of Jocasta as the organic computer Pythia, and invent interstellar voyaging by means of flickerdrive, which is based on the idea of what happens in all the spaces caused by the refresh-rate of the retinal image. This feels like a real meeting, a fusion of art and science.

The show at @kettlesyard is, as always free, and comprises : http://t.co/JOMKVXrcjx Plus, on site, one can usually enter Jim Ede's house
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 10, 2014

In comparison, Metzger – not always easy to understand when he speaks nowadays – may have been talking about meeting The Who, how they wanted to do a benefit gig for his colleagues and him (but their management refused), and ending up doing a liquid-crystal light-show for a gig of theirs at The Roundhouse. However, it was in some obscure context, never curatorially explained, of having to be at The Central Criminal Court (The Old Bailey), and there was never any suggestion here of cross-fertilization between art and science – he did his things, they did theirs (almost a transaction**)

Kettle's Yard in Cambridge pic.twitter.com/mlmyLqqhDh
— Ian Thompson (@ianthompson) August 24, 2014

A note on so-called auto-creative art :

Put a primed canvas on an easel, line up a prepared palette and a selection of graphite, pencils, rags, brushes, solvents, water-jars, lock the room, and wait to see what happens…

Or set a process off (it could be a computer, generating fractal- diagrams, or liquid crystals that are being heated on a slide in front of a projector), and see what happens.

Both outcomes are predictable within certain limits, i.e. that the canvas remains as it is, or another piece that looks like a fractal-diagram is generated and the heated crystals distort into patterns that are projected, but there is no auto-creation. If there were, the canvas would be painted on, and one would not know what to expect of the program or the set-up with the crystals :

The exact patterns generated are not known beforehand, but they have not caused the process that gave rise to them (even if they did, via a feedback loop, that loop’s effect would have been envisaged and pre-ordained).


The show Lift Off ! is stochastic processes and applied physics, and, although some of the exposures of fibres moved around on photographic paper may be striking, it is essentially an aleatory method that can be repeated over and over, and one could fill the room with the things, but they largely resist having an artistic content. Dancing Tubes could just as well belong in a Health and Safety Commission training video about the dangers of releasing compressed air without controls, and any lab could set it up.

The scientific method says that an experiment should be capable of being reproduced, and these works can be by just having the notion of what is to be achieved and setting it up, which may even produce refinements or improvements. The idea seems temptingly close to the approach of Damien Hirst (except that he was the one who did first cut – or have cut – in half a formaldehyde-treated cow (and a calf)) and exhibit it (them) as art), and yet so far away, with his being across the line in art.

Not indisputably so, though, with works displaying concepts such as What Goes Up Must Come Down (1994)*** and Loving in a World of Desire (1996) (using the same essential technology), or, perhaps, the less-skilled spin paintings) but in terms of a body of work that is recognized as artistic. The Plexiglass, table-tennis ball and hair-dryer of the former differ from similar museum displays of the principle of keeping a ball in the air by explicitly being – or appearing to be – ready-made items, such that the hair-dryer coincidentally has the right amount of upthrust to keep the ball in motion (though its current may, of course, have been safely adapated to achieve this effect, by trial and error with resistors or the like, behind the scenes).

Hirst’s huge ashtray Crematorium (1996) (not his only repository for cigarette-butts), Roni Horn’s huge glass pieces (opaque, red, black, and one at least resembling an ashtray ?), take the artist into the hands of a manufacturer who will produce what the artist seeks, but the vision makes it more than any old order from a glassworks. There is even more artistry in generating a fractal diagram and giving it a colour-scheme than in most of these exhibits of Metzger’s :

Though some would sniff at fractals as art, but not hesitate to embrace Duchamp’s Fountain [http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573] (Tate Modern (@Tate) exhibits a replica in 1964) – there, the mistake is as to the real work of the piece, which was Duchamp’s gall and iconoclasm in submitting it to an exhibition at The Society of Independent Artists, not the urinal itself. A Museum of Curiosities seems a better place for what Metzger gives us, alongside automata, counting-engines, and elaborate orreries.

He created, after all, a significant art show in and using materials found around a brand new laboratory in Swansea : if that influenced anybody, then we need to know how and why, and that should be at the heart of curation. Instead, the rather unhelpful assumption is of an unannounced starting-point, and hence of shutting off discussion, to the effect that any distinction between art and science is arbitrary : yet the fact is that anything that can be depicted as a continuum has no point where something ceases and another begins does not render it meaningless to ask the question*** and to set limits (e.g. abortion and the medico-legal test of how many weeks old a foetus is).

However, the one-day conference Art, science and social responsibility in 1960s’ Britain largely took tangents from Metzger, and shied off, much of the time, from stating clearly why we should care about him now, whatever his approach was 50+ years ago, and not just forget about it as a by-way : Metzger, sadly in a wheel-chair, was ‘in the room’ literally (the aptly Zen Lecture Theatre 0), but he was rarely the topic.


A brief summary report on the conference – to come…

The best part of @kettlesyard's Gustav Metzger conference White Heat ? Tangentially, it was getting to chat to Robert M. Young at lunch.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 5, 2014

As to auto-destructive art, the Conference seemed to have assumed that what Metzger did in 1960 with a large pane of glass, a larger piece of nylon stretched across it and applying hydrochloric acid that neither the set-up, not the outcome needed to be described : the Tate (@Tate) has has done it for us.

Again, it is to be noted that the description of auto-destruction is simply wrong : the nylon clearly did not destroy itself, Metzger destroyed it by painting acid on it, otherwise, if I kill someone with a gun, I could call it as meaningfully self-shooting syndrome.


End-notes

* Respectively, Bloomsbury, London, 2001 and 2010.

** The allusion is to the play Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill.

*** One of Zeno’s paradoxes starts with a grain of millet, and adds one, and then another : when does it become a pile ? Blurring boundaries because of the in-between ground is as much a fallacy as the law of the excluded middle (where anything that is not X must be Y, whereas it could be Z, in that middle ground), and it ignores the obvious fact that two grains are not a pile, 20,000 grains are. A chemistry experiment is not a piece of art, and a work by Watteau is not science.




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

PS, Mr Linklater

This is an after-thought to a review of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014)

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

This is an after-thought to a review of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014)

The things remembered from (or known about) from childhood, which potentially made watching Boyhood (2014) seem like quite likely to be a self-revelatory experience, but which just are not there in your rather golden, cleaned-up States…


Thinking of, in an unordered list :

* Drug use amongst the earlier years when we follow Mason

* Jerking-off competitions

* Anything harder, pornographically, than models in a lingerie catalogue (although there is a nervous moment when some Internet footage was about to be watched)

* Peeing up the wall of the urinal (another form of competition)

* Bullying for being ‘a swot’ (sc. too academic)

* Sweat / body odour

* Peers showing each other their nascent pubic hair (as a film actor did whom I know)

* Guns and playing soldier

* Getting hurt in games (bruises, cuts, etc.)

* Childhood illnesses / vomiting

* Sneaking some of the parents’ booze

* Exploring each other sexually / one’s sexual organs (doctors and nurses), including siblings

* Embarrassment about being seen naked

* Facial hair and what to do with it – likewise coping with voice dropping

* Brighter kids getting their work copied / doing homework

* Awkward / embarrassment, and unwanted erections (hard-ons)

* Chemistry lessons – stealing magnesium ribbon to burn, and child tendencies to delinquency / immorality

* Fussy eating

* Masturbation / wet dreams / semen

* Being asked to perform in front of one’s parents friends (reading / singing)

* Tantrums – getting tired and stroppy

* Not just graffiti in a tunnel, but mucking around with paint at home

* Breaking things and pretending not to know about it

* Feeling awkward about one’s feelings / self-image / appearance

* Crushes on teachers, etc., etc.


Get the point, Mr Linklater ? Now, you didn’t have to cram all of these in, but the vast majority of them are not even suggested in this sunshiny world* – did you, for example, ever see Herr Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) ?



End-notes

* Was the film shot with a bright filter, or has it been colour matched in that way ?



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Almost Monty Python (Almost) Live

This is a review of Monty Python (Almost) Live

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

This is a review of Monty Python (Almost) Live

As Spamalot may have been (the writer does not know), another Eric-Idle-engineered piece, centred on big musical numbers (which, in the case of Monty Python (Almost) Live, were very impressive - with a talented cast of singer / dancers), this show was, for all that it offered, uneven.

No doubt some of the unevenness could have been levelled out by the editing of the Live show to be (Almost) Live, which seemed a marked advantage (as it does for, say, NT Live broadcasts, though others see these things differently).

From the start, we had the dubious benefit of a kangaroo (with an obviously human face) on stage, which eventually found its place later on (please see below). In the meantime, its locomotive human bobbed around, in an irritatingly jolly fashion, which seemed to sound the inappropriate note that the show was going to be cuddly, which, in places, it flatly contradicted, e.g. with the penis, vagina, arse* group of songs (can one seriously write that in a review ? yes, as this is Python…)
It was the same Idle with Michelangelo's Last Supper, where John Cleese was too strong, as when he is allowed to be (such as with that whack with the mammoth fish on the edge of the quay, The Fish-Slapping Dance, and one of Cleese or Idle robbed Idle of the strength of the lines about the 28 disciples, and the 3 Christs – along with Idle’s outclassed cheery quattordicicento painter guise, they plummeted, unable to compete with Cleese, as The Pope, blithely saying fucking.

In this early part of the show, some of the humour – in what seemed to be new material – just did not work, and, by definition, was not the best of Python (e.g. the tame misunderstanding of Oz Arena for the O2 Arena, dutifully delivered by Michael Palin), as one might expect the show to aim to be. ‘Every sperm is sacred’ (from The Meaning of Life (1983)) was a huge production number, with a great dance routine, although not quite to rival the energy and scope of the film, and it also had new lyrics (in places). Another big set-piece, ‘I like Chinese’, was similarly impressive, but – if it was Python – taxed this writer’s familiarity. It started seeming marginally racially offensive, only to turn out not to be*.
Wherever the philosophers’ song came from (with the Bruces as philosophy professors**), Palin seemed, as observed, the only one who had obviously learnt his lines (such as they were) : Eddie Izzard was probably brought on stage at this part, but he just seemed star struck, and contributed nothing other than his awe. Linked with footage of the German and Greek Philosophers’ Football-Match, and sensationally going back to the match as Socrates scores in the final seconds, it worked well as a combination, because of the sheer shared incongruity : when parts of original Python shows were given oxygen to thrive by a suitable setting, both were enhanced.

A re-enactment of the Crunchy Frog Sketch at the premises of the Whizzo Chocolate company had the visually and aurally coarse element of Terry Gilliam, as Superintendent Parrot, farting and retching, as his senior officer (Cleese as Inspector Praline) recalled what he had eaten from the assortment. By the time that sweetmeats such as the crunchy frog were reached, Terry Jones was reading impassively from the card, and, cracking up with Cleese, swallowed and lost losing the impact of Ah - now, that's our speciality (Spring Surprise) - covered with darkest creamy chocolate. When you pop it in your mouth steel bolts spring out and plunge straight through both cheeks.

Up until the interval, the show had been pretty good, and the choice of archive Python had been well made : The Fish-Slapping Dance is always a killer (however many times one has seen it), because of Cleese’s all-too-adept bludgeoning, and included amongst Gilliam’s wizardry were the teasingly postponed / interposed full frontal nudity, the pram that swallows people, and the Rodin ocarina.

However, one strange note sounded was by a caption flashed up that said ‘Munich 1972’ – the year of the Olympic massacre, most notably ?

* * * * *

Palin in Blackmail was smarmy, but the sketch did not have the bite and impetus of that in the t.v. series, and just felt a bit weak. Another piece of shrapnel on stage was what looked like Mike Meyers : no doubt that he was pleased to be there, but he had nothing to do, and added nothing.

Great moments of the second half (as far as they can be recalled) were :

* The Exploding Blue Danube, which (although it probably was not as clever as it looked) was very entertaining

* The Spanish Inquisition, kept together, again, by Palin – with his not inestimable, dogmatically precise zealot prelate (to give the Pythons their full complement, lines on introduction, such as One on't cross beams gone owt askew on't treddle, had been given to members of the cast)

* Moving into Idle opening a fridge, and doing his pink-suited number, ‘The Universe song’ (alias ‘The Galaxy song’)

* One Professor (Brian Cox) being rammed by another (in Stephen Hawking) and accused of being pedantic (for correcting the detail of the preceding song)

* The Dead Parrot Sketch linked up with The Cheese Shop Sketch and finishing with Do you fancy coming back to my place ? (from a little t.v. moment when Cleese, as a Police Inspector, meets another Python in the street) : Palin and Cleese on top form, trying to make each other corpse with ad libs, but Palin getting the upper hand by recalling where they are and telling Cleese 'Your next line is...' - very funny, and in the spirit of Pythons' four re-enactments for Amnesty International (The Secret Policeman's Ball) between 1976 and 1981, although, perhaps notably, Idle was never involved in them***

* Inevitably, ending with a lively, shimmering version of ‘Always look on the bright side of life’


A good way of spending a couple of hours, and an encouragement to dig out that huge boxed set of the t.v. series – and Just the Words, the nicely curated scripts in two volumes (which has provided information of the episodes above)…


Hesitations:

* Just how much it was Idle’s patent show and with his songs, when it could have celebrated Python more widely, than promoting purchase of the films on the flier, by incorporating clips from them (or were their copyright limitations ?)

* Would everyone have known who Carol Cleveland was ? She may have substituted for the original Connie Booth to Palin’s lumberjack, but she was never introduced. Although she did an admirable few other turns, she had always been the token glamour in the t.v. series (when the pepperpots, etc. could not be suitable sirens), so it was a shame that the team did not put the record straight by officially acknowledging who she was.


Reference material :

Blackmail - Episode Eighteen (recorded 10/9/1970, transmitted 27/10/70)

The Bruces - Episode Twenty-Two (recorded 25/9/1970, transmitted 24/11/1970)

The Cheese Shop Sketch - Episode Thirty-Three (recorded 7/1/1972, transmitted 30/11/72)

The Crunchy Frog Sketch - Episode Six (recorded 5/11/1969, transmitted 23/11/1969)

The Dead Parrot Sketch - Episode Nine (recorded 7/12/1969, transmitted 14/12/1969)

Exploding Blue Danube - Episode Twenty-Six (recorded 16/10/70, transmitted 22/12/1970)

The Fish-Slapping Dance - Episode Twenty-Eight (recorded 28/1/1972, transmitted 26/10/72)

I’m a Lumberjack - (Episode Nine (recorded 7/12/1969, transmitted 14/12/1969)

The Philosophers’ Football-Match - From Monty Pythons Fliegender Zirkus (made for German t.v.)

The Spanish Inquisition - Episode Fifteen (recorded 2/7/1970, transmitted 22/9/1070)



End-notes

* Is that taken from The Meaning of Life (1983) and – as only Idle could – ‘updated’ ? (It was an irritation that the text of this, and of the philosophers’ song, were not kept in front of the camera for long enough – perhaps a last-minute bid to protect the innocent ?) If it was, as other pieces / songs were not straight renditions (unlike those that were – insofar as those performing them could manage it – meant to be straight renditions), but had been modernized (one was not always sure why) :

After all, I’m a Lumberjack is just as offensive to the trans audience as it has ever been, but no changes had been introduced to the sacred text (except the tease, in the preceding Lion-Tamer sketch, that Mr Anchovy really wants to be a Systems Analyst). Palin was jeered as ‘disgusting’ by one in the choir (uncelestial), whereas another song (‘I like Chinese’) was cute in pretending to be, but not actually being, racist. In fact, the interjection that followed the sketch on t.v., from Cleese voicing over a letter from Brigadier Sir Charles Arthur Strong (Mrs), had said Many of my best friends are lumberjacks and only a few of them are transvestites


** Which was the only connection with The Bruces, an insignificant piece, made no more or less significant.
*** It is understood that only Jones and Cleese took some role (of whatever kind) in all four shows, with Palin registering three, Chapman two, and Gilliam one. Apart from a brief cameo in the 1989 show by Palin and Cleese, there has been no engagement with any later Amnesty shows.



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