Showing posts with label Neil Brand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Neil Brand. Show all posts

Wednesday, 1 November 2023

Keen appreciation for Neil Brand's Laurel & Hardy show : Seen at The Stables, Wavendon, MK

Keen appreciation for Neil Brand's Laurel & Hardy show : Seen at The Stables, Wavendon, MK

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

31 October (additions, 5 January)

Keen appreciation for Neil Brand's Laurel & Hardy show : Seen at The Stables, Wavendon, MK
















Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 3 March 2017

Mayhem with murderous intent, yet stately and serious of purpose : Neil Brand's orchestral score for Robin Hood (1922)

This is a review of Robin Hood (1922), with new orchestral score by Neil Brand

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

25 February



This is a review of the new orchestral score for Robin Hood (1922) by Neil Brand, as performed by The BBC Symphony Orchestra, under Timothy Brock, at Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden, Essex, on Saturday 25 February 2017 at 7.00 p.m.




Playwright, composer and accompanist of silent fims, Neil Brand (@NeilKBrand) has recently come to a wider audience as a t.v. broadcaster, in and through his series The Sound of Cinema, and The Sound of Musicals

Neil¹ has regularly played silent films at Cambridge Film Festival - including, last year, Buster Keaton for Kids [of all ages] ~ Here we had Neil’s score for more than 90 musicians for Robin Hood (1922), as orchestrated by Timothy Brock (for the second part, alongside Hugo Gonzalez Pioli) : by contrast, in 2011, Neil and percussionist Jeff Davenport had played it between them at #CamFF


First part :

At the start of the film, the scene was given by a glissando, the timpani, and by setting the woodwind against the brass, and lively writing for harp. Later, as tournament was established, a quiet theme was presented, with a hint of horns, and we were already quite clear who were King Richard I (Wallace Beery) and the Earl of Huntingdon (Douglas Fairbanks) [plus the skulking, sullen Prince John], and, amidst trombones, martial sounds, and procession, the gracious sweetness of strings.

 During stately declamations, Lady Marian Fitzgerald was next characterized by a delicate pizzicato, Prince John by deep cellos and basses, and sinuous oboe for Sir Guy of Gisbourne. Gisbourne tries to cheat, to get near Lady Marian (Enid Bennett), but this is the last of Huntingdon’s thoughts (soberly assuming a fair contest of skill ?), and we focus on the merriment (rather than Gisbourne (Paul Dickey) and his henchmen) - because Fairbainks is mobbed by women (in that way of ‘the flower of chivalry’), but has told his king that he is ‘afeared of women’ [which tickles us - it tickles us especially, for the combination of the shame-faced inter-title, with Huntingdon's demeanour !].

 Later, in the huge hall of the castle (Fairbanks' dreamchild), as Prince John (Sam De Grasse) toys with his sinister goblet, and a desire to poison Richard, the latter has more sport at Huntingdon’s expense, by tying him to an upright stone, and at the growing mob of women around him : he breaks away to rescue, and find fascination in, Lady Marian [many of the women around and about him were more obviously alluring - but she must be his type ?], and so make himself an enemy to Gisbourne (Paul Dickey). It is only just at this point that we had become truly aware that this gathering is on the eve of setting out for the Crusades, and as he courts her (with a love theme plus flutes).


With the procession in which King Richard makes ready to go – he appointed Huntingdon to be his second in command, and also urged him to woe a maid during the night before, but, with increasing tetchiness, Wallace Beery peremptorily now calls out for Douglas Fairbanks’ appearance – we hear purposiveness in more subdivided note-values. It is from now on that we become more aware of the vibraphone (or ‘vibes’), and start to notice how it becomes significant : we think of it usually as a relaxed sound, but these are sinuous and sinister vibes, and – in conjunction with the Prince John theme – denote his dread intent, of which we already know…

The army is on the Continent when Marian is bold to pen Huntingdon an uncensored account of life in England under the rule of John, and, in this respect, Robin Hood is a political film for our day, because it shows how quickly what had been taken for granted in life can change and be changed : for John has swiftly moved to tax and otherwise penalize those who already had little to make revenue² for him and those to whom he looks to maintain power. As well as a shock, a love-note for Fairbanks, which comes with the sweetness of oboe and flute.

 Fearful that Richard will abandon the Crusade, if he knows, Fairbanks feels forced to make his request, without giving reasons, to return to England, and we hear the solemnity in the trombones, and the snare-drum. Unfortunately, he then has to repeat it, because the same man who made Huntingdon his second also insisted that he needed a maid at home, for when war is over, and now cannot credit him with any better reason than she : king and knight are not talking the same language, because the former sees it as a big, if impertinent, joke.


Meanwhile, the highly symbolic play is in the sky, with Gisbourne’s falcon bringing down the dove that bears Huntingdon’s message for Lady Marian (at the tournament, Richard had enticed John to wager his falcon on Gisbourne’s tourney defeating Huntingdon). The score to this, Gisbourne’s stopping Huntingdon from deserting, and instead producing the message and other proofs of treason gives weight to the serious purpose, and sense of the stately, and then with eerie effects on vibraphone, and plangent viola and cello.

 Fortunately, Gisbourne is another knight out of step with his king, because the more that he over-eggingly insists that death is the penalty for a traitor, the less Richard wants to do it. Bundling Huntingdon (still with a fresh wound from Gisbourne) and his squire into the tower till Richard’s return looks undignified and painful, but it is worth harp and soft vibes, although the latter become suspensive with the plot ‘then let them rot’, when the convoy has moved on. (Surviving is what proves to have mattered, as the squire then springs them from captivity…) With the process and intensity of the score, we had been able to feel the drama building, which is something special in music for silent film.


For the close of the first part, to which this has been prelude, messages in telegraphese about the mysterious robber-chief (with which Neil Brand made play in Blackmail (1928) [also at Saffron Hall, with this conductor and orchestra], and its computer-brain, seeking incriminatory data), and the impression of lively rebellion from the luminous violins, and their energy and pulse : stealing from the rich to give to the poor, whilst John - when not torturing and persecuting – uses outdated (and fussily tetchy) words, such as ‘meddling’ and ‘tattling’, to describe Lady Marian’s actions.

 From other films (and accounts), we know the fantastical exploits in more detail, and the characters and characteristics of the woodland ‘pals’, such as Will Scarlett : after some merrie frolics and horseplay, Fairbanks’ focus remains on the story of this new life, for Huntingdon, as Robin Hood… (The original inter-title granted an interval of just six minutes, but service at the bar necessitated taking a little longer.)
Second half :

Slow to make good on ensuring that some people did not return from the Crusade, and to flute and harp, and then to the surprise of the deed with vibes, strings and tubular-bells – Gisbourne stabs the sleeping Richard. Except that, to resonant vibes, and then muted trombones and timps, when he turns over the body, Richard finds that his fool (or jester) has been killed in his stead (he tells him that has slept in his bed once too many).

 Gisbourne is hardly ‘a valiant knight’, but, when Richard hears of one in England, he guesses at who it is, and his laughter, and that of Robin, link them (as against the sour John) : to an English dance, and then the tune of ‘Richard of Loxley’, we see good-hearted distribution of dole, and restorative acts, on the greensward.
It is usually said, with versions of the story of Robin Hood and Lady Marian, that she must have thought him dead, when she had no answer to the message that she sent, and she, equally, had spread around the story of her death, although she is actually at the priory of St Catharine’s : in Robin Hood, the moment when they become disabused is exactly that when what has really happened to them - and who and where they are - becomes known to Prince John, mixing Joy with Doom...

With that to work on, in terms of dramatic irony, the second part of the film is where whether escaping, or getting somewhere else to effect a rescue – in time – is in issue, and generates suspense. The first is at St Catharine’s, after Robin Hood has brought back its monstrance and other liturgical items (John’s pretence of raising funds for the Crusade – by raiding a religious order – is shown to be just that), and intercutting with, probably, the Sherriff of Nottingham's men approaching, but about John’s dire retributive work.


 Here, Neil gives us :

 (1) Lady Marian, by water – richness of strings and modulation, (2) another initiate identifies Robin Hood as Huntingdon – swell and woodwind, and brass undertones, (3) the plotting of John – sinister tremolo plus vibes, (4) Robin and Marian – ‘happy’ violin-tone and vibes, (5) cross-cutting, until Robin mistakenly leaves her, as if safe – triangle and soft pizzicato, (6) the militia approaches - a sinister snare-drum pattern, (7) arrival of troops - snare-drum plus triangle and xylophone, (8) when searching - over to glockenspiel, then back to xylophone.


The next long scene is with Lady Marian and the Sherriff of Nottingham (and briefly contrasted with Robin’s mood, thinking that a victory has been won, and that he can carouse – till told news otherwise), and scored with elements that begin with tremolo, with bassoons and trombones, and then enters the territory of ‘spooky’ vibes, heralding the screech of woodwinds, joined by basses, for the Prince John theme - to which are added trombones, plus tubular-bells (as at the fool’s death), and with that ambiguity, as previously, of the beats of the snare-drum.


Momentarily, these disturbing elements are mitigated by the excitement of the stranger’s lusty fight with Little John, who then (and therefore) acclaims the still-helmeted figure King Richard – to the jubilant sound of cymbals. In Nottingham, Robin is happy, joining in, and celebrating its capture - with an ale-horn³ : till he has news of Marian’s, and makes great haste for the castle, which we hear in the use of hectic xylophone. BBC Symphony boasted some half-a-dozen versatile percussionists, watching whose movements served as a guide [as at an all-Steve-Reich concert at this venue]), and clarified what sounds were reaching us at any moment (as well as hoping to keep track of the action). This player moved directly to give us a moody passage on the vibes, and into further telegraphese (with harp and strings), to signify the messages that are vitalizing the counter-assaulting forces.


Now, it is as if, for her tattling and meddling, Lady Marian is no better than some sacrificial victim. (At the time of John’s peeved comments, we had seen her lady-in-waiting or handmaiden tortured, to make her confess what her mistress had written to Huntingdon, but there was no Marian to answer the offences.) The inter-cutting is to Robin’s high daring, notably athleticism on the drawbridge, and we know that he provided Marian with a dagger, expressly in case of her virtue being assailed, so his battling against great numbers is also against the clock.

 At one point, we see Marian speak from under a cross, with xylophone, timps, and string-strokes – perhaps for private devotions, long abandoned in this castle, where Marian is instead supposed to be the agreed reward for ill-doing (although twice bungled) ? Later, she is driven to the window by the menace of Gisbourne's advances, and, looking up, Robin perceives the danger, seeing her at the window : as has been the stuff of theatre since as least Sophocles, and evidently in Lear, there is a leap, but no fall.


Do not ask, as one’s attention was elsewhere, how Neil scored Robin jumping up and Marian’s being caught, but, be it here or with Neo and Trinity in The Matrix (1999), there is something so deeply and primally moving about the other being there, seconds to spare, to effect the rescue. As Huntingdon, Robin promised to crack Gisbourne’s spine, and we heard that sound ring out, after Robin has had his grip around Gisbourne’s neck, exerting force – again, immersion in the drama means that, as is a true credit to conductor’s and composer’s craft, one would have to watch again to know what the scoring did here !

 So, from Marian and Robin meeting again after a year or more (though unaware of the tightening noose), and Robin spurred into energetically saving her from death (we can be glad that she did not trust to the blade that he gave her - please see above, as to when this was...), it is still Robin, alone, and unaided, despite the ‘three blasts’ horn-signal, which promised so much. Initially, the mood is summed up by anxious triangle and quiet xylophone, because Robin's charmed life only got him thus far, and not even Marian is safe again :


This still suggests that Marian may be given the dagger after the mid-air catch - an excuse to watch it all again !


 Against material to match the greatest darkness that Shostakovich conjures in his symphonic works, we see Robin tied to the same post where he was mocked, by Richard’s having placed him at the mercy of the mob of women. The cross-cuts, this time, are more frequent, but, although they offer some hope and even given that the dagger that John is to dip – as a signal to the cross-bolts to fire – obligingly lingers about doing so, too little is at hand. Or so it appears… because the bows fire, and then the tail and stout shield of King Richard interposes, deflecting them from harming Hood / Huntingdon.


It is not too much to say that there is a moment of revelation. The lion-hearted king, whose people his trustworthy patriot and friend has been protecting, and protecting in Richard’s own name⁴, reasserts his regality and his reign. Pulling down the dark drapes on the throne, Richard shows that the three vivid lions are still there, underneath the appearance.

Even now, some might perhaps still think to call it a group hug, but, back to the film’s opening gesture of glissando, Richard, Marian, and Huntingdon cheerfully embrace, as we launch into strings, and the flowering of the theme, with glockenspiel. Prince John is put outside the door, and the drawbridge raised against him.

 The only mutiny is in the matter of matrimony : passing over the question of droit de seigneur, has Richard’s sense of humour gone astray, or is it a test for Huntingdon ? On a wedding-night, we would – pranks apart (or those traditions that demand to see the virginal bed-sheets) – not do such a thing, but this is the third time that Richard has bellowed for his knight, and this at the door behind which he has been shut out.


Wisely, because, whether he wishes to give his personal greetings, he should really read Do not disturb !


As at the end of the first part, the approbation was warm and keen, but this time Neil could come down from his seat, and Timothy Brock and he could each urge that he owed the other more.

A thoroughly satisfying evening, and one commends which other dates this tour de force with Robin Hood screens on !


End-notes :

¹ Neil had comped Cambridge Film Festival director Tony Jones, who in turn invited Ramon Lamarca, its programmer of Camera Catalonia (as well as its Retro 3-D strand), and #UCFF. (This was a rematch, involving some story about winning a pair of tickets, through Silent London (@silentlondon), for the premiere at The Barbican in September 2016, and then Ramon not getting to see the film, because of someone at #UCFF getting the early start-time, of 7.00 p.m., wrong…)

² Forgetting that Crusades were, as all wars are, ways of occupying territory and taking what belongs to others, the usual version of the story says that John exaggerated the cost of the crusading force, and justified such cruel measures by needing to pay for it.

³ In branding terms – no pun intended ! – Huntingdon has caught this hearty, man-of-the-people look, and which has been the making of a trusty, if once unduly serious, knight – and the film thrives on the gaiety of the man who deserts his king’s service to do the proper service of saving his people, and of giving them comfort and hope.

⁴ With paper versions of Richard’s heraldic lions used to promote that allegiance, as well as prankishly belittling those who have been causing enmity and fear – there, again, is that unity in laughter). There is something proto-Aslan to Wallace Beery, though Aslan is more wise, who also enjoys good-natured fun ?




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 14 November 2015

They moved away the highway : Hitchcock and Herrmann in Psycho (1960) (work in progress)

This reviews Psycho (1960), with live score from Britten Sinfonia at Saffron Hall

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 November




This work in progress is a review of a film, with its score played live, at Saffron Hall (Saffron Walden, Essex) : Psycho (1960), performed by Britten Sinfonia, under the baton of Anthony Gabriele, on Saturday 10 October 2015






To be truthful, Psycho (1960) had not seemed Saffron Hall’s (@SaffronHallSW’s) ideal choice for World Mental Health Day (#WMHD = 10 October) – even if a colleague, in mental health, thought it a hoot (rather than a dire mistake that was likely to give rise to great offence)…

In the event, and in crucial respects (to be explored further below), Psycho was not the film that one remembered – as many a film may prove to be, when watched again… ? What the sum of Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates, Joseph Stefano’s screenplay, and Robert Bloch’s original novel did and does is much more nuanced than a merely reductive recollection wanted to say – all of those things make the film far more about culpability / criminal responsibility than about a stereotypically negative view of people in states of mental ill-health. (Does Hitchcock feel much nearer to what he believes in, about the mind, with Marnie’s (Tippi Hedren’s) motivations, and with her being mistrusted and misinterpreted by Mark (Sean Connery), in Marnie (1964) ?)


This part is intended to be non-spoilery*

 Seeing a film after more than thirty years, but having seen clips from it at Cambridge Film Festival (@Camfilmfest) in 2011, when Neil Brand (@NeilKBrand) presented his illustrated talk Knowing the Score, about Bernard Herrmann and his film-scores, one was surprised both by how much, and how little, was recalled :

 As well as the major crime, and what happened in the Bates house towards the end, one recollected well the apparent dénouement, the lengthy exposition by an expert (or an imagined one ?*) just before the closing sequence of shots. However, maybe its significance - in relation to those same shots - had been missed, at the time, or overlooked by more vividly remembering an explanation for what Norman Bates did, and who he was, that seemed tenuous… ?

Indeed, it is tenuous, but in fact that is rather the point of it, and why we might be interested in what follows it in the film. Looking at Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho (first published in 1959**) confirms that he intended something loose and artificial about understanding Bates in that way, because Bates’ view of himself, and how others will see him, from the start pervades how it has been written (which leads up to Chapter Seventeen, the three-page conclusion to the work that the film parallels) : the exact level of Bates' self-awareness (which we might gloss as ‘insight’) may be uncertain, but that of his self-reflexiveness is not.


The film with its score played live

 Psycho (1960) is introduced by music that serves as an overture (over the title-sequence), and which is not only full of swirling motifs (which are suggestive of the hesitation and guilt that are to wrack Marion in the opening part of the film [one notes that, in the novel, she is not Marion, but Mary]), but also presents the pattern of strokes that we are to hear later, when she showers. In this way, Herrmann is (as is so often his way – which is, of course, not to suggest that is not also that of Hitchcock) aurally preparing us for what is to come, just as does the inspired, but frenzied, title-sequence (we may remember the energy of that of Vertigo (1958)).

Just being aware throughout of Britten Sinfonia’s (@BrittenSinfonia’s) skilled string-players, arrayed below the screen, we could already sense Herrmann’s work of composition far more immediately than through any sound-system (although the soundtrack, with the music-tracks stripped out, continued to be heard through the speakers). The ensemble normally has a leader (or director), rather than a conductor, but being under the very experienced baton of Anthony Gabriele (@MaestroGabriele) was needful : having the instrumentalists and him before us really heightened our appreciation of how the film had been scored, both when they were playing, or, by being in waiting, thereby making us aware of how Hitchcock and Herrmann (the man, par excellence, of beautifully disconnecting harmonic progressions) had let silence speak. (One important unscored moment is when Marion has been forced to rest – please see below.)


It is a story which begins, at least, with immense specificity (as a crime-story might ?) : we have panned, and homed in on that building in Phoenix, Arizona, and that very room within it – a precise, named Friday (Friday, December the Eleventh - the year will come later), and even the time in the afternoon within it (Two Forty-Three p.m.). (Perhaps Hitchcock, too, when we are still in the mood for expecting when and where he will make an appearance himself, prepares us for Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates : just in one shot, at the window of the hotel-room, does he momentarily give us a premonition of Perkins ?)

 From Marion Crane’s conversation with her lover Sam (John Gavin), who will be flying back out of her life soon, we judge that (whatever the passion that they have just indulged) they are in an affair that does not seem to be going anywhere : the nearest suggestion (itself prescient ?) that we have that he will ever really be with her is when, referring to the question of alimony, he suggestively says I’ll lick the stamps. (Despite the tawdriness of having to be together in this room, they are dogged by the question of what is respectable - which really means ‘affordable’, because he cannot see any way to afford to leave his wife for Marion.)

Dogmatically, if not purely fatalistically, these establishing sequences of the film have Marion saying that one cannot buy off unhappiness with pills (and we also hear views about what happens When your time is up). All very relevant to society's life since influential books such as Prozac Nation (published by 1995), and yet with increasing numbers of prescriptions of such so-called anti-depressants, for patients expecting to escape ‘unhappiness’. When we meet the client of Lowery Real Estate, the dandy with the boot-lace tie and so significant for the plot, he even declares Unhappiness ? I buy it off ! (whose, one might ask ?) : already, Psycho (1960) has so much to say, for 2015, that we may have overlooked before…


We need to pass over the flirting at Lowery Real Estate, and its connection with power and money (though it is relevant to how Norman perceives / chooses to perceive [the character of] Marion Crane - not least as an ornithological taxidermist). In showing the temptation, and the distinct tease, of the cash in the envelope, which sits on the bed where Marion lives (as if it were a person or a lover : Sam, but suddenly become ‘affordable' ?), Hitchcock – excusably, because inexplicitly ? – plays with us just as much with her, as he also does with and through Alice in Blackmail (1929), and the question whether, if we could, we would try to distance ourselves from the scene of a crime…

What turns out to be Marion’s crime is one thing, and that of Norman Bates another (quite other), but Hitchcock involves us, and engages us, with what possibly connects them. For he keeps unravelling the skein of guilt, but keeps something back – because somehow one is reminded of Macbeth, and Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care, in a film where Sleep has a role to play. An idyll of just silence comes when Marion has had to pull over to rest – and, when she awakes to find that she has succumbed to sleep, everything is suddenly tense, because she also finds a traffic-cop looking in at her : he is in intense close-up, and with his expression impenetrably uncertain behind large, dark shades.

This moment, too, serves to set up eventually meeting Perkins, and how he interacts with Marion as Norman, and to inform their conversation both when she is first at the motel, and then in Norman’s parlour, as typified by this exchange :

 Traffic-cop : May I see your license ?

 Marion : Why ?

 Traffic-cop : Please...


Before this moment, arguably the most prominent visual – though much else may have distracted our conscious attention from it – has been Janet Leigh’s (Marion’s) very alert and wide eyes in the car***, intensified by her lashes as we watch her drive. This was in the montage when, over and over, she imagines what has been happening since she left town, which we hear in the intensity of the score, and as voices that are talking about her : an embodiment of a guilty conscience, for her and for us. Almost inverting how, in life lived outside the construct of a film, trying to sleep may be a time when memory crowds in and prevents it from happening (we can find ourselves tired, but not sleepy ?), Hitchcock gives us Marion, needing to press on in the dark, but dispirited and discouraged by these night-time thoughts, which sap her energy and resolve – that is a representation of depression and its exhausting effects (apt for #WMHD2015).


Far, far more could be said about the unfolding of this day on screen, with Marion’s seeking to escape the attentions of the cop (and, thus, her guilt personified), and finally arriving where she does, 15 miles from Fairvale : in all this, Herrmann’s score is naggingly there, with worrying how will what she did with the car help, and how much is she torn – by driving on, and by the darkness and the rain – as to whether she can do, or wants to do, what she is attempting. (In fact, is stopping at Bates Motel just fatigue again, or is it partly that she might plan to contact Sam and ask him here… because she does say to Norman about going into town to eat ?)

Having arrived here, though, there was delicacy now brought out in the Sinfonia’s playing, and also a depth of intonation and feeling : unlike those first audiences of Psycho, probably we know where this is going to unfold towards, but that is not important to watching Hitchcock, because following the craftsmanship in how he takes us there is part of the journey, and the mood of the music is tender, as Marion is shown to her room.



More to come...


 End-notes

 * In a section to come (which may end up as a separate posting on Unofficial Cambridge Film Festival), quotation will be made from Robert Bloch's novel Psycho**.

 ** First published in Great Britain in 1960 (Robert Hale Limited, London).

*** They will remind us of Perkins' eyes, right at the end of the film, as well as of when we last see Marion...




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday, 26 July 2015

Film Festival frenzy (#CamFF 2015)

Recollected in tranquillity : Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

27 July

Recollected in tranquillity :
The bustle that was Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF)

Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) is just around the corner from putting on its big show again – amazing to think that, when one first attended screenings there, all the programming was for a one-screen cinema, and one almost took for granted getting to see the new Woody Allen early…

As the Festival gears up for the thirty-fifth time (that’s where, behind the scenes, the frenzy comes in !), no less, a little moment to reflect on last year…


* Well, one was seeking to promote the Camera Catalonia (Catalan) strand, by providing reviews ahead of the screenings : a double pleasure, first to do so, and then to see how – beyond the confines of 'a screener', watched on a laptop – the full potential of the image blossomed in proper screenings


Composer Ethan Lewis Maltby, on the far right, during the Q&A for Fill de Caín (Son of Cain) (2013) (with Ramon Lamarca next to him, and director Jesús Monllaó)


* Relatedly, meeting and interviewing three Catalan film directors – and happening to take two of them punting on the Cam (and even giving one a punting lesson)


Punt pupil (and film director), Hammudi al-Rahmoun Font


* Plus lovely Festival photography from Tom Catchesides (@TomCatchesides) and David Riley (@daveriley) ! (That as well as being with the winning team of Catalan curator Ramon Lamarca, and intern-cum-interpreter Cristina Roures)



Ramon Lamarca and Mar Coll at Festival Central – image courtesy of Tom Catchesides


* The chance to watch both screenings of some Festival favourites at, and see especially how Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross) (2014) (but also Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy) (2013) repaid renewed attention



* The coffee, the chats, the news – in passing, as one dashed to different screenings – of other viewings, and the celebrated insanity of the TAKE ONE (@takeonecinema) crew (and of a Vine into which we were all cajoled, which was later banned (Not me, guv’ !)…)

* Meeting Dunstan Bruce (@dunstanbruce) for a fun, late-night TAKE ONE interview about A Curious Life (@a_curiouslife), his film on The Levellers (@the_levellers) (with a microphone-wielding editor in chief hiding under a table ?)



Dunstan Bruce


* With Screen 1 in gala mode, the warmth and energy in a film tribute to the late Tony Benn, Tony Benn : Will and Testament (2014)




* Warmth and energy of a different kind in, having guided one of the Catalan directors there, Festival regular Neil Brand (@NeilKBrand), with Jeff Davenport, playing to Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) (1930), an early picture credit for Billy Wilder




* And, of course, the expected preview of the new Woody Allen, Magic in the Moonlight (2014) (and the brief delight of a vocal from Ute Lemper) – a tetchy role for Colin Firth that also made some people unnecessarily sceptical of historical fact that men of his age married women of the age of Emma Stone ?












* Closing-night party ? No, sorry, one does not know anything about that !



See you at Cambridge Film Festival, daily during the eleven days from 3 to 13 September !




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 23 July 2015

Cambridge Open Studios 2015 : Images kindly supplied by Cathy Parker

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 July

 In two versions, the paintings described in the companion posting Cambridge Open Studios 2015 : Sunday 12 July (Weekend 2) – Happy viewing ! :



Images, speaking for themselves














And / or



Images, with intended characterization underneath


* North York Moors [CP2] – oil, £290



The view is characterized by ruddy clouds, with water represented, as it recedes, by purples and violets – what we feel most clearly in the landscape is the flatness, and the sense of distance



* Wicken Fen, November [CP8] – watercolour, £190




The eye is drawn to cherry browns, with yellow touches in the sky, and the blue-grey rendering of the trees that skirt the scene



* North York Moors [CP7] – watercolour, £190



In the heavy blackish brown of the foregorund, there is a detail of green, with, in the distance, a wash of cloud, and bluey-purple hills





 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 22 July 2015

Cambridge Open Studios 2015 : Sunday 12 July (Weekend 2)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 July




On 12 July, a day had been planned – despite the rain, which was not light at one stage – to visit the Cambridge Open Studios displays of three favourite artists...


Anna Pye






And now :





Gina Ferrari

Then (after elderflower at Anna's) a no less welcome invitation from Gina Ferrari (@FanMyFlame) :











Cathy Parker

Later, deliberately to see Cathy Parker’s work (which had been long admired, and often got one’s literal vote, at exhibitions by Cambridge Drawing Society), one ventured out to the church of St Mary the Virgin (?*) at Swaffham Prior : there turned out, still, to be relatively little of Cathy's on display (although there were some unframed works, notably a watercolour, Wicken Fen, Baker’s Fen [UF7]), but one engaged more with it than with that of her fellow exhibitors.




Here are some highlights, described :


* North York Moors [CP2] – oil, £290
The view is characterized by ruddy clouds, with water represented, as it recedes, by purples and violets – what we feel most clearly in the landscape is the flatness, and the sense of distance


* Wicken Fen, November [CP8] – watercolour, £190
The eye is drawn to cherry browns, with yellow touches in the sky, and the blue-grey rendering of the trees that skirt the scene


* North York Moors [CP7] – watercolour, £190
In the heavy blackish brown of the foregorund, there is a detail of green, with, in the distance, a wash of cloud, and bluey-purple hills


A good round of visits during Open Studios – before needing to make it to Saffron Hall (@SaffronHallSW) to review Neil Brand's (@NeilKBrand's) score for Blackmail (1929), performed by The BBC Symphony Orchestra (@BBCSO), conducted by Timothy Brock


End-notes

* None of the web-sites seemed, despite the fact that there are two churches in one churchyard, to take sufficient trouble to tell one which is which, so the venue was – as Cathy Parker kindly advises** – actually the Church of St Cyriac and St Julitta (dedicated, according to the detail of the Wikipedia® web-page, to Saint Quiricus and Saint Julietta)...

** She has also usefully provided images of the three paintings described : for those who like the words on their own first, they have been put in a separate posting...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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An environmental thread at #CamFF 2014 : Energized and (incomplete) Last Call

An environmental thread at Cambridge Film Festival : Energized (2014) and Last Call (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 July

An environmental thread at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 : Energized (2014) and (incomplete) Last Call (2013)

There is synergy (no pun intended !) between Last Call (2013) and Energized (2014), which is why they should be being reviewed together. (That said, a clash of programme at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF)* meant that only the last part of Energized could be seen – and the review of Last Call has been ‘forever’ finishing itself, so it will continue to linger, and we hope that it may follow…)



The latter seems more focused, because its sections, although in some ways discrete, bleed into each other – in a short space of time, we get a good sense of the energy-independency of Murnau, in Austria, with examples, facts and statistics concisely given, and then move on (via narration and then a caption) to a related topic. This is the style of the film, which means that it can cover much ground by linking segments in this way.

Who benefits from large-scale solar arrays, the possible merits of a super-grid for power distribution, and the competing claims about power loss when conveying electricity over vast distances were all presented – quite apart from France’s near-total reliance on nuclear as a source of energy, and the concerns about the integrity of how its nuclear waste is kept (nothing to do with the risk of terrorists gaining access, but the relatively poorly understood systems of storage that were apparently used in the early years (as mentioned in the review of Containment (2015) at Sheffield Doc/Fest (@sheffdocfest)), but which no one, except the campaigner shown (who installed them), seems to want to acknowledge and revisit) – the film is a compendium of issues that affect the choices that nations make for the future of Earth’s resources.



Yet one simple example hits home very hard, that of a farmer growing sunflowers on one-tenth of his farmland. He told us that harvesting crops (one assumes that he meant the whole process of planting seeds, spraying, harvesting, tilling and levelling) uses 23% of the world’s consumption of fuel. However, he has converted his machinery to be powered by the sunflower oil that he produces (and in a way that satisfied his wife that he was not ruining the machinery) : the oil not only provides fuel for his farm, but gives him the means to plant and harvest future sunflowers.




By contrast, Last Call (2013) takes a longer view, because its ambit is from when the study The Limits to Growth was published (in 1972 – we see footage of the hopeful launch), how it came to be written, and what has happened since. It suffers – not inevitably – on this account, because, at times, its focus seems to be on where its authors were twenty years on, a subtle shift from how the study itself is being viewed at that remove (although, for those still alive and campaigning, there is common ground).

With the fortieth anniversary, it becomes even less clear whether we are following the authors’ fortunes or that of their work, some of whom, such as Dennis Meadows, are still addressing conferences, whereas others, such as his ex-wife Donella, set up an environmental community (and had died before the anniversary)… The narration also suffers from the fact that the voice used seems to have a patronizing tone to it, which tends to make one feel that one is not being given credit for what one already knew :

 For example, Geography lessons at school (shortly after the report had appeared) had treated things such as the impending population explosion as understood – even if, when it comes to governments, they generally have not, of course, had the resolve to do very much to address it, despite the related problems of increased consumption of limited resources…

 What one did not appreciate, until now, was the existence of The Club of Rome (as instigated by the invitation of Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King), which had a significant role in the publication of The Limits to Growth, because it sponsored the visit to MIT and commissioned the report. Likewise, one does not recall footage of Jimmy Carter addressing the American nation about the challenges that it faced, and also putting solar-panels on The White House :

That with which one is more familiar is the attitude that ignored or disdained the possibility that mankind might be having any effect on the environment, typified by further footage, this time of Ronald Reagan, dismissing any idea of limits to growth as unthinkable – as if growth were a God-given right, even an undeniable virtue, and so anyone talking of limiting it were calling for a curb on the American spirit itself, if not pronouncing anathema.

 One takes from the film the idealism of the writers of the report, imagining that their views would be influential for good, and their not expecting a vigorous and very hostile reaction against them, which in the press – as a file of newspaper clippings show – rarely, if ever, engaged with the real issues, or represented the writers’ arguments for what they were.

 The report had been a scholarly plea, based on the best modelling available of the world’s interrelated and potentially ungovernable infrastructure (i.e. if left until out of control), to consider what growth upon growth would yield for the Earth’s future : just as Carter embraced the possibility of changing path to ensure mankind’s survival, so – because politically motivated – Regan’s administration ridiculed it.

 Probably (though other advocates are not much mentioned) they ridiculed Isaac Asimov, a scientist as well as a science-fiction writer. Green-house gases, and the effects that they may have had on the environments of other planets in the solar system, may have been fine for extraterrestrial science, but it was only in the little knee-jerk ban of CFCs (carbon fluorocarbons), when a hole was found in the ozone layer, that we have seen any obvious response to a consideration of Earth’s atmosphere.

 For Dennis Meadows, even if the point may have been passed when the foot could have been taken off the throttle with regard to the effect on Earth, he keeps on campaigning and fighting for this cause. [...]


End-notes

* Watching Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) (1930), with interpretative commentary from Neil Brand and Jeff Davenport, meant that one was elsewhere at Energized's start-time of 5.00 p.m.




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