Wednesday 17 December 2014

Ockham's Razor at Cambridge's Corn Exchange : Not Until We Are Lost

A new show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange by aerial theatre group Ockham's Razor

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

17 December (closing Tweet added, 28 December)

Glimpses of the dress rehearsal of a new show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange (@CambridgeCornEx), by aerial theatre group Ockham’s Razor (@AlexOckhams) : Not Until We Are Lost



Although sounding like it could quote the works of Samuel Beckettt, the title derives from Henry Thoreau’s Walden*, but no knowledge of Emerson’s or his transcendentalist thought (or of Beckettt) is necessary to an appreciation of what is to be seen and heard…

In around half-a-dozen scena, which seem to defy transparent and scaffolding materials by the forces that are exerted on them (though this is no lesson in dynamics or Newtonian principle), aerial theatre group Ockham’s Razor (@AlexOckhams) tell a series of stories – the exact meaning, though, is for us to interpret, even as it would be if we had words, rather than actions and interactions, to construe…


Afterwards, co-director Alex Harvey said that what appears before the audience is open to interpretation, and fellow directors Charlotte Mooney and Tina Koch even felt that saying that there is a choir as part of the musical accompaniment is not a give-away, so here goes :


Image by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

Some of the scena (involving all four performers (Alex plus Hamish Tjoeng, Grania Picard and Telma Pinto) on a giant scaffolding climbing-frame, which later becomes a swing) seem euphoric, even utopian, with a triumph of collective behaviour and what modern jargon calls ‘working together’, but not all of them.

One seems to revolve, more unfortunately, around the conjoined roles of Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, another that of a young woman pestered by the attentions of two similar men, who appear to be hunting her as if in a pack and to win her confidence : it all ends with seemingly innocent fun and enjoyment, but what has she been cajoled into, and for what reason ?


Image (of Telma Pinto) by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

Paper rips and tears, and the performers bodies fly between or across the face of, blunt scaffolding-poles, with no room for error, no avoiding the consequence of a mistake, and, as already alluded to, the transparent material is tested, seemingly to its limits :




It is in that medium of a clear tower, which sometimes seems more than merely a box in cross-section, that we have scope both for what seems survival of the fittest pushed to its extremes, and for the greatest elation. In the latter case, maybe a release from a – maybe Narcissistically-created – invisible prison that could be what we conveniently call 'depression', and where love, and responding when another reaches out, are part of the healing.


Image (of Alex Harvey and Telma Pinto) by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014


Never pulling its punches, in the fitness of the guitar- or harp-like melodies, dissonances, arpeggios, the physicality and riskiness of the performances, and the theatrical content of the scena, Ockham’s Razor (@AlexOckhams) give more than an entertainment :

All at once, something that, by turns, can be seen as encouraging, cynical, or appalling, but always thought provoking, and never compromising with the belief in realiz[ing] where we are and the infinite extent of our relations (Thoreau*).


A follow-up piece, featuring Gilly's sketchings from her images after the event, is linked here ...


The show runs at Cambridge's Corn Exchange from 18 to 21 December.




End-notes

* Specifically, chapter 8 (‘The village’), where Thoreau starts by talking about being physically disoriented, and having to put one of several visitors on the right track in the dark, being guided rather by his feet than his eyes.

Following the observation It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time, Thoreau develops the thought ,with the effect of snow, and of night added to it, ending the section where the words occur, first in a different form, then as quoted (but he is clearly no longer to be read as writing just about the visual world and mistaking one’s way, any more than Canto I of Inferno) :

In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round — for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday 10 December 2014

A review by Tweet of Renaissance’s recital for York Early Music Christmas Festival

A review by Tweet of Renaissance’s recital for York Early Music Christmas Festival

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

10 December

A review by Tweet of Renaissance’s (@RenaissanceBenR's) recital for York Early Music Christmas Festival (@yorkearlymusic) at All Saints’ Church, North Street, York, on Wednesday 10 December 2014























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Monday 8 December 2014

I am to Mozart (and Haydn) as Schubert and Brahms are to me

This reviews Noriko Ogawa’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3

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

This is a follow-up to the posting What I am looking forward to in the Cambridge Classical Concert Series… (Part III) : a mini-review of Noriko Ogawa’s (@norikogawa's) performance / interpretation of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 83, at Cambridge's Corn Exchange (@CambridgeCornEx) on Wednesday 3 December 2014


This performance set one thinking (concentrating throughout on Noriko's rendition of the solo part (after contact on Twitter, one cannot write 'Ogawa', which would seem unnatural)) :

What if Beethoven felt about Mozart (and, maybe, about Haydn) as we know that, in turn, Schubert and Brahms felt about Beethoven himself – at least with regard to orchestral / large-scale writing – which is to say, in his shadow ?

Might not Beethoven, in his early thirties (we believe) when he composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 (in C Minor, Op. 83), have been comparing himself to Mozart - a composer who, at his death at the age of nearly thirty-six*, may not have completed his famous Requiem**, but the main theme of which Beethoven appears to allude to here... ?


The autograph title-page of Mozart K. 626, Requiem


Yes, the list itself of works without Opus Number ascribed to Beethoven after his death is lengthy, but he could well have been more than keenly aware of Mozart, both as a prolific composer and as one who, even as a teenager*, had not had trouble finding his own voice with works for orchestra in what resembles his mature style.


Particularly in the first movement, Noriko deliberately held back in handling the initial material, not so much using legato as, in the more direct passages and motifs, not making them as expressive as moments where the heart of the music clearly lies for her : there was, thus, a double-contrast between the slight abruptness to Beethoven’s diction in ‘the cooler places’, where it felt as though he might be dutifully paying his respects to the earlier performer / director / composer (since, of course, Beethoven – as long as his hearing allowed – was another such), and where he appeared to break free in language that we know to be his.

As to the question of the cadenzas, they were brought to us with such freshness as to seem spontaneous, and it mattered little whether they were a later addition, or Beethoven's seeking to notate what he may have performed in 1803. They had a natural creativity to them and were alive, when some bring them to us in ‘studied’ form, maybe note perfect, but lacking warmth.



As Noriko played it for us, the opening of the second movement, for piano alone, felt as though it was not just recognizably Beethovenesque, but also capable of founding and fostering the rest of the movement, laying a sure basis for it, almost as if Beethoven were saying :

Look, this is my calling-card ! Here, I can write in this style – and, here, I can seamlessly integrate it into the orchestral texture, for which I have prepared the ground with it.


For composers or performers acclimatize to and acquire their craft, technique, approach and skill with and through others, at conservatoires and colleges of music, who have gone before, and homage across wider generations then becomes part of what, say, Stravinsky is about, in relation to Tchaikovsky, with Le baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) in 1928 (and when he revised the piece in 1950) – or Schoenberg, orchestrating Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 (in G Minor, Op. 25)****.

The reflective moments in the second movement, alongside those that were less inward, made the more celebratory liveliness of the Rondo - Allegro feel an innate progression, an inevitable development from it : with great music, just as with a powerful film or play, one does not even hesitate to imagine how it could have been other when it has been well conceived by those playing it, complete with, as one would expect, passing-notes and elisions executed with ease.




Noriko may not have intended to make the exact journey suggested above with her audience, for, with a chance to speak to her briefly in the interval, she suggested that Beethoven, if he were indeed trying to exorcize the spirit of Mozart, is not as chromatic as Mozart (assuming that he could be writing in homage to Mozart in order to move forward).

In this kind of way, Brahms clearly established his inner confidence with works for larger ensembles when he both wrote and had his Symphony No. 2 performed in six months, hard on the heels of the successful performance of his Symphony No. 1, which had taken much more than a decade in the writing – and whose predecessor he had transmuted into the poorly received Piano Concerto No. 1.

It does not matter, in a way, if this sort of account has truth outside the concert-hall, for the feeling from many commentators that Beethoven is being, especially in this concerto, so Mozartian must have some sort of meaning, and why should that, in this kind of fantasy, not go along with the pianist’s interpretation – even if it were never in Noriko's head to convey it ?

Many a writer has viewed him- or herself as a conduit*****, just as we have in the legend of Mozart’s compositional ease, perpetrated by history and perpetuated – as if he were God’s amanuensis, along with the Mozart / Salieri story – in such accounts as Peter Shaffer’s play (from 1979) and the huge film of the same name derived from it, Amadeus (1984).


End-notes

* To the day, Mozart died 223 years ago yesterday (in 1791). It appears that Beethoven was 56 / 57 when he died.

** In D Minor (K. 626).

*** When he wrote his five glorious Concertos for Violin and Orchestra (respectively (as numbered), K. 207 (in B Flat Major), K. 211 (in D Major), K. 216 (in G Major), K. 218 (in D Major), and K. 219 (in A Major)).

**** The LA Phil’s web-site [the work was first performed by this orchestra, under Klemperer, in 1937] tells us this about why :

Schoenberg explained the rationale behind his orchestration in a letter to Alfred Frankenstein, the music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, almost a year after the premiere :

'1. I like the piece

'2. It is seldom played

'3. It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.'


***** For example, novelist Russell Hoban was pleased to see himself as a channel, and to invent characters in his books as writers in his image, e.g. Hermann Orff in The Medusa Frequency, one of his finest novels (published by Jonathan Cape, London, 1987).



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday 5 December 2014

Sergey Prokofiev hypnotizes Yevgeny Sudbin - or vice versa - at The Wigmore Hall [uncorrected proof]

A mini-review of Yevgeny Sudbin performing Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 7

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

A mini-review of Yevgeny Sudbin performing Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 7 in B Flat Major, Op. 83 ~ The Wigmore Hall (@wigmore_hall) (heard live via Radio 3 (@BBCRadio3blog) - available for 30 days ?) on Tuesday 2 December 2014


The sonata was first performed in Moscow, on 18 January 1943 :

Allego inquieto

Andante caloroso

Precipitato


In those markings, several that one would not often encounter…





At the end of this recital, a so-called war sonata (Sergey Prokofiev's Piano Sonata no. 7) followed three Preludes by Sergey Rachmaninov, Op. 32 Nos 12 and 5 (in, respectively, G Sharp Minor and G Major), and Op. 23 No. 5 (in G Minor), amongst the most glorious of his smaller-scale works, and with a certain tonal grouping – all beautifully played, but at a time when concentrating on the road had to be a priority, rather than luxuriating in their compositional perfection.

When parked, however, one could not resist the prospect of this familiar work by Prokofiev – a friend had learnt it at university, and so there was much exposure to it in practice form. For, when a pianist ‘understands’ and can interpret a piece of music (even if it is being interpreted new to the listener), the manner in which the composition is being presented is likely to be persuasive, and notes that do not otherwise necessarily fit easily into the whole then have a place and purpose :

Yevgeny Sudbin’s playing of this sonata certainly was of this persuasive kind, and it was hypnotically so, as he construed the repetitions, dissonances, and inner notes, softening them so that the sonata cohered – and even ending it not at a break-neck, hell-for-leather pace, but conveying the sense of speed, yet at the same time being properly able to articulate the detail, which can get lost / subsumed in the conventional rush to be more literally ‘precipitate’.

Taking the finale thus, in the light of a central movement whose resemblances to Gaspard de la nuit (of Ravel) were sensitively brought out, meant that it was not an act of bravado – in the way, too, that Prokofiev’s Toccata, Op. 11, is often rendered – but part of the texture and structure of the sonata : not an add-on, but, through its edginess and figurations, reflecting the preoccupations of the opening and middle movements.

In the former was where Sudbin had exercised discretion and control, and not made this the stereotype of performance that Martin Handley had announced to us. Yes, detonations and explosions of a sort, but those of emotional turmoil, not the barbarisms of war – rather, the anguish of the soul, not a slashing knife in the vein (no pun intended) of Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates* (as the friend, not alone, gave one).

Not for nothing does Prokofiev juxtapose gestures that could be rendered as [the] violence [of war]** alongside the tenderness that was brought out for us here, which made the different modes of being communicate together and with each other, not separate messages, but aspects of one affect. (Which, unfortunately, seemed lost on Handley, judging by the words with which he sought to summarize his experience of the sonata.)







End-notes

* I.e. in Psycho (1960).

** And, of course, such gestures usually are, when this sonata is heard performed – which begs the question :

Why are the Prokofiev sonatas for piano (which are amongst the strongest and most exploratory of the smaller-scale works) rarely broadcast, whereas seemingly it is always the symphonies, in which some of us may sense that the composer’s heart did not really lie (any more than Shostakovich’s in his) ?



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Saturday 29 November 2014

Section 136 : What is it and why do we have it ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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29 November (now (5 December) with esteemed Tweets of appreciation from @MentalHealthCop)



One would have to read Hansard, the verbatim record of the business of the Houses of Parliament, to know what was on the mind of MPs and Peers when they enacted the Mental Health Act 1983 (since amended), and, within it as a sequence of numbered enactments, section 136, which begins (quoting sub-section 1) :

Mentally disordered persons found in public places

(1) If a constable finds in a place to which the public have access a person who appears to him to be suffering from mental disorder and to be in immediate need of care or control, the constable may, if he thinks it necessary to do so in the interests of that person or for the protection of other persons, remove that person to a place of safety within the meaning of section 135 above.


Not exactly normal English ! However, if they can interpret it, our police are given a power by this sub-section (s. 136(1)), but only if the criteria apply for it to arise – one could infer a concomitant duty to act by using this power, though, if so, one should be able to justify one’s thoughts…





The test of whether someone is ‘suffering from mental disorder’ is a subjective one, i.e. what appears to the constable. Fair enough, but how has the constable been trained to recognize ‘mental disorder’*, and does the constable even know what happened last time that he or she exercised the power (please see below for how often officers are wrong) ? If not, how does he or she know whether that had been a case of ‘mental disorder’ and so learn from it ?


Or should we even be putting a responsibility on the police to construe mental-health legislation and to assess the appearance of a person on public property as to whether there is mental disorder ? One has to ask, because (under s. 136(2)), the person with the appearance of mental disorder can be detained (i.e. against his or her will) for as long as 72 hours. Sub-section 2 specifies what that period of time – longer, by far, than the period for which someone can be detained, on such authority, because of suspected criminality – is to be used for :

(2) A person removed to a place of safety under this section may be detained there for a period not exceeding 72 hours for the purpose of enabling him to be examined by a registered medical practitioner and to be interviewed by an approved mental health professional and of making any necessary arrangements for his treatment or care.


The sub-section is therefore quite precise about what the purpose of the detention is, but the Act fails to make any link between sub-section 2, and exercising the power to take the person (against his or her will) to a place of safety under sub-section 1 : where is the link, except temporally, for up to 3 days in detention within which to arrange the specified matters ?

The Act is not explicit, but one is essentially looking at an assessment to see whether the person should be detained under ss. 2, 3 – but giving this period of 72 hours in a so-called place of safety to do it. As can be seen above, s. 136(1) refers to s. 135 in this connection for a definition, where s. 135(6) says :

(6) In this section “place of safety” means residential accommodation provided by a local social services authority under Part III of the National Assistance Act 1948..., a hospital as defined by this Act, a police station, an independent hospital or care home for mentally disordered persons or any other suitable place the occupier of which is willing temporarily to receive the patient.


Pretty broad, one would think – so why do commissioners of mental-health services not have standing arrangements with, say, independent hospitals for them to be places of safety in case of need ? Why, if NHS Trusts do not have the beds, is someone not paying for them to be provided in this way – somewhere that would also have staff trained to know mental disorder when they see it ?

And we are relying on officers on the street, etc., to determine what appears to be mental disorder, when – even if they could all be given training in Mental Health First Aid – it would probably be far better for them to call someone who is versed is mental disorder – except that we seem to jump straight to the ‘place of safety’, often enough a police-cell, and then no one stirs themselves, because the medical practitioner and / or AMHP (approved mental health professional) have three days in which to call by.


Would a police officer be trusted to move someone with a suspected broken neck in the back of a police-car ? No, of course not ! An ambulance would be called, and one would rely on those trained medical staff to deal with assessing the person’s injuries and moving him or her.

If there were a crowd or other situation, one would keep the person safe at the scene until the trained staff arrived, and then assist them in carrying out their duties or treatment on site and of taking the person to an appropriate hospital. Why – just because so many people view those who may have a mental disorder as nutters ? – should the status quo equally not be maintained until appropriately trained mental-health professionals can arrive, rather than ‘carting the person off’ ?

Allegedly, we have parity of esteem under the NHS (Health and Social Care Act 2012) for mental and physical health, so why is the person suspected of a breakdown not treated in the same way as for a broken neck ? So, X fell from a balcony in a shopping centre – we clear the area and keep him or her out of harm until the ambulance crew arrives – and the same should apply if X had been reported to be behaving bizarrely in that shopping centre, keeping X safe until the trained personnel come.


A Briefing Note by the Centre for Medical Health makes a point relevant to how s. 136 is being used, quoting this statistic given by a report from 2013 by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Care Quality Commission, Health Inspectorate of Wales, and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons :

It also noted that 80% of those detained under section 136 are not admitted to hospital for treatment. This suggests an urgent need for better working relationships and knowledge between the police and mental health services.

Thus, in just 1 in 5 cases, the officer was right. Hardly a good enough percentage on the basis of which – even if it were not otherwise problematic – to continue as we are ?


But we must end as we began, with sage words - albeit of denial - from @MentalHealthCop... :




End-notes

* If one wants to know what that phrase means, the much-amended s. 1 tells one…




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday 28 November 2014

What I am looking forward to in the Cambridge Classical Concert Series… (Part III)

What I am looking forward to in the Cambridge Classical Concert Series… (Part III)

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

28 November

What I am looking forward to in the Cambridge Classical Concert Series… (Part III)

Our guest soloist at The Corn Exchange (@CambridgeCornEx) in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Japanese-born Noriko Ogawa – as well as the work itself – forms the focus for this posting

That said, there is also a soloist for organ on the programme, in the shape of Oliver Condy, for Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 in C Minor*, Op. 78 (and Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances**)




For those who would like a taste of Ogawa’s playing, she can be heard here (for 30 days from Friday 7 November) on In Tune (@BBCInTune), talking to Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3blog’s) Suzy Klein, along with fellow judge and head of the panel for Dudley International Piano Competition, John Humphreys, with whom she plays some duets.

Ogawa also gives a lot more out than when performing, as her web-site shows : as mentioned, she is an adjudicator, but additionally a teacher (including at The Guildhall), and has raised funds for the Red Cross Japanese Tsunami Appeal, and The Japan Society (in continuation of that work).

Ten years ago, Ogawa started giving Jamie’s Concerts to provide a sort of musical oasis : they are named after Jamie Mather, the son of Janice, both of whom she came to know when she lodged with Janice and could see how Jamie’s severe autism affected Janice and him. The concerts are not only a practical support for carers through the therapy of music being played for them, but have also helped raised awareness for the demands that they face. She has now just become a Cultural Ambassador of The National Autistic Society.


The opening movement (Allegro con brio) has a very hushed introduction before what then feels like an explosion of sound – just as, in the same time-frame (although it opens with abrupt initial chords), Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (in E Flat Major, Op. 55) goes on to make a very strong statement of the principal theme. The concerto and symphony were composed three or four years apart, and first performed – nearly to the day – within two years of each other :

5 April 1803 :

* This concerto - in C Minor, Op. 37

* Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36

* Christ on the Mount of Olives (Christus am Ölberge), Op. 85 (oratorio)


On 7 April 1805, his Symphony No. 3 in E Flat Major, Op. 55 was first publicly performed (the same year as the first version of Fidelio (with the Leonora Overture No. 2)), but seemed, to some, in the shade of Anton Eberl's Symphony in E Flat Major


In this concerto that Ogawa is bringing to Cambridge, she can be heard, via YouTube, in a nine-minute excerpt that concludes the first movement. Her playing is characterized by a feeling of fluidity, but also reflecting, at other moments, the lugubrious or hesitant character of the writing : repeated notes, sustained trills, and a sense of danger, summed up in the querulous undertones of the final chord.


In a performance by Mitsuko Uchida (with The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Mariss Jansons), the Largo*** is, at times, extremely hushed and tender – with Uchida’s entranced engagement with, and responsiveness to, the dynamics and mood of the quieter sections of the orchestral accompaniment :

Since the movement (not least as Uchida plays) begins almost like a meditation or prayer, and it leads to, and so sets up, the livelier rhythmicity of the Rondo – Allegro, might we likewise see Ogawa communicating with key players of the reeds and woodwind – particularly with the principal flute, who has a near-duet with her (and which is an instrument that is to the fore in the concerto’s closing moments) ?

Also, Wikipedia® has a lengthy list of first-movement cadenzas composed by others (more than a dozen, including by pianists Wilhelm Kempff and Franz Liszt). Might we find ourselves surprised by hearing not Beethoven’s written-out ones, but someone else’s ? – or could there even be one improvised afresh on the stage of The Corn Exchange… ?

One says ‘afresh’, because, without wanting variation for the sake of it, music played is only music as long as it lives, and has life


End-notes

* The same key as the concerto.

** Which, by long tradition, have been extracted from his opera Prince Igor - rather as the so-called Manfred Overture by Schumann…

*** It starts at around 16:41. It is curious : Look, alongside this one, for the top listings for performances of this Concerto, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, on www.youtube.com, and Krystian Zimerman, Evgeny Kissin and Uchida not only all finish before the thirty-eighth minute, but within no more than twelve seconds of each other.




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Tuesday 25 November 2014

That film - again !

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

Before I Go to Sleep (2014) is that film at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF), which provoked an uncomfortable response afterwards from the persons questioned (the director / writer (Rowan Joffe), and the original novelist (Steve Watson)) - on a par with the following occasions when :

* A minister from the Home Office, at a launch event for the Community Legal Service, had to admit that making its information Internet based almost certainly meant that those who were most likely to qualify (those on low incomes and, as a likely subset, those also with disabilities) were least likely to be able to access it easily

* A composer, who had been commissioned to write a work in response to and for the same forces as a piece by Mozart, could not say – if Mozart had been plucked from history to meet him – what he would say to Mozart to explain his composition


A spoilery, stinging posting sets out some of the many ways in which the film’s plot fails so often to hang together, but it was then interesting to see, on the Rotten Tomatoes web-site, what even the positive reviews (the so-called ‘fresh’ ones) had to say about it…


Even the ‘Fresh’ reviews...

3* from Helen O’Hara, Empire Magazine

Perhaps it’s a limitation of the material, or overfamiliarity with the themes of the amnesia thriller, but you’re left wishing that the filmmakers hadn’t forgotten all that has gone before when approaching this.


3* from Stella Papamichael, Digital Spy

It's no wonder Christine is so confused about who she can trust, although there are times when she believes too willingly what she is told; often, when it's convenient for the plot. The verbal spills of information are always less interesting than the uncertainty and as the moment of epiphany draws closer, the truth seems less plausible. Consequently, what might have been a smart, insightful thriller is instead a creepy bedtime story.


3* from Allan Hunter, Sunday Express

The first half of the film is the strongest as Joffe retains a firm hold on the material, feeding us revelations that are like tiny explosions that completely change your sense of the story.

He also immerses us in Christine’s dilemma of trying to figure out what kind of person she is and what really happened before the night returns to steal away her memories all over again.
The second half is slightly less successful as the human dilemma gives way to the mechanics of the plot.


And these are people who give the film as many as three stars…




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Sunday 23 November 2014

Henry James in Poland ? (Part II)

This is a follow-on from a Festival review of Ida (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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23 November (updated 25 November)

* Contains spoilers *

This is a follow-on from a Festival review of Ida (2013)

Some reviewers have made claims for the strength of the film’s cinematography*, and comment has already been made (in Part I) about how the monochrome makes the convent look and feel. Outside that setting, one hoped for uses of the medium that would match the power and rare presence of the landscapes in Nebraska (2013), but there are very few moments of such cinematic beauty (all of which feature trees, and two movement), and instead the film-makers choose to alter the aspect ratio, as if to suggest moments of ‘widening out’** :

* A misty rank of trees on the sky-line

* Leaves (which appear to have been added by CGI) falling in an avenue (which we come back to)

* Trees to the side of the moving car, which, through persistence of vision, create a pattern


In Nebraska, as in Frances Ha (2012) for that matter (and despite some banal critical assertions made about both films and other uses of monochrome), its use here felt integral to the project. In Ida, except when she is framed on a diagonal, or fellow novices and she are decorating Jesus (on a plinth) and then – through the snow (more CGI ?) – carry not so much their cross as his***, nothing remarkable is going on with the composition (one hoped for it - it was not there).

As to what the images in the heart of this film denote, unearthing past events – not least in the Nazi period (when motives and actions had necessarily been mixed) – is almost bound to be compelling (please see below), and doing so is with Wanda to the fore, again necessarily. Three times (before the cock crows three times ?), Ida absents herself from the scene of her aunt’s apparent endeavours on her behalf (we go with her) :

* To the cow-shed (with the parental stained glass) (during the interrogation)

* To bed in her habit (rather than go down to the jazz with Wanda – Wanda, Ida somehow thinks (so she says), cannot really be there to find out what happened, if she wants to dance)

* To the street (when Wanda starts breaking into the flat (of Szymon Skiba ?))


Discovering the fate of her own sister, Róża Lebenstein, is possibly too close to home and so what Wanda has been assiduously avoiding in the years when she was acted as a prosecutor and since : however Wanda survived the war, Ida’s own Jewishness seems to have either been disregarded or overlooked by her peers (although Mother Superior and the authorities must have known all along, if they now know Wanda ?), so maybe Wanda’s asserting that it is not there was part of her life, and has become essential to it.

After all, her first impulse is to greet her niece coolly with I know who you are, with facts about her history (We were from Lublin), and to brush Ida off quickly, after what she insultingly describes as ‘our little family reunion’. If the film really gave us space to contemplate Wanda’s position, her attitude to the past, and what it means to her, it would be good to feel that that one really could do so alongside Ida’s exploration of her equivalent of The Old World and its ways, which she can barely know.

When, for example, Wanda is asked on their travels Who are you ?, and replies I used to be someone once, it is not even as if, self-pityingly or otherwise, her response is really allowed to hang in the air. Yes, it is Wanda’s style to utter things casually and then act as if she did not say them, but, here, nothing stems from her comment, nothing depends on it, and, having had her say it, it is as if she makes (perfectly psychologically) as if the hurt is healed over :

Since we seem influenced to concentrate so much on Ida, since she lost the parents whom she was thus never to know (not only a sibling), and, just until now, her fate resulted from what happened to them (as Wanda’s patently did not). Granted, the film is in translation, and a Polish viewer might gain a different impression.

Even so, the film - named after Ida, after all - seems to have the flaw (unless that can be seen as a strength, of some sort ?) of placing us in alignment so often with her point of view (see above for the three points where we leave Wanda, going with Ida). In the shot in question, we are far more with Ida at the wayside shrine (than with Wanda in the car), looking – in those Jamesian terms – out from The New World at what is happening. These are not the casual religious observances that travellers on the road might make out of habit or ritual, but part of her life and / or identity.

As to Wanda's more uncertain identity, we learn that she is Wanda Gruz (Red Wanda is her nickname) and that she used to be a State prosecutor (so, until we learn that she is a judge, it is unclear what panel she still sits on, when we momentarily see her), and now her status still gets her released (after a delay, when they realize that, as she says, she is a judge) from an incident of drink driving that takes the car off the road. To try to find out the truth about her sister, she is aggressive, and threatens I can destroy you, whereas, when with Ida, she makes idle references (which will not be understood) such as to Gone with the Wind.

Then again, Peter Bradshaw, in his review for The Guardian, suggests that he knows more (but where, even if it is in the press-pack, is this information in the film ? - such layers of bogus description, posing as interpretation (if not vice versa), just obscure what is to be seen or heard) :

In @PeterBradshaw1's review of Ida (2013), he says that Wanda 'owing to misdemeanours, is reduced to [...] judging petty quarrels' - script?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 26, 2014

[...] Wanda Gruz, tremendously played Agata Kulesza: a worldly hard-drinking woman who lives on her own, and who is evidently something of an embarrassment to the authorities.

Wanda was once a high-flying state prosecutor and former zealot of the communist state who, owing to misdemeanours, is reduced to being a magistrate, judging petty quarrels between neighbours. [...]


That said, despite having determined that dancing is inconsistent with searching for (the truth about) her parents (the arbitrary law of the excluded middle), we still cannot much identify with whatever hang-ups Ida has about going down to listen to the music with Wanda – and the film, even in its own terms, then wants to have Ida assimilating jazz (by osmosis through Wanda's comment about the sax in the car ?) when she has never heard it before (irrespective of who is on alto).

Fortunately, the tune played, when Ida’s curiosity gets the better of her, is the Coltrane of ‘Naima’ (as she is told – his ‘Equinox’ is also used****), not Ascension, from three years later ! As to the authenticity, in Eastern Bloc Poland, of jazzers travelling around the countryside to gigs, one does wonder…

At its touching core, at the burial-place, we have Wanda and Ida united (just for now, anyway) : they have passed through trees that we are almost sure that we saw on their journey, one with headscarf, the other with the head-dress of her habit. All of which has been rooted in the ground of temptation, family-feeling, and discovering what people did in the recent past (but have so soon concealed, forgotten). Undeniable, powerful material, but does it sit that well with (let alone with Wanda's deeper motivations and thoughts) an exploration of the territory of The Last Temptation of Christ, taking as its seeming starting point this exchange (quoted in >Part I) [the last utterance is paraphrased] :

Wanda : Have you had impure thoughts ?

Ida: Yes.

Wanda : Carnal ?

Ida : No.

Wanda : That’s a shame. (Slight pause.) How do you know what you are giving up ?


Henry James writ large enough, but in a story that wants to yoke together not only a dichotomy of The New World / The Old World, but also guilt and retribution, what one did in the time of war and why, the lure of the alto sax, and even what makes life worth living. Realistically, too many calls on a run-time of around 80 minutes ?


End-notes

* For example, Linsey Satterthwaite for New Empress Magazine :

Ida […] is also one of the most stunningly shot films to emerge this year, very much to the credit of cinematographers Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal. Director Pawel Pawlikowski presents a masterclass in black and white imagery; each scene is assembled with mesmeric precision. Every shot looks like a piece of art, as Ida explores the outside world anew concealed in her habit, it is like a Vermeer painting has come to life.


Well, yes, the cutting between the different scenes, contexts and lighting conditions makes for an interesting montage of Ida, determinedly pressing on towards we know not what (though not art - and nothing but her head-dress to invoke Tracy Chevallier's wretched Girl with a Pearl Earring : as to whether she has anything to 'explore' is doubtful, since she is just crossing rural terrain, back-roads and the like).

Everything else being equal, it would seem like a good place to part from her, leaving us at last in doubt about what she intends, after a couple of all-too-human minor reversals of action - yet is it now a cop-out, suggesting that more has emotionally been captured in Ida than bears rational examination ?

Would we even think such things, if this were not 'evocative' monochrome ? Just compare this with the resolution and conclusion found with Bruce Dern in Nebraska...


** The format is variable, between nigh square to rectangular.

*** Even here, the symbolism felt a little heavy handed, let alone when we explored our Jamesian dichotomy (please see Part I) of ‘being in, but not of, the world’. Compare this with the limitation of an entirely static camera in all but three of the fourteen scenes of Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg), which might sound wholly artificial and sterile as an idea. However, the effect of this limitation was very and surprisingly full – quite apart from the riches of the script and performances.

**** As are, prominently, Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 (‘Jupiter’) and Bach’s Chorale Prelude Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ BWV 639 (from Das Orgelbüchlein) – beloved of Tarkovsky ?




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday 22 November 2014

Henry James comes to Poland ? (Part I)

This is a Festival review of Ida (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)

22 November

This is a Festival review of Ida (2013)
(because it should have been seen on Day 3 of Cambridge Film Festival)

Some narratives [some really just do not care that one is awake enough to ask] need to be able to answer the question Why this – why now ? It is convenient enough that, before making a commitment (and so that there is a film), Anna is given knowledge that she has not had before : that, for all the time that she has been in the convent, she has had a living relative, whom she is now being sent to meet.

Understandably, as a good convent girl, she accepts what has happened, and does not seem angry or bitter, but, when she meets Wanda Gruz and learns that her real name is Ida*, she does still ask Wanda why she did not have her to live with her. Ida gets a good enough, and candid answer : maybe the candour actually goes over her head (or she has learnt much despite her upbringing), but she gives the impression of somehow being unshockable.

People will praise Agata Trzebuchowska (Ida) for her performance, imagining that age is a factor to allow for and that the interpretation can be attributed to her, but Agata Kulesza (Wanda) is the one to be impressed by, for her emotional energy and depth, and her integrity.

In any case, there is a sort of reason behind her deciding to get interested in her niece, when we see Wanda sitting on a tribunal panel, but, because she is never asked this quite obvious question, the film and she only obliquely answer it – if what she determines to do now with Ida matters, why is she only doing it now ?


In the opening part, before Ida meets Wanda, film-making gives us an example of how using monochrome can neatly lend visual severity to scenes in a convent. However, unlike the painful, extended treatment of this kind of setting, in colour in Beyond the Hills** (Dupa dealuri) (2012), here it feels gratuitous to use colour-deprivation – almost as if it is employing the potential of the aesthetics of asceticism to mislead.

Yet, although this is not an equivalent religious regime to that shown in Romania (and so that is not the point being made), giving an appearance of being austere chooses to suggest to us what might be – along with, later, showing prostate, cruciform candidates for taking orders, which might be straight out of Luis Buñuel at his most anti-clerical.

The convent is no doubt run strictly, with a seeming rule of silence at meals (and it is a nod that advises Anna to see Mother Superior), and the story-telling here is crisp, neat, orderly. However, what director Pawel Pawlikowski is really about here, in a film set in 1962 (according to IMDb), is setting up a dichotomy, which for Henry James’ characters was between The New World and The Old World (e.g. in novels such as The Ambassadors, or The Golden Bowl) – hence this review’s title.

In James, the dichotomy becomes embodied by, and so takes place within, the visitors from the States, who bring their preconceptions and imagination, but hamper them by not using their perceptions. Ida, summoned on the verge of taking orders, is told to go to stay with her aunt ‘for as long as is necessary’ (which is sufficiently vague to allow it to further the plot).

It may not the only dichotomy in the film, but it is summed up in this exchange – in the car – between Ida and her aunt [the last utterance is paraphrased] :

Wanda : Have you had impure thoughts ?

Ida: Yes.

Wanda : Carnal ?

Ida : No.

Wanda : That’s a shame. (Slight pause.) How do you know what you are giving up ?


To look further at the film requires a further posting and being spoilery…

Suffice for now to say that the working out of dichotomies here is fairly predictable. Which one would not expect of the director of The Woman in the Fifth (La femme du Vème) (2011), and is also lacking the subtleties of the various Jamesian texts that have been so successfully adapted cinematically.


End-notes

* Pronounced, whatever one may think, in the film Eh-dah.

** Or even in Philomena (2013).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday 20 November 2014

Ingmarssönerna (1919) and inter-titles...

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

20 November

* Contains spoilers *

In their role in the status of what a silent film presents, inter-titles are a thing in themselves, carrying more weight than a voice-over often does now – since they intercede in the action, literally interrupting it, and interpret to us what has been seen, what is to come :

Provided, of course, that one can read them in time (especially with inter-titles in translation), there is no escaping them, no doubting their authoritativeness. Not, at any rate, in the way that one can ascribe an interpretative bias to (or infer one from) what a narrative voice says, suggesting that maybe it is not to be trusted…

Taking Ingmarssönerna (Sons of Ingmar) (1919) as an example, we ‘get told’ the following things (about Birta, played by Harriet Bosse), that, having moved from her parents’ property at Bergksog to Ingmar’s Farm (following the reading of the banns), she :

* Became ‘more quiet and strange’

* Had ‘a wild look in her eyes’


In between, we are also told that, in Young Ingmar (Victor Sjöström), there is ‘suspicion brooding’ (although he may have said these words to Old Ingmar). Informing us, in any case, that Brita is behaving ‘strangely’ or has ‘a wild look’ obviates the need to show such things – just as it does to try to present us physically with Ingmar’s brooding suspicion : we can have them implanted as facts, or givens, and make of them as seems fit.

Meanwhile, Kajsa, who seeks to minister to Birta at the farm by assuring her that all is well, seems of a piece with the travelling painter : it seems quite apt that they will meet on the precipice, where Birta says that she desires ‘Peace in my soul’.

The cause, maybe guessed at, of her pain and hurt is learnt in actual speech, to Old Ingmar (and to the judge ?), when Young Ingmar says (of Birta) I forced myself on her : Even so, it ‘came out in the land’ earlier, in Biblical outworking / pathetic fallacy such as we later see, say, in Days of Heaven (1978), and, before it, in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956).

Unlike The Holy Family, Ingmar trusts to his material resources, and so fails to have the wedding that he does not think that he can afford, and does not realize what he has turned his fiancée into – in her eyes – as a result. We have the grandeur of the magnificently visual wedding, but it is just what should have been, not, for all its reality before us, what was…

In saying that he forced himself on Birta, he is ready to abase himself, though acknowledging less, at the very same moment, how Birta actually felt about this, or his own failure to address her feelings. Outside the very prison, he is still pleased to imagine that other victims have ‘suffered less’ than he, but it is where but begins the dance between them, as she challenges him – R. D. Laing style – to respond to her, responding to him.

And Mother Märta, who could not have been at church (but maybe she is exempted on account of her great age), pronounces sentence on her son for wanting Birta back, but finds herself forced to reverse it – and to literal rejoicing in heaven, which is suddenly cognisant of the mortal realm, or Ingmar of it, once more.




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