In a grave situation

This is a rating and review of Gravity (2013)

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10 November


78 = S : 9 / A : 12 / C : 16 / M : 14 / P : 13 / F : 14

This is a rating and review of Gravity (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17 / 17 x 6 = 102)


With Gravity (2013), 'irrelevant' questions easily abound :

* How does fire propagate in a space station ?

* If fire were whooshing down a tunnel, would it delay momentarily to allow someone to get through a hatch ?

* Are not the International Space Station (ISS) and its hatches actually square in profile (as this footage, hosted by astronaut Suni Williams, shows), with rounded edges, not circular hatches (except for in the oldest part, the Russian module) ?

* Would debris said to be from a missile-strike on a satellite whose explosion had set off the destruction of other satellites behave predictably in orbiting the earth, all in one direction and at the same velocity?

* If communications’ satellites had been damaged, would communications between individuals, or between space stations, operate ?

* Could the ISS initially escape without damage and with an uncompromised air-lock, despite such debris ?

* When hit by debris, would it explode, as vessels commonly do in the cinema, as if it were kindling, or made of tinder ?

* How would an atmosphere and a survivable temperature be maintained in a capsule from which someone went out on a pressurized line, protruding from its hatch left ajar ?

* If it were not maintained, how quickly would systems be able to create a breathable atmosphere and acceptable temperature?

* Would bodies in space and colliding at relatively low speeds cause a thump of a collision ? The footage, taken within the ISS, suggests not. Here, also, is NASA footage, showing the use of a jetpack in a space walk.

* Do space suits, as NASA footage seems to suggest, really need two crew members to help lock together and seal upper and lower parts, i.e. not something that one could simply do on one’s own ?

* Does breath condense on the visor of such a space suit, given that they have to withstand and compensate for the temperatures of outer space (in the footage linked to above, our guide calls the suit a spacecraft, since it contains 300kg of equipment for regulating its heating and the breathable air)?

* Do not helmets (as this footage demonstrates) have a silvered visor to act as sun-glasses, which the film - keen to keep showing us the actors' faces (since, most of the time, nothing else was visible)* - does not show being used ?

Finally, here are some comments from astronauts, interviewed by First Post, about what mattered to them in what the film showed...

An astronaut's view on Gravity http://t.co/QDbyd4Htnf pic.twitter.com/adRd2w008H
— Guardian Film (@guardianfilm) December 2, 2013

None of these really matter, but they are niggly : they draw attention to the fact that a reality is being shown, as always in film, but that it may not be drawing on facts about space and survival in space, but be invention.

They also serve to detract from the fact that, apart from voices and a colleague whom she never see properly (until it is too late, and then by the proxy of a family photo), there are actually only two actors in this film – we are not even shown the famous control-room at Houston. Sandra Bullock (Ryan Stone), with some on-screen support from George Clooney (Matt Kowalski), has to carry it all, and, although I do not generally find her engaging as a performer, she must have done it, because I only realized this fact after the event.

Call it spirituality, call it faith, but there is a trail of images and ideas. In the Russian craft, above the controls, there is an icon (St Christopher, a fellow viewer thought), and, perhaps less realistically, a Buddha in the Chinese one (they are actually Korean, but lucky cats have been adopted fairly widely in Chinese culture). Thinking that she will not survive at one moment, Stone realizes that there will be no one to say prayers over her body and that she has never been taught how to pray, and, later, addresses requests to Matt for her daughter, amongst other things, that are effectively prayers.

Typically, for such a film, there are sacrifices in the interests of the wider good, there is ingenuity and lateral thinking, and we have evidence for the strength of the human spirit. Whether such traditional elements sustain here, any more than in The Day After Tomorrow (2004) or Captain Phillips (2013), depends on one’s point of view.

Bullock is good enough, compared with her usual showing, but others could have been much better, and Kowalski’s oscillation between making wisecracks or giving monologues and being directive in a grimly jokey does not leave a lot of room in between for the character development that Stone has, not least, as I observed, largely alone.

All that aside, for me, the setting in space has been compromised by, primarily, not getting detail right or cheating the laws of physics to spice things up. I wonder what Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield really thought...



End-notes

* I am merely saying that, if there are any pretensions to show things as they are, a film that can only show people through their visors is not an obvious place to start.


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All by the board ?

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9 November (updated 10 November)


* Contains mild spoilers *


79 = S : 15 / A : 14 / C : 12 / M : 11 / P : 13 / F : 14

A rating and review of Captain Phillips (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17 / 17 x 6 = 102)


I know that I am not alone in saying that the closing minutes of Captain Phillips (2013) made all that went before worth watching.

Much of those two hours was, not very subtly, made to seem more thrilling by quick cutting and by the effects of heartbeat-like pulsations, other percussive sounds, and sustained high-frequency notes, which one may not register in Henry Jackman's score, but whose sudden absence lifts the preceding tension. The script also makes use of power-games, and games of people tryin g to work out which game is being played, such as wearing your opponent down through talk, addressing comments to someone who is not there to make it seem as those one has a powerful ally, and, equally, speaking when one knows that, unknown to others, someone else is listening.

The film has some basis in actual events. We have a captain, in Tom Hanks, who notionally establishes his American Irish credentials by saying one line in a lilting brogue (brogues always lilt), but not at any other point. Prior to finishing getting ready, he gratuitously brought up the itinerary on his PC, telling it to us, but as if he was just checking to be sure, which might fit his desire to have things shipshape.

On the journey to the airport to meet his vessel, Rich (Phillips) is admirably concerned about his children's future, when in conversation with his wife Andrea, but he sounds as though he is paraphrasing the lyric of 'Times they are a-changing' in a Forrest Gump (1994) sort of way. His arrival in port in Oman has him check the security on the way up to the bridge, which he announces that he wants rigorously put in place, but, when the time of testing comes, it puts up no resistance whatever.

This is where one wonders what has gone before - Phillips must know more than the e-mail warnings of Somali pirates that we see on his screen on board, and the hoses that are deployed must have been installed as part of a stratagem on the part of Maersk, but, if so, it all seems a little rusty, and rather too ineffectual.

We have Phillips' preparations for sea, and we have that of Muse's (Barkhad Abdi's) crew, under his warlord boss - we compare the Western approach of civility in giving orders with that of the Somalis, shouting at each other and jostling for position, but it is there in the relations on the Maersk Alabama, when Phillips takes on an objecting union member, and urges people to finish their break on time. Another point of contact is engines, on both vessels, being taken beyond their limits, all of which tends to suggest how similar things are in this parallel way.

Still, we do not quite know how much, on Muse's and Phillips' side, is instinctual thinking on their feet, and how much training. Maybe a vain boast from Muse that a $6m Greek vessel had been caught, maybe it was, but all benefit went to his boss - the huge surprise is the successful boarding. From there, everything is bound to go in cat-and-mouse fashion to sustain the film's need for twists and turns, even if Phillips seems the person least likely to convince in lying (both as he does it, and with the lies to hand), and when Muse allows a powerful position to slide for reasons that are fairly tenuous : either he knows how to conduct a situation like this, or he does not, whereas he seems swayed by Phillips, almost as if the white man saying that he does not know what happened to the crew is worth listening to.

For me, when Phillips is left to his own devices, the situation does not build a claustrophobic tension whose resolution one longs for, but one that drags, and where the visuals did not impress a sense of confinement on me. (However, we do have the very necessary element that all this happens at the time of the full moon.)

Hanks after that, though, is an excellent end to the film, focusing just on him, his essential responses and feelings, before we pull out from a wide view and close. Abdi and his fellow captors, especially Najee (Faysal Ahmed) and Elmi (Mahat M. Ali), are very strong, and suitably threatening.


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Let the little children... : A write-up of Poor Kids (2011) and an Arts Picturehouse Q&A

This is a review of Poor Kids (2011) [Made for t.v. ?]

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15 October

This is a review of Poor Kids (2011) [Made for t.v. ?]

I had not seen Poor Kids on t.v. Around 100 of us watched, felt, feared. Sad that the Q&A host at @CamPicturehouse didn't ask a filmic Q...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 15, 2013

Not every statistic in this film – there are numerous quoted, many of them quite shocking – is stencilled onto a wall for us to read (the writing is literally on the wall), but those that are actually appeared to be, to judge from a long, angled shot, which leaves two children playing beneath it :

How take in that one in six children in poor families have thought of suicide, for example, or the effects on asthma and other conditions, or on mortality, of living in poor housing ?

We took it in more easily through the eyes, and prematurely wise words*, of Paige, living in a horribly damp apartment that, rightly, we see demolished, condemning the high-rise solution, and, as Paige tells us, the dust carried as far as Argos. We see how she has trimmed the blind, affected by mould, and hear from her how humiliating it is, even though she keeps clothes away from the window, to be told that she smells of it. She is a sensitive girl, adapted to these hard ways of living, and we can see her joy when her mother is given a property half-an-hour away, out of the Gorbals. Seeing her playing in the snow in their garden gives us hope.

The most shocking thing is how these children have to take on financial constraints. One subject, who had eczema on her legs (until repeated applications of cream cured her), chillingly told us, in a throw-away remark, how she had picked her legs until they bled as a way of feeling a sense of release. Self-harm is little understood in society, least of all that there are various, very different reasons, why people harm themselves, not all related to harming in itself – some, who feel numb, do it to feel something, whereas someone else might, through feeling in control (even only of what he or she is doing to her body), balance the sense that everything else is beyond their power.

Sam’s sister Kaylie (?) also told us, I think, that she had attempted suicide, and had suicidal thoughts. Although Sam was the subject in her family (in Leicester), we could see through Sam and her (Sam had to wear his sister’s blouse as a shirt (and her blazer) for school, and that was hardly going to go unnoticed) how they sought to support and understand the pressures on their out-of-work father, including the fact that Child Benefit for her had wrongly been stopped, and he was having to survive until the mistake got remedied. We saw him produce meals for them to eat that looked very nice, but which he said that cost almost for ingredients.

Empty fridges, children going without lunch, or having to be put onto free school meals, and meters for electricity or even t.v. – these things were the stuff of the lives that these children (and their parents) had allowed us to look into. And, as film-maker Jezza Neumann was at pains to point out in the Q&A, this film, had been made for t.v. two years ago, and yet people were still watching it – not a world that suddenly came into existence with The Coalition, but carrying over from the Brown years, and those of Blair before.

We were told that, not surprisingly after the screening, Sam had some two hundred donations of school uniform (and a vicar donated to set up a second-hand uniform facility), Page (I think that it was Page) an offer of riding lessons (she had wanted to try), and numerous other kindnesses from people whom the film had touched. Neumann’s take was that, when areas become those where the poor live, and no one is in any better position than anyone else to help a neighbour, that kindness cannot operate so easily as it might have done, when someone lost a job, and those near them could tide them over.

The film is extremely well made, and Neumann told us how those who had seen it in the States, prior to making the US version, had been through it almost frame by frame, before reporting that they had been unable to see how he had prompted these words from the featured children - he said that the only way to make such a film is to be honest, and that he had known, with Page’s mother, that people would query her apparently manicured nails, whereas she had cut them from Coke cans and superglued them on.

The snobbery between cinema and t.v. films apart, this film conveys its message effectively, economically, and with an emotional force.

We are still where we were, and worse, with Poor Kids (2011)...https://t.co/atiycAeQtahttps://t.co/8IomNOagED

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 8, 2019

End-notes

* We hear children, in this film, troubled with adult concerns, such as debt, how their presents can be afforded


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George MacKay Q&A

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19 October


When George MacKay answered questions at @CamPicturehouse yesterday afternoon, it was after a screening of one of his latest, For Those in Peril (2013) - guarding against the peril of forgetting, here is a posting to record the main points...



* Non-spoilery answers *


NB Here is a link to the review


MacKay worked on three films last summer, which, in order, were How I Live Now, For Those in Peril and Sunshine on Leith.

He said that, as he had most involvement with the director in this film, he had found it a more involving experience, whereas he might have relied more on the cast on other projects.

I asked about the voice that he had used for the voiceover, and how it had been arrived at - it sounded like a complex process, not just of director Paul Wright making it sound more breathy in post-production, but of MacKay working with Wright in a studio, trying being himself, being his character Aaron, etc.

I also asked whether MacKay thought that, given that Aaron sees through Michael Smiley's character (Jane's father), he would have taken in what the people in the town were saying about him, or was too absorbed in trying to get his brother Michael back to pay attention - MacKay thought that it would have affected him, but that he knows what he thinks

Host Jack Toye, Marketing Manager at @CamPicturehouse, asked where MacKay saw himself going in twenty years' time - Toye asked if he would be a Hugh Grant by then, but MacKay said that it was not for him to comment

It was also commented that, despite appearing in this film and Leith with an accent, Mackay is not Scottish - I am not so sure that those who do not sound Scottish do not call themselves Scottish, but am assured that MacKay is from London.

Regarding those fellow citizens' derogatory comments, we were told that they had a script for them, but improvised with Wright, who then processed the results in post-production

As to the arduous nature of the part / story, MacKay said that the support from Wright had made it not difficult, but an enjoyable experience

He had not researched mental health much, and his work with Wright had always been to see where the roots to what was happening to his character lay in events, rather than approaching the film as if it were about mental ill-health as such - the status of the doctor whom he sees was left deliberately imprecise regarding being a psychiatrist


At the end, the irrepressible Rosy Hunt from TAKE ONE presented MacKay with two gingerbread figures, the traditional gesture of welcome in these parts


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What can we learn from Tracy Chevalier... ?

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17 October

Well, I would listen to Richard Egarr, director of the Academy of Ancient Music, endlessly about musicianship, instruments and performance, because I know him, I trust him, and he is knowledgeable.

This filmed account of an exhibition (now past ?), co-written by Phil Grabsky (and another) under the title Vermeer and Music, probably thought it unavoidable to have Ms Chevalier in it.

Does it make as much sense for Jacobi to be a talking head on Bacon's paintings as for Chevalier to be one on Vermeer's ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 20, 2013

I do not know why. Yes, she wrote a best-selling novel about Vermeer's life, and it gave rise to a film of the same name (a vehicle for young Scarlett). The title of both renamed a painting that, albeit by tradition, already had a name. (Vermeer seems to have named none himself : nothing, other than an inventory of his house, was mentioned, whereas what I want to know is why - when he was also dealing in art - he did not have a catalogue of his own works, to whom sold, for how much, when. etc.)

The film, perhaps gratuitously, has a narrator (a woman) as well as an art historian (a man) as its host : in the discussion of the second painting that Chevalier was given space to talk about (probably four minutes of the film, twice, and so competing with the time allowed to the exhibition's curator), she called an instrument lying on its side, which the host had described a viola da gamba, a bass viol. They are not interchangeable terms.

I really do not know which speaker was right, but neither even noticed. This is meant to be a film about music, Egarr has already told us that a gamba is like a guitar on its side (it has frets), and, somewhere, the narration has said that the bass viol got taken over by the cello (via the baroque cello, I think), so there is no scope, and no credibility, in calling the depicted recumbent instrument both gamba and viol: it is just inexcusable that this level of inaccuracy is present at this fundamental level.


Am I interested in what narrative there might be in a painting (the two paintings from The National Gallery, which were flanking the guitar player from Kenwood House) ? Does that fit in with facts about Vermeer's family, wife, mother-in-law, household, children ? Do I need to give such space to this to the exclusion of further comments from curators from all over the world ?

At the exhibition itself, the AAM had been playing live – nothing gave that sense in seeing them filmed, for a short while, at the Handel House Museum, which could have had the camera moving from the players to the artwork and back, and which could have been both cinematic and evocative.

There was nothing about genuine Delftwork, no comment on the tiles that form a floor-level frieze in the two paintings that Chevalier was talking about. No mention, also, of Brian Sewell’s theory that the women in the Vermeers, because of how they are dressed, are prostitutes. Nothing, further, about how any artist who did not have brass chandeliers or any musical instrument might see examples to paint.

Nothing about the provenance of any of the works, or (except a hint, in one curator being interviewed, to the effect that Vermeer created a genre) whether he is believed to have originated them in the hope that they would sell (could any artist afford to do that ?), rather than being commissioned.


And what I wanted to know (or nearly did not get told) :

* That Vermeer  did not abandon the family business (which his deceased father had turned his hand to), because he was still dealing in art, and finding it hard to make ends meet, near the end of his life

* That the inventory tells us that the studio was in the four-storey home - but not why (unless painters worked from home) Vermeer did not incur the obvious expense, to have more space and quiet, of an external studio

* Whether it was unusual for artists' works to be untitled

* Why we only have 36 of the known 50 works of Vermeer (addressing the above - was there no catalogue ?) ?

* Do we really know nothing about whether the two to three paintings per year that Vermeer produced (compared, say, with how many by a typical artist) commanded a suitable price ?

* As to commissions, if Vermeer was dealing as well as painting, what the customary practice was - this model (a family member) with these elements and this feel and size and detail ?

* Could the woman standing at the keyboard (and her fellow, seated at one) be looking out, not at us (as we allegedly wanted the woman with the baroque guitar, in the centre, to do), but at the person who had commissioned the work


Too many such questions indicate too few hard facts, too little solid statement of professional opinion by experts...


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Descent into raggedness - the studio version

This is a review of Le Week-End (2013)

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16 October

This is a review of Le Week-End (2013)

* Unlike the director's cut, it may be possible to read this version and still see the film without knowing too much already *

I loved Lindsay Duncan in Shooting the Past, vulnerable but knowing, so it is only the ever-present hat that gives me pause with Le Week-End
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 16, 2013

Thankfully, Lindsay Duncan only wears the hat at the end - and one soon forgets the title...


Experimentally, I have rated the film 76 = S : 13 / A : 15 / C : 11 / M : 12 / P : 13 / F : 12 - follow this for explanation...

The end references a film clip from Godard, conveniently - unless it is a DVD, not t.v. - on the screen earlier on, but it have been nicer for the film just to have mimicked it, without explanation...

I am unsure about that (or the message that it sends, which will be visited in the director's cut of this posting). I also wonder about Haneif Kuresihi writing the screenplay, and will also need to look into that.

As to the raggedness, when trying to characterize it to someone after the screening who had not seen it, we agreed that the over-elaboration of different styles and types of shot highly resembled someone who is doing a first PowerPoint presentation, and, just because he or she can, having this slide coming in from the left, the next one dissolving - it does not add to the cinematic discourse, but disperses our attention when the crisp focus does not have a function, the arty shot with foregrounded objects wildly out of focus another, and becames variation for the sheer reason of being able to do it, rather than advancing the interpretative message.

The music leaves something to be desired, too. Famously, in the soundtrack to Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), Miles Davis and his quintet improvised it in December 1957 : rather cheaply, the composer's sub-Milesian tones were just brought in, from time to time, to convey the beauté triste (if that is the right word order) of Paris, lovers, life. Otherwise, it sounded more like shopping music, vaguely colouring the mood with a sort of sepia, or hitching a ride on Dylan (or the Godard film).

I had my reservations, but the Jim Broadbent strand in Cloud Atlas actually worked in well - plus he is in Le Week-End (avec Le Toast)...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 16, 2013

Those are the very bad things. The plus, an immense one, is the performances of Duncan (Meg Burroughs) and Jim Broadbent (as her husband Nick), although one did feel that one had been there a bit before with a quietly spoken Duncan not knowing her own mind or why she hides behind her husband and such reputation as he has. That apart, when she says that she'd like to stop teaching, learn Italian, play the piano, and dance the tango, we utterly believe in her desire to transform her live.

We believe in this couple, the dangerousness of being them, and how they surprise, hurt and electrify each other. We believe in Nick, despite an injured knee, on all fours, and wanting to scent Meg's vagina. We believe in him trailing after her, forlornly calling out Meg, Meg, wait, no, when she flounces out on him.
With Jeff Goldblum in the equation, who seems totally unknowing but not necessarily insincere, the implausibility creeps in - as is said at a dinner party, his character, Morgan, is always loud. What we have to say is how he would he possibly have recognized Nick, in a passionate embrace (cheered on by younger French people), from the back of his head, and how, in this world of Facebook and Google, he would not possibly, if he wanted, have known what Nick was doing and made contact. Morgan's entry, not least as described, seemed forced, as if rescuing the plot from not knowing what it intended.

Goldblum's role just about works, though, nice though it was to see him, he was unremarkable. With the film ending as it does, he ends up as more of a magical figure - and, after what Nick says at dinner, it is hard to imagine that Morgan would be calling down the stairs saying when do you leave, do you have to go, send me a text-message, if you do not want to talk.

All in all, the Morgan involvement is unhurried, but lax in the overall sense of cramming in the enjoyment, and clearly only there to provide a deviation from Nick and Meg just together. I am not sure that it spoils the film, but one imagines that Kureishi could have made progress with the couple (in the film's terms) in some way less striking as a contrivance.

Despite the gratuitous ragged cinematography, the film deserves a watch, if only to mull over these questions afterwards.


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What happened to my Lederhosen… ?

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14 October

A portrait of a man with traits of sociopathic disorder (and / or narcissism), which, because it is a slice of his life, might be a surprise to us – and to those on whom he preys - if they and we have never seen him before. That is the fiction, at any rate, but it does make you wonder whether A Brief Moment of Joy (Ein kleiner Augenblick des Glücks) (2013) may not be trying to educate us that people with such impulses exist : the close, however, shows that he is not wholly exploitative, when he had a free hand to do whatever he wanted…

That brief moment referred to the title may be right at the end, when he is no longer driven, and can just be, perhaps. The film presents Andreas, but is not a study of him – he is not real, because we cannot project his life beyond the confines of hiding keys in the leaves so that there is the shared experience of ‘finding’ them.


An experiment, maybe more than that, a mother who wants her son, in all seriousness, to praise her from a script of her devising (where she is the best mum in the world), a chance encounter in the forest, and then a repetition of the experiment, maybe more than that…

These words in no way tell one what Gasp (2012) is like, because it runs to 15 minutes and explores that time in a wholly unhurried way, as one might turn over pebbles on the beach, pick one up, let it drop. The contrast is with Brief Moment, which busies itself until, as I have commented, right at the end.


I regret to say that I felt that Remains Quiet (Die Ruhe Bleibt), with a similar running-time, tried too hard with a minuscule conceit, which was that of a crew making a film where the member of the crew delegated to block off one of the roads into the shoot will never get anywhere near (as we know that he and we will not).

What we can infer at the end is so banal and clumsily executed that it is surprising that anyone would trouble to make a film with such poverty in its concluding moments, whereas what went before, however observed, was just lacking in interest, and could not summon any up under any grander agenda of The Truth About How A Film Is Made.


Of this collection, the best came last, winning the audience award (A Golden Punt) for best short film. Inventive, engaging, spirited are just a few of the words that still come to mind : there is no point describing this film, the worst thing about which is the title (Rhino Full Throttle (Nashorn im Gallop) (2013)), and which just needs to be seen.


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Dolby sea : A Festival review of Thomas Dolby's film and performance The Invisible Lighthouse (2013)

This is a Festival review of Thomas Dolby's film and performance The Invisible Lighthouse (2013)

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14 October

This is a Festival review of Thomas Dolby's film and performance The Invisible Lighthouse (2013)

Even if I knew the career highs or fortunes of Thomas Dolby, it would be of more relevance to knowing what he played before his film and after the Q&A (through the fog of forgetting, I am fairly sure that he set the mood for his film with a couple of thoughtful instrumental numbers), which I cannot now say, than to reviewing the film component.

In fact, I remembered him more from the videos of a younger he that he showed at the end than from any prior associations with his name, but it was clear that he was confident with the event that he was putting on, and happily hosted his own Q&A, usefully prefacing the answers that he gave with a technical run-down of how filming had been carried out.

Lighthouses have not only been a theme for British commemorative stamps, but the recent campaign to save the one at Beachey Head has made them newsworthy, when – after all those Blue Peter visits, and clambers up spiral staircases to look at a lot of mirrors and a very bright bulb – we knew that they had mainly been converted to be automated beacons. I do not know in what way the Beachey Head lighthouse has been ‘saved, but Dolby’s, on an island off Orford Ness that he excitingly secretes himself on, was simply turned off.

We sense his passion at trying to find out what will happen. Since, although it is soon clear that he is very familiar with technology, but not with the grey bureaucracy of Trinity House, which will not give him an answer, frustrations arise.

Not only that, but the land-owner (once the Ministry of Defence) apparently, so he told us afterwards, went back on its arrangement to let him occupy some sort of shelter on the night of the switch-off by suddenly announcing a fee that would have made his entire film’s budget much higher and giving priority to BBC’s Look East (or similar) : Dolby seemed to have become just the nuisance to them that we maybe always thought that they did not conceal suggesting.

A theme that ran through the presentation was memory. The family has connections with the Suffolk coast that go back decades, and Dolby tells us how he remembers the beam of the lighthouse as part of his childhood, just as things such as foghorns can be, because it would shine on his bedroom wall – or that is how he recalls it. I say that, because Dolby draws attention to the discrepancy between having a memory, from home, of seeing the roof ablaze of the building at The Maltings at Snape first used as the concert hall by Benjamin Britten (it was rebuilt, and in record time), whereas his mother says that the family was away in Oxfordshire at the time of the fire.

Then, in Rendlesham Forest on a recce, he wonders how the beam that he can see there could possibly have been said to give rise to stories of an unidentifed craft, because it is so weak, and so clearly from a lighthouse. However, although aware that the beam was brighter then, he evinces extreme scepticism at the stories that are still being told, and the stories tottering on stories, which he finds constructed from previous sources. Applying a principle of doubt, when his own memory of Snape burning is discredited, seems not an unnatural approach to take, but this element did seem like a diversion.

The filming is of very good quality overall, but of varying narrative force, and Dolby talked about the quad-copter and how he was able to use it for his project, including having a fellow user hide in the dunes and film him when he did not think that he could do too many things at once on his expedition. Most strikingly, he showed us (from its perspective) flying it in the Concert Hall, just before introducing the element about memory.

Any notion that the film is a fixed piece of work is belied by what Dolby was quite clear to explain when he spoke, because he adjusts it when on the road in this tour, and can quite easily move things around, so, for example, he might have the question of how reliable his boyhood recollections are set in some other relation.

The moments that the film really built up to were those of sincere and honest quest. Dolby’s problems with the closure have been mentioned : having to film from the mainland and without knowing when it was to be (only that it would be when the daylight sensor switched off the beam), he captures the poignant final flashes from this island undergoing erosion :

All, too, that was involved in the clandestine attempts to get close to the lighthouse, despite unexploded bombs, and take photographs, all very carefully planned with the tide and his visibility, have the same personal energy and interest.

As part of an evening, with musical numbers proceeding, and Dolby’s highly proficient live programming of looping and sequencing software, which he used to synch the videos to the tracks that he was laying down, it had enough to cohere as a whole. What he might plan for the developing the film outside such venues, and without a stated ambition to become a filmmaker in any broader sense, is unclear.

However, it had been a successful project of documenting this history, after Dolby found that he did not like the look of footage that a freelance made of him. Quickly and realizing how relatively cheaply useful equipment can be bought, he has produced this creditable realization, and it ties in with how, at the time of perhaps greater career recognition, he had, as I learnt this evening, been innovative with various technologies.


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

Sympathy for the Vampyr

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13 October (updated 21 October)

The British Film Institute (@BFI) trailer for the release of the restored Nosferatu in its original version for the first time - due out on Hallowe'en - quotes Time Out as calling it one of the most poetical of all horror films, an evaluation with which I concur :

Lovely shimmering, chiming piano accompaniment from @NeilKBrand to a restored Nosferatu - fangs, claws, and rats with yearning (Sehnsucht).
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 28, 2013

It's a magical atmosphere in Screen 2 for @NeilKBrand 's @camfilmfest live piano accompaniment to NOSFERATU :)X pic.twitter.com/6ij8CztIXa
— Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) September 28, 2013

Nosferatu (1922), one will gather, was performed with live accompaniment by Neil Brand, and it was a very fine one :

In all of this, Brand brought out the passing of time with key moments when a clock strikes, for much in this film happens at a pace - Hutter's journey across to where Count Orlok lives - and much, when there is no immediate movement, has a sort of febrile negative inertia, a sort of immanence that the shining arpeggios or alternated chords bring out.

For example, when Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) energetically, boyishly even, dashes the book that tells him all the mysteries of the vampires to the floor, we suspect that he is trying to convince himself in youthful disrespect that all this is nonsense - and the music played out that half-hearted self-deceit. We, as observers of the film, are in a different relation to its subject, set, I guess, in something like the seventeenth century, when distances maybe seemed further and we did not have the same instantaneous media by means of which to learn things about the world, e.g. do a Google search about Orlok and his castle...

Pianist, composer, writer @NeilKBrand did not entertain us with Nosferatu, he helped us see it live, make it live : http://t.co/fCz3Dcj2iq
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 13, 2013

We would expect no less from Brand that his playing is humane - he does not imbue a live performance with qualities that are not there, but he so knows and loves this pre-spoken form of cinema that he can draw out the story, the visible emotions, the hidden feelings, and we trust him with seeing this film because he invests of himself and his talent. I am not sure whether, technically, they are themes or leitmotifs, but they recur, they remind us of earlier moments, and they help us be inward with the characters.


The film revolves around Nosferatu himself, who is involved in some land deal that will bring us back where we started and to his fate. In these times, some of the visual effects and the nuances of the film, for those not used to films of the time, will seem ludicrous, so there was a fair amount of laughing in Screen 2, but I hope that there was also an appreciation that there is a sort of obsessive love-story at play here, not just of a vampire for blood : the film's subtitle is eine Symphonie des Grauens, and a symphony requires more than one theme.

As a reviewer at IMDb has judged that Max Schreck (the name means something like 'fright'), who plays Count Orlok / Nosferatu, is Nosferatu, and he is both sinister, but at the same time desires beauty, in Ellen Hutter (played by Greta Schröder) : her character name means someone who keeps watch, and ultimately, by doing so, she defeats the infestation that responds to the control of Orlok.

As I say, there is an unfulfilled sense of longing, and this was in Neil Brand's masterly playing, showing that even the ugly Orlok can have desires in 'an Expressionist film' : if we can be in touch with the art of this time, whether the ambiguous states of mind in Edvard Munch's paintings, woodcuts and other prints, or the artworks and diaries of August Strindberg (not often enough thought of nowadays as a painter), we will see the action as something to engage with more seriously, and not limited by its technical constraints.


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

Taking over the asylum ?

This is a Festival review of Sieniawka (2013)

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6 October

This is a Festival review of Sieniawka (2013)

What can I say about Sieniawka (2013) that is not inherent in watching it, in sticking with it ? Put another way, anything that I say will be reductive or interpretative (or both)


I believe that I cannot review this film (this was its UK premiere) in any traditional way, even with a ‘spoiler’ warning, but that I just have to say what I know, consistent with not saying too much :


1. Just as Fulbourn Hospital is named after a village near Cambridge, so Sieniawka is a psychiatric unit named after its neighbouring town, and we see another place nearby, damaged by flooding, at the end of the film.

2. Director Marcin Malaszczak and I talked extensively during gaps in my schedule, when not simply socializing at the end of the day (and once some reviews had been written). Those who do not just read film reviews on this blog will know about an experience of working in mental-health advocacy.

3. Marcin’s film (I cannot call him by his surname) falls into three sections, of which the longest is filmed in Sieniawka and its grounds. I have already mentioned the last section, and Marcin seems to think that we need not see it as chronologically the final one, although how it is set up suggests that it may be.

4. In the Q&A, I referred to Mr Endon in Murphy and to other writings of Samuel Beckettt. In particular, in Watt there is a journey to Mr Knott’s house, a two-part stay there, and a departure, but the narrative is framed by Watt and Sam meeting and doing their best to converse in different ‘pavilions’ of some sort of establishment. Apparently, the likeness had been seen before, but had not informed the making of the film.

5. Some of the questioners wanted to declare what the figures seen in the first part of the film, or their actions, meant.

6. However, it had a clear provisionality to it, which, at best (and knowing that one was doing so), one could interpret. From the end (or earlier), then, one might make an inference about whose body is delivered where at the opening, but never be sure.

7. It does not follow from the agreement of the staff for filming to take place, or from gaining the trust of the residents, that filming them does not exploit them.

8. I am not saying that it does, but comments from some of the others were that witnessing the repetitive behaviour disturbed them, or that they did not see the need to continue watching the footage.

9. When Marcin and I talked about such institutions (the food being set out, and a watery soup ladled into bowls, did not look very inviting), he agreed that his film would be seen differently by someone as familiar with them as I, and that I probably ‘knew too much’.

10. The impression that I know that he intended to give was of a sort of microcosm, where the smoking room – and people’s efforts to ask others, who receive tobacco beyond a ration, to give them some – is a hub of activity.

11. I cannot endorse such a view when, here as at Fulbourn in recent history, there have been people there for 20 or 30 years : they are alive, but they do not have their own space or life, and how some of the staff were heard talking about restraining a ‘bastard’ who got violent was shockingly self centred.

12. We see some residents playing volleyball or handball, but with no ball. Maybe they are more clever than Marcin imagines, and are ironically putting on a show for the camera. At any rate, when someone serves, he has – as I asked at the Q&A – added in the noise of the ball being hit.

13. Apparently, the mosaic at the end of the film gives hope, whereas one viewer had found hope lacking (see paragraph 11, above).


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

Whiter than White Star

This is a Festival review of White Star (1983)

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6 October

This is a Festival review of White Star (1983)

You could not call it a Roland Klick* retrospective as such (Cambridge Film Festival did not), because (so I gather) many of his films had not been released in the UK. Not wishing to do a Jos Stelling, I decided on White Star (1983), and then, depending on how it went, maybe Supermarkt (1974).

However, I had, of course, not reckoned on making a mistake (going into Screen 3, rather than Screen 2), so missing the beginning of Leviathan (2013), and ending up with dubbed Klickery in Deadlock (1970), a film not on my list.

A desert, a guy who finds a dressed-up other guy, then takes more interest in his case and its contents, but hesitates – rock held high – to ensure that he does not survive, as if leaving him for dead were better. Second thoughts, going back, but the suited guy is gone, and holds him up. They drive off, arrive somewhere, only for the man with the upper hand to be easily overpowered. A mysterious woman. And so on, but all dubbed.


Did it seem bizarre, as the Festival write-up tells me that some had thought it ? No, not least because the word is overused, but really because it seemed arbitrarily wafer thin (to the point where I sneaked out, having stayed too long – until just after the title, because I had bizarrely thought it to be a preceding short that I had overlooked) who was in control. Hence ‘Deadlock’ ? Maybe, but the dubbing was killing me (even if subtitles were not then the norm) for its way of sucking the life (any of the film’s and mine)…

So Star, with its stark title, no longer seemed such a good choice, but there would be a Q&A with Klick. It, too, was supposed to be strange, but it seemed amazingly one dimensional in the way that Deadlock had threatened to be :

The opening scene is, I think, of Dennis Hopper (as producer Kenneth Barlow) trying to persuade Terrance Robay (as star Moody) to appear on stage in a club full of restless punks – either that, or of him, with his stooge Frank (David Hess), setting up for the latter to smash windows (which will later look as if there has been a riot), and arranging the foment of said punks. Oh, and, in arguing with the club’s owner, Barlow reveals that Moody is his sister’s boy. Nothing else do we need to know, and nothing else of significance emerges save from this starting-point.


Do we know why Moody trusts Barlow to be his producer, or why he goes along with this ‘White Star’ branding (with all its connotations of white supremacy, apart from those of space and of a burst of creation : it certainly is not Moody’s choice, though it is the best that the pair have to offer, even when Moody seeks to collaborate with a female vocalist (Sandra ?? Mascha ??)) ? Quite simply, other than probably having no other hope, no – since the conceit of the film is that Moody lives in Berlin**, the club would have been notorious, and he would never have agreed to try to play his synthesizer there.

The same objection is not dependent on being a denizen of Berlin. Since nothing in the film suggests that Moody is trusting (or, at any rate, trusts Barlow – except disastrously to take unspecified tablets in the back of a dangerously driven car when also ordered to change into his white suit), it hardly seems likely that he would not have objected to the choice of opening gig long before being there.


The only way in which this film works is if it is just a vehicle for a Hoppermonster, and we watch him barge through life like a giant game of PAC-MAN. Klick may not have hired him with that intention, and what he said about Hopper in the Q&A suggested that both that the man whom he had met before he arrived in Berlin, and what other people had said about working with him, had not prepared him for the reality :

Klick told the Festival audience (apparently, a story that he has told before), a coke story about Hopper, that, when he arrived in Berlin, the first thing that he wanted was cocaine, and Klick had to arrange something such that a man arrived with a briefcase every week with Hopper’s fix. The story went on : that Hopper was too high to act for the first part of the day, and too tired later on, but Klick had a clear two hours to get what he wanted from him (and, moreover, Hopper is scarcely off the screen).


Maybe, then, with the roles reversed, the film is a paradigm for making the film itself, with Hopper as the maverick star whom the director struggles to control, versus Hopper as the hell-bent producer, using all means and any to promote ‘White Star’ and ‘The Future’. A model of capitalism gone crazy in search of selling goods, but one that has really very little to say about why Moody goes along with it all and, say, sells the fittings of his studio (and shafts his black colleague) for Barlow to sell them for a song.

Glengarry Glenn Ross (1992), O Lucky Man ! (1973), The Color of Money (1986) – maybe (I don’t know) some of these films could have learnt something from Klick, and it is a helluva show from Hopper, but the ‘terrifying, unhinged performance’ (Festival write-up) is not enough, and Lindsay Anderson is careful to throw Malcolm McDowell into relief.


End-notes

* What sort of name is that ? I knew the phrase Das klickt nicht and the like, but still – perhaps he could develop and print a film for me…

** As we learn later, even if it may be a poor translation, since he is staying in a hotel.


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

When we still had icebergs…

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5 October


This film was shown in conjunction with a live relay from The Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton, in which the host introduced Sophie Fiennes (who grew up watching films there), its director, and later interviewed its presenter, Slavoj Žižek


The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) is a very good film, but, for a documentary, a longer one at 136 minutes : a little in the way of some non-narrative features, one kept wrongly thinking that it was making a move towards resolution, but that is an element that will be less present on a re-watching, which it well deserves.

Not least when sitting in Row C in Screen 2 (where one does not have the distance on it), it is not easy to keep with Žižek, because, although he may sometimes be tongue in cheek, he is always quite intense. In addition, the snorting, touching the nose with one hand, then the other (which are not feigned – if they were, he did them in the Q&A), can be off-putting. I say this merely to prepare a prospective viewer, as there is much, much more that is positive, and which draws one in.

One attraction, as one might gather from the trailer, is a wealth of film material that Žižek references here and – sometimes in more depth than in other cases – whose significance he analyses. It ranges from pre-war footage of Chaplin (plus Nazi commentary that criticizes him as typical of what is despicable in Jews) to Freeing Berlin from around 1944, which tells the story, from Stalin’s perspective, of what led to that event (and even portrays Hitler and him).

Žižek has many other examples, which encompass David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968), and Seconds (1966), as well as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), and The Dark Knight (2008).

Where Žižek is amongst his most expansive is in pulling apart James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), saying how ludicrous Kate Winslet partying with the lower decks to be with Leonardo DiCaprio is as a representation of class solidarity, and how hateful the denizens of the upper decks are made out to be by contrast. Most of all, though, how out-of-sorts Winslet is doing little more than feeding on DiCaprio to regenerate her flagging energies, even if at the cost of letting herself be abused.

Not that Žižek says so, but an arrangement of mutual benefit. However, he does ask, as one would know from the trailer, what part the iceberg plays in the development of the love-story, and he suggests that a worse disaster was averted by the couple’s not disembarking together and splitting up after two to three weeks of sex. He also comments how Winslet saying words to the effect that she will never let go of DiCaprio are literally at odds with thereupon releasing her grip on him so that he sinks into the water.

Throughout the film, through largely effective dummy-ups, and to much amusement, we see Žižek in a lifeboat beneath the stars to introduce this section about Titanic. He is then, variously, in the head in Jacket, relaxing by some of the furniture from Orange’s Korova Bar, or even on Travis Bickle’s bed – as good a way as any to draw attention to the artificiality both of the medium (in the original film, and in this one), and of what it passes of as distinct, real things.

Of course, this method also draws attention to the words that we hear Žižek saying, not least when, back to Titanic, he ends the film with an assertion and a power salute, and to how cinema can teeter on having us believe something and showing us that it is contrivance. Which is partly what he appears to be saying about the love-story in that film, that the real-life iceberg dramatically serves to make enduring the love that he predicts would have quickly petered out without it – no one wants the iceberg for that, but predicating a film on a doomed voyage would only be done to exploit it.

Žižek, as he did at length in the Q&A, states his views vigorously, but seems to disregard the reaction of the audience of Titanic when it was released, which must have known, at some level, that (a) the love was likely to be doomed, (b) it was being shown a fictionalized / idealized encounter between the classes, and, as a composite of these, that (c) the order of things is maintained.

No matter, as there is so much to follow in Žižek’s analysis*, that one loses the impression of being on top of it, for it is also part of his thesis that we chose our dreams and that we are complicit with engaging with ‘ideology’. Punchily, by showing us a scene from Guys and Dolls (1955), where one of the gang impersonates Officer Krapky (?) and the others make excuses that are grounded in their upbringing, and contrasting it with footage from the riots in the UK in 2011 and what was said by some then about why it had happened, he shows the connection between ‘ideology’, life and art. With scenes from the suppression of ‘The Prague Spring’ in 1968, he draws the lesson from Titanic that killing off the uprising allowed it to live on as a dream, not what he posits might have happened.

Necessarily, because Fiennes has had Žižek talk to camera* and then edited it together for her film, the creative act is hers, but the polemic may have, in the structure and order that she chose for it and the takes that she selected, have had its dynamics altered : I failed to hear this in the Q&A, but presumably (nominally) Žižek endorses the film, if only on the basis of having produced copy that is grist to someone else’s mill.


End-notes

* Incidentally, he told us in the Q&A that Fiennes read all of his books, worked for months beforehand, and, as she told us in the introduction, on nine months of solitary editing. He stated that his part was to shoot for two hours per day for two or three weeks in two locations, and was graphically explicit about how irritated he got when he was improvising, asked, because of technical issues, to do a second take, and then Fiennes asked him for a third take, saying that what he had said the first time had been better. Altogether, a strange collaboration.

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