Sounding different - and sounding just the same as always...

Perhaps, in disguise, some responses to a recital of string quartets in Cambridge...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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31 January

Perhaps, in disguise, some responses to a recital of string quartets in Cambridge...

So, people will know mvts 1&3 well, which means that one cannot play them very differently (as with the famous one of the Chopin Mazurkas, Op. 17, or those amongst Rachmaninov's Op. 23 set) - yet is it an answer to make mvt 4 (marked Adagio) Molto adagio, and slow the Moderato ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 1, 2019

A standard account or explanation of the poor reception of the first performance of the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Brahms (in D Minor, Op. 15) is that there was insufficient familiarity with the work, probably by players and audience alike, but does one - although there are people who go to certain orchestral concerts, because they want to hear works played just the way that they know them - want to allow the fact that one knows a work to solidify how it is to sound ? (More scope to change that, perhaps, as a solo performer, or a conductor, than if, say, the members of a string quartet or trio attempt to come to 'anbsp;democratic agreement' after arguing points over ?)

The gravity and stillness of the opening section lead to an Adagio that feels paced, and restrained. The rest of the performance is fine, but, apart from added stateliness in the Menuet (from the bass), does not ‘break new ground’.

So to what end that initial impression ? https://t.co/FnW5EvvTwY

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 1, 2019

Two theses here, then. One is that, accepted that there is an overlap between performance practice and playing a composition by Tchaikovsky in the style of Vivaldi (or vice versa), chamber musicians can easily respond to each other to avoid the familiar, and, by introducing small changes in emphasis, etc., they can bring us the piece with new ears.

The other is that one could, for example, adopt quite different approaches to the sound of the first two movements (Allegro and Molto adagio, etc., respectively) of the second of Beethoven's so-called Razumovsky quartets (Op. 59), but, if the Allegretto and Presto, in the nature of their playing, do not (or not easily) lend themselves to one's continuing in that vein, one may not meaningfully have transformed a listener's experience of the quartet as a unity.


What gives hope that music can be so, and artists give us a studied insight that shapes the whole piece, are such examples as :

* Imogen Cooper's three live double-CD performances of Schubert, where the care is in the structure of the individual programmes and in the way that she gives us a coherent reading of each work

* Likewise, when Angela Hewitt played the whole Book II (BWV 870-893) of Das wohltemperierte Klavier at West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge

* When Nicholas Collon conducted a programme of Vaughan Williams, Britten and Elgar at The Corn Exchange, Cambridge


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

Some responses to Mary, Queen of Scots (2018)

Some responses to Mary, Queen of Scots (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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28 January

Some responses to Mary, Queen of Scots (2018)

From @JimGR's review :

The true issue is [the face-to-face meeting] is shot more like a perfume advert : bed sheets artfully hung everywhere to obscure the women’s view both literally and metaphorically, gently brushed aside one at a time in soft light.

Quite liked Mary Queen of Scots (more full thoughts later), with the exception of the meeting scene. No problems with lack of historical accuracy, more the fact that scene stood out like a sore thumb. More like a perfume advert.

— JimGR (@JimGR) January 19, 2019

Blimey - talk about being determined to drag in Orson Welles and the close of The Lady from Shanghai in at what is effectively the end of the film* !

* Presaged by the start (and its captions), in musical terms the film telescopes 18+ years into a coda (and more captions).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 29, 2019

[The review by Jim Ross (@JimGR), for TAKE ONE, can be found here]

Whether this scene is also referencing such things as David Inshaw’s The Badminton Game (1972-1973), or The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), one doubts that the impetus for including it is John Guy’s book Queen of Scots : The True Life of Mary Stuart, on which the film says that it is based. Between them, first-time director Josie Rourke and first-time screenwriter Beau Willimon have decided to structure their film by having all the politicking that was to come about after Mary’s being taken into ‘protective custody’ - including what ensued by way of investigation into the death of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and the circumstances in which it happened - subsumed into cinematic imagery that invokes mirrors and confusion, and then, as the shoot-out, resolved by an over-frank discussion that supposedly, at this moment, gave Elizabeth determination (which had been seen long eluding her)¹.

It is as if they have built backwards from this point to determine what the scope of the rest of the film will be (where they make simplifications to the established fact (e.g. the fact that Mary had to break out of prison), and truncate time (such as the that between the death of Darnlet and her marriage to Bothwell), yet with no good reason – as Jim Ross says, the scene feels out of place, and, in #UCFF's view, it is sentimental, and overladen with meaning and portents.


People want drama, but they never met so they could never explain their motives to one another - that is one of the triggers that lead to Mary's death, she could never explain her motives or what happened in her own life before her death.

When in the film she says she considers Elizabeth as her inferior - she would never have said that to her face. And then Elizabeth is seen crying? She would never have done that, she would have flipped. ~ Dr Estelle Paranque [quoted in The Telegraph]


In The Lady from Shanghai (1947), the mirror-scene [the link is to YouTube] had a context, however, of the actual interplay between Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth, as the titular Lady), Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles), Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane) and others, whereas Queen of Scots effectively has none, except the jockeying between the English and Scottish courts², and some messages and portraits passed between the queens (inevitably reminding, as in the case of Elizabeth’s father and Anne of Cleves, that portraits were the closest to photographs, but could mislead).

The film is not quite as lacking in being even handed as this, but the implication is that Mary is a force of nature, and, when confronted with her, Elizabeth has no doubt that she will and must clip her wings

For them to really work out who was who was never, except in the case of the Welles, part of and a vindication of the film that preceded this point, because Mary and Elizabeth have no actual past other than at a remove. A few moments of hide and seek and then seeing each other has Mary say stupid things to the cousin whom she expects to help her such as that Elizabeth is her inferior, and Elizabeth concluding that the qualities for which she was envious of Mary are actually what have brought about her downfall. Willimon and Rourke want to root everything that happened hereafter in this moment, at the point when Mary has come to England to be supported to get her throne back (as she is no longer Queen of Scots, and her son James is her half-brother’s ward), and the result is to highlight the artificiality with which they have differently portrayed the lives of Mary and Elizabeth.

It does not cement what we have seen of this Queen of Scots martyr-figure (King of the Jews ?), but unpicks the joins in the film, because we all know enough to understand that there was a whole world to what went on regarding Mary when she was in England¹, which cannot be sketched in with three captions. (And it cannot be sketched in by Simon Russell-Beale, sounding Shakespearean and, as with Lowden, not of a piece, because we probably know that the demise of Mary was as much a botch as that of Charles I : having seen how the film theatricalizes what Mary was wearing when she died, and then read an account, one marvels at what this cabaret-style presentation is for.)


* * * * *


Other things grated, too. The music of the two courts seemed woefully undifferentiated, as if they did not have different classical traditions. Sometimes, spotting the historic interiors was more interesting than the massed action that went on in them - with the script's uneven modern inflections and idiom (especially in the case of Darnley) just a distraction from both.

God, the script was ponderous : bung Darnley and Mary in some scenery, and have them chat over power-politics for a minute or so !

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 29, 2019

Darnley, played by Jack Lowden, seemed intent on rendering the part as if he were Eddie Izzard³, and his lines and manner just grated – fine that the film made gestures in the direction of theatricals and other entertainments for royalty at the time, but too much there was out of register. As John Knox, there appeared to be an element of historicity to what we see, but David Tennant was still ‘hammy’ with his acting⁴, and he is implausibly thrust into the first formal court appearance over which Mary seeks to preside (with the emphasis much on the 'seeking to') and the rough-hewn nature of those proceedings (not least compared with those in England).

Finally, the film is called Mary, Queen of Scots, seems to want to flesh out her claims as a worthwhile figure (if something of a victim ?), and at the same time not very unobviously point up some matters that, then as now, affect how England and Scotland relate to each other. How has the film benefited us, though, rather than our watching it benefited its makers ?


End-notes :

¹ Which, in no clear way, explains why Mary was taken into Elizabeth's protection on 18 May 1568, but did not die until 8 February 1587.

² And wanting to depict Mary as playful, fun-loving and affectionate, whereas Elizabeth simply is not, and largely accedes to what her advisers suggest (and puts an intense amount of trust in William Cecil, who, played here by Guy Pearce, may have been a powerful politician, but gave the impression of being either past it or from some very bygone age - despite Elizabeth's factually being his elder by thirteen years), is the facile contention that the film wants to make for much of its run-time.

³ Not the Izzard who is a pefectly competent actor, but he of his stage-act, lampooning the utility of Le Francais d'aujourd'hui with Le singe est dans l'arbre.

⁴ He has an attentive congregation, but, for some reason, in a tiny church building.


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

Is Billboards really a screenplay - and not a play-script ?

Is Billboards really a screenplay - and not a play-script ? [posting in development]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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9 January

Is Billboards really a screenplay - and not a play-script ? [posting in development]

Those who think Seven Psychopaths (2012) a great film can delight in that opinion. However, after the $15m that was spent on it (so it is estimated (as reported on IMDb)), the bosses at investors such as CBS Films, Film4 and BFI may have been less sure : in the US, it just made back what it is thought to have cost.

In that world, one could imagine Martin McDonagh, hawking pitches for a new film. He had tried a film that was very cinematic, and then had made this one, which dearly desired that some of Lynch had rubbed off on a tale of people who were not the people whom they seemed to be.

Maybe the inspiration was to make visual what one would never try to show on stage, these billboards : in a play, everyone would be talking about them, but they would be an off-stage trio of elephants.

Yet, as soon as you have them in a film, and in its title, the film-goers will know without needing to think (or question) that they are significant*, and a fierce Frances McDormand, pictured with them, can then import a #MeToo message that makes it a winner.


To be continued


* Missouri, and a made-up place there, being the other label on the tin : In Bruges, likewise, is going to be a film that is set in Bruges...

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

In four Tweets, a taste of Mike Leigh's Peterloo (2018)

In four Tweets, a taste of Mike Leigh's Peterloo (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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16 December

In four Tweets, a taste of Mike Leigh's Peterloo (2018)

It's both as when Spall is stylized to prick pomposity (e.g. portraying Ruskin's aesthetics as fatuous) and reclaim his works as those of humility, not nobility, and @Aiannucci's melding the terror and humour in the power-struggle (e.g. Molotov (Palin) and Beria (Russell Beale)).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 17, 2018

Therefore, for example, it is apt for us to be reminded of any of these events or references :

* Hillsborough

* The Battle of Culloden

* @orgreavejustice

* Blackadder The Third*

* *That* 23 June thing

* And Leigh's Prince Regent is Curtis and Elton's own Tim McInnerny.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 17, 2018

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

Phronesis : Solos aren't really their thing

Reflections on hearing Phronesis in Cambridge (November 2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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24 November

Reflections on hearing Phronesis (@phronesismusic) at Cambridge International Jazz Festival 2018 – a gig at The Mumford Theatre, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge,
on Saturday 24 November 2018 at 7.30 p.m.

In the first set, the band gave us four numbers (or 'songs'), the third of which (Jasper Høiby, leader and bass-player, suggested) was from 2014 (and which had been heard played at The Stables in 2016), but they were all in such extended forms that one was almost aware of 'Four seasons in one day' (to quote Crowded House).

By which is meant, almost necessarily, that the instrumentalists are all 'playing the long game', painting 'a bigger picture', whereas the solo is most usually a period taken out of a shorter treatment of a song, which does not necessarily have or need an overarching feel in which such individualism, rather than the compact work of the trio, is going to feel out of place¹.

They will no sooner have excitingly stepped up into an energetic, faster gear² than drop down or away, and the trick in the hearing is, when it happens, to enjoy the acceleration into that movement, but accept that it is part of a whole, in that Phronesis perform songs that are fundamentally quite modular, or moody – or modular³.


However, it is something more loose than that¹, as if the structure of the song is modelling-clay that can be shaped by the interaction of the members of the trio as they go, by listening to each other, and also looking out for each other’s signals. The things that communicate themselves in this music at its height - which is already of an unbelievably and highly reliable special quality - are that everyone enjoys the others' playing, and a strong sense of freedom and of play, which can easily move between the very melodic and the strongly rhythmic.

We had tight and virtuosic drumming from Anton Eger (@AntonEger), as one will remember when the band were at Cambridge Jazz Festival in 2016, and saw the erect and observant Høiby (@jasperhoiby) centre stage, at times casting looks back and forth between Ivo Neame (@Ivoneame) on piano, and Eger. Harmonically, and in terms of the figurations and inflections that he can adeptly work with, Neame seems like a mirror to and for Eger, and Eger for Neame, with Høiby (using the bow more often than two years ago) in the role of using his playing and presence to mediate and direct, at the cross-roads of patterned communications, and gauging with Eger and Neame when to extend a section, when to move – which they always do so smoothly – to another passage, another facet, another feeling.


This is not jazz that is pretending to be clever. It just is clever, in the sense of being good and of quality, but does not even require of us to congratulate ourselves for being there to listen (or for listening to it). It takes us to places, maybe not real ones, in the band's sound-world, and, as the new album is called, perhaps tells us We Are All ?

With the three of them, deeply bowing at the front of the stage in The Mumford Theatre, who could doubt that they had given their all, and that we had truly been with them, in - and because of - the music !


End-notes :

¹ Another musical example, if in the world of what has been written out, might be where a chamber work is in movements, but - without a break - they are run together, such as Ravel's Sonata in A Minor (Op. Posth.) ?

² Colour coded by the principal lighting of the back, velveteen curtain, behind the band, as blue, red, and sub-marine green (the encore was purple, then red), the three songs of the second set all had this synergistic short moment, when the trio took off together, in tempo and intensity :

Perhaps we most immediately sense how alive their creativity is in this type of sound, but it is there to act as a contrast to much else that is going on in the song, such as when they are relishing a repetition or noodling with the possibilities of tossing a fragment around, yet almost without exception conveying the feeling of being both experimental and able to cope with the play-offs that they create, the interplay on which they thrive.


³ Which is not to say that they are blocks of material in, say, a Boulezian sense, where playing one determines whether one will or will not play another (e.g. his Piano Sonata No. 3), or, within a set of reels or jigs, where a group such as Lau might take a pre-arranged, short common rest - a little like the heart 'missing a bit, or a jump-cut in the cinema - and then directly juxtapose the tempo and rhythm of what went before with those of the new.


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

The #UCFF Tweets about Cargo (2017)

The #UCFF Tweets about Cargo (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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25 October

The #UCFF Tweets about Cargo (2017)

Take One, the Cambridge Film Festival's official publication, has released their Festival Review. Come by the Arts Picturehouse and pick one up! pic.twitter.com/T4CyuWDumx

— Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest) October 25, 2018

April McIntyre’s (@AprilMcIntyre’s) review for TAKE ONE is here…

One suggests that, although it owes not a small amount to Manchester by the Sea (2016), Levaiathan (2012) [the trawler one], and Cassandra's Dream (2007), it's a film that works on the level of gestures, not even episodes - we can't believe that a guy just starts driving lorries.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 25, 2018

But - there's a but - he's only really driving a lorry so that he witnesses what he sees for the moment that will riff on Fire at Sea or The Breaking Point... but with a very tenuous 'moral' choice.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 26, 2018

* How much are we re-visiting The Brothers, from British t.v. (1972 to 1976), let alone The Breaking Point (1950) ?

* Are some scenes of violence just extraneous to the story, or even convenient pegs to hang it on ?

Especially strong acting, though, by Chiel Vande Vyvere !

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 13, 2018

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

Four #UCFF Tweets about Searching for Ingmar Bergman (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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26 October

Four #UCFF Tweets about Searching for Ingmar Bergman
(Vermächtnis eines Jahrhundertgenies) (2018)

That is to say writer, director and critic Olivier Assayas, and, likewise, Stig Björkman, who has also written books of interviews with Bergman, Lars von Trier and - if one may still say so - Woody Allen [the last two published by @FaberBooks : https://t.co/NwNEFOgfj7]. pic.twitter.com/IJuC6WvwrC

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 11, 2018

* On account of all those elements of Macbeth and Hamlet, is von Trotta imputing to Block's prayer (after washing his face) the context of the 'my offence is rank' speech of Claudius ? :

'My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.'

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 27, 2018

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

Some #UCFF Tweets and a link about The man who killed Don Quixote (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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25 October

Some #UCFF Tweets and a link about The man who killed Don Quixote (2018)

It was rather wasn't it! Thanks for coming. https://t.co/qoWbcsXtbd

— Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest) October 25, 2018

Of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), it obviously isn't in three acts - but they'd be Terry Gilliam, playing with Fellini's 8½, him riffing on Scorsese's After Hours (1985?), and giving us his own Time Bandits...

Opening Night at @camfilmfest ! https://t.co/u6WXbGtLWW

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 25, 2018

However, if you're interested in some of those titles and *not* rooted to The West Country from 25 October to 1 November, you'll also find a dozen of them at @camfilmfest 2018 :

For example, Terry Gilliam's The Man who Killed Don Quixote (2018) is #CamFF Opening Night Film... https://t.co/3PW25JqzmQ

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 6, 2018

More, by way of a comment, on Rosie Applin’s review for TAKE ONE (@TakeOneCinema)…

At #Shakespeare400, we hear Don Quixote extolled on @BBCRadio3's The Verb :

A novel that founders in endless Così-fan-tutte-like stories ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 22, 2016

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

Five #UCFF Tweets that start with More Human than Human (2018)

Five #UCFF Tweets that start with More Human than Human (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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30 October

Five #UCFF Tweets that start with More Human than Human (2018)

In Screen 3, near the end of Day 6 of @camfilmfest 2018, for More Human than Human (2018) - and hoping for better than Werner Herzog's Lo and Behold : Reveries of the Connected World (2016). #CamFF

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 30, 2018

#UCFF has a review here of Her (2013) [and maybe a paragraph or two somewhere on Alice Cares (2015), from @leedsfilmfest 2015, to dig out...] :https://t.co/gB94gAkkhP

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 30, 2018

If Alice does care, is it because she is programmed to care – and are humans just usually less obviously programmed to care ?

If the film has a thesis, it is not this, but it could have been…

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2018

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

Two #UCFF Tweets about Rafiki (2018)

Two #UCFF Tweets about Rafiki (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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30 October

Two #UCFF Tweets about Rafiki (2018)

Riffing not a little on [The Tragedy of] Romeo and Juliet, and with nods to the presentation of community that Spike Lee makes, Rafiki (2018) is still individual, colourful, and with great performances by Samantha Mugatsia and Sheila Munyiva !

Shown by @CAFF during @camfilmfest.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 1, 2018

I knew that Shoplifters (2018) was coming on release, so I decided to use the spaces for other things (on the first occasion, looks like it was sleep, as If.... (1968) seems to have been my first film on Day 4).

Loved Rafiki (2018), but Roobha (2018) more ! :)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 3, 2018

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

Three #UCFF Tweets about Colette (2018)

Three #UCFF Tweets about Colette (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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1 November

Three #UCFF Tweets about Colette (2018)

As if (even if a novel, etc., may begin with lines conceived to start it) a work's just written wholly linearly - nothing that's out of sequence (even if only off the page).

No matter : there's enough that shines here, even if we know that we're going to be in Colette's corner !

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 1, 2018

A very full Screen 1 at Festival Central [@CamPicturehouse] just watched, held by a script that was full of Stoppard-like wit and which evoked real laughter and response - and with some fascinating original scoring / playing by Thomas Adès, alongside @DominicWest as wicked Willy.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 1, 2018

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Four #UCFF Tweets about The Silence of Others (2018)

Four #UCFF Tweets about The Silence of Others (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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31 October

Four #UCFF Tweets about The Silence of Others (2018)

Features such as Philomena (2013), Death and The Maiden (1994) or Land and Freedom (1995) have treated of, respectively, mothers being separated from their children by Church / State, torture, and reprisals against Republicans - but the tearful welling of emotion and hope's here. pic.twitter.com/ASLFHHpiRE

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2018

#UCFF's plan for Day 7 at @camfilmfest :

12.45 The Silence of Others

15.00 Birds of Passage

18.00 Roobha - missing Q&A and straight to

19.30 From Cairo to the Cloud : The World of Cairo Geniza

21.45 Gwendolyn#CamFF

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2018

They can be driven by a choice that one can or has to make, because other screenings do or do not fall in line with it, but Day 7 has been a really good one !

Sadly, too fatigued to persevere with Birds of Passage (2018), but that was too much to expect after @SilenceofOthers... https://t.co/FfU9Y66IS2

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2018

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Four #UCFF Tweets about Roma (2018), Surprise Film at Cambridge Film Festival 2018

Four #UCFF Tweets about Roma (2018), Surprise Film at Cambridge Film Festival 2018

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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2 November

Four #UCFF Tweets about Roma (2018), Surprise Film at Cambridge Film Festival 2018

It is brought to us by writer / director Alfonso Cuarón, whose Gravity (2013) one readily agreed had the plot of a B-movie and dubbed Gravy. There, three national space-vessels give us three world religions - here, it is earth, water and fire.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 2, 2018

On Closing Night at @camfilmfest [Day 8], who stayed to contemplate the sky in Roma (2018) to which we panned and rotated upwards, and across which a plane - maybe the same plane - has several times passed ?

Did you also see 'Shanti Shanti Shanti' ? :https://t.co/S556MmUUJh https://t.co/2QwQSpfGDU

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 3, 2018

As previously Tweeted, these are the actual closing words of @alfonsocuaron's film [which are not in the video-clip] :

So, of those in Screen 1 at @CamPicturehouse afterwards, who actually did see the whole of @camfilmfest 2018's Surprise Film... ? ;)

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 3, 2018

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Cambridge Film Festival 2018 : Seen by #UCFF at #CamFF

Cambridge Film Festival 2018 : Seen by #UCFF at #CamFF

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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2 November

Cambridge Film Festival 2018 : Seen by #UCFF at #CamFF

Day 1 ~ Thursday 25 October

(1) 4.45 - Cargo (2017) : Emmanuel (91 mins) - Catch one film before...

(2) 8.30 - Opening Film : The Man who killed Don Quixote : Screen 1 (132 mins + Q&A)


Day 2 ~ Friday 26 October
(Voi1 2*) 1.30 Fortuna (2018??) Arriving too late for the start, instead...

(3) 1.45 - For the Birds (2018) : Screen 2 (90 mins)

(4) 4.00 - Searching for Ingmar Bergman (Vermächtnis eines Jahrhundertgenies (2018) : Screen 1 (95 mins)

(5) 6.00 - Letter from Masanjia (2018) : Screen 2 (75 mins)

(6) 8.00 - Jean-François i el sentit de la vida (Jean-François and The Meaning of Life) (2018) : Screen 2 (90 mins + Q&A)

(7) 10.15 - The Seventh Seal (1957) : Screen 2 (96 mins)


Day 3 ~ Saturday 27 October

(Extracurricular 1) Punting with Leon ‘Letter from Masanjia’ Lee [who took to it like the duck of the simile, and quickly took the pole]

(8) 2.00 - Miss Dalí (2018) : Screen 1 (165 mins + Q&A)

(Void 2*) 5.15 - Marquis de Wavrin : From the Manor to the Jungle (Marquis de Wavrin : Du manoir à la jungle) (2017) : Screen 3 (85 mins)

(9 ?) 8.30 - The Blot (1921) : Emmanuel (93 mins)


Day 4 ~ Sunday 28 October

(Extracurricular 2) Punting with Ventura ‘Miss Dalí’ Pons [who took to the Cam straightaway - taking it in, visually and photographically]

(10) 2.0 - If…. (1968) : Screen 1 (111 mins + Q&A)

(11) 5.45 - Júlia ist (2017) : Screen 2 (96 mins)

(12) 9.15 - Nancy (2014) : Screen 3 (86 mins)


Day 5 ~ Monday 29 October

(12½) 12.45 - 3 Days in Quiberon (2013) : Screen 1 (115 mins)

Then, as it falters, instead...

(13½) 2.30 - Roobha (2018) : Screen 3 (91 mins + Q&A)

(14½) 7.15 - The Free Life (La vida lliure / A Life of Freedom) (2017) : Screen 2 (90 mins)

(15½) 8.45 - Gentlemen prefer Blondes (1953) : Screen 3 (91 mins)


Day 6 ~ Tuesday 30 October

(16) 12.00 - Visionary Landscapes : Snow (1963) + A Year along The Abandoned Road (1991) : Screen 1 (8 + 12 mins)

(16½) 1.00 - Burning (2014) : Screen 2 (148 mins)

Insufficiently interested, despite (extra) wine, to stay the course for so long,
so abandoned in favour of lunch, then…

(17½) 4.00 - The Archive (2018) + Feline (2018) : Screen 2 (12 + 78 mins + Q&A)

(18½) 6.20 - Rafiki (2018) : Screen 2 (82 mins)

(19½) 10.00 - More Human than Human (2018) : Screen 3 (79 mins)


Day 7 ~ Wednesday 31 October

(20½) 12.45 - The Silence of Others (2018) : Screen 1 (96 mins)

(21) 3.00 - Birds of Passage (2018) : Screen 1 (125 mins)

Too fatigued to continue with this one, so a break before re-watching…

(22) 6.00 - Roobha (2018) : Screen 2 (91 mins)

Missing the Q&A to catch the last hour of...

(22½) 7.30 - From Cairo to The Cloud : The World of Cairo Geniza (2018) : Screen 3 (92 mins)

(Void 3*) 9.45 - Gwendolyn (2017) : Screen 3 (85 mins)


Day 8 ~ Thursday 1 November

(23½) 10.30 - Malcolm is a Little Unwell : Screen 3 (introduction + 80 mins)

(24) 12.45 - From Cairo to The Cloud : The World of Cairo Geniza : Screen 1 (92 mins + Q&A)

Seeing the first thirty minutes, and then coming back for the Q&A...

(25) 3.00 - The Image Book : Screen 1 (84 mins)

(26) 5.00 - Colette : Screen 1 (111 mins)

(27) 8.00 - Closing Film : Monsters and Men (2018) : Screen 1 (96 mins)

(28) 10.00 - Surprise Film : Roma (2018) : Screen 1 (135 mins)


End-notes :

* I.e., by 'Void', there was no realistic prospect of watching the film, or of continuing to watch it to the end, with the resources of energy available...


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

In three Tweets, a response to Nancy (2018)

In three Tweets, a response to Nancy (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

31 October

In three Tweets, a response to Nancy (2018)

Playing on Andrea Riseborough's physique as a sort of Scissorhands, and since she is maybe too close to the project as its first-titled producer, Nancy desires to flip the Hitchcock.

Yet La propera pell (2015) in #CameraCatalonia 2017 was finer :https://t.co/wQhjCyZm9p#CamFF

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 1, 2018

Not least in terms of trust, the principal characters do / do not do various things that they have little reason, except to give us a plot and hence a film, to do :

This includes the script-writers, who choose to have an academic who somehow's published just one book in decades.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 1, 2018

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

First-gig response [European premiere] to Roobha (2018*)

First-gig response [European premiere] to Roobha (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

First-gig response [European premiere] to Roobha (2018)

Caveat : Not absolutely everything in this film might be how, on a first viewing, one thought that it might have worked best – but it has so much going for it that, as they could or should say, those reservations fade into irrelevance in the face of so much that is daring, and bold, and strong.

And one needs to be all such things when the commonality that we could and really should have, as human-beings, with one another can or does dissolve and decay into judgement, hatred, and ostracism : this film is political, in the sense of showing what we are missing when we separate ourselves from others and deem them Other.


Preaching apart for seeing others apart from the prejudices that one – if one had a family – imbibed under its eaves, because one almost instinctively and disruptively hears the parental responses that ring in one’s ears, Roobha (2018) is beautifully inventive and visually alert. Asked in the Q&A after the European premiere about the scene that is witnessed through a car windscreen, director Lenin M. Sivam credited it to Arsenij Gusev, his cinematographer, when it came to the shoot : alongside, for example, the permeable and impermeable membranes, and reflections / doubled images, with which the film is populated one gets a sense of the known but unspoken that Henrik Ibsen gave us on the stage, the truths that we dare not confront or confess until we have to, and the hardnesses in our hearts in extremis that, in some other extremity, can soften into love and acceptance.

This is meant as an appreciative and totally unspoilery reaction to the film : if you want to know what ‘it is about’, there are other accounts that will provide that. In conclusion, what one suggests that one might better look out for in terms of cinematic qualities is given in the Tweets that follow.


[...]


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

Just as if the present penetrated the future, leaving behind a trace of anxiety¹

This is a Festival preview of Miss Dalí (2018) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 October

This is a Festival preview of Miss Dalí (2018) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2018)

The #CamFF synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here,
and it screens on Saturday 27 October [in Screen 1 at Festival Central] at 2.00 p.m.,
and also on Monday 29 October at 11.00 a.m. [in Screen 3 at Festival Central]

Salvador Dalí is not a trustworthy source of information about himself. From his adolescence he set out consciously to become a myth, and he continued to work at being Dalí even after he had achieved his goal. A vital stage in the process was his The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, written in French and published in English translation, for American consumption, in 1942, when he was thirty-eight.

Ian Gibson ~ The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí² [Introduction, opening sentences]

When, to a voice-over (from which the words that are used as a title to this preview have been quoted¹), the film opens with a slide-show of unpeopled bays, cliffs, the sea and waves, it has a disembodied quality to it that speaks, inter alia, of lives beyond these vistas : perhaps they seem hyper-real in their intensity, as if in canvases of Salvador Dalí, where we might wonder what time soft watches would tell ?

Alice sighed wearily. 'I think you might do something better with the time,' she said, 'than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.'

'If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, 'you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him.'³

The twentieth century was hardly the first time when big personalities were operating in the sphere of the creative media (since it had given us such towering egos as Benvenuto Cellini, Christopher Marlowe, Caravaggio, Samuel Johnson, Niccolò Pagannini, Richard Wagner, August Strindberg, Richard Strauss, etc., etc.), but how art was to develop then not only allowed, but also almost required, the person of the artist to be an important part of the art-work and its values : to be an artist called Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Andy Warhol, to name but three, made it de rigueur to venerate at The Shrine of The Personality Cult (or, rather, have others make votive offerings to approach one and / or on one's behalf).

In telling the story of Edie Sedgwick, Factory Girl (2006) may not, in search of a good premise for a film, be accurate with all of its claims about Warhol – which is not to say that he did not use / exploit people, but that it misrepresents what one can nowadays easily check :

Part of Ana María’s motivation, in 1949, in publishing Salvador Dalí vist per la seva germana was to correct assertions that would otherwise pass for truth. Imagine being Salvador Dalí's sister, and having happily posed for hours for your evidently highly talented brother, then, as his art developed (and Dalí, having learn to draw and paint figuratively, initially thought himself first an Impressionist, then a Cubist), finding that one has more in common with one’s father’s increasing sense of frustration with him - that is what Miss Dalí asks us to entertain.

Yet all the indications are that, although Ana María’s book also appeared in Spanish (and was translated into French), it has never appeared in an English-language edition, and Ian Gibson's seemingly unchallenged biography The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (quoted above) only gives a few pages to it. (Gibson spends longer on considering the various and inconsistent accounts by Dalí and Buñuel of how the screenplay for Un chien andalou (1929)⁴ came to be written.) Perhaps Ventura Pons' film will change that... ?

He loved to sign thousands of blank sheets for lithographs ~ Ana María

Whatever the exact status may be now of Mr Allen or his reputation, his Midnight in Paris (2011) was unjustly fêted, and To Rome with Love (2012), the following year, no more justly neglected, though both treat of visiting the past, and of regret : Midnight's literal vehicle takes Gil (Owen Wilson) back to such remarkable times, with remarkable people, as Miss Dalí treats of. Yet – except excused as Gil's fantasy wish-fulfilment that sees a disaffected Inez (Rachel McAdams) and him in Paris (i.e. if it is in his dream, what does it matter ?) – too many ways in which these writers and artists they have been visualized and / or portrayed in Allen's film grates not a little, such as the portrayal of Luis Buñuel or Dalí himself, as well as how, anachronistically, some of the men are dressed so informally⁵.


Director and co-writer Ventura Pons has already shown himself too savvy, with the multiple facets of how scenes play and re-play in El virus de la por (The Virus of Fear) (2015) [which screened during #CameraCatalonia in the following year], to be pegged solely to the view-point of Dalí’s sister Anna Maria [Ana María], who (later in life, and played by Siân Phillips) is the 'Miss Dalí' of the title. Which is to say that, although the ostensible work of the film is to tell it as she saw it (via the medium of her reminiscences when her friend Maggie visits, whom she knows from when she was at the University of Cambridge), it is not its purpose simply to endorse or validate Ana María Dalí’s account or perspective :

It's a good story, written by a cunning and brilliant man… - to distract curious fools ~ Maggie

It is Maggie (Claire Bloom) who is shown, as if in a very understanding confessional, to be validating how Ana María feels, and endorsing why she might have resentments that she does not feel able to forgive, for her sake - rather than for our benefit as such. As the film goes on to show us, it was the outrage of Ana María and her remaining family at Salvador's biased autobiography for his own selective purposes, The Secret Life (1942), that was sufficient reason for her to publish her riposte in Salvador Dalí vist per la seva germana (1949).

In other filmic terms, we might think how Mike Leigh, in Mr. Turner (2014), confounds the art-establishment tradition of nobilizing Turner as aristocratic (rather than demotic). In Miss Dalí, by contrast, we see Dalí becoming more haughty, as he cultivates strangeness, and cannot, as his family does not easily overlook distancing himself from his Catalan roots, and courting the Fascists against his Republican education...


When I die, I will be totally cured ~ Salvador Dalí


At root, Ventura Pons' film embodies a sister's abiding love and admiration for the brother with whom she had shared her early years :

But he is still Dalí. One of the greatest figures in twentieth-century painting. The art was greater than the man.


End-notes :

¹ As had been suspected, these words have been taken from Ana María Dalí’s writing, in Chapter IX of Salvador Dalí vist per la seva germana, where we read – in the French translation : Comme la proue coupe l’eau, le présent pénêtre dans l’avenir, en laissant une trace d’inquiétude.

Ana María Dalí ~ Salvador Dalí : vu par sa sœur, p. 99. Arthaud, France, 1961.


² Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1997.

³ This exchange, at The Mad Hatter's Tea-Party, is likewise quoted in the #UCFF preview for Jean-François i el sentit de la vida (Jean-François and The Meaning of Life) (2018) : ça va ici aussi !

⁴ When this image comes onto the screen, during footage from Un chien andalou (1929) that the film shows, some might want to turn away, for a few seconds, at this point…

⁵ In fact, one would far rather not be in Gil's company at all, but in that of the truly fantastical Drako Zarharzar (@DrakoZarharzar) in Toby Amies' highly effective personal portrait, The Man Whose Mind Exploded (2012), of a man who knew people such as Salvador Dalí, because he modelled for him.


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