Sunday 7 October 2018

What is seen – or maybe not quite seen – in the half-light ?

This is a Festival preview of La vida lliure (The Free Life¹) (2017) (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)


7 September

This is a Festival preview of La vida lliure (The Free Life¹) (2017) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2018)


The #CamFF synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here,
and it screens on Monday 29 October [in Screen 2 at Festival Central] at 7.15 p.m.

We are thoughtfully introduced to a beautiful setting on Menorca (which, however, we do not see that often in full sunshine - please see the comments below) by footage of what appears to be the sinking of a vessel by a U-boat, and so we are partly located in time : as with everything in this film, right through to when, starting with a jazzy title-sequence, the end-credits roll² (and which one therefore cannot afford to miss), there is a significance to it all, but probably only the avid readers of certain types of fiction would be alive to them all.

For, when reading Joyce in Ulysses (or even Finnegans Wake), it is not as if we need to be able to know all the different languages that he uses, or follow the references that he makes to Dublin (current as at 16 June 1904), to take in the novel's sweep³.


Here, Marc Recha's La vida lliure (2017) is a similar, but direct, immersion of the senses, which just asks us to see and hear as much as possible, and absorb it : a gorgeous sound-scape complements cinematography that, at least, apparently feasts itself on the effects that can be achieved by using available light (in what seems to have been a shoot of only 15 days) – and they will blossom wonderfully in a darkened auditorium where a film like this belongs, projected on a cinema-screen and evoking aspect of the penumbral, crepuscular and nocturnal :


If we can think of how Marc (Michel Quer) looked at Venice in La redempció dels peixos (The Redemption of the Fish) (2013), and what director Jordi Torrent showed us through his visitor’s eyes [here is a link to the trailer (on the industry film-sharing platform Vimeo)], or of Agustí Villaronga and his co-writers, in setting Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory) (2017) in Aragón in 1937, we will have suitable film-references from previous seasons of Camera Catalonia in mind.



Four stills : from La redempció dels peixos (above), and Incerta glòria (below)


What we essentially have here is a boy (Biel) (who noticeably gets an interest in his name above that in that of Tina, his older sister), and both of whom are now with their uncle on Menorca (Minorca), because their mother could not take them with her to Algeria. (We do not know where they came from, but might guess that it is not one of the other Balearic Islands, but the mainland territory of Catalunya [Catalonia], far from here ? [Incidentally, the Catalan director Villaronga was born in Palma, on Mallorca (Majorca).])


A physical geographical map of Islas Baleares (The Balearic Islands) - from Wikipedia


In a residence by the harbour, a man calling himself Rom, from whom – without much force or effect – their uncle tells them to stay away. Yet, other than their uncle lovingly spending time with them when he rests, and their doing jobs around the farm that he tenants, there is little to occupy them.


Biel (Macià Arguimbau), Rom (Sergi López), and Tina (Mariona Gomila)

Time on their hands does not exactly lead to mischief, but we will find – amongst other things, if we are observant – that Rom fixes up a swing that their uncle did not find time to do (and which he had forbad Tina attempting, when she suggested it). For, part of the purpose and intent of the film is to acclimatize us to the sounds and rhythms of this simple place and the way of living there, and to get used to what stays the same (or to what changes) - as if, ourselves, we become Tina and Biel... ? :



Although Núria Prims is credited for a very minor part in the film, Ramon Lamarca (who programmes Camera Catalonia at #CamFF) stressed that she also carried out the important role of coaching Biel (Macià Arguimbau) and Tina (Mariona Gomila). (Prims strikingly played La Carlana last year in Incerta glòria, and one suspects that she may have done the same office for, as well as being the mother of, her murdered husband’s supposedly illegitimate children⁴ in the film.)


Núria Prims (as La Carlana) on set in Incerta glòria


As in Guillermo del Toro’s superb Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) (2006), La vida lliure’s success depends on their performances, and therefore on our being engaged with whether - and, if so, the extent to which - they should trust Rom, of whom their uncle seems to disapprove strongly (and whom, with mistrust, he even confronts).



We may recognize Miquel Gelabert from El cafè de la marina (which these pages prefer to translate as The Harbour Café¹) (2014) - Libori, the inn-keeper father to Caterina (Marina Salas). Likewise, from last year in Camera Catalonia, Sergi López as Rom - from when he played a cynically unwelcoming uncle Enric to Gabriel (Àlex Monner) in La propera pell (The Next Skin) (2016).



Miquel Gelabert (and Marina Salas) ; below, Sergi López (R) (with Àlex Monner (L))

Those are simply observations, in case anyone is wondering why the face of Rom or the uncle might be familiar, but they are not given to suggest that, unlike Sílvia Munt [adopting Josep María de Sagarra, adopting Pagnol] in The Harbour Café, La vida lliure is likewise observational cinema per se, or essentially driven by the characters and their more-or-less known (or guessed-at) motivations.

In a sense, though, the film will come to us, if we come to it and treat it on its own terms, and, as with Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno), we should bear in mind how it opened, what we have noted in between in that light, and how it closes :




Stills from El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) (2006) [Doug Jones and Ivana Baquero]

Until which point, the gift of the use of light in Hélène Louvart's cinematography (please see the stills above), and in the beauty of the sound-design [on the film's web-page on IMDb, three individuals and a mixing studio are credited for the Foley], has similarly been a lesson in creating atmosphere, which furthers our mental uncertainty about a town or port that we have not seen, or about the influenza, which we similarly cannot see, but of whose results we hear.


The images are exact - it's our understanding that lacks precision

They are the ‘big things’ of life that penetrate - as in Michael Frayn’s powerful war-time novel Spies ? - into the consciousness of Tina and Biel, but from which they are expected to remain at a distance : as much as from why their mother had to travel without them (even though she is able to write to them) and leave them in this place⁵ ?


Tina (Mariona Gomila), their uncle (Miquel Gelabert), and Biel (Macià Arguimbau)



The #CamFF synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here,
and it screens on Monday 29 October [in Screen 2 at Festival Central] at 7.15 p.m.


End-notes :

¹ Without being a speaker of Catalan, one always hesitates about how / whether one should translate the definite article. (Thus, #UCFF has argued that Immense Beauty is nearer to what La grande bellezza (2013) conveys than the word-for-word English title.)


Galatea Ranzi and Toni Servillo in La grande bellezza (2013)

In some languages, the article must be there with a noun, i.e. one cannot just say Dolce vita - it has to be La dolce vita. Here, vita and vida are clear cognates, and so a less literal title in English might be A Life of Freedom ?

² At BAFTA (@BAFTA), they decently require that members and those whom they invite as their guests stay in their seats until the last line of the closing credits and the house-lights have gone up. (One forgets, from a solitary visit in 2015, but the curtain may go across as well.)

³ That date in June was that of his first date with Norah Barnacle, the woman whom he married. For such and much, much else, we have illustrated and / or foot-noted editions of Joyce (as for The Bible), such as Ulysses Annotated ! :

As to 'sweep', Joyce opens the Wake with riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs


⁴ Much hung on La Carlana's assertion of their illegitimacy, and, in this (and elsewhere), she may have deceived the local Republicans – who would have killed them, and her, too. Whereas they allow her to become stronger, almost unchallenged, until the battle for the soul and heart of Catalunya (Catalonia), against the will and weapons of fascism, erupts at the end of the film - with her sons and she retiring together under the covers : the significance of how Incerta glòria finishes, as if she has fomented this display of war-like action, will hardly have been lost on a Catalan audience.


La Carlana (Núria Prims) in Incerta glòria


⁵ As to what writer / director Marc Recha has done with what is in and amongst the credits, presenting the film’s title is deliberately ‘held back’ until just beforehand. As, perhaps, with Debussy’s titles to the works in his two Books of Préludes : only shown to us when relevant ?

Thus, the foot of the close of 'La cathédrale engloutie' (tenth in the first Book of Préludes) (taken from http://myricaeblog.wordpress.com/second-year/march-challenge/la-cathedrale-engloutie)




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

Friday 5 October 2018

#UCFF Tweets about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

The #UCFF Tweets about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

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


5 October (updated 29 October)

The #UCFF Tweets about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)





This Tweet is about the contrast between blonde Naomi Watts (as Betty / Diane Selwyn) and Laura Harring (playing Rita and Camilla Rhodes) in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) :








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

Monday 3 September 2018

An Arts Picturehouse Special Screening of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989)

Following an Arts Picturehouse Special Screening of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989)

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


3 September


Following an Arts Picturehouse Special Screening of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989)





Samuel L. Jackson as Mister Señor Love Daddy








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

Wednesday 29 August 2018

First impressions of Paris When it Sizzles (1964)

First impressions of Paris When it Sizzles (1964)

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


29 August


First impressions of Paris When it Sizzles (1964)







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

Sunday 26 August 2018

Some Tweets about The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Some Tweets about The Lady Vanishes (1938)

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



26 August


Some Tweets about The Lady Vanishes (1938)


Sally Stewart, Margaret Lockwood, Alfred Hitchcock, and Googie Withers







Alfred Hitchcock and Margaret Lockwood







From the interviews that François Truffaut boldly asked for, and Alfred Hitchcock graciously granted (to both men's credit*), one can click here to listen to Hitchcock-Truffaut Episode 7 : ‘Young and Innocent’, 1937, ‘The Lady Vanishes’, 1938 and ‘Vertigo’.





End-notes :

* A story told in Hitchock / Truffaut (2015) :






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

Thursday 23 August 2018

Three Tweets about The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

Three #UCFF Tweets about The Miseducation of Cameron Post (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)


22 August

Three #UCFF Tweets about The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)*




Sasha Lane and Chloë Grace Moretz






Desiree Akhavan, Chloë Grace Moretz, Sasha Lane, John Gallagher, and Jennifer Ehle





End-notes :

* As viewed at The Little Theatre cinema [@LittleTheatreUK], Bath :






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

Wednesday 25 July 2018

I swear that there are cracks that weren’t there before ~ A review of Julia Bolden's Alternate Slices

This is a review of Twisted Willow Theatre in Julia Bolden's Alternate Slices

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


24 July

This is a first-night review of Julia Bolden's Alternate Slices, as performed by Twisted Willow Theatre at Corpus Playroom, St Edward’s Passage, Cambridge, on Tuesday 24 July at 7.45 p.m.


Julia Bolden's play Alternate Slices, which premiered this evening at Cambridge's cosy Corpus Playroom (@corpusplayroom), runs until Saturday 28 July.




Without saying so, Julia Bolden deliberately evokes a tennis-court, and umpire's chair :




Plays are fully as referential as films are expected (or wrongly uniquely imagined ?) to be¹, so Alternate Slices is suitably infused with other works of theatre, such as Michael Frayn’s masterly Copenhagen, Christopher Hampton’s Treats, Stoppard’s Arcadia or The Real Thing, or Ian Rickson's fascinating production(s) of Pinter's Betrayal and Old Times². [Which is to say that, with the last of these, #UCFF had 'to watch both ways'³, i.e. with KST (Kristin Scott Thomas) as Kate and Lia Williams as Anna, then vice versa].



Those predecessor plays are named, in case they help to understand what to expect of the scope and nature of Bolden's prescribed and circumscribed universe, and by no means to daunt, but encourage, the general reader by introducing them as and for company⁴ - since they are not quite bed-fellows (except in that limited sense of ‘Ishmael’ and Queequeg in Moby Dick).


Not precisely off duty, the cast (L to R)
Steven Kitson (Matt), Ashley Harris (Nick), Jenny Scudamore (Finola)


Still, one might ask, why all this cleverness (from #UCFF) ? Well, for one, because the play itself talks about post-graduate life, so that is the other-worldly realm to which Matt, Finola and Nick still partly relate (because drawn to academically), when not having to plan how to go about decorating (filling, rather than painting (or even papering) over, the cracks), or kite-surfing at Hunstanton : do they, as some will claim that the phrase has it, Live in their heads still, and not [in amongst] the physicality of the world... ?

The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika' (1994) ~ Martin Kippenberger


And yet, for example, although all three of Matt, Finola and Nick are very and almost equally talkative, superficially covering - when not spikily alluding to - their common hurts and gripes (passing hints of Sartre and Huis clos ?), does Matt riff a little on the more morbid / saturnine parts of Deeley in Old Times, and Nick on his ostensibly more gregarious Pinteresque cover-up for envy, menace, and unacknowledged fear / insecurity ?

The opening-page, in a MS original [the 'Ellesmere' MS], of the tale told by The Knight in Chaucer’s 'The Canterbury Tales' : A story that effectively begins with Palamon and Arcite, who are cousins as well as imprisoned knights, and when Palamon, waking early one day in May, sees Emelye, a princess, from their shared tower-cell…


Pinter's play, of course, is a man and two women³, and vying - as if it is a final battle - for whose relationship with whom is rooted in the least assailable memory, which Alternate Slices arguably may not (or may ?) be found to be... ?




Postlude :

Which is where, to be a first-night review that might be seen by a second-night audience (and the rule of thumb, of course, is that the teething problems of opening night have been [insert whatever continues the analogy / metaphor] and the show is even better, this attempt has to end...

Oh, you'd really like to see that extra bit⁵ that didn't find a place (in time), would you ?



End-notes :

¹ Those whose milieu is as much cinematic as theatrical may not only find possibilities here for a screenplay (as already mentioned, in passing, to Julia Bolden afterwards), but also such film-references useful as - in no particular order – Sliding Doors (1998), About Time (2013) [NB Richard Curtis cannot 'do' time-travel], Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run) (1998) [the link is to the IMDb web-page for the film]...



² And maybe, momentarily, Beckettt's Play ?

³ Although playing it both ways, where KST was Kate half the time (and even on the throw of a coin, for some performances), brought out both what Lia Williams and she were bringing to each role, and how that made Rufus Sewell, in each of their equivalent Deeleys, necessarily different and so not static either, even at the level of how the stage-business was blocked.



⁴ Thinking as much of Sondheim’s Company, as Bekettt’s late prose masterpiece of the same name.

NB Embedded links (below) are for illustrative purposes only, and not paid or any promotion, endorsement or recommendation of goods and / or services referred to therein or thereby :


You might lay bets, handle cancelled bookings and make them available again, or work as an ethically sourced wedding-planner – but living with uncertainty is part of the territory ~ McLuhan (paraphrasing Barthes)






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

Wednesday 18 July 2018

For Ocean's Eight (2018), four Tweets

For Ocean's Eight (2018), as seen at The Light Cinema, Cambridge, four Tweets

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


18 July


For Ocean's Eight (2018), as seen at The Light Cinema, Cambridge, four Tweets









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

Saturday 14 July 2018

Some notes from a viewing of Almodóvar's Live Flesh (1997)

Some notes from a viewing of Almodóvar's Live Flesh (Carne trémula) (1997)

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 July

Some notes from a viewing, on DVD, of Almodóvar's Live Flesh (Carne trémula) (1997)



They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow :
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense




Christmas Eve 1970 (Franco's Spain / excuses for repression)
Victor - Bus - Centro


A cast that is a close-knit quintet - in adapting Ruth Rendell, Pedro Almodóvar gives us the sort of love-circle of a play by Jean Racine, which (Samuel) Beckettt gently parodied at the start of Murphy, or we may know from (Arthur) Schnitzler and La Ronde... :

David ~ Javier Bardem
Elena ~ Francesca Neri
Victor ~ Liberto Rabal
Clara ~ Ángela Molina
Sancho ~ José Sancho


'We are two tear-drops
In a song'


Like a musical
Or an old film



David - re-enacting Rear Window (1954), with an immensely more mobile version of James Stewart (as L. B. 'Jeff' Jefferies)

Sancho - married 12yrs - hits wife
Victor - in reading the Book of Genesis, sees Moses referring to him

Bienvenido mat


'You need me more than he does'

'Yes, you're offensively honest'

'I'll keep exploiting your guilt complex'


Ends in 1996 - stopped being shitless




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

Cambridge Open Studios 2018 : Visiting Anna Pye (and Pepper)

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 July

Cambridge Open Studios (July 2018) ~ The Open Studio of Anna Pye (and Pepper)





There are plenty of lino-cuts and mono-prints available to buy, or just to admire - on display, in a portfolio, or in several free-standing browsing-racks :




Upper : Breakfast (mono-print, 1 / 1) ; Lower : Portfolio, open to a puffin with sand-eels


As in previous years, Anna kindly allowed #UCFF to take photos in order to Tweet, etc., about her Open Studio, but cards and numerous items with her designs, from tea-towels to cushions and tote-bags, are on sale :




As Anna says, when purchased, prints can come in a variety of forms - to suit the buyer...




All in all, plenty to inspire in Anna Pye's Open Studio 2018 - including that owl, and Pepper the Cat :





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

A few second-night Tweets about in situ:'s production of Woyzeck, by Georg Büchner

A few second-night Tweets about in situ:'s production of Woyzeck, by Georg Büchner

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


A few second-night Tweets about in situ:'s production of Woyzeck, by Georg Büchner







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

Friday 13 July 2018

Pure review-notes : The Sixteen perform in York Minster during York Early Music Festival 2018

Pure review-notes : The Sixteen perform in York Minster during York Early Music Festival

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


For those for whom waiting for a fully written-out account is needless, because the review-notes suffice, here they are for The Sixteen's performance, in York Minster and as part of their Choral Pilgrimage and during York Early Music Festival, on Wednesday 11 July at 7.30 p.m.

The Sixteen

Britten ~ A Hymn
Serious, but not solemn - affecting, praise and celebration

Cornysh ~ My love
Just males
A work that subtly grows, and also through the element of hearing the refrain repeated

Britten ~ Hymn to
I - dramatic touches and harmonies

Use of the more restrained chorus

II - playfulness continues, with lightness of touch

Chorus - with greater gravitas, but transparent and joyous

III - the effect as of rain-drops
With a super solo, the scale and scope of what Britten creates
Fire - deep bass
'With fire' - emphasis

Cornysh ~ Salve Regina
A rich, layered setting, which, at times, seems rooted in plainsong
Full of beauty and gracefulness

II - Virgo mater section - timelessness
Soaring end with 'O pia'

III - Simple 'o dulcis Maria', but decorated
Boost on 'Salve'


* * * * *


Sixteen Part II

Britten ~ Advance Democracy
Paced and vigorous

Cornysh ~ Ave Maria
The melismatic, imitative lines were brought out in a coherent and robust ensemble

Cornysh ~ Woefully Array'd
A multi-entry opening to a piece whose premise reminded of Dietrich Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri
High and low - then filling in in-between
Echo of opening with 'woefully'
II alto voice

Cornysh ~ Ah, Robin
At times, a round for three voices
Not complicated, but effective

Britten ~ Sacred and Profane
I - revisiting Sainte Marie x3
II - Interruptions
III - covering ground quickly (as VIII)
IV - Same theme in ll. 1-2
V - still point (Leiermann)
Tortured and painful
For the luve
Meditation
VI - Use of a chorus - chilling
VII - challenge to us

Assembly of the texts
Ending with the grave




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