More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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9 March
Tim Brown, whose conducting I always find infectious to watch, brought together the forces of Cambridge University Bach Ensemble and Cambridge University Chamber Choir in to-night’s performance of the perennial Lententime Bach work, which never fails to find an audience.
To-night’s, if it – as I did – needed to read what Tim had written about the piece at the front of the programme to appreciate this truth, would have seen what he said about what determines how it unfolds to be perfectly correct: much about what The Matthew Passion (BWV 244) ends up being in performance is a result of the way in which the recitative of The Evangelist is delivered.
As I noticed for the first time in this performance (though I have heard two or three others before), three times he introduces Jesus saying, with remarkable economy and concision, Du sagest's*:
(1) The first is an answer to Judas, asking whether he is the one to betray him, Bin ich's, Rabbi?.
(2) The second is when Jesus is already before the High Priest, who seeks to compel Jesus to say whether he is The Christ with the words Ich beschwöre dich bei dem lebendigen Gott, dass du uns sagest, ob du seiest Christus, der Sohn Gottes.
(3) The final one is a little further on, when, before Pilate now, he is asked Bist du der Juden König?.
Of course, the threefold repetition chimes with Peter's three denials. Just as much as Judas, Peter betrays Jesus, first by saying Ich weiss nicht, was du sagest, and then, twice, Ich kenne des Menschen nicht. And we are led straight to what is almost certainly the aria in the piece capable of most beauty, Erbarme dich, mein Gott**, which made such an impression on me when Tarkovksy used it in The Sacrifice (1986), his final film.
As to the other two denials, one is by the High Priest, who tears his clothes and accuses Jesus of blasphemy for what he says about how the Son of Man will be seen seated at the right hand of glory and coming on the clouds of Heaven; the other is by the head of the secular authorities, who seems to see through the motives of those who seek for Jesus to be crucified, but ultimately seems powerless to resist the crowd that has been worked up to bay for his blood***.
Enough on the performance for now, save to say that Stefan Kennedy (as The Evangelist) and Nicholas Mogg (as Christus) both showed a feel for delivering recitative where some of the members of the choir, who had solo spots but also a passage of recitative immediately before, appeared vocaly less comfortable, and almost as though it were a chore to be got out of the way before the aria: as becomes quite evident when seeing the work, Jesus does say remarkably little in the quite lengthy time taken before the High Priest and then Pilate, and not because he has nothing to say, but Nicholas Mogg concentrated extremely well to give a cohesive Jesus.
In the case of Stefan Kennedy's recitative, I only felt very occasionally that it was a little rushed (and that only towards the end of the piece), but that it was otherwise carefully and thoughtfully paced to best effect****: I was certainly won over by how he placed emphasis as the interpretation developed, and, with a solid but often silent Jesus, there was an interesting dynamic between them.
All in all, not least with regard to the quality of the instrumental playing from the Bach Ensemble (with a highly solid continuo line from Dan Smith on organ and Kate Aldridge on violone), a very fine Matthew Passion!
End-notes
* The quotations are all taken from the text as it is given in the insert to the first version, on LP, that I owned of this work, as just an English translation was printed in the programme - I largely followed the German in that insert, but referred to the programme.
** Though this is not the only time that this verb is used, because it is in a passage of recitative that recapitulates that Jesus has been given over by Pilate to be scourged, ready for crucifixion. In the meantime, Judas has repented of his actions in accepting money to betray Jesus to the religious authorities, and there is a telling bass aria after he has thrown the money back at them and gone away and hanged himself:
Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder!
Seht, das Geld, den Mörderlohn,
Wirft euch der verlorne Sohn
Zu den Füssen nieder.
*** I was reminded a little how the Tribunes in Coriolanus (most recently seen as a film directed by Ralph Fiennes, who plays the title role) also stir the crowd.
**** With a few vowel-sounds, there seemed some variance from the text that I was following, but the score being used may have adopted a different editorial policy with regard to rendering past tenses in eighteenth-century German.
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Sunday, 11 March 2012
Saturday, 10 March 2012
What, if anything, can we learn from Project X?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 March
To-night, I read Joe Walsh's condemnation of this film* on New Empress Magazine's web-site - at http://newempressmagazine.com/2012/03/in-review-project-x-2012/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewEmpressMagazine+%28New+Empress+Magazine+|+The+film+magazine+that+breaks+convention%29 - and it has prompted me to write the following (in addition to the comment made there):
What is the purpose of film?
Or does it have a variety of purposes, not all of which need be served at all - or not in the same scene?
I ask these questions, because Joe, in what he wrote, is clearly looking to what Project X might have been saying - but, in his not finding a 'moral arc', it neglects (did not seek?) to say - about responsibility and the consequences of our actions.
Reading between the lines of what he describes, I'm just guessing that the film didn't care** about anything more than a tokenistic reproof in the form of the simple slap on the wrist, which Joe, given what has gone before, finds inadequate.
Right, so what about Haneke's Funny Games (1997)***? The interview with Haneke that is included as 'an extra' on the DVD shows him saying two things:
(1) If one wants to stop watching the film, then it has served its purpose - and if one wants to watch it to the end, that is actually (he does not use these words) a less healthy impulse than saying that one has had enough.
(2) Relatedly, he reports what happened when Funny Games was shown at Cannes, at the moment when the mother, after her husband, son and she have been terrorized for a long time, succeeds in getting hold of the shotgun (some such gun) and kills one of the two teenagers. There was keen applause and acclaim from those present.
However, as they watched what happened, the other teenager swears a bit, rummages around for the t.v. remote-control, and - amazingly - winds back the action (as, in those days, one would a VHS cassette) to before his accomplice's killer gets the weapon, and ensures that she does not get near it a second time.
Cinematically, of course, that sequence is doing many things (as are the occasional addresses to the camera), but what concerns me is that it highlights the unremitting, unstoppable course of the reign that Tom and Jerry (or Peter and Paul - they have no real names) have over this family: they do what they do, because they enjoy it, and because they can.
I am not saying that there probably is any connection with whatever Project X may be, but neither film is going to make you feel at the end, as Spielberg almost invariably wants, gooey and that humanity has been redeemed - definitely not in Funny Games, where the pair of torturer killers just go on to further victims (whom they set up earlier).
In the same interview, Haneke is quite candid that his pair are stereotypes, his response to hearing reports that there were numbers of disaffected young people who committed such crimes for the sheer hell of it. In that case, then, really quite a straightforward 'moral arc', being the depiction of the ultimate absence of positive affect, unlike, say, Alex's journey through A Clockwork Orange (1971) (or, following the same actor, in O Lucky Man! (1973)).
Project X, I must infer, really is not in the same league, and sounds as though it is the vehicle - albeit a rather uncomfortable one - for jokes that did not pay off for Joe. So, essentially, the primary purpose of the film - even if it proves to have failed - is entertainment, and maybe a challenge in the form of being confronted with what the trio get up to.
Returning to Haneke for a moment, two of his films, Code Unknown (2000) and Hidden (2005), are related in being likely to provoke one of two reactions: either irritation that one is not being presented with a clear and unambiguous story, or seeing how he uses the medium to show what is uncertain or even unknowable about life, yet we have to - or are tempted to - fill in the gaps.
Which, of course, leads to 10 (1979), the impulse to pursue Bo Derek at any cost, just as Joe concludes that the message of Project X could be to say that similar abandonment of moral thinking is justified by the enjoyment to be had from one's actions.
In one film, though, the place that said Derek has occupied to the exclusion of Julie Andrews is seen for the mistake that it is (even if that realization on Dudley Moore's part may just seem a sop for all that has gone before), whereas it seems that Project X embodies a moral void, where maybe unnaturally rich and / or indulgent families overlook the excesses of the young (and I gather that they are quite excessive excesses).
Neither of these is a Pilgrim's Progress, neither a Crime and Punishment, and they do not bear further examination. But, in closing, they do make me think of this:
For all that Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck (unfinished at his death in 1837), however we come to approach it (e.g. through Berg's opera or Herzog's film), is, in study circles, routinely looked at as a piece of some sort of social archaeology (as Büchner studied the evidence of what had happened to the real Woyzeck in 1821), seeing the causes of Woyzeck's thoughts, and the actions resulting from them, in how he is treated as less than a person. (Black Swan (2011), more than 170 years later, appears to have very similar preoccupations, in considering how pressures can impact on an individual.)
Yet, in many ways, our psychiatric care in England and Wales often seems to struggle to comprehend those truths, which maybe the general public think self evident in Natalie Portman's portrayal, and that talking to a person and coming to understand his or her fears and concerns might be more humane than simply dosing up with haloperidol or the like: if you can imagine walking through treacle, or picture crossing a ploughed field and your feet gradually getting heavier and heavier, you will have some idea of what haloperidol does to a person and his or her self-worth.
End-notes
* I had previously satisfied myself that there would be 'no lasting benefit' from watching it, just by the cursory glance at a write-up that I recommend (in a mere five postings, beginning with The Future or How do you choose a satisfying film? (Part 1)): in this case, the 140 words or so in the booklet that the Arts Picturehouse produces every six weeks or so.
I deliberately use the phrase no lasting benefit, because, by text-message, I wished my friend Chris something to which the opposite applied when he was recently attending a conference in my home town.
He replied the following morning, wondering whether (since there is no such thing as 'an attendee') those words might apply in a different way from which it was intended to some of his fellow delegates: they would still be feeling, in all probability, every drop of how heavily they had been drinking, and doing so till 4.00 a.m.
** OK, I know that a film can't care or not care about anything (but it might have hurt feelings if it doesn't get shown very much), but a team of people put the thing together as a product and seek to market it for distribution - if that proves harder than it should be, the product gets changed (to the extent that it can be). The people who corporately bring the film into being and into circulation have intentions for it and how (pun intended!) it will be viewed.
*** I still find it bizarre that Haneke remade this film in English 10 years later, but I am referring to the original version (in German).
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11 March
To-night, I read Joe Walsh's condemnation of this film* on New Empress Magazine's web-site - at http://newempressmagazine.com/2012/03/in-review-project-x-2012/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewEmpressMagazine+%28New+Empress+Magazine+|+The+film+magazine+that+breaks+convention%29 - and it has prompted me to write the following (in addition to the comment made there):
What is the purpose of film?
Or does it have a variety of purposes, not all of which need be served at all - or not in the same scene?
I ask these questions, because Joe, in what he wrote, is clearly looking to what Project X might have been saying - but, in his not finding a 'moral arc', it neglects (did not seek?) to say - about responsibility and the consequences of our actions.
Reading between the lines of what he describes, I'm just guessing that the film didn't care** about anything more than a tokenistic reproof in the form of the simple slap on the wrist, which Joe, given what has gone before, finds inadequate.
Right, so what about Haneke's Funny Games (1997)***? The interview with Haneke that is included as 'an extra' on the DVD shows him saying two things:
(1) If one wants to stop watching the film, then it has served its purpose - and if one wants to watch it to the end, that is actually (he does not use these words) a less healthy impulse than saying that one has had enough.
(2) Relatedly, he reports what happened when Funny Games was shown at Cannes, at the moment when the mother, after her husband, son and she have been terrorized for a long time, succeeds in getting hold of the shotgun (some such gun) and kills one of the two teenagers. There was keen applause and acclaim from those present.
However, as they watched what happened, the other teenager swears a bit, rummages around for the t.v. remote-control, and - amazingly - winds back the action (as, in those days, one would a VHS cassette) to before his accomplice's killer gets the weapon, and ensures that she does not get near it a second time.
Cinematically, of course, that sequence is doing many things (as are the occasional addresses to the camera), but what concerns me is that it highlights the unremitting, unstoppable course of the reign that Tom and Jerry (or Peter and Paul - they have no real names) have over this family: they do what they do, because they enjoy it, and because they can.
I am not saying that there probably is any connection with whatever Project X may be, but neither film is going to make you feel at the end, as Spielberg almost invariably wants, gooey and that humanity has been redeemed - definitely not in Funny Games, where the pair of torturer killers just go on to further victims (whom they set up earlier).
In the same interview, Haneke is quite candid that his pair are stereotypes, his response to hearing reports that there were numbers of disaffected young people who committed such crimes for the sheer hell of it. In that case, then, really quite a straightforward 'moral arc', being the depiction of the ultimate absence of positive affect, unlike, say, Alex's journey through A Clockwork Orange (1971) (or, following the same actor, in O Lucky Man! (1973)).
Project X, I must infer, really is not in the same league, and sounds as though it is the vehicle - albeit a rather uncomfortable one - for jokes that did not pay off for Joe. So, essentially, the primary purpose of the film - even if it proves to have failed - is entertainment, and maybe a challenge in the form of being confronted with what the trio get up to.
Returning to Haneke for a moment, two of his films, Code Unknown (2000) and Hidden (2005), are related in being likely to provoke one of two reactions: either irritation that one is not being presented with a clear and unambiguous story, or seeing how he uses the medium to show what is uncertain or even unknowable about life, yet we have to - or are tempted to - fill in the gaps.
Which, of course, leads to 10 (1979), the impulse to pursue Bo Derek at any cost, just as Joe concludes that the message of Project X could be to say that similar abandonment of moral thinking is justified by the enjoyment to be had from one's actions.
In one film, though, the place that said Derek has occupied to the exclusion of Julie Andrews is seen for the mistake that it is (even if that realization on Dudley Moore's part may just seem a sop for all that has gone before), whereas it seems that Project X embodies a moral void, where maybe unnaturally rich and / or indulgent families overlook the excesses of the young (and I gather that they are quite excessive excesses).
Neither of these is a Pilgrim's Progress, neither a Crime and Punishment, and they do not bear further examination. But, in closing, they do make me think of this:
For all that Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck (unfinished at his death in 1837), however we come to approach it (e.g. through Berg's opera or Herzog's film), is, in study circles, routinely looked at as a piece of some sort of social archaeology (as Büchner studied the evidence of what had happened to the real Woyzeck in 1821), seeing the causes of Woyzeck's thoughts, and the actions resulting from them, in how he is treated as less than a person. (Black Swan (2011), more than 170 years later, appears to have very similar preoccupations, in considering how pressures can impact on an individual.)
Yet, in many ways, our psychiatric care in England and Wales often seems to struggle to comprehend those truths, which maybe the general public think self evident in Natalie Portman's portrayal, and that talking to a person and coming to understand his or her fears and concerns might be more humane than simply dosing up with haloperidol or the like: if you can imagine walking through treacle, or picture crossing a ploughed field and your feet gradually getting heavier and heavier, you will have some idea of what haloperidol does to a person and his or her self-worth.
End-notes
* I had previously satisfied myself that there would be 'no lasting benefit' from watching it, just by the cursory glance at a write-up that I recommend (in a mere five postings, beginning with The Future or How do you choose a satisfying film? (Part 1)): in this case, the 140 words or so in the booklet that the Arts Picturehouse produces every six weeks or so.
I deliberately use the phrase no lasting benefit, because, by text-message, I wished my friend Chris something to which the opposite applied when he was recently attending a conference in my home town.
He replied the following morning, wondering whether (since there is no such thing as 'an attendee') those words might apply in a different way from which it was intended to some of his fellow delegates: they would still be feeling, in all probability, every drop of how heavily they had been drinking, and doing so till 4.00 a.m.
** OK, I know that a film can't care or not care about anything (but it might have hurt feelings if it doesn't get shown very much), but a team of people put the thing together as a product and seek to market it for distribution - if that proves harder than it should be, the product gets changed (to the extent that it can be). The people who corporately bring the film into being and into circulation have intentions for it and how (pun intended!) it will be viewed.
*** I still find it bizarre that Haneke remade this film in English 10 years later, but I am referring to the original version (in German).
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My unusual job
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19 March
I live under one of the bridges of the Île de la Cité - I'm not saying which, and I change from time to time, but that's where I sleep, and have my home.
I choose to live there, as I have an important duty to carry out, and it's just that I feel more comfortable with this way of life.
By day, my business is bananas, 'hands' of bananas they call them in English (but not in French), and I inspect them wherever they are to be found, and they are even to be found in very small quantities in Les Halles, an area where once they abounded.
I smell them, feel them, taste them, so that I know where the best specimens are to be found at any time - the bananas that are most fresh, most juicy, and more like a peach than many one knows.
The true Frenchman and -woman value this information, because they have a native passion akin to that of Gauguin, so they scan my column, which tells them everything that they need to know, first by arrondisement and by the style of fruit within each (because there is no one such thing, o no, as a banana any more than 'a white wine').
But I also give links to the neighbouring arrondisements, so that my readers can choose: someone in the fifth might be the wrong side, and be nearer to a good supplier on the sixth, so I think that through for him or her and have a feature that cross-references in that way.
And I do very well on it. I remain anonymous, with a wealth of disguises to make my visits, and I receive a big bag of letters every week from those grateful to me for what I do, so I am content.
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19 March
I live under one of the bridges of the Île de la Cité - I'm not saying which, and I change from time to time, but that's where I sleep, and have my home.
I choose to live there, as I have an important duty to carry out, and it's just that I feel more comfortable with this way of life.
By day, my business is bananas, 'hands' of bananas they call them in English (but not in French), and I inspect them wherever they are to be found, and they are even to be found in very small quantities in Les Halles, an area where once they abounded.
I smell them, feel them, taste them, so that I know where the best specimens are to be found at any time - the bananas that are most fresh, most juicy, and more like a peach than many one knows.
The true Frenchman and -woman value this information, because they have a native passion akin to that of Gauguin, so they scan my column, which tells them everything that they need to know, first by arrondisement and by the style of fruit within each (because there is no one such thing, o no, as a banana any more than 'a white wine').
But I also give links to the neighbouring arrondisements, so that my readers can choose: someone in the fifth might be the wrong side, and be nearer to a good supplier on the sixth, so I think that through for him or her and have a feature that cross-references in that way.
And I do very well on it. I remain anonymous, with a wealth of disguises to make my visits, and I receive a big bag of letters every week from those grateful to me for what I do, so I am content.
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Keep your Bolly heart on - she's a heroine! (According to AOL®)
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Dramatic departure for Emmerdale star
Holly Barton will soon suffer an overdose of heroin on screen
Since I knew nothing about Emmerdale - other than the obvious Linda Lusardi connection - it took good old Wikipedia® to put me right that the person pictured is not the said Barton, but the person (with a challenging surname) who plays her:
Holly Barton is a fictional character from the British soap opera Emmerdale, played by Sophie Powles. She made her first on-screen appearance on 17 July 2009
What I'm wondering is of a manifold nature:
* Whether AOL®'s 'people' had any idea who this Barton about whom they wrote was
* In any case, why they chose to use a photo of Sophie P. standing in front of the logo of a duscredited and defunct newspaper
* Unrelatedly, why the item just days ago that reported Lorraine Kelly falling off her horse appeared weeks after a small mention in i newspaper around a week before the end of February*
End-notes
* I have checked, and it was in the edition on Thursday 23 February. So much for 'breaking news' (pun probably intended)!
The full item, under the heading Lorraine Kelly hurt falling from horse (which pretty much is the story), read:
TV presenter Lorraine Kelly said she got a "real fright"** after falling from a horse, which then stamped on her leg. The 52-year-old lost a lot of blood and was rushed to hospital for surgery after the accident on Tuesday [i.e. 21 February]. Ms Kelly tweeted that the horse had made a deep wound that would take several weeks to heal properly [sc. around the time, then, that AOL® reported it as if it were, at least, recent].
** Why this isn't "a real fright" is beyond me (or, although it may be i's house-style, with single quotation-marks).
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Friday, 9 March 2012
My 'favourite' browser (2)
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10 March
Looking, as I have not done in a while, at the audience - or the apparent audience - for or of this blog, I have found a new browser: Debian
It connects more to my posting (somewhere - I shall try to find a link) about names that sound forcedly made up, but never mind, I can rest content in the knowledge that there is a browser with such a name.
And I am reminded how, as much out of superstitition as any real belief that it would shock my 'actual' browser into co-operation, I used to call up one called NetShark (or some such) - if NetShark itself had actually been compatible, it might have been brilliant!
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10 March
Looking, as I have not done in a while, at the audience - or the apparent audience - for or of this blog, I have found a new browser: Debian
It connects more to my posting (somewhere - I shall try to find a link) about names that sound forcedly made up, but never mind, I can rest content in the knowledge that there is a browser with such a name.
And I am reminded how, as much out of superstitition as any real belief that it would shock my 'actual' browser into co-operation, I used to call up one called NetShark (or some such) - if NetShark itself had actually been compatible, it might have been brilliant!
* STOP PRESS *
12 September
New browser sighted. Goes by the name of OS;FBSV, just like typical virus name...
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Can I get…?*
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10 March
What is this bloody rubbish?! Since when have we said this in this country, rather than I’d like… or (though it is closer) Could I have…?, but it’s the subjunctive ‘could’, not ‘can’.
Yet I will freely admit that asking questions in the form ‘May I…?’ is a dinosaur, and the only person whom I know to use it (and who also uses ‘whom’ when it’s appropriate) is Russian, but that is, it must be said, what I was brought up to say: May I hit you on the nose – right now?.
Some put-downs that those in the so-called hospitality business** might find helpful:
Q Can I get a bottle of beer and some dry-roasted nuts?
A Depends on how long your arms are, mate – and whether I stop you!
Q Can I get---?
A Yes, you can ‘get’ – get stuffed!
End-notes
* Thankfully, this isn't topical, as it has been 'hanging around' since Thursday 1 March, which is what seems to happen when blogging isn't done straight into the on-line box (but in some Word document, supposedly for posting later).
** It’ll be called an industry yet – no, I mean a factory, as some idiots have already decided that it is an industry (heavy or light?).
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10 March
What is this bloody rubbish?! Since when have we said this in this country, rather than I’d like… or (though it is closer) Could I have…?, but it’s the subjunctive ‘could’, not ‘can’.
Yet I will freely admit that asking questions in the form ‘May I…?’ is a dinosaur, and the only person whom I know to use it (and who also uses ‘whom’ when it’s appropriate) is Russian, but that is, it must be said, what I was brought up to say: May I hit you on the nose – right now?.
Some put-downs that those in the so-called hospitality business** might find helpful:
Q Can I get a bottle of beer and some dry-roasted nuts?
A Depends on how long your arms are, mate – and whether I stop you!
Q Can I get---?
A Yes, you can ‘get’ – get stuffed!
End-notes
* Thankfully, this isn't topical, as it has been 'hanging around' since Thursday 1 March, which is what seems to happen when blogging isn't done straight into the on-line box (but in some Word document, supposedly for posting later).
** It’ll be called an industry yet – no, I mean a factory, as some idiots have already decided that it is an industry (heavy or light?).
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A very delayed excuse for a review of Red State (2011)
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10 March
Yes, well... What follows - more of an excuse of a review, than for one - has been lurking on my desktop* for a very long time, and, when I opened it just now, didn't even turn out to be the limerick that, I thought, was the best part of my response to this screening at last year's Festival (yes, some six months ago).
I have tidied and tarted it up, but it remains what it is: incomplete (if only I had that limerick!)
* Contains spoilers *
Can one ever be prepared for Kevin Smith? I don’t think so. (He probably isn’t himself.)
So I don’t think that, just because I hadn’t done my homework and managed to watch Clerks (1994) my companion at the screening was at an advantage: the world into which we were plunged was one of proud intolerance, casual killings, being right (in more than one sense) in the face of everything, and prepared to fight to the death. Not much scope for humour there.
My friend enjoyed what Smith, despite all odds, did wring from the situation by way of comedy at the end, but I was less sure – being unsure is not a good foundation for comedy, unless it is one involving a nervous kind of tittering.
Where will I go next, if I feel in need of searching out Smith? Well, I could investigate Dogma (1999), the one whose poster owes more than a little to (the work of) Gilbert and George, but why should I watch Damon team up again with Affleck? That said, Alan Rickman and Salma Hayek are both in it…
End-notes
* Which we know doesn't mean that thing that the computer - or part of it - stands on, because we call that 'my desk', and 'top' never has anything to do with it!
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10 March
Yes, well... What follows - more of an excuse of a review, than for one - has been lurking on my desktop* for a very long time, and, when I opened it just now, didn't even turn out to be the limerick that, I thought, was the best part of my response to this screening at last year's Festival (yes, some six months ago).
I have tidied and tarted it up, but it remains what it is: incomplete (if only I had that limerick!)
* Contains spoilers *
Can one ever be prepared for Kevin Smith? I don’t think so. (He probably isn’t himself.)
So I don’t think that, just because I hadn’t done my homework and managed to watch Clerks (1994) my companion at the screening was at an advantage: the world into which we were plunged was one of proud intolerance, casual killings, being right (in more than one sense) in the face of everything, and prepared to fight to the death. Not much scope for humour there.
My friend enjoyed what Smith, despite all odds, did wring from the situation by way of comedy at the end, but I was less sure – being unsure is not a good foundation for comedy, unless it is one involving a nervous kind of tittering.
Where will I go next, if I feel in need of searching out Smith? Well, I could investigate Dogma (1999), the one whose poster owes more than a little to (the work of) Gilbert and George, but why should I watch Damon team up again with Affleck? That said, Alan Rickman and Salma Hayek are both in it…
End-notes
* Which we know doesn't mean that thing that the computer - or part of it - stands on, because we call that 'my desk', and 'top' never has anything to do with it!
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Max Bruch is most famous for...?
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9 March
Not for inventing the dishwasher (as Max Christian Friedrich Bruch didn't, having been born, on the day of Epiphany in 1838, too early to do so), but, from more than 200 compositions, arguably for that Concerto for Violin (in G minor No. 1, Op. 26 (1866))*, or, if not that for you, for one of three other pieces (with very close opus numbers, and even corresponding dates of composition):
* The Scottish Fantasy in E flat major, Op. 46 (1880)
*Kol Nidrei, Op. 47 (1881);
* Symphony No. 3 in E major, Op. 51 (1883)
It is not that his work was not received well by audiences in its time (apparently, his cantata Frithjof, in the early 1860s, was met with great enthusiasm), but it didn't help either that, on account of the second of the works listed above, it was assumed that Bruch had Jewish ancestry and so was not performed in countries under Nazi control, or that music critics since seem to have sidelined him.
And there is, of course, a huge element of chance in what makes it into the repertoire. I have always loved the symphonic music of Vaughan Williams, but it is taking a figure such as Andrew Manze, as conductor, to make out a case for listening to symphonies that I have long valued. I also repeatedly remember how important Mendelssohn was, in a similar way, in making sure that works of Bach such as the B Minor Mass were heard, and also - love or loathe what he did with it - there is the influence of Glenn Gould's first recording of the Goldberg Variations.
With Tchaikovsky, it is rare to hear (least of all live) the Piano Concerto No. 2, and, despite how it was famously received at the time, it is almost always No. 1 that is played. There are also four Concertos for Piano and Orchestra by Rachmaninov, but it is relatively rare for the first or the fourth to be heard.
As to Bruch, although some sources say that he thought that the third concerto was as fine as the first, he seemingly knew where he was in history, and that the reputation of Brahms would overshadow hs own. In an unascribed comment**, he said:
Fifty years from now he [Brahms] will loom up as one of the supremely great composers of all time, while I will be remembered for having written my G minor violin concerto.
In their concerti for the instrument, both men owed a debt to the great Joseph Joachim (violinist, but also composer, as had been Pisendel before him), and - although it is another story - where would either work have been without him?
End-notes
* There are two others, both in D minor.
** Taken from The Rough Guide to Classical Music (London, 2005).
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9 March
Not for inventing the dishwasher (as Max Christian Friedrich Bruch didn't, having been born, on the day of Epiphany in 1838, too early to do so), but, from more than 200 compositions, arguably for that Concerto for Violin (in G minor No. 1, Op. 26 (1866))*, or, if not that for you, for one of three other pieces (with very close opus numbers, and even corresponding dates of composition):
* The Scottish Fantasy in E flat major, Op. 46 (1880)
*Kol Nidrei, Op. 47 (1881);
* Symphony No. 3 in E major, Op. 51 (1883)
It is not that his work was not received well by audiences in its time (apparently, his cantata Frithjof, in the early 1860s, was met with great enthusiasm), but it didn't help either that, on account of the second of the works listed above, it was assumed that Bruch had Jewish ancestry and so was not performed in countries under Nazi control, or that music critics since seem to have sidelined him.
And there is, of course, a huge element of chance in what makes it into the repertoire. I have always loved the symphonic music of Vaughan Williams, but it is taking a figure such as Andrew Manze, as conductor, to make out a case for listening to symphonies that I have long valued. I also repeatedly remember how important Mendelssohn was, in a similar way, in making sure that works of Bach such as the B Minor Mass were heard, and also - love or loathe what he did with it - there is the influence of Glenn Gould's first recording of the Goldberg Variations.
With Tchaikovsky, it is rare to hear (least of all live) the Piano Concerto No. 2, and, despite how it was famously received at the time, it is almost always No. 1 that is played. There are also four Concertos for Piano and Orchestra by Rachmaninov, but it is relatively rare for the first or the fourth to be heard.
As to Bruch, although some sources say that he thought that the third concerto was as fine as the first, he seemingly knew where he was in history, and that the reputation of Brahms would overshadow hs own. In an unascribed comment**, he said:
Fifty years from now he [Brahms] will loom up as one of the supremely great composers of all time, while I will be remembered for having written my G minor violin concerto.
In their concerti for the instrument, both men owed a debt to the great Joseph Joachim (violinist, but also composer, as had been Pisendel before him), and - although it is another story - where would either work have been without him?
End-notes
* There are two others, both in D minor.
** Taken from The Rough Guide to Classical Music (London, 2005).
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Might I ask what our Sunday trading legislation is for? (2)
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18 March
Just, for the sheer helluvit, I had planned to revisit this topic (when I started this posting as what Wikipedia® calls 'a stub'), but it happens to have become topical, with plans 'to relax' the legislation for the time of The Olympic Games.
Already The Opposition is questioning whether this is an initial move to do away with some provisions of the Sunday Trading Act 1994 permanently, which might be calculated to put the idea into the relevant noddle, not least when AOL® flashed a hint, last night, that the National Minimum Wage will be under attack in The Budget.
And, of course, we know how businesses suffered impossibly when the minimum wage was brought in - it's just that they chose to do so in a reaction delayed by many years - and that businesses, like banking, are good for the country as a whole, not just for those who receive large rewards for being part of the sector of financial services.
As for the 1994 Act, what would it mean to relax its effect temporarily? Not having any protection from sanctions, such as victimization or dismissal, if one refuses to work on a Sunday? A different regime for opting in or out of Sunday working?
Or is Mr Osborne going to look at that window of six hours for Sunday opening instead - or as well? So the shop can be open from 9.00 till 6.00, maybe, and if you don't want to work those hours, then
Nice XYZ Plc is offering you nine hours' work on Sunday - take it or lose it, as they want the hours worked, and you will be short on your usual working hours, because they are restructuring the shifts, if you refuse them, and these are part of your allotted hours, not additional ones.
And not that they would roster the rest of your hours at unsocial hours either...
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18 March
Just, for the sheer helluvit, I had planned to revisit this topic (when I started this posting as what Wikipedia® calls 'a stub'), but it happens to have become topical, with plans 'to relax' the legislation for the time of The Olympic Games.
Already The Opposition is questioning whether this is an initial move to do away with some provisions of the Sunday Trading Act 1994 permanently, which might be calculated to put the idea into the relevant noddle, not least when AOL® flashed a hint, last night, that the National Minimum Wage will be under attack in The Budget.
And, of course, we know how businesses suffered impossibly when the minimum wage was brought in - it's just that they chose to do so in a reaction delayed by many years - and that businesses, like banking, are good for the country as a whole, not just for those who receive large rewards for being part of the sector of financial services.
As for the 1994 Act, what would it mean to relax its effect temporarily? Not having any protection from sanctions, such as victimization or dismissal, if one refuses to work on a Sunday? A different regime for opting in or out of Sunday working?
Or is Mr Osborne going to look at that window of six hours for Sunday opening instead - or as well? So the shop can be open from 9.00 till 6.00, maybe, and if you don't want to work those hours, then
Nice XYZ Plc is offering you nine hours' work on Sunday - take it or lose it, as they want the hours worked, and you will be short on your usual working hours, because they are restructuring the shifts, if you refuse them, and these are part of your allotted hours, not additional ones.
And not that they would roster the rest of your hours at unsocial hours either...
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Thursday, 8 March 2012
Woody and his women (1)
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9 March
Now, don't get me wrong, because Allen has written some great screen parts for women, but I'm thinking - as I do incessantly, thoughts feverishing racing around my head, trying to catch up with each other and sometimes crashing - about this collection Mere Anarchy yet again.
What does he read (or hear) that he writes such things in these stories for his male characters to write (or say) about women*?:
* The twin dirigibles that stretched her silk blouse to the breaking point
* Hoping to revel in tableaux of raven-tressed sinners looking like they’d come directly from the pages of a Victoria’s Secret catalogue as they undulated, seminude, in sulphur and chains
* Once she wiggled her award-winning posterior into the lift
Not, by any means, that sex - particularly oral sex - hasn't always been a preoccupation since Allen's earliest films (such as Bananas (1971), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), and Annie Hall (1977)), but maybe, despite the humour (which is maybe a bit too unsubtle), it's that it passes by quickly onscreen as cheeky, rather than as smutty or prurient...
End-notes
* There is another in this collection of around 18 pieces, but I have mislaid it: it must be resting in Father Ted's account, I think. (None is narratated by a woman.)
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9 March
Now, don't get me wrong, because Allen has written some great screen parts for women, but I'm thinking - as I do incessantly, thoughts feverishing racing around my head, trying to catch up with each other and sometimes crashing - about this collection Mere Anarchy yet again.
What does he read (or hear) that he writes such things in these stories for his male characters to write (or say) about women*?:
* The twin dirigibles that stretched her silk blouse to the breaking point
* Hoping to revel in tableaux of raven-tressed sinners looking like they’d come directly from the pages of a Victoria’s Secret catalogue as they undulated, seminude, in sulphur and chains
* Once she wiggled her award-winning posterior into the lift
Not, by any means, that sex - particularly oral sex - hasn't always been a preoccupation since Allen's earliest films (such as Bananas (1971), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), and Annie Hall (1977)), but maybe, despite the humour (which is maybe a bit too unsubtle), it's that it passes by quickly onscreen as cheeky, rather than as smutty or prurient...
End-notes
* There is another in this collection of around 18 pieces, but I have mislaid it: it must be resting in Father Ted's account, I think. (None is narratated by a woman.)
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Mystery Worshipper: Mr Ricarno
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8 March 2012
Having heard to-night about some mystery drinkers, really from CAMRA, but who had masqueraded as members of a rugby club in the region, I cannot resist posting a link to this item, which I have happened to discover and has a synergy:
http://ship-of-fools.com/mystery/2005/1134.html
If only to tell me that there may be more reasons than the supposedly obvious one why someone attends a service, buys a ticket for a concert, or has a meal...
And, although it does not appear to work for all numbers, if you edit the link to make it 1133, you get another visit to another church (but I haven't - and probably never will - figured out (pun intended!) why 1132 works, but 13 does not)...
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8 March 2012
Having heard to-night about some mystery drinkers, really from CAMRA, but who had masqueraded as members of a rugby club in the region, I cannot resist posting a link to this item, which I have happened to discover and has a synergy:
http://ship-of-fools.com/mystery/2005/1134.html
If only to tell me that there may be more reasons than the supposedly obvious one why someone attends a service, buys a ticket for a concert, or has a meal...
And, although it does not appear to work for all numbers, if you edit the link to make it 1133, you get another visit to another church (but I haven't - and probably never will - figured out (pun intended!) why 1132 works, but 13 does not)...
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LENT LUNCH - 23 MARCH
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8 March
Some people's take on the feeding of the five thousand is that a little boy shared his lunch-box.
Mine on reading the notice that advises me of this meal is to mourn the failure to use the word Lenten, because my understanding of a lent lunch is a sandwich that you somehow expected to get back, and I feel a richness and a beauty in this specific adjective for the church season of Lent - the word aurally has a better ring to it than the monosyallabic Lent: 'we welcome to you our service at this Lenten time'.
Yet it is the church itself that is turning its back on this word, because who else, other than the various denominations and some charities, has Lent lunches?
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8 March
Some people's take on the feeding of the five thousand is that a little boy shared his lunch-box.
Mine on reading the notice that advises me of this meal is to mourn the failure to use the word Lenten, because my understanding of a lent lunch is a sandwich that you somehow expected to get back, and I feel a richness and a beauty in this specific adjective for the church season of Lent - the word aurally has a better ring to it than the monosyallabic Lent: 'we welcome to you our service at this Lenten time'.
Yet it is the church itself that is turning its back on this word, because who else, other than the various denominations and some charities, has Lent lunches?
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Wednesday, 7 March 2012
What was it with Sibelius and the milk pudding?* (2)
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7 March
And old Jean had a thing not just about gâteaux, but milk puddings, notably tapioca:
Of course, he tried to give the game away, by writing a whole programmatic work in praise of it, but - probably only in a misreading (his handwriting was worse than mine) brought on by incredulity, rather than an attempt to suppress his message - it ended up as being interpreted to depict a forest spirit called Tapio and his realm, hence Tapiola.
No wonder it was his last work, for his publisher asked him for clarification of its themes, and he then had to struggle to write four lines of verse to turn his appreciation of one of his life's delights into some other wretched evocation of Finnish mythology!
End-notes
* Oh, I know that it's a formulation little better than Can I get...?, but it was done with thought, with deliberation, with Love.
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7 March
And old Jean had a thing not just about gâteaux, but milk puddings, notably tapioca:
Of course, he tried to give the game away, by writing a whole programmatic work in praise of it, but - probably only in a misreading (his handwriting was worse than mine) brought on by incredulity, rather than an attempt to suppress his message - it ended up as being interpreted to depict a forest spirit called Tapio and his realm, hence Tapiola.
No wonder it was his last work, for his publisher asked him for clarification of its themes, and he then had to struggle to write four lines of verse to turn his appreciation of one of his life's delights into some other wretched evocation of Finnish mythology!
End-notes
* Oh, I know that it's a formulation little better than Can I get...?, but it was done with thought, with deliberation, with Love.
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Sunday, 4 March 2012
What is this fascination with the music of Adès? (2)
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4 March
An achievement whose performance, I feel, deserves celebration, by contrast, is that of a piece that I happened to hear (and turned out probably only to have missed the beginning of and a little bit twenty minutes on) as part of Music Nation on Radio 3 last night:
It was Surrogate Cities by Heiner Goebbels, called a composition for orchestra, and broadcast live from The Royal Festival Hall.
In default of saying anything more meaningful now, here is a link to the composer's web-site:
http://www.heinergoebbels.com/en/archive/works/complete/view/46
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4 March
An achievement whose performance, I feel, deserves celebration, by contrast, is that of a piece that I happened to hear (and turned out probably only to have missed the beginning of and a little bit twenty minutes on) as part of Music Nation on Radio 3 last night:
It was Surrogate Cities by Heiner Goebbels, called a composition for orchestra, and broadcast live from The Royal Festival Hall.
In default of saying anything more meaningful now, here is a link to the composer's web-site:
http://www.heinergoebbels.com/en/archive/works/complete/view/46
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Saturday, 3 March 2012
James Bowman pronounces: Most Handel operas have stupid plots
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3 March
I'm not sure (maybe, now, he, too, isn't sure) why he had to share this opinion to introduce a duet from, I think, the last Act of Riccardo Primo, but, he excepted only Giulio Cesare and Ariodante.
Which, I believe, is a little hard on:
Acis and Galatea (about a poster for which he made another joke) - why shouldn't a jealous giant, in love with one, kill the other?
Teseo, because Medea is such a great, wild and torn character, and the things that she does are of legendary status, and what is wrong with the Theseus story?
Likewise Alcestis, for why should not Ruggiero, very much modelled on Odysseus and his wanderings, be unwittingly enslaved by enchantments - a paradigm for love, after all?
And so one could go on - I don't disagree with Bowman that the music is great, but where is the evidence that the libretto / story is so unworthy that Handel must have composed with an eye to the money, not the power of the piece*?
For, if the da capo arias really did have such little merit in terms of a story not worth advancing, I really do find it hard to believe that Handel's audience would, throughout his opera career, have been so often duped. Whereas I honestly believe that word of mouth and personal recommendation, then as now, are so much a part of whether a run closes early that the success that he enjoyed should give us pause in the face of Bowman's dimissal:
Really, when Bowman himself boasted of how many Handel roles he has played, isn't he, not Handel, the cynical one, if he thinks them so much trash...?
End-notes
* Is the opinon, one wonders, based on anything better than having seen the highly unflattering portrait of the composer in Farinelli (il Castrato) (1994)?
(The film gives, by contrast, much evidence of the beauty of the music and of Farinell's (imagined) voice, against the background of hard-nosed competition and ruthless business deals, the depiction (whether or not invention) of the latter of which may easily influence for the worse against our notion of Handel the man.)
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3 March
I'm not sure (maybe, now, he, too, isn't sure) why he had to share this opinion to introduce a duet from, I think, the last Act of Riccardo Primo, but, he excepted only Giulio Cesare and Ariodante.
Which, I believe, is a little hard on:
Acis and Galatea (about a poster for which he made another joke) - why shouldn't a jealous giant, in love with one, kill the other?
Teseo, because Medea is such a great, wild and torn character, and the things that she does are of legendary status, and what is wrong with the Theseus story?
Likewise Alcestis, for why should not Ruggiero, very much modelled on Odysseus and his wanderings, be unwittingly enslaved by enchantments - a paradigm for love, after all?
And so one could go on - I don't disagree with Bowman that the music is great, but where is the evidence that the libretto / story is so unworthy that Handel must have composed with an eye to the money, not the power of the piece*?
For, if the da capo arias really did have such little merit in terms of a story not worth advancing, I really do find it hard to believe that Handel's audience would, throughout his opera career, have been so often duped. Whereas I honestly believe that word of mouth and personal recommendation, then as now, are so much a part of whether a run closes early that the success that he enjoyed should give us pause in the face of Bowman's dimissal:
Really, when Bowman himself boasted of how many Handel roles he has played, isn't he, not Handel, the cynical one, if he thinks them so much trash...?
End-notes
* Is the opinon, one wonders, based on anything better than having seen the highly unflattering portrait of the composer in Farinelli (il Castrato) (1994)?
(The film gives, by contrast, much evidence of the beauty of the music and of Farinell's (imagined) voice, against the background of hard-nosed competition and ruthless business deals, the depiction (whether or not invention) of the latter of which may easily influence for the worse against our notion of Handel the man.)
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STOP PRESS: Beat-Crazed Boffins trounced by Daniella (1)
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3 March
Alas, that whole Westbrook / East End scene has trashed all the planning for the gig!
In other words, the promoter has got twitchy about 'the substance issue' with which - let's face it - the Boffins had always been inextricably connected.
So he's itchy, because he thinks that the backers will have the rug pulled by the bankers, who, maybe, might be looking to a bonus other than in the form of unsaleable gig tickets, and who, in turn, are in hock to God knows whom who owns X who should honour some favours to Hugh Hefner and / or his estate.
Sorry, BCB following, but that - and, admittedly, this is only the latest - appears to be the terminus, the station where Tolstoy died and the Tolstoyans took over...
That said, the desperate and the downright depraved can now go here in search of news of what Bray King (one-time fight promoter, and now would-be manager of the putative Boffins) has to say about A Tall!
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3 March
Alas, that whole Westbrook / East End scene has trashed all the planning for the gig!
In other words, the promoter has got twitchy about 'the substance issue' with which - let's face it - the Boffins had always been inextricably connected.
So he's itchy, because he thinks that the backers will have the rug pulled by the bankers, who, maybe, might be looking to a bonus other than in the form of unsaleable gig tickets, and who, in turn, are in hock to God knows whom who owns X who should honour some favours to Hugh Hefner and / or his estate.
Sorry, BCB following, but that - and, admittedly, this is only the latest - appears to be the terminus, the station where Tolstoy died and the Tolstoyans took over...
That said, the desperate and the downright depraved can now go here in search of news of what Bray King (one-time fight promoter, and now would-be manager of the putative Boffins) has to say about A Tall!
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Naomi Campbell performs her Sonata for Piano (according to Samuel VII and YouTube)
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3 March
And a cracking performance it is!
Shunning designer wear for a frock borrowed (on the sly) from Katie Derham, Campbell cuts a stunning figure, as she sits silently, contemplating the black interleaved with the white.
Then, in a shot of her actually at the piano, we see her hesitate, before unleashing this piece of compressed energy. For the entire sonata, although in two quite different movements, lasts just 15 seconds, without repeats. (With repeats, which are intermeshed in a complicated way, it could take days, which is longer than can be uploaded to the relevant web-site.)
In a naive act, as if of rage, we are reminded of nothing so much as Bartók's Allegro barbaro, and then, in the contrasting mood, of his well-known nuance for 'night music'. How good, then, that Campbell turned down, in favour of this work, a commission for a Theme and 57 Variations on an Original Melody by Thomas Adès!
Just the first in a strand dubbed 'Supermodels play Sonatas'*.
End-notes
* Although, personally, I'm with Nietzsche still - and waiting for the hypermodel to emerge.
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3 March
And a cracking performance it is!
Shunning designer wear for a frock borrowed (on the sly) from Katie Derham, Campbell cuts a stunning figure, as she sits silently, contemplating the black interleaved with the white.
Then, in a shot of her actually at the piano, we see her hesitate, before unleashing this piece of compressed energy. For the entire sonata, although in two quite different movements, lasts just 15 seconds, without repeats. (With repeats, which are intermeshed in a complicated way, it could take days, which is longer than can be uploaded to the relevant web-site.)
In a naive act, as if of rage, we are reminded of nothing so much as Bartók's Allegro barbaro, and then, in the contrasting mood, of his well-known nuance for 'night music'. How good, then, that Campbell turned down, in favour of this work, a commission for a Theme and 57 Variations on an Original Melody by Thomas Adès!
Just the first in a strand dubbed 'Supermodels play Sonatas'*.
End-notes
* Although, personally, I'm with Nietzsche still - and waiting for the hypermodel to emerge.
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Complex?
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3 March
Complex?
'They've got it all wrong,
About the Don'
(So says he):
'They're the ones who demand -
They want him'
(Such his view)
'They truly stand in need -
They want him'
(Thus he observes)
At the same time,
In a basement in Amsterdam,
He cannot deny:
The desire to inseminate,
To make pregnant,
To give her one!
Priapic, his lust
For intercourse
Defies Leporello's notes,
Numbers, logic,
Save the logic
Of genetic lines
Rutting in the glade,
Seducing another's wife,
All about passing it on,
Passing on the impulse
To pass it on,
And on again
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
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3 March
Complex?
'They've got it all wrong,
About the Don'
(So says he):
'They're the ones who demand -
They want him'
(Such his view)
'They truly stand in need -
They want him'
(Thus he observes)
At the same time,
In a basement in Amsterdam,
He cannot deny:
The desire to inseminate,
To make pregnant,
To give her one!
Priapic, his lust
For intercourse
Defies Leporello's notes,
Numbers, logic,
Save the logic
Of genetic lines
Rutting in the glade,
Seducing another's wife,
All about passing it on,
Passing on the impulse
To pass it on,
And on again
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
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Friday, 2 March 2012
Somehow I blinked... (2)
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3 March
I quote, rather hurriedly, from http://www.takeonecff.com/about:
The Official Cambridge Film Festival & Arts Picturehouse Review
Take One is an independent film journal run by volunteers. It evolved in 2011 from the original Film Festival Daily as the official source of news, reviews and interviews on all films screened during the Cambridge Film Festival. The first hard copy issue of Take One was distributed around Cambridge on September 8th, and the website is set to run throughout the year. We are in the process of publishing unseen gems from CFF 2011 including interviews with John Hurt, Gary Oldman, Paddy Considine and Nicholas Winding Refn – not to mention friends you maybe haven’t met yet such as Jos Stelling and Simon Rumley.
We will be covering many events in Cambridge including the Silent Film Festival and Cambridge African Film Festival, keeping you abreast of all things Picturehouse and reporting back from events and film festivals around the world.
We pride ourselves in being quotable but un-hip, informative but not smug, and we won’t spoil endings. Stick around, chums.
QED
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3 March
I quote, rather hurriedly, from http://www.takeonecff.com/about:
The Official Cambridge Film Festival & Arts Picturehouse Review
Take One is an independent film journal run by volunteers. It evolved in 2011 from the original Film Festival Daily as the official source of news, reviews and interviews on all films screened during the Cambridge Film Festival. The first hard copy issue of Take One was distributed around Cambridge on September 8th, and the website is set to run throughout the year. We are in the process of publishing unseen gems from CFF 2011 including interviews with John Hurt, Gary Oldman, Paddy Considine and Nicholas Winding Refn – not to mention friends you maybe haven’t met yet such as Jos Stelling and Simon Rumley.
We will be covering many events in Cambridge including the Silent Film Festival and Cambridge African Film Festival, keeping you abreast of all things Picturehouse and reporting back from events and film festivals around the world.
We pride ourselves in being quotable but un-hip, informative but not smug, and we won’t spoil endings. Stick around, chums.
QED
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Never Let Me Glow - Ishiguro's Nocturnes
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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3 March
I had more than a hand in critiquing this set of five stories (subtitled 'Five Stories of Music and Nightfall'), which is posted, under my friend's pseudonym, as a review on Amazon®:
One reviewer said that this book is not a `miscellaneous collection of unpublished scraps', but it is - why else mention it?
Another reviewer praised the book this way: `The five brief novellas of Nocturnes are intense and beautiful [read as shallow, boring, banal, shapeless and colourless]; they are packed with detail [read as inconsequential information, senselessly repeated], never waste the readers' attention [read as continuous amazement about oneself for continuing to read on], and are entirely engrossing [read as feeling that doing the dishes would be time better spent]'.
A third reviewer soberly observed: `Had my A level student son written in the same way, I would have made him do a re-write.' The stories are juvenile, and so is the writing.
One other reviewer suggested killing time by reading the stories `in quick succession in one go. Given their pacing, this seems like a manageable task over a long languorous weekend afternoon'.
In fact, there is only one way to experience this book: reading it aloud, doing humorous voices for Ishiguro's feeble characters, and pointing out all his poor style on the way. A hilarious and enjoyable form of entertainment for many an hour!
As a one-star review, it's done well by being read: it has won no stars at all of its own, but it is better than expected for 0 out of 8 people not to have found it helpful (i.e. at least 8 people have looked at it and been bothered enough to want to respond).
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3 March
I had more than a hand in critiquing this set of five stories (subtitled 'Five Stories of Music and Nightfall'), which is posted, under my friend's pseudonym, as a review on Amazon®:
One reviewer said that this book is not a `miscellaneous collection of unpublished scraps', but it is - why else mention it?
Another reviewer praised the book this way: `The five brief novellas of Nocturnes are intense and beautiful [read as shallow, boring, banal, shapeless and colourless]; they are packed with detail [read as inconsequential information, senselessly repeated], never waste the readers' attention [read as continuous amazement about oneself for continuing to read on], and are entirely engrossing [read as feeling that doing the dishes would be time better spent]'.
A third reviewer soberly observed: `Had my A level student son written in the same way, I would have made him do a re-write.' The stories are juvenile, and so is the writing.
One other reviewer suggested killing time by reading the stories `in quick succession in one go. Given their pacing, this seems like a manageable task over a long languorous weekend afternoon'.
In fact, there is only one way to experience this book: reading it aloud, doing humorous voices for Ishiguro's feeble characters, and pointing out all his poor style on the way. A hilarious and enjoyable form of entertainment for many an hour!
As a one-star review, it's done well by being read: it has won no stars at all of its own, but it is better than expected for 0 out of 8 people not to have found it helpful (i.e. at least 8 people have looked at it and been bothered enough to want to respond).
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A letter to The Editor
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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3 March
Dear Cedric
The letter is probably Z, since it is more versatile on the board than Q or J, and my handkerchiefs are accordingly monogrammed with it. (They wanted to monograph them, but I refused, unless they gave them a free mammagram: which they refused.)
I had a telegram from Tom, but he had telegraphed in vain - 'twas ever in vain with Tom, after dear Viv, and it is now just an Unreal City in which he cannot believe death has undone so many. (Dr ZenZen has charge of his case now, after taking over the left-property concession at Victoria. [He wanted the right-property one, but he had sealed a playing-card in the envelope, rather than his bid].)
Victoria sends her love, and, forgiveably, spends less time with Virginia now after that incident with the water, so the hours hang heavy, unless she goes to the lighthouse, or calls on her kid brother Jacob in his room. At least he has a room of his own!
Ed tells me - a little too candidly even for my club's steward - that he 'wants to get his end away', but maybe he'll sublimate that in another novel. I'd like to believe that there is a visual quality in his prose, as everyone else says, but I'd rather buy ivory from a merchant in the street!
Anyway, that's a round-up of the set. (Moeran had tried to buy the set, saying that, after all, he, too, was known by his initials, but his Egyptian funds fell through.)
Yours dutifully
Bertie
PS I did want to get this to the post to-night, but, at the head of the stairs (or was it the stead of the hares?), I was blunged into parkness, everything became a blur, and I had visions of falling, my head mashed to a pulp on the newel-posts.
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3 March
Dear Cedric
The letter is probably Z, since it is more versatile on the board than Q or J, and my handkerchiefs are accordingly monogrammed with it. (They wanted to monograph them, but I refused, unless they gave them a free mammagram: which they refused.)
I had a telegram from Tom, but he had telegraphed in vain - 'twas ever in vain with Tom, after dear Viv, and it is now just an Unreal City in which he cannot believe death has undone so many. (Dr ZenZen has charge of his case now, after taking over the left-property concession at Victoria. [He wanted the right-property one, but he had sealed a playing-card in the envelope, rather than his bid].)
Victoria sends her love, and, forgiveably, spends less time with Virginia now after that incident with the water, so the hours hang heavy, unless she goes to the lighthouse, or calls on her kid brother Jacob in his room. At least he has a room of his own!
Ed tells me - a little too candidly even for my club's steward - that he 'wants to get his end away', but maybe he'll sublimate that in another novel. I'd like to believe that there is a visual quality in his prose, as everyone else says, but I'd rather buy ivory from a merchant in the street!
Anyway, that's a round-up of the set. (Moeran had tried to buy the set, saying that, after all, he, too, was known by his initials, but his Egyptian funds fell through.)
Yours dutifully
Bertie
PS I did want to get this to the post to-night, but, at the head of the stairs (or was it the stead of the hares?), I was blunged into parkness, everything became a blur, and I had visions of falling, my head mashed to a pulp on the newel-posts.
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Thursday, 1 March 2012
True Stories (1986)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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2 March
Not (essentially because, ironically, of the story) much of a film (and I doubt that I would revisit it to be sure*), but it gave rise to what should be admitted is a great album (some people might like to say the same about The Mission (1986), released the same year, but I think that is probably unfair).
My best friend from school, for reasons that were quite hidden to me, had - probably still has - a great liking for Martinu's** music. A few years ago, and a few years on from then, he played me some favoured orchestral composition of his when we were at university, and, admittedly not intending to be complimentary, said that it sounded like film music to me. (He found, I seem to remember, some way of interpreting the comment that questioned whether that was actually a bad thing.)
I vaguely heard the concert in the first part of to-night's Through the Night announced by the very safe voice of Susan Sharpe (on the night shift yet again!), but it was only when what turned out to be Martinu's Symphony No. 1*** was playing that it struck me that it could be accompanying some action that I probably wouldn't want to pay to see at the cinema (not my sort of film), and I went to www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 to be sure that this composer was on the bill of fare.
End-notes
* Even if a whole load of Garrison Keillor (and Bill Bryson's take on small-town America) has flowed under the bridge since then. (And, yes, I do know that this is Texas, not the mid-West!)
That said, I notice (which is the reason for all this) that I missed a film last year about and showing David Byrne in live performance, and have added the DVD to my basket - somewhere - for when I feel like spending a fiver...
** Radio 3 doesn't bother with the accent on his name on its web-page, so I am not troubled to go somewhere else, only to find that I cannot reproduce it anyway (or is that the one on his Christian name?).
*** Elsewhere (work in progress) I shall be asking about how we refer to kings and queens.
In the meantime, this convention of calling works by titles such as 'Concerto No. 3' (which no one respects when talking about them - but, then, we live in a world where Tracy Chevalier made up a name for a painting and got away with it) suddenly seems very odd.
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2 March
Not (essentially because, ironically, of the story) much of a film (and I doubt that I would revisit it to be sure*), but it gave rise to what should be admitted is a great album (some people might like to say the same about The Mission (1986), released the same year, but I think that is probably unfair).
My best friend from school, for reasons that were quite hidden to me, had - probably still has - a great liking for Martinu's** music. A few years ago, and a few years on from then, he played me some favoured orchestral composition of his when we were at university, and, admittedly not intending to be complimentary, said that it sounded like film music to me. (He found, I seem to remember, some way of interpreting the comment that questioned whether that was actually a bad thing.)
I vaguely heard the concert in the first part of to-night's Through the Night announced by the very safe voice of Susan Sharpe (on the night shift yet again!), but it was only when what turned out to be Martinu's Symphony No. 1*** was playing that it struck me that it could be accompanying some action that I probably wouldn't want to pay to see at the cinema (not my sort of film), and I went to www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 to be sure that this composer was on the bill of fare.
End-notes
* Even if a whole load of Garrison Keillor (and Bill Bryson's take on small-town America) has flowed under the bridge since then. (And, yes, I do know that this is Texas, not the mid-West!)
That said, I notice (which is the reason for all this) that I missed a film last year about and showing David Byrne in live performance, and have added the DVD to my basket - somewhere - for when I feel like spending a fiver...
** Radio 3 doesn't bother with the accent on his name on its web-page, so I am not troubled to go somewhere else, only to find that I cannot reproduce it anyway (or is that the one on his Christian name?).
*** Elsewhere (work in progress) I shall be asking about how we refer to kings and queens.
In the meantime, this convention of calling works by titles such as 'Concerto No. 3' (which no one respects when talking about them - but, then, we live in a world where Tracy Chevalier made up a name for a painting and got away with it) suddenly seems very odd.
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Russell's Pate and degenerate languages
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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2 March
Of course, the apostrophe is slowly, itself, in danger of slipping into oblivion, but it is only there to make the point:
We do not live in very literate times, and much is passed (or, as some would write, past) on by word of mouth* (a strange phrase, if one stops to think about it), so what is envisaged by the argot (call it what you will) in which the novel Riddley Walker's author has a future time and its notion of its past related is a disjunction between some sounds and what saying them has come to mean.
Apart from the immersive feel of impenetrability that the language seems to give until you have a chance to hear even Will Self himself read a section of it - which you may be able to do on one of the web-sites dedicated to the late Russell Hoban (sa4qe.blogspot.co.uk is as good a place as any from which to find some of the others) - and then realize that there is a way through (other than gritting one's teeth) and there is so much more besides to explore.
End-notes
* Even a very good announcer on Radio 3 talked about, very recently, Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale: I have said elsewhere that the same unstressed dead vowel in a and the can make them sound indistinguishable (which is because the 'th' sound is the unclear one of the pair, unlike the one in that).
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2 March
Of course, the apostrophe is slowly, itself, in danger of slipping into oblivion, but it is only there to make the point:
We do not live in very literate times, and much is passed (or, as some would write, past) on by word of mouth* (a strange phrase, if one stops to think about it), so what is envisaged by the argot (call it what you will) in which the novel Riddley Walker's author has a future time and its notion of its past related is a disjunction between some sounds and what saying them has come to mean.
Apart from the immersive feel of impenetrability that the language seems to give until you have a chance to hear even Will Self himself read a section of it - which you may be able to do on one of the web-sites dedicated to the late Russell Hoban (sa4qe.blogspot.co.uk is as good a place as any from which to find some of the others) - and then realize that there is a way through (other than gritting one's teeth) and there is so much more besides to explore.
End-notes
* Even a very good announcer on Radio 3 talked about, very recently, Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale: I have said elsewhere that the same unstressed dead vowel in a and the can make them sound indistinguishable (which is because the 'th' sound is the unclear one of the pair, unlike the one in that).
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The Great Composers: the stories that amuse us, but do not edify them or us
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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2 March
Announcing Beethoven's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3, they almost invariably tell you this story about the premiere:
A pupil of his was asked to turn the pages, but was aghast that there was almost nothing written on them.
Are we ever told who the pupil is? I don't recall it, if so. So from whose account, save the pupil's, would we know that this happened (or is there a claim that Beethoven confirmed the story)? Could the audience itself possibly have known, by looking at the manuscript paper?
More importantly, how does it help us to approach the work and listening to the solo part to know that, if the story is to be believed, Beethoven had allegedly gone before an audience to play it without having written it out? Even if he had, aren't all of Concertos Nos 3 to 5, at least, in the established repertoire?
So does this account, if it tells us anything, inform us more about our own prejudices and pre-suppositions than about whether Beethoven was so behind with things that he had failed to get something down on time? After all, improvised cadenzas were the stuff of Haydn's day, and of Mozart's, and we love that story of how the latter supposedly wrote a trio whilst playing skittles:
How rare - or common - would it have been for Mozart to play a solo part that he had not committed to paper? Can we even have that notion in our mind when this story about Beethoven is trotted before us once more? It almost compels us to feel that he - in the slang idiom - was 'chancing it', was 'winging it', when maybe he was doing nothing of the sort that was unusual.
You could very well look at the prompt cards that experienced and very professional after-dinner speakers use, and maybe the key-words would say nothing to you, but wouldn't you judge the quality of the preparation evidenced in the speech by hearing it, not by looking at cards that are not meant to mean anything except to the person holding them?
So - and I truly think so - this account of the premiere of that concerto just needs dumping. Unless we know how the performance was received by that contemporary audience - and whether its members detected shortcomings that could be laid at the door of poor groundwork - so what, frankly? And, in any case we value Beethoven for the works that he left us, not for his vices or virtues as a soloist whose efforts, in that domain, we will never hear...
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2 March
Announcing Beethoven's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3, they almost invariably tell you this story about the premiere:
A pupil of his was asked to turn the pages, but was aghast that there was almost nothing written on them.
Are we ever told who the pupil is? I don't recall it, if so. So from whose account, save the pupil's, would we know that this happened (or is there a claim that Beethoven confirmed the story)? Could the audience itself possibly have known, by looking at the manuscript paper?
More importantly, how does it help us to approach the work and listening to the solo part to know that, if the story is to be believed, Beethoven had allegedly gone before an audience to play it without having written it out? Even if he had, aren't all of Concertos Nos 3 to 5, at least, in the established repertoire?
So does this account, if it tells us anything, inform us more about our own prejudices and pre-suppositions than about whether Beethoven was so behind with things that he had failed to get something down on time? After all, improvised cadenzas were the stuff of Haydn's day, and of Mozart's, and we love that story of how the latter supposedly wrote a trio whilst playing skittles:
How rare - or common - would it have been for Mozart to play a solo part that he had not committed to paper? Can we even have that notion in our mind when this story about Beethoven is trotted before us once more? It almost compels us to feel that he - in the slang idiom - was 'chancing it', was 'winging it', when maybe he was doing nothing of the sort that was unusual.
You could very well look at the prompt cards that experienced and very professional after-dinner speakers use, and maybe the key-words would say nothing to you, but wouldn't you judge the quality of the preparation evidenced in the speech by hearing it, not by looking at cards that are not meant to mean anything except to the person holding them?
So - and I truly think so - this account of the premiere of that concerto just needs dumping. Unless we know how the performance was received by that contemporary audience - and whether its members detected shortcomings that could be laid at the door of poor groundwork - so what, frankly? And, in any case we value Beethoven for the works that he left us, not for his vices or virtues as a soloist whose efforts, in that domain, we will never hear...
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Beat-Crazed Boffins re-form for a final bash! (according to Samuel VII)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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1 March
Actually, they haven't so much re-formed as reformed, so their gig will be of a rather penitential nature, in kind memory of all those monitors (not of the scaly, four-legged variety) that they have hacked to pieces in previous 'on-stage benders' (Daily Scum).
Catch them if you can - the venue for the gig and other relevant details (such as blood-type) are available to all those who can hack into the deeply hidden treasure-chest, just waiting to be found by the lucky few at www.beatcrazedboffins.org.uk/timian...
For the hard of hearing* (you soon will be):
NB Go here for the latest!
End-notes
* Surely no longer a PC phrase (i.e. only compatible with use on a Mac)?
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1 March
Actually, they haven't so much re-formed as reformed, so their gig will be of a rather penitential nature, in kind memory of all those monitors (not of the scaly, four-legged variety) that they have hacked to pieces in previous 'on-stage benders' (Daily Scum).
Catch them if you can - the venue for the gig and other relevant details (such as blood-type) are available to all those who can hack into the deeply hidden treasure-chest, just waiting to be found by the lucky few at www.beatcrazedboffins.org.uk/timian...
For the hard of hearing* (you soon will be):
www.beatcrazedboffins.org.uk/timian
NB Go here for the latest!
End-notes
* Surely no longer a PC phrase (i.e. only compatible with use on a Mac)?
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What is this fascination with the music of Adès? (1)
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1 March
Well, I have now witnessed the much-vaunted Thomas Adès (I was sceptical, but The Tempest - almost like The Artist (2011) - seemed to have everyone enthralled, i.e. in slavery), and he does not, at any rate, look like a man who is comfortable with himself: it could be fanciful, but he struck me, in dress and demeanour, as more like a harassed postmaster (or, maybe, an astonished station-master) than the director of an evening's programme of music.
In fact, he did not direct at all: he conducted, arms jutting out to give cues and the like, and he even conducted a very small chamber group, of no more than half-a-dozen players, almost as if, with a string quartet performing one of his works, he would do the same.
As to his music, it may not be pastiche as such, but these were my brief impressions of his concerto Concentric Paths (which, I also believe, was meant to sound more clever than it was - some people want to claim about Chopin that his solo piano works sound very difficult, but are not really that hard to play):
If I had not known that I was listening to the first movement of this concerto for violin, I would have sworn that this was a piece of Ligeti, and that made me feel that Adès does not have his own voice.
(Sally Beamish has just been on Composer of the Week, and, Undertow, a piece by Tansy Davies was played to-night on Radio 3, and neither of those composers sounded so like anyone else.)
In the second movement, it appeared to be a variety of composers' influences (two British) that I was hearing: in writing this, I did forget, for a moment, who all three were, but it was Shostakovich, Maxwell Davies, and Nyman.
In the case of Nyman alone, he continued into the finale: unlike with what sounded like a piece of Ligeti, the music just seemed immensely in the shadow of Nymanesque concerns and approaches (and maybe, as Adès looked, not happy with them).
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1 March
Well, I have now witnessed the much-vaunted Thomas Adès (I was sceptical, but The Tempest - almost like The Artist (2011) - seemed to have everyone enthralled, i.e. in slavery), and he does not, at any rate, look like a man who is comfortable with himself: it could be fanciful, but he struck me, in dress and demeanour, as more like a harassed postmaster (or, maybe, an astonished station-master) than the director of an evening's programme of music.
In fact, he did not direct at all: he conducted, arms jutting out to give cues and the like, and he even conducted a very small chamber group, of no more than half-a-dozen players, almost as if, with a string quartet performing one of his works, he would do the same.
As to his music, it may not be pastiche as such, but these were my brief impressions of his concerto Concentric Paths (which, I also believe, was meant to sound more clever than it was - some people want to claim about Chopin that his solo piano works sound very difficult, but are not really that hard to play):
If I had not known that I was listening to the first movement of this concerto for violin, I would have sworn that this was a piece of Ligeti, and that made me feel that Adès does not have his own voice.
(Sally Beamish has just been on Composer of the Week, and, Undertow, a piece by Tansy Davies was played to-night on Radio 3, and neither of those composers sounded so like anyone else.)
In the second movement, it appeared to be a variety of composers' influences (two British) that I was hearing: in writing this, I did forget, for a moment, who all three were, but it was Shostakovich, Maxwell Davies, and Nyman.
In the case of Nyman alone, he continued into the finale: unlike with what sounded like a piece of Ligeti, the music just seemed immensely in the shadow of Nymanesque concerns and approaches (and maybe, as Adès looked, not happy with them).
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Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Daniella Westbrook: 'Drugs Have Ruined My Looks' (courtesy of Huffpost)
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1 March
Yes, well, there might be one pose chosen for this story where Daniella resembles an Emma Watson, but - unless I am hopelessly misinformed - she was never awarded the beauty contracts that come the ex-Potter star's way.
Or are we all supposed to be having amnesia and believing that she was some sort of raging beauty in her significant t.v. role in a family of crooks?
To flip the coin, Marilyn was, of course, never comfortable with the attention that came with her looks (and, needless to say, they were enhanced for lenses of all sorts), but it wasn't as if she said that she wished she could be plain once more - why did those Martians have to whisk her away and beautify her one day?
Maybe I'm being mean, but we all knew years back about Daniella and her septum, so why is this news?
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1 March
Yes, well, there might be one pose chosen for this story where Daniella resembles an Emma Watson, but - unless I am hopelessly misinformed - she was never awarded the beauty contracts that come the ex-Potter star's way.
Or are we all supposed to be having amnesia and believing that she was some sort of raging beauty in her significant t.v. role in a family of crooks?
To flip the coin, Marilyn was, of course, never comfortable with the attention that came with her looks (and, needless to say, they were enhanced for lenses of all sorts), but it wasn't as if she said that she wished she could be plain once more - why did those Martians have to whisk her away and beautify her one day?
Maybe I'm being mean, but we all knew years back about Daniella and her septum, so why is this news?
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Mysteries of Lisbon: The varieties of self-destruction
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1 March
* Contains spoilers *
If I hadn't given the game away in the title, and you told me that you, as I did last night, went into a film for 6.40* and - including a 15-minute interval - did not come out until minutes before 11.30, I'd have asked if you had been watching the full version of Fanny and Alexander (1982).
Actually, not just because of the scale**, I had that film on my mind, and, in the interval between the parts, tried to engage one known from last year's Festival-going with that conceit. (Actually, I should have known better from having said, then, that I had taken my chance, when I could, to see The Seventh Seal on the big screen that it would not be a good thing to air it***.)
As with that earlier conversation, I was met with the notion that Bergman's films are chamber works (and so are just as perfectly seen at home), which The SS, waves pounding on the cliffs and beach, patently isn't. (And nor, for my money, is Fanny and Alexander, despite its domestic roots, but the suggestion was that the proper comparison was with The Forsyte Saga.)
Still, after the (welcome) interval, my belief that a debt is owed to Fanny and Alexander (its being set in a different century notwithstanding, and, really, nothing to do with what I felt that Bergman had demonstrated in that film) did not abate with continued viewing. As to the Galsworthy link, I do not see it myself, any more than I was really reminded of Buddenbrooks (2008) (of which I thought, as of a longer film, but then dismissed), because both are dynastic in a way that Mysteries of Lisbon truly is not.
What I did get put in mind of, momentarily, was The Leopard (1963) in the scenes of nobility in their finery, but, unlike in Visconti's film, I had the feeling that some extras in some scenes just did not move or look as if they belonged in their elaborate clothes, i.e. it seemed that they were not used either to the costumes, or to what those wearing them in that period would have done.
Mention was made, in the film (I forget where), of Ann Radcliffe, and (apart from its usefulness now) I still rue having been required to read her Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) - on the slender basis that it would inform Northanger Abbey. Sixty years later, Branco's novel, from which Mysteries of Lisbon derives, clearly took a cue from the title of Radcliffe's book.
However, although the film does yield answers, it casually replaces them with nearly as many mysteries (though some may be created by sheer fatigue in concentrating on a set of interconnecting stories for so long - as against two unrelated films of the same duration - and having to remember who everyone is): by contrast, the Austen text presents us with a world where, despite appearances to the contrary, an utterly rationalistic approach is capable of explaining everything, however spooky or sinister.
Not that Austen (in this and other books) is necessarily always meaning to show us what a nincompoop everyone but her narrator is, but one could be forgiven for thinking so. Father Dinis, for all that he delves into mysteries (as well as creating them), is, in this respect, more like Chesterton's Father Brown, having a healthy respect for others' capacity to set out to mystify him, but at the same time teasing out those things that can be caused to yield to the joint attack of persistence and intellect.
And I would be very interested to know, if I can look into the matter at some point, why I was so put in mind, by this Portuguese film, of the works of the late Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges (as well as struck by the beauty of at least two of the female members of the cast).
End-notes
* And still didn't manage to avoid these over-energized trailers that just leave you in the wrong state of mind to watch the film that you paid to see, let alone that incessant VW Ghostbusters [(1984)] mess about 'seeing films differently', as against seeing the same damn' thing every time!
** IMDb claims that FaA only clocks in at 188 mins, as compared to 266 mins for MoL, but I shall rummage for a better reckoning of its true intended length (even if a version may have been released at that duration of around three hours)...
Yes, according to the running times of the two DVDs on which it was released by Artificial Eye, it is 309 mins (i.e. 5 h, 9 mins).
*** It is almost a commonplace that Bergman is - is supposed to be - a director on the small scale, and thus that his films can conveniently be viewed from a DVD on a smaller screen: to me, that makes as little sense as suggesting that seeing / hearing / feeling string quartets played live adds nothing to one's appreciation, and that one might as well listen to one's favourite recording on CD instead.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 March
* Contains spoilers *
If I hadn't given the game away in the title, and you told me that you, as I did last night, went into a film for 6.40* and - including a 15-minute interval - did not come out until minutes before 11.30, I'd have asked if you had been watching the full version of Fanny and Alexander (1982).
Actually, not just because of the scale**, I had that film on my mind, and, in the interval between the parts, tried to engage one known from last year's Festival-going with that conceit. (Actually, I should have known better from having said, then, that I had taken my chance, when I could, to see The Seventh Seal on the big screen that it would not be a good thing to air it***.)
As with that earlier conversation, I was met with the notion that Bergman's films are chamber works (and so are just as perfectly seen at home), which The SS, waves pounding on the cliffs and beach, patently isn't. (And nor, for my money, is Fanny and Alexander, despite its domestic roots, but the suggestion was that the proper comparison was with The Forsyte Saga.)
Still, after the (welcome) interval, my belief that a debt is owed to Fanny and Alexander (its being set in a different century notwithstanding, and, really, nothing to do with what I felt that Bergman had demonstrated in that film) did not abate with continued viewing. As to the Galsworthy link, I do not see it myself, any more than I was really reminded of Buddenbrooks (2008) (of which I thought, as of a longer film, but then dismissed), because both are dynastic in a way that Mysteries of Lisbon truly is not.
What I did get put in mind of, momentarily, was The Leopard (1963) in the scenes of nobility in their finery, but, unlike in Visconti's film, I had the feeling that some extras in some scenes just did not move or look as if they belonged in their elaborate clothes, i.e. it seemed that they were not used either to the costumes, or to what those wearing them in that period would have done.
Mention was made, in the film (I forget where), of Ann Radcliffe, and (apart from its usefulness now) I still rue having been required to read her Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) - on the slender basis that it would inform Northanger Abbey. Sixty years later, Branco's novel, from which Mysteries of Lisbon derives, clearly took a cue from the title of Radcliffe's book.
However, although the film does yield answers, it casually replaces them with nearly as many mysteries (though some may be created by sheer fatigue in concentrating on a set of interconnecting stories for so long - as against two unrelated films of the same duration - and having to remember who everyone is): by contrast, the Austen text presents us with a world where, despite appearances to the contrary, an utterly rationalistic approach is capable of explaining everything, however spooky or sinister.
Not that Austen (in this and other books) is necessarily always meaning to show us what a nincompoop everyone but her narrator is, but one could be forgiven for thinking so. Father Dinis, for all that he delves into mysteries (as well as creating them), is, in this respect, more like Chesterton's Father Brown, having a healthy respect for others' capacity to set out to mystify him, but at the same time teasing out those things that can be caused to yield to the joint attack of persistence and intellect.
And I would be very interested to know, if I can look into the matter at some point, why I was so put in mind, by this Portuguese film, of the works of the late Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges (as well as struck by the beauty of at least two of the female members of the cast).
End-notes
* And still didn't manage to avoid these over-energized trailers that just leave you in the wrong state of mind to watch the film that you paid to see, let alone that incessant VW Ghostbusters [(1984)] mess about 'seeing films differently', as against seeing the same damn' thing every time!
** IMDb claims that FaA only clocks in at 188 mins, as compared to 266 mins for MoL, but I shall rummage for a better reckoning of its true intended length (even if a version may have been released at that duration of around three hours)...
Yes, according to the running times of the two DVDs on which it was released by Artificial Eye, it is 309 mins (i.e. 5 h, 9 mins).
*** It is almost a commonplace that Bergman is - is supposed to be - a director on the small scale, and thus that his films can conveniently be viewed from a DVD on a smaller screen: to me, that makes as little sense as suggesting that seeing / hearing / feeling string quartets played live adds nothing to one's appreciation, and that one might as well listen to one's favourite recording on CD instead.
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What satisfaction does a good - or better - novel give?
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 March
Of course, start by defining your terms - is On Chesil Beach (which Philip French probably thinks is a palaeontology manual) a novel or a novella? Maybe, just maybe, it depends - in part - on what the author calls it.
That said, I have a lovely red pepper sitting in my kitchen (well, it's on top of a mug), but, if I called it a novel, I doubt that anyone would approach it as one, but rather with a knife and / or some cheese, mushrooms and breadcrumbs.
So, peppers and McEwan (or even McEwan's lager) apart, you are reading this book, and a bit as if it's a lover keep wanting to spend time with it, and its takes you not quite where you wanted, but where you were content to be taken (because of the dialogue, the descriptions, the ideas, the characters...), right to the final word.
Is that better than when, as with Das Schloss (The Castle), that novel of Kafka's allegedly snatched from the fire to which he had mentally consigned it, there is no ending, as he did not finish it (although I think that it is Max Brod, the man who refused to destroy it and other works, who reports that Kafka had something in mind, and says what it is)?
Probably a pig to read it to that point - in whichever of numerous editions / translations comes one's way - not knowing, but would one, say, with Gogol's Dead Souls curse God and Man on finishing what we have and learning that there is no more, because - if we believe the story - the wrong MS, that of the reworked later part, was thrown into the fire?
Do things have to be wrapped up by the author, if he or she can, so that we can put the book down with a sigh of satisfaction, or can we declare, as I do with The Medusa Frequency and Angelica's Grotto, that the books are still great, even if it is clear enough - as debated elsewhere - that the books terminate with what, in musical terms, is a final cadence, but one that, for its formally ending, nonetheless smacks of an ending to be done with it as none other promoted itself in the mind of Russell Hoban.
And then, with that idea of an end to a symphonty* or like, we steer dangerously close - and so pull back, pretending that we touched the leg by mistake - to the labours left unfinished of Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler and the like (not to mention Fartov and Belcher).
End-notes
* I'm keeping that in, and I shall write to Peter Maxwell Davies, urging him to abandon the symphonic form (he's written at least four, after all), and compose a Symphonty instead!
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 March
Of course, start by defining your terms - is On Chesil Beach (which Philip French probably thinks is a palaeontology manual) a novel or a novella? Maybe, just maybe, it depends - in part - on what the author calls it.
That said, I have a lovely red pepper sitting in my kitchen (well, it's on top of a mug), but, if I called it a novel, I doubt that anyone would approach it as one, but rather with a knife and / or some cheese, mushrooms and breadcrumbs.
So, peppers and McEwan (or even McEwan's lager) apart, you are reading this book, and a bit as if it's a lover keep wanting to spend time with it, and its takes you not quite where you wanted, but where you were content to be taken (because of the dialogue, the descriptions, the ideas, the characters...), right to the final word.
Is that better than when, as with Das Schloss (The Castle), that novel of Kafka's allegedly snatched from the fire to which he had mentally consigned it, there is no ending, as he did not finish it (although I think that it is Max Brod, the man who refused to destroy it and other works, who reports that Kafka had something in mind, and says what it is)?
Probably a pig to read it to that point - in whichever of numerous editions / translations comes one's way - not knowing, but would one, say, with Gogol's Dead Souls curse God and Man on finishing what we have and learning that there is no more, because - if we believe the story - the wrong MS, that of the reworked later part, was thrown into the fire?
Do things have to be wrapped up by the author, if he or she can, so that we can put the book down with a sigh of satisfaction, or can we declare, as I do with The Medusa Frequency and Angelica's Grotto, that the books are still great, even if it is clear enough - as debated elsewhere - that the books terminate with what, in musical terms, is a final cadence, but one that, for its formally ending, nonetheless smacks of an ending to be done with it as none other promoted itself in the mind of Russell Hoban.
And then, with that idea of an end to a symphonty* or like, we steer dangerously close - and so pull back, pretending that we touched the leg by mistake - to the labours left unfinished of Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler and the like (not to mention Fartov and Belcher).
End-notes
* I'm keeping that in, and I shall write to Peter Maxwell Davies, urging him to abandon the symphonic form (he's written at least four, after all), and compose a Symphonty instead!
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