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17 October
Russell Hoban wrote a short piece, included in the collection of various bits and pieces The Moment under The Moment, of that name, and elsewhere, in his novels, gave characters that Spooneristic phrase to describe their predicament.
I have always inferred, since first reading the words, that they were, if not dear to Russ' heart, then at least acknowledged as part of his own experience: I find that he is a writer who does not keep you at arm's length, in that way, from what he has known or seen, and I see The Medusa Frequency, in 1987, as having come out of a very particular encounter with Medusa's powers, for ill and good. The previous novel, Pilgermann, had come out in 1983.
The fact that there was another such long gap and then, instead of a novel to follow Medusa, Moment came out in 1992, suggested that something had happened, and that the volume attempted, by bringing various things into one place, to maintain an interest / following. The next novel, Fremder, was not published until 1996*.
Although, for my money, both Medusa and Fremder are flawed by their ending, they are, nonetheless, masterpieces, linked by containing the same piece of text about occulting views and the rate at which the retina refreshes, making films possible, because of the persistence of image. Fremder, especially, though both books are short, is costly on dedication to read. It seems to me that the road to these novels had been a hard one, and likely that there had been prolonged stays on Blighter's Rock, before and after Moment.
What is characteristic of Russ is that he creates something out of the impossibility of creation, converting the self-pitying writer's block (being 'blocked' doesn't sound good) to something that happens to blighters. In other words, not taking himself or it too seriously.
End-notes :
* Data courtesy of http://www.ocelotfactory.com/hoban/, known as The Head of Orpheus.
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Wednesday, 17 October 2012
NHS carrier-bag slogans
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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17 October
Inspired by Hobanesque influences such as The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz and Kleinzeit, here are some slogans, for NHS carrier-bags, dreamt up to (try to) amuse @jakkicowley, the starting-point being:
* CONTAINS BAGS
* BAG NOW EMPTY, BUT WILL SOON BE FULL
* AVOID THIS BAG - DIRTY SMALLS!
* THIS BAG CONTAINS 1.257 KILOS OF SMACK
* BAG WILL BREAK AT 2.36PM
* THIS BAG CAN DISGUISE A SEVERED HEAD
* CARRY THIS BAG, AND FEEL LIKE A QUEEN
* THE QUEEN CARRIED THIS BAG PREVIOUSLY
* BAGS LIKE THIS DON'T GROW ON TREES
* SAVE A TREE - DIG IT UP, AND CARRY IT HOME IN THIS BAG
* NOT REMOTELY PATIENT PROPERTY - OUTTA MY WAY !
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17 October
Inspired by Hobanesque influences such as The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz and Kleinzeit, here are some slogans, for NHS carrier-bags, dreamt up to (try to) amuse @jakkicowley, the starting-point being:
Why wld a hospital feel the need to give carrier bags with 'PATIENT PROPERTY' emblazoned on them. Plain 'confidential' ones not do same job?
— Jacqueline (@jakkicowley) October 17, 2012
* CONTAINS BAGS
* BAG NOW EMPTY, BUT WILL SOON BE FULL
* AVOID THIS BAG - DIRTY SMALLS!
* THIS BAG CONTAINS 1.257 KILOS OF SMACK
* BAG WILL BREAK AT 2.36PM
* THIS BAG CAN DISGUISE A SEVERED HEAD
* CARRY THIS BAG, AND FEEL LIKE A QUEEN
* THE QUEEN CARRIED THIS BAG PREVIOUSLY
* BAGS LIKE THIS DON'T GROW ON TREES
* SAVE A TREE - DIG IT UP, AND CARRY IT HOME IN THIS BAG
* NOT REMOTELY PATIENT PROPERTY - OUTTA MY WAY !
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Tuesday, 16 October 2012
A banana with a twist : A Festival review of Hope Springs (2012)
This is a Festival review of Hope Springs (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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30 September (revised 26 August 2023)
This is a Festival review of Hope Springs (2012)
If anyone had seen Woody Allen's film Celebrity (1998), the scene with a self-help sex manual, Meryl Streep and a banana in Hope Springs (2012) would remind them of where a hooker, allegedly demonstrating fellatio, ends up choking on her chosen fruit. (Ironic, as gagging is supposed to be one of the fears of Robin Simon (played by Judy Davis), which she is seeking to have allayed by seeking out the hooker's advice.)
The parallel between Kay, Streep's character, and Robin in seeking perfection, or, rather, the reason for it, is obvious enough, hence Kay on her knees in the cinema. And, in Robin's case, Lee (Kenneth Branagh) - her husband and the intended male beneficiary - is arguably, if not as cantankerous as Tommy Lee Jones is as Arnold, then scarcely more appreciative.
Arnold and Kay have gone to Maine, the fictional resort of Great Hope Springs (filming took place in Connecticut¹), because, essentially, he is a Reggie Perrin of a man, except that his routine doesn't even include kissing his wife when he leaves in the morning, and she wants him to be interested in her. None of this, although it obviously is a serious matter that couples grow into ignoring each other / taking the other for granted (or, at least, one within a couple, rightly or wrongly, may see it that way), is any more than a pretext for a romp :
We will see them in what is played as a therapy-session for couples, but it is just the backdrop for Kay to be girlish and want her man back, and for Arnold to be stroppy, admit that he fancies the female neighbour / other dimensions to sex, and, when the going gets tough - as it often enough does - take his soldiers away. Of course, we know where it's going to go, and that, for comedic effect, the sailing will not be plain (whatever unplain sailing is), and there will be mishaps - such as, as it turns out, the seduction in the cinema.
Steve Carell (Dr Bernie Feld) does a fairly good job of saying the sorts of things that therapists say and / or behaving as they do to redirect anger onto the clients. However, we know that some of it, or some of what has been said already, is not 'for real', because, when the woman with the corgis is revealed as an object of Arnold's suppressed desire, Kay doesn't react by saying anything, let alone slapping Arnold, whereas she is hardly, as we learn, a swinger, and has not so much as admitted to a fantasy about, say, other men in the shower (or to having been in the shower with other men). (Carol, the neighbour with the corgis, turns out to deliver a line with a highly deferred pay-back.) As to how things turn out, Scotland takes some credit when there seems to be a dark night ahead, because Annie Lennox, whose singing captures all the bad stuff in the words² of 'Why', helps exorcize it (some such).
In fact, as The Lennox's career is not lacking in interest to me (and as this is a film from the States), I asked David Frankel, the film's director and the guest afterwards in the Q&A at Cambridge Film Festival, how the song 'Why' had come to be used : he told us that it had been there all along at that point as a place-holder, and had ended up staying because nothing ever did take its place.
(If, as I believe that I recall, 'Why' is the song used, lines such as 'I may be viciously unkind' (and so on) actually delivered some elements that maybe the film itself had not (except by employing it), since one of the therapy-sessions with Dr Feld shows that there has been an issue of It takes two to tango in why separate bedrooms also became not having had sex since 22 September four years earlier.
End-notes
¹ A name that I have never understood.
² I must check this somewhere else, i.e. the album, but four people seem to be credited with writing these lyrics.
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Harold at sunrise
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16 October
Well, Siobhan Redmond, Harriet Walter and Juliet Stepphenson* in a sub-Pinteresque radio play for their trio of voices - a dilation on the nature of memory / experience / forgetting ...
Nods in the direction of Beckettt's 'dramaticule' Come and Go, and The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson, but most reminiscent of The Waste Land and Harold's Old Times, and what else isn't derivative doesn't impress.
But most radio plays sound as though, with the same forces to perform them, anyone could write them : this one sounds as though very much written against the grain, because a commission.
End-note
* A third, whom I forgot / couldn't place when I originally made this posting...
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16 October
Well, Siobhan Redmond, Harriet Walter and Juliet Stepphenson* in a sub-Pinteresque radio play for their trio of voices - a dilation on the nature of memory / experience / forgetting ...
Nods in the direction of Beckettt's 'dramaticule' Come and Go, and The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson, but most reminiscent of The Waste Land and Harold's Old Times, and what else isn't derivative doesn't impress.
But most radio plays sound as though, with the same forces to perform them, anyone could write them : this one sounds as though very much written against the grain, because a commission.
End-note
* A third, whom I forgot / couldn't place when I originally made this posting...
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My naive little thoughts about the red-carpet treatment...
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16 October
My recent Tweet to this effect, that, when you have bought furniture from MFI and the clothes-rail collapses, that is a wardrobe malfunction, shows how even the words that we use about film and its principals are dominated by the big business behind celebrity and cinema : after all, there is no such thing - to my knowledge - as a wardrobe function*, unless it is the costume department having an end-of-filming pre-bash !
So we have this nonsense about Angelina Jolie's bikini body, as if - in some proper wardrobe - her real body keeps Dorian Gray company, or a nip showing, or whether that look is hot or not. All of it just lazy shorthand, used not to be bothered to express something other than through what is tritely ill thought out.
And, back where we started, we pay the ticket-price to see, say, @HelenHunt, as made up in the appropriate chair for the role and the part of the film in which her character appears in the scene to be shot. A lot of time, money and expertise is spent - if people know what they are doing with the film, and her prize acting isn't edited away - to get her looking a certain way.
So why, without those lenses, make-up artistes, costumes, studio lighting - why, in hell, do we expect her to look like that, nice enough as she is, when she gets out of a car outside a big cinema? To use a stupid parallel, why watch Madonna, say, doing some car maintenance from the vantage of a nearby tree and without binoculars, when you could buy a ticket to see her act the part of, say, Lucrezia Borgia on the cinema screen? (Not that I know anything about any such film-project, you understand...?)
End-notes
* And perhaps it was only as a bit of light relief from that tired dysfunction, which every family knows about, that they chose the prefix mal-.
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16 October
@bfi Odd that, when a film's cast is shot again and again until the expressions are perfect, we set any store by them appearing in the flesh
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 16, 2012
My recent Tweet to this effect, that, when you have bought furniture from MFI and the clothes-rail collapses, that is a wardrobe malfunction, shows how even the words that we use about film and its principals are dominated by the big business behind celebrity and cinema : after all, there is no such thing - to my knowledge - as a wardrobe function*, unless it is the costume department having an end-of-filming pre-bash !
So we have this nonsense about Angelina Jolie's bikini body, as if - in some proper wardrobe - her real body keeps Dorian Gray company, or a nip showing, or whether that look is hot or not. All of it just lazy shorthand, used not to be bothered to express something other than through what is tritely ill thought out.
And, back where we started, we pay the ticket-price to see, say, @HelenHunt, as made up in the appropriate chair for the role and the part of the film in which her character appears in the scene to be shot. A lot of time, money and expertise is spent - if people know what they are doing with the film, and her prize acting isn't edited away - to get her looking a certain way.
So why, without those lenses, make-up artistes, costumes, studio lighting - why, in hell, do we expect her to look like that, nice enough as she is, when she gets out of a car outside a big cinema? To use a stupid parallel, why watch Madonna, say, doing some car maintenance from the vantage of a nearby tree and without binoculars, when you could buy a ticket to see her act the part of, say, Lucrezia Borgia on the cinema screen? (Not that I know anything about any such film-project, you understand...?)
End-notes
* And perhaps it was only as a bit of light relief from that tired dysfunction, which every family knows about, that they chose the prefix mal-.
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My poem about Tom Hanks
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16 October
Inspiration strikes in strange places! (More often, it doesn't strike at all.)
My poem about Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks
Invariably thanks
Cast and crew,
Getting through
Some-another damn' film (or two)
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16 October
Inspiration strikes in strange places! (More often, it doesn't strike at all.)
My poem about Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks
Invariably thanks
Cast and crew,
Getting through
Some-another damn' film (or two)
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Monday, 15 October 2012
Crucifying The King
This is a Festival review of La nit que va morir l'Elvis (The Night Elvis Died) (2010)
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15 October
This is a Festival review of La nit que va morir l'Elvis (The Night Elvis Died) (2010)
* Contains spoilers *
Forget the ludicrously low rating on www.imdb.com, definitely the weak-point with The Night Elvis Died (2010) is the title*, which would not matter, but, when it comes to people choosing whether to watch film X or Y or Z that are on at a convenient time this evening, they do not pay much attention to detail, and this one just sounds like a documentary about burgers, Gracelands and The King of Rock'n'Roll before anyone gets to read something saying otherwise - so film X or Z will fight it out as to which gets viewed.
Now, I don't say that it's right, but, particularly with a foreign-language film and translating its title into English, something judged dead right, like Holy Motors (2012), which - whatever it is - sounds swish and appealing, will get an audience, whereas this much better film didn't close the festival (in Screen 1), but was in Screen 3 one evening.
The comparison with Motors is not just incidental, as this review may go on to make clear, but Motors is on release, and, when I last noticed, showing twice per day locally, whereas those of us that night with Toni Espinosa for a screening and Q&A were the lucky few to be seeing it at all. Forgetting the investment of money, talent and time in making a film, the purpose of any creative act is for it to be seen.
What, then, is Elvis? Well, in a sort of Hitchcockian way, we have a character (Aureli Mercader, hauntingly played by Blai Llopis) with certain experiences, and we know - as the film goes on, but early on that he has issues with anxiety and that something has happened to me - that he had a breakdown. So his credibility is automatically if not written off, then in doubt, because that goes with the territory, which is often a filmic struggle for the person who had ill-health, to amass enough evidence to overcome the weight of the sceptical standard of proof. Classic Hitchcock, too, he has amnesia about what happened on the crucial night, although he knows the outcome and why that night was significant.
Alongside Hitchcock, though, there is also a feeling of Chinatown, because part of seeking for the answer, the breakthrough, is to visit a woman who might be unfairly treated as if she has dementia, when she seems reasonably coherent. Are people pretending to be mentally ill to protect themselves, have others drugged them to make them unwell for their own protection, or was there a real trauma? The film has us play with all three ideas, and when (as in Spellbound) a visual stimulus unlocks Aureli's memory, there is a psychologically convincing remorse that has him put the blame on himself for a death.
Part of the unfolding, where supernatural elements take over, and Aureli can wander into the behind-the-scenes part of a theatre and emerge from vegetation comprising props into a real wild space, is the working out of that assumed guilt. Aureli is in the theatre at all because the historic amateur passion play that has its home there is at risk, and his amnesia and the forces that threaten the play's existence are bound up together. There is a patchiness in the extent to which these hints at dimensions beyond our habitual ones feature, and they seem to go silent at one point when the machinery of a murder and clearing up after it are under way, but, in the final development, although rather mysteriously and highly symbolically at times, the floodgates open of worlds beyond possibility.
The guilt reaches an obvious conclusion with Elvis, so called because he had played Jesus in the passion play (and so was The King), seen on the cross and Aureli at the foot of it. He asks Elvis to forgive him, and so is literally both beseeching the crucified Christ, as one of the thieves does in one gospel account, and his supposed victim.
Maybe not an easy film to follow, especially in the closing scenes, but there was no doubt that something was being worked out, understanding which might be repaid by a second viewing. Producer Tony Espinosa is to be thanked for coming to the festival with his film, and also the programmer of the Catalan strand (Ramon Lamarca) for inviting him to come. (He did answer questions, but my recollection of that session is not clear enough just now to try to record the main points discussed,although I do recall that, when I asked about the Hitchcock parallels, there had not been any deliberate reference.)
End-notes
* As Elvis is Jesus, calling the film The Night Christ Died might be OK.
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Holy Motors is another Funny Games
This is a review of Holy Motors (2012)
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16 October
This is a review of Holy Motors (2012)
By which I mean (in the title)... ?
Well, if you've ever looked at the extras on the DVD of the original German version of Funny Games (1997), writer / director Michael Haneke doesn't expect you to go through the unremitting torture right to the end, which, itself, is just the beginning of the next cycle of it, which was set up during the film.
In fact, he suggests that it's a normal reaction to get to a point where you have seen enough. So, too, with Holy Motors (2012), and I have already indicated that, for me, that point would have been not long after the interlude, and thereby cut my losses.
After all, although there is a pretence that the contents of the day that we see are in real time, by the end of the third of M. Oscar's nine appointments, night has already unaccountably fallen, and nine appointments, despite a schedule to keep, do not get kept. But as if one cares, just as, with Haneke, as if one cares to keep willing evil to be defeated, whereas callous, pointless, calculated persecution is not going to be that easy - so why witness it all, just in the hope?
With Motors, arbitrary acts that are, at best, morally neutral have been stipulated for the day, but what is the point of following this diary through to an end? For it to mean something, when it is just a construct in Carax' mind, and, if he chooses not to explain it (or, at the end, to hint at banality), then it is hardly amazing that such withholding will occur or be foreseeable.
The DVD blurb for Haneke's film almost has a strapline of How fare will you go? I believe that Motors implicitly has the same one...
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Robin Holloway's Gilded Goldbergs are given a rare live performance (Radio 3)
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15 October
Pretty nauseating if for you have any feeling for The Goldberg Variations BWV 988, but probably meant to be, to hear Huw Watkins and Ashley Wass, who are no doubt engaged in an exercise of stripping away the veneer, playing what Robin Holloway has done to the piece with two pianos, a plastic carp, a buoy and 80m of fishing-line (after all, Cambridge, Faculty of Music, etc., etc.).
From what I judge, the effects, when not simply those of subverting the harmonic structure, are such that any imprecision juts out like a promontory, since these ones sound like performance errors - full marks to Holloway for making himself seem admirably postmodern, but why couldn't he (despite his peeling away layers) have chosen something else to get his treatment?
Why not even get a poor piece of music and arrange for trombone and walking-stick if you like, but get the thing to work, rather than maul Bach in a way that, all the time, makes you wish that you could only hear the original? Or is it like getting an image of the sun on your retina, but it bizarrely makes what you've taken for granted look better...? If I spin Richard Egarr's two-CD Harmonia Mundi set on harpsichord, will it seem dazzlingly more alive, after the ritual slaughter - like Aslan, bigger and better for submitting himself to a night on The Stone Table?
Nearly done, with the aria being mangled as if by Les Dawson, in what are better called Gelded Goldbergs, which make Mahler mucking around with Beethoven symphonies seem almost laudable. Our reward, seemingly, to hear the Aria (after the repeat of the Aria chez Holloway) unbuggered, but it may just be an excuse for a final raspberry..., which it is, in terms of RH now prettifying the texture with adornments from some quite other age, now thankfully over.
Twaddle to close from presenter Tom Redmond, and, thanks to him, I can rest happy that RH, at least, looked absolutely delighted with having heard his own burning, I mean gilding.
STOP PRESS A review, by the fetching entitled Jed Distler (who is surely an anagram), of a recording of this work...
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15 October
Pretty nauseating if for you have any feeling for The Goldberg Variations BWV 988, but probably meant to be, to hear Huw Watkins and Ashley Wass, who are no doubt engaged in an exercise of stripping away the veneer, playing what Robin Holloway has done to the piece with two pianos, a plastic carp, a buoy and 80m of fishing-line (after all, Cambridge, Faculty of Music, etc., etc.).
From what I judge, the effects, when not simply those of subverting the harmonic structure, are such that any imprecision juts out like a promontory, since these ones sound like performance errors - full marks to Holloway for making himself seem admirably postmodern, but why couldn't he (despite his peeling away layers) have chosen something else to get his treatment?
Why not even get a poor piece of music and arrange for trombone and walking-stick if you like, but get the thing to work, rather than maul Bach in a way that, all the time, makes you wish that you could only hear the original? Or is it like getting an image of the sun on your retina, but it bizarrely makes what you've taken for granted look better...? If I spin Richard Egarr's two-CD Harmonia Mundi set on harpsichord, will it seem dazzlingly more alive, after the ritual slaughter - like Aslan, bigger and better for submitting himself to a night on The Stone Table?
Nearly done, with the aria being mangled as if by Les Dawson, in what are better called Gelded Goldbergs, which make Mahler mucking around with Beethoven symphonies seem almost laudable. Our reward, seemingly, to hear the Aria (after the repeat of the Aria chez Holloway) unbuggered, but it may just be an excuse for a final raspberry..., which it is, in terms of RH now prettifying the texture with adornments from some quite other age, now thankfully over.
Twaddle to close from presenter Tom Redmond, and, thanks to him, I can rest happy that RH, at least, looked absolutely delighted with having heard his own burning, I mean gilding.
STOP PRESS A review, by the fetching entitled Jed Distler (who is surely an anagram), of a recording of this work...
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Video: Has Russell Crowe called time on marriage? (according to AOL®)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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15 October
If some actor doesn't want to get married (again), do I care? It's only what he says.
If, though, he is revealing hiself as a Supreme Being, declaring that no one, anywhere, can now get married, then maybe I'm interested - I might even watch the video-clip of this Great Astronaut of the Universe...
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15 October
If some actor doesn't want to get married (again), do I care? It's only what he says.
If, though, he is revealing hiself as a Supreme Being, declaring that no one, anywhere, can now get married, then maybe I'm interested - I might even watch the video-clip of this Great Astronaut of the Universe...
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Sunday, 14 October 2012
Trash that SLR !
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15 October
Not my entire thoughts about going digital, but nearly :
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15 October
Not my entire thoughts about going digital, but nearly :
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 14, 2012
It does befit the quality of much photography that people's 'weapons for taking photos' are crappy phones, but why ever are cameras there ?
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The Russ whom I knew...
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14 October
Some industrious people, since the death of Russell Hoban in December last year, have been putting together a web-site in his memory and in service of the future of the books that he wrote (for adults and for children): I should name them, but the one of whom I am aware is Richard Cooper, who appears to have been at the helm of the Good Ship Russ.
This is all to be found at www.russellhoban.org, but I just wanted to share this link to a page intended to steer (nautical theme) the new reader in some possible directions.
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14 October
Some industrious people, since the death of Russell Hoban in December last year, have been putting together a web-site in his memory and in service of the future of the books that he wrote (for adults and for children): I should name them, but the one of whom I am aware is Richard Cooper, who appears to have been at the helm of the Good Ship Russ.
This is all to be found at www.russellhoban.org, but I just wanted to share this link to a page intended to steer (nautical theme) the new reader in some possible directions.
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Saturday, 13 October 2012
The Perfection Thing - over at Writer's Rest
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14 October
Lindsay, again, has set off some interesting talk in the realm of AI with a recent case of applying The Turing Test.
To read your correspondent's and other people's comments, go to The Perfection Thing.
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14 October
Lindsay, again, has set off some interesting talk in the realm of AI with a recent case of applying The Turing Test.
To read your correspondent's and other people's comments, go to The Perfection Thing.
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What things do I point to in Laing and Szasz's thought?
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13 October
Following on from Ronnie, gae hame!, I have some thoughts to share about Drs Laing and Szasz and their place in the order of things...
1. Dignity and respect - talked about in recent days, as if just invented with applicability to being an in-patient, but the story tells us that Ronnie was alongside, literally, someone who, naked, just rocked and would not engage, so he did the same. But, for all these schemes such as Star Wards, because it's not in the culture of mental-health nursing, nothing much is different, not least at the level of patients feeling that they're in an underclass because of being 'ill': on a crude scale, a sort of pecking order, anything that the relatives have to say (and so they can support, and speak up for, the patient about troubling side-effects, because, unlike the patient him- / herself, those people count) carries far more weight, and the status of anything said by the patient is less important than the family pet's views of his or her care.
2. Coercion - if I compel you to do or suffer something, even for your own good, how is it likely that you will feel about the thing that you did (or suffered), about me for forcing you, and about myself for having been a person who is legally allowed to be treated in that way? Whatever a breakdown is, if it leads to an admission, being dehumanized by hospitalization and institutionalization makes for far more trauma for the in-patient (whereas his or her aberrant behaviour hacked off friends, neighbours, relatives and /or the police, and so, for their sake, he or she gets detained) than the breakdown itself. I think that Thomas questioned why, if someone has to be coerced, there can be therapy, rather than distrust, resentment, fear, pain, on the part of the patient towards the detaining authorities - my analogy, but a bit like trying to carry out dentistry on someone who is not willingly opening his or her mouth.
3. Compassion - much more than those basic things at 1, above, - partly involved in doing what Ronnie did in rocking with that patient, and which feeling for and honouring the respect and dignity of patients would not, in itself, lead to. Compassion wholeheartedly and without reservation puts your lot in with the other person's*, often thought of as unconditional love, and is almost at an opposite pole to psychiatric practice of Ronnie's time - you wouldn't have found many endorsing the rocking anecdote as concordant with their views of patients.
4. Criminality - if I lock you up, whether you're drunk and have smashed some things, or in psychosis and have done the same, and you don't appreciate the situation (in the latter case, thought of as lack of insight), you will nonetheless - at some level - know that you are being treated as if you have done something wrong. As I look at what Thomas might have meant at 2, above, and think of mental health in England and Wales, the police can (forcibly) take you to a place of safety, they may be involved in any sectioning process or in taking you to hospital (if you do get sectoned), and they are the people who take you back, if you escape (or try to). In our own system, then, the coercion and the criminal taint are linked, even though, under the Minstry of Justice's control, there is quite separate legal provisions for the foricble detention of people on remand for or convicted of criminal offences: the in-patient not only feels imprisoned, mistreated, misunderstood, misrepresented, but has a perception that some criminal wrong is the reason for all this punishment. And, amidst all this, he or she is supposed to recover, respond to treatment, and - which is itself ambiguous as to health and character - get better.
For what it is worth, those are my thoughts on what Thomas and Ronnie still have to say to us, decades on...
End-notes
* In Ronnie's case, I suggest that he probably took compassion too far, rather than the approach of being empathic, which, for anyone with mental-health issues, is a less costly and, literally, less soul-destroying way of relating to patients. Whatever happened to him in later life, with booze - but he was a Glaswegian - and the effect of efame or whatever, I guess that he may have given too much of himself, and in a way that Adrian, one of his sons, likes to report (he has written a biography) that Ronnie did not do at home, by usually describing home life as a crock of shit.
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13 October
Following on from Ronnie, gae hame!, I have some thoughts to share about Drs Laing and Szasz and their place in the order of things...
1. Dignity and respect - talked about in recent days, as if just invented with applicability to being an in-patient, but the story tells us that Ronnie was alongside, literally, someone who, naked, just rocked and would not engage, so he did the same. But, for all these schemes such as Star Wards, because it's not in the culture of mental-health nursing, nothing much is different, not least at the level of patients feeling that they're in an underclass because of being 'ill': on a crude scale, a sort of pecking order, anything that the relatives have to say (and so they can support, and speak up for, the patient about troubling side-effects, because, unlike the patient him- / herself, those people count) carries far more weight, and the status of anything said by the patient is less important than the family pet's views of his or her care.
2. Coercion - if I compel you to do or suffer something, even for your own good, how is it likely that you will feel about the thing that you did (or suffered), about me for forcing you, and about myself for having been a person who is legally allowed to be treated in that way? Whatever a breakdown is, if it leads to an admission, being dehumanized by hospitalization and institutionalization makes for far more trauma for the in-patient (whereas his or her aberrant behaviour hacked off friends, neighbours, relatives and /or the police, and so, for their sake, he or she gets detained) than the breakdown itself. I think that Thomas questioned why, if someone has to be coerced, there can be therapy, rather than distrust, resentment, fear, pain, on the part of the patient towards the detaining authorities - my analogy, but a bit like trying to carry out dentistry on someone who is not willingly opening his or her mouth.
3. Compassion - much more than those basic things at 1, above, - partly involved in doing what Ronnie did in rocking with that patient, and which feeling for and honouring the respect and dignity of patients would not, in itself, lead to. Compassion wholeheartedly and without reservation puts your lot in with the other person's*, often thought of as unconditional love, and is almost at an opposite pole to psychiatric practice of Ronnie's time - you wouldn't have found many endorsing the rocking anecdote as concordant with their views of patients.
4. Criminality - if I lock you up, whether you're drunk and have smashed some things, or in psychosis and have done the same, and you don't appreciate the situation (in the latter case, thought of as lack of insight), you will nonetheless - at some level - know that you are being treated as if you have done something wrong. As I look at what Thomas might have meant at 2, above, and think of mental health in England and Wales, the police can (forcibly) take you to a place of safety, they may be involved in any sectioning process or in taking you to hospital (if you do get sectoned), and they are the people who take you back, if you escape (or try to). In our own system, then, the coercion and the criminal taint are linked, even though, under the Minstry of Justice's control, there is quite separate legal provisions for the foricble detention of people on remand for or convicted of criminal offences: the in-patient not only feels imprisoned, mistreated, misunderstood, misrepresented, but has a perception that some criminal wrong is the reason for all this punishment. And, amidst all this, he or she is supposed to recover, respond to treatment, and - which is itself ambiguous as to health and character - get better.
For what it is worth, those are my thoughts on what Thomas and Ronnie still have to say to us, decades on...
End-notes
* In Ronnie's case, I suggest that he probably took compassion too far, rather than the approach of being empathic, which, for anyone with mental-health issues, is a less costly and, literally, less soul-destroying way of relating to patients. Whatever happened to him in later life, with booze - but he was a Glaswegian - and the effect of efame or whatever, I guess that he may have given too much of himself, and in a way that Adrian, one of his sons, likes to report (he has written a biography) that Ronnie did not do at home, by usually describing home life as a crock of shit.
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Friday, 12 October 2012
Ronnie, gae hame!
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13 October
There's a rather strange review / account of The Turner Prize entries in The Telegraph (at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/turner-prize/9578907/Turner-Prize-2012-Tate-Britain-review.html).
Strange in that, when Luke Fowler has a film 'about' R. D. Laing, the writer (Richard Dorment) takes issue with Laing himself, what he represented and advocated, and how he was discredited for his theories, and one 'wrong-headed belief' (about schizophrenia)in particular.
Dorment says not only that Laing could be 'self-aggrandising' and 'pretentious', but also 'compassionate' and 'articulate', once he has finished talking, perhaps with less knowledge than he believes, about medications such as lithium and Prozac, neither of which would have done much, if anything, for Laing's core patients.
Far be it from me to say whether one should watch Fowler's film, but Dorment leaves himself precious little space in which to make comments that might inform such a view. Such description as there is leaves one not knowing whether this is a film with an arty feel (as another Telegraph critic felt), or a work of art, nor even, whichever it is, whether it is any good. Just as well Ronnie left the stage earlier...
On which more here.
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13 October
There's a rather strange review / account of The Turner Prize entries in The Telegraph (at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/turner-prize/9578907/Turner-Prize-2012-Tate-Britain-review.html).
Strange in that, when Luke Fowler has a film 'about' R. D. Laing, the writer (Richard Dorment) takes issue with Laing himself, what he represented and advocated, and how he was discredited for his theories, and one 'wrong-headed belief' (about schizophrenia)in particular.
Dorment says not only that Laing could be 'self-aggrandising' and 'pretentious', but also 'compassionate' and 'articulate', once he has finished talking, perhaps with less knowledge than he believes, about medications such as lithium and Prozac, neither of which would have done much, if anything, for Laing's core patients.
Far be it from me to say whether one should watch Fowler's film, but Dorment leaves himself precious little space in which to make comments that might inform such a view. Such description as there is leaves one not knowing whether this is a film with an arty feel (as another Telegraph critic felt), or a work of art, nor even, whichever it is, whether it is any good. Just as well Ronnie left the stage earlier...
On which more here.
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Catalan strand
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13 October (updated 25 October)
By way of an an announcement, I want to write next about four more Catalan films that were kindly brought (along with V.O.S. (2009), already reviewed) to the festival this year, which I am sure was a very good and also well-received initiative, The Body in the Woods (1996), Warsaw Bridge (1989), and The Night Elvis Died (2010). And I nearly forgot to say Black Bread (2010).
What I can say now is that, to write effectively about the middle of these three, I would really need to see it again, whereas the other three are clear in my mind. That said, I have less to say about the first, and would prefer to concentrate on the other two.
Regarding Warsaw Bridge (1989), it came as a surprise to me (although subliminally I recognized the connection, in the festival programme, when making this one of my selections), that the prize-winning book (of the same name) within was one of the landmarks from a stay booked at a hotel in the former East when I visited Berlin seven years ago, meaning that I was so many stops before, probably, the omnipresent Friedrichstraße.
However, rather than self-psychoanalyse why I can retrieve only the ending (which solved a mystery), and, vaguely, a slightly evasive acceptance speech or press questions from the award-holder at a busy reception around a pool at night, it is better to seek out a copy to fill in the gaps, and to talk about Body. We were told that it was a sort of Catalan Twin Peaks, which was something that, for not having followed it, only helped me vaguely.
It turned out to be not quite what it presented itself to be, an investigation into a crime, but rather the manipulation of evidence, gender and even human remains in a self-interested and alarmingly corrupt way. That said, that revelation came after an immensely slow-burn, and after a string of people, who at first denied that they knew anything (or more than what they said), collapsed under the real or imagined threat of violence (or other penalty) made by the woman lieutenant: it felt like too much of a deferral, not to mention a massive misdirection, to merit the hoped-for pay-off.
Not just that, but that the depiction of events, whether in recall or in real time, made no especial use of the resource of film as a medium (as against t.v.), and so seemed rather prosaic, as if not made for cinema. A good piece of work, but not, for my money, in the same inventive league as, say, V.O.S., in being for and of film per se.
As for the films that remain, Elvis now has a review, as does Bread.
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13 October (updated 25 October)
By way of an an announcement, I want to write next about four more Catalan films that were kindly brought (along with V.O.S. (2009), already reviewed) to the festival this year, which I am sure was a very good and also well-received initiative, The Body in the Woods (1996), Warsaw Bridge (1989), and The Night Elvis Died (2010). And I nearly forgot to say Black Bread (2010).
What I can say now is that, to write effectively about the middle of these three, I would really need to see it again, whereas the other three are clear in my mind. That said, I have less to say about the first, and would prefer to concentrate on the other two.
Regarding Warsaw Bridge (1989), it came as a surprise to me (although subliminally I recognized the connection, in the festival programme, when making this one of my selections), that the prize-winning book (of the same name) within was one of the landmarks from a stay booked at a hotel in the former East when I visited Berlin seven years ago, meaning that I was so many stops before, probably, the omnipresent Friedrichstraße.
However, rather than self-psychoanalyse why I can retrieve only the ending (which solved a mystery), and, vaguely, a slightly evasive acceptance speech or press questions from the award-holder at a busy reception around a pool at night, it is better to seek out a copy to fill in the gaps, and to talk about Body. We were told that it was a sort of Catalan Twin Peaks, which was something that, for not having followed it, only helped me vaguely.
It turned out to be not quite what it presented itself to be, an investigation into a crime, but rather the manipulation of evidence, gender and even human remains in a self-interested and alarmingly corrupt way. That said, that revelation came after an immensely slow-burn, and after a string of people, who at first denied that they knew anything (or more than what they said), collapsed under the real or imagined threat of violence (or other penalty) made by the woman lieutenant: it felt like too much of a deferral, not to mention a massive misdirection, to merit the hoped-for pay-off.
Not just that, but that the depiction of events, whether in recall or in real time, made no especial use of the resource of film as a medium (as against t.v.), and so seemed rather prosaic, as if not made for cinema. A good piece of work, but not, for my money, in the same inventive league as, say, V.O.S., in being for and of film per se.
As for the films that remain, Elvis now has a review, as does Bread.
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Batsqueak
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12 October
Right now, I would edit a Wikipedia® page to say this:
Contrary to popular reckoning, a batsqueak is not a term for a noise emitted by one of our webbed, flying foes, but a sheer yoking together of words heard often enough together in the pretence that it is a noun.
Essentially, such things used to be done, at wearisome length (Finnegans Wake !), by Jimmy Joyce, but even he gave up on it, and the whole practice has only been resurrected by the secret Brethren of Bradshawites, who invoke it in the hope that you'll be so dazed that you do not twig that they have not, behind all this mucking around, got anything of any sense to contribute.
This entry is a stub - you can help make it a complete Bradshaw's by donating $10
Pipsqueak, anyone?
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12 October
Right now, I would edit a Wikipedia® page to say this:
Contrary to popular reckoning, a batsqueak is not a term for a noise emitted by one of our webbed, flying foes, but a sheer yoking together of words heard often enough together in the pretence that it is a noun.
Essentially, such things used to be done, at wearisome length (Finnegans Wake !), by Jimmy Joyce, but even he gave up on it, and the whole practice has only been resurrected by the secret Brethren of Bradshawites, who invoke it in the hope that you'll be so dazed that you do not twig that they have not, behind all this mucking around, got anything of any sense to contribute.
This entry is a stub - you can help make it a complete Bradshaw's by donating $10
Pipsqueak, anyone?
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Thursday, 11 October 2012
From my week's post
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12 October
I share the following, largely self-contained, item of correspondence from one of my parishioners :
Dear Apsley
I am a little uncertain what to make of the Rector's letter in the latest edition of the magazine for the group of parishes, and wanted to seek your advice.
In the past, the Rector has made references to other cultural matters, such as the coronation (and the words said during part of the service) or a piece of music, but always as a way of bringing 'the conversation around' to Biblical principles and the Christian life. (Mention of things in nature and the like may have been made with the same intention.)
However, in a recent magazine, he talked a lot about poetry and only, almost as an afterthrought, put in any sort of message that you might expect, in the circumstances, from an ordained minister. This time, he seems to have forgotten about why he is writing entirely.
Having begun by talking about the history of the pastoral tradition, halfway through he quotes two quatrains from the six-stanza poem 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Love' by Marlowe (and, knowing other work of that writer, it would be a stretch to imagine that he had any other shepherd of the flock in mind here). The language of the rest of the poem is described, and the whole thing ends up like an exercise - perhaps not even a very good one - in literary appreciation, not a letter from a Rector, but someone using a sixteenth-century text to make loose, general observations about village life.
I have always read these letters in the past, but, if this is to be the type of generalized observation that I can expect from now on, which does not even attempt to consider a spiritual dimension or another moral viewpoint, I feel reluctant to continue.
Do you have any thoughts?
Yours, &c.
Herbaceous P. Crubb
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12 October
I share the following, largely self-contained, item of correspondence from one of my parishioners :
Dear Apsley
I am a little uncertain what to make of the Rector's letter in the latest edition of the magazine for the group of parishes, and wanted to seek your advice.
In the past, the Rector has made references to other cultural matters, such as the coronation (and the words said during part of the service) or a piece of music, but always as a way of bringing 'the conversation around' to Biblical principles and the Christian life. (Mention of things in nature and the like may have been made with the same intention.)
However, in a recent magazine, he talked a lot about poetry and only, almost as an afterthrought, put in any sort of message that you might expect, in the circumstances, from an ordained minister. This time, he seems to have forgotten about why he is writing entirely.
Having begun by talking about the history of the pastoral tradition, halfway through he quotes two quatrains from the six-stanza poem 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Love' by Marlowe (and, knowing other work of that writer, it would be a stretch to imagine that he had any other shepherd of the flock in mind here). The language of the rest of the poem is described, and the whole thing ends up like an exercise - perhaps not even a very good one - in literary appreciation, not a letter from a Rector, but someone using a sixteenth-century text to make loose, general observations about village life.
I have always read these letters in the past, but, if this is to be the type of generalized observation that I can expect from now on, which does not even attempt to consider a spiritual dimension or another moral viewpoint, I feel reluctant to continue.
Do you have any thoughts?
Yours, &c.
Herbaceous P. Crubb
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A Tweet review I
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That was a Tweet that I couldn't trawl through Splatter to find (I found), so got it on Google® instead...
I need to say a little more about this, in another posting.
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The Idiot (2011) pares Dostoyevsky's story down to essentials, but, by fully realizing key scenes in a stylized universe, hints at the whole
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 12, 2012
That was a Tweet that I couldn't trawl through Splatter to find (I found), so got it on Google® instead...
I need to say a little more about this, in another posting.
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Kraken crake
This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)
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12 October
This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)
* Contains spoilers *
Two admissions, which ruin my credibility forever:
(1) I declined the opportunity to see The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) because I had no wish to follow the journeys of an early Che - he could have been an early Woody Allen and it would have made no difference to the fact that, if I want a travel documentary (in the case of somewhere where I am not going to go), I will watch Michael Palin's antics, and I see the concept of a film rather differently. (As I did not see the film, obviously I do not know for sure what I missed. Accepted.)
(2) I have never read On the Road (let alone any of Kerouac's other writings), though, when I decided to get around reviewing the film, which a friend and I saw, largely through his desire to do so, at Cambridge Film Festival, I looked out my copy of it. Therefore, anything that I find to quote from it will be just that - a phrase or passage that I find when flicking through it.
I also have some insights about Jack K. from my friend, who has read it and more, namely the close identity between the narrators of these works and JK himself.
As the credits for On the Road (2012) tell you, scenery through which we are supposed to be following various travellers on various journeys is nowhere near where it was shot, but in another part of the States (or of Canada). Yes, unconvincingly London passes for Paris in the dire Bel Ami (2012) (quite apart from what we see in The Third Man (1949) or Amadeus (1984)), but that almost makes sense - we can have a sense of the monumentality or grandeur of parts of Paris, even if we are not seeing them.
Certainly, they must have had reason, in this film, not to show the territories surrounding, say, Louisiana (to and from which we journey), but isn't the entreprise a bit hollow if whatever they do show has nothing to do with those places? I start with this point because, if one cannot say Great panoramas - I must go and see them myself some day, we are 'forced back' on the characters, and I honestly do not think that their desires and changes of heart run to a whole two hours 17 minutes worth of interest, but maybe 90 (with less need to show shots that were really somewhere quite different - I do not think that the list bore any relation to what we thought that we were shown).
OK, my thesis is this - it's a nice safe bet to film some version of a well-known, successful book, because people have been satisfied enough with how it is put together working to have read it approvingly. Nothing new there, but, if one's choice lands on something that, to be done justice to, has to sprawl so much and maybe be pretty lacking in any story, is that the ideal project, unless one has a big shake-up with the text and portrays it radically differently? Yes, that might upset an author's estate, or even fans at grass roots, but would it be a better film, maybe even be a film?
Given the acknowledged limitations, but in the light of talking to my friend and others as to whether the way that the text lies lends itself to taking it point for point as the basis for a film, what I have to ask (as I did) is what credibility Sal Paradise has, when we meet him, as a writer, or even simply what there is about him that would make someone, on pretty slight acquaintance, ask him to travel from New York to Denver to see him.
Now we know, after the event, that On the Road the book resulted from this and all the other travels, and, when Sam Riley (as Sal) starts hitching, we see him scribbling is his small but somehow infinite note-book (as if the guys on the back of the truck with him would not have been more than a little interested and been likely to have parted their company).
It may be little more than sexual when he is cotton picking, but there is even a sense that this Sal abandons his exteriority to his own experiences and actually feels them : frustrated though I was that I was being asked to believe in him as a writer when there had not even been so much as something being read aloud with his New York chums, I think that, by now, there might have been voiceover, maybe, of some of his writerly snippets (unless that only occurs later, when he actually starts writing, and he is reliving these moments).
Set against now, where, unless I wanted to be scenic about it, I would take a flight to make this first journey of Sal's, I would still be less than impressed with Dean Moriarity to have had impressed on me that I needed to make a trip whose basis and necessity turn out, in the ever-casual way of intoxication beyond the means of alcohol passing for the common currency of life, to have dissolved, so that, no sooner there and with no thought of where Sal might stay, Dean has to go to Los Angeles (or some such).
Just the first of a series of long, long journeys that seem to have the same capacity for their purpose to disappear more quickly than the destination can be reached. For me, none of it amounts to more than a few very blunt character traits and repressed feelings, which is where I arrive at a run-time around 90 minutes, because they do not merit more :
Sal is flattered by Dean's interest in him, and Dean, for his part, talks up this man who, if he did not resemble (a little) Scottish saxophonist Tommy Smith (whose talent I know and value), actually seems to possess no qualities to justify it. It is all sublimated through Dean arranging girls (including his own partner, at a key point) for Sal to sleep with, and then noisily doing so himself.
That holds true until (for money, and as he says to Sal he has done before) Dean has sex with the man who has been sedately driving them, and Sal witnesses it : not much guessing where his disgust with Dean and walking out on him at breakfast comes from. With a few twists and turns of sub-plots, and of Dean's various and far-flung women, that is pretty much the emotional core of all these lengthy wanderings, except that they always serve as a distraction from him ever knowing what on earth he wants, and all the signs, from how he chatted up Sal on first meeting, are that his own deeper desires from their 'relationship' (I only call it that because they virtually travel across the continent to say hello for ten minutes) are the same.
However, the film decides to swallow its own tail by having Sal write the book that we are viewing, with a roll of paper that he makes and feeds into the typewriter. Apparently such a roll does exist amongst JK's effects, though its status as being how he wrote the book might be suspect, but we get back to the bogus demonstration of creativity, as if there has to be this infinite roll of paper to receive the limitless notes that we saw scribbled before, and the white-hot power of the process is such that nothing, not even puttting in a new sheet of paper and keeping the finished ones in order, must be allowed to interrupt it. Believe that idea of writing if you like!
Clearly, things were taken from this film, but - from my position of majestic ignorance - I believe that a better film could have been made by taking the book as raw material, and not setting out depiction as if sacrosanct. And, blow me, I've still not opened the wretched text!
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Brad Pitt wants to play a scouser (according to AOL®)
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11 October
If it's a classic Mark Twain (although such things as the Feast of Fools and the framing device of The Taming of the Shrew foreshadow him), then the scouser chosen should have the chance to be Pitt in return.
Whatever happens, I think that Pitt should be under Terene Davies' direction as to how he can play what he apparently wants to be - either that, or thator Alexei Sayle.
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11 October
If it's a classic Mark Twain (although such things as the Feast of Fools and the framing device of The Taming of the Shrew foreshadow him), then the scouser chosen should have the chance to be Pitt in return.
Whatever happens, I think that Pitt should be under Terene Davies' direction as to how he can play what he apparently wants to be - either that, or thator Alexei Sayle.
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The Turnip Prize II
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11 October
There has already been such an enormous amount of interest in the previous questions posed on these pages that I have agreed to post some further ones from readers and to see if I can find out some answers when I make it down to the show...
1. Is it true that everyone working on this part of the show wears a Ronnie Laing mask?
2. The prohibited actions didn't mention laughing - was that an oversight?
3. Is it general admission or allocated seating?
4. The prohibited actions didn't mention farting - was that an oversight?
5. Can other sorts of vegetable be taken into the screening, then?
6. I've heard that, too, about the masks, but aren't they from images from all different times in Laing's life?
7. If you watch the film twice, do you get Air Miles?
8. The prohibited actions didn't mention scratching (oneself, others or the seat) - was that an oversight?
9. I've heard that it's allocated seating, but the seat is allocated to you, depending on whether you screen for schizoid tendencies, schizophrenia, etc. Is that right?
10. Can people obtain verification, if it is needed, that, although they were at the Turner Prize show, they didn't attend a screening of All Divided Selves?
11. Can they still obtain such verification, even if they did actually attend one?
12. The prohibited actions didn't mention yawning - was that an oversight?
13. Does the death penalty still apply to anyone who mentions the word 'documentary' in connection with the film?
PS Hey! This sounds like an almost interesting approach to a film about a hisorical subject (taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/5307532/Luke-Fowler-stories-upside-down-and-inside-out.html) :
Your eyes have barely focused on the tousled head of the composer Cornelius Cardew, when the image on the screen dissolves into footage of winter foliage that skitters in and out of focus. Newspaper cuttings concerning Cardew's early death (in a hit-and-run accident) are presented floating in space like elements in some miniature sculptural installation.
This is documentary film-making according to Luke Fowler, one of the hottest names in contemporary British art, winner of the inaugural Derek Jarman Award for artist film-makers, whose first major retrospective has opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In Fowler's best-known film, Pilgrimage between Scattered Points, which tells the story of English composer Cornelius Cardew, interviews are presented deliberately out of synch, subjects appear suddenly upside down, interspersed with apparently random imagery.
Apart from the random imagery, why has the canon of invention dwindled?
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11 October
There has already been such an enormous amount of interest in the previous questions posed on these pages that I have agreed to post some further ones from readers and to see if I can find out some answers when I make it down to the show...
1. Is it true that everyone working on this part of the show wears a Ronnie Laing mask?
2. The prohibited actions didn't mention laughing - was that an oversight?
3. Is it general admission or allocated seating?
4. The prohibited actions didn't mention farting - was that an oversight?
5. Can other sorts of vegetable be taken into the screening, then?
6. I've heard that, too, about the masks, but aren't they from images from all different times in Laing's life?
7. If you watch the film twice, do you get Air Miles?
8. The prohibited actions didn't mention scratching (oneself, others or the seat) - was that an oversight?
9. I've heard that it's allocated seating, but the seat is allocated to you, depending on whether you screen for schizoid tendencies, schizophrenia, etc. Is that right?
10. Can people obtain verification, if it is needed, that, although they were at the Turner Prize show, they didn't attend a screening of All Divided Selves?
11. Can they still obtain such verification, even if they did actually attend one?
12. The prohibited actions didn't mention yawning - was that an oversight?
13. Does the death penalty still apply to anyone who mentions the word 'documentary' in connection with the film?
PS Hey! This sounds like an almost interesting approach to a film about a hisorical subject (taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/5307532/Luke-Fowler-stories-upside-down-and-inside-out.html) :
Your eyes have barely focused on the tousled head of the composer Cornelius Cardew, when the image on the screen dissolves into footage of winter foliage that skitters in and out of focus. Newspaper cuttings concerning Cardew's early death (in a hit-and-run accident) are presented floating in space like elements in some miniature sculptural installation.
This is documentary film-making according to Luke Fowler, one of the hottest names in contemporary British art, winner of the inaugural Derek Jarman Award for artist film-makers, whose first major retrospective has opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In Fowler's best-known film, Pilgrimage between Scattered Points, which tells the story of English composer Cornelius Cardew, interviews are presented deliberately out of synch, subjects appear suddenly upside down, interspersed with apparently random imagery.
Apart from the random imagery, why has the canon of invention dwindled?
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Wednesday, 10 October 2012
The Turnip Prize I
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
I have already seen on Tate Britain's web-site that Luke Fowler's film, All Divided Selves (2012), has published screening-times for his entry for The Turner Prize (on which the Evening Standard has given an overview).
I'm assuming that they have built a cinema-room in the show in which it will be projected, but do all (or any) of these rules apply? :
1. No latecomers admitted
2. No popcorn, fizzy drinks or noisy sweet-papers
3. Only bona fide appreciators of the genre of artists' films allowed in
4. Any screening not containing a full quota will be cancelled
5. No petting
6. Anyone found with a root-vegetable about their person will be ejected
7. No whispering to your companion when you cannot follow what is happening (or what the title means)
8. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, except in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
9. Anyone found with closed eyes during a screening will be given The Alex Treatment
10. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, even in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
11. Anyone who betrays any knowledge of the subject of R. D. Laing, the man, his thought and his psychiatric practice will be encouraged to believe that they really have a very busy day and cannot spend ninety-odd minutes in a screening
12. No heavy petting
13. Friends of the film-maker will not be allowed entry (on the grounds of protecting them from getting the impression that they, too, are famous artists)
NB Now that I have found out, I should acknowledge that The Turnip Prize has existed for some years - www.turnipprize.com is its web-site.
STOP PRESS - now more at http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-turnip-prize-ii.html
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
I have already seen on Tate Britain's web-site that Luke Fowler's film, All Divided Selves (2012), has published screening-times for his entry for The Turner Prize (on which the Evening Standard has given an overview).
I'm assuming that they have built a cinema-room in the show in which it will be projected, but do all (or any) of these rules apply? :
1. No latecomers admitted
2. No popcorn, fizzy drinks or noisy sweet-papers
3. Only bona fide appreciators of the genre of artists' films allowed in
4. Any screening not containing a full quota will be cancelled
5. No petting
6. Anyone found with a root-vegetable about their person will be ejected
7. No whispering to your companion when you cannot follow what is happening (or what the title means)
8. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, except in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
9. Anyone found with closed eyes during a screening will be given The Alex Treatment
10. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, even in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
11. Anyone who betrays any knowledge of the subject of R. D. Laing, the man, his thought and his psychiatric practice will be encouraged to believe that they really have a very busy day and cannot spend ninety-odd minutes in a screening
12. No heavy petting
13. Friends of the film-maker will not be allowed entry (on the grounds of protecting them from getting the impression that they, too, are famous artists)
NB Now that I have found out, I should acknowledge that The Turnip Prize has existed for some years - www.turnipprize.com is its web-site.
STOP PRESS - now more at http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-turnip-prize-ii.html
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Allen Italian
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
Allen's right, you know! Just look at how great these titles look translated :
* Misterioso Omicidio A Manhattan
* Crimini E Misfatti
* Una Commedia Sexy In Una Notte Di Mezza Estate
* Harry A Pezzi
* Il Dormiglione
* Prendi I Soldi E Scappa
* La Maledizione Dello Scorpione Di Giada
* Basta Che Funzioni
* Incontrerai L'Uomo Dei Tuoi Sogni
* Provaci Ancora Sam
But I don't know where they were going with this one (unless conjured up after a cult viewing of the desperation that is Withnail and I) :
Io E Annie
Turning Sweet and Lowdown into Accordi E Disaccordi is, to me, a little mystifying, too.
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11 October
Allen's right, you know! Just look at how great these titles look translated :
* Misterioso Omicidio A Manhattan
* Crimini E Misfatti
* Una Commedia Sexy In Una Notte Di Mezza Estate
* Harry A Pezzi
* Il Dormiglione
* Prendi I Soldi E Scappa
* La Maledizione Dello Scorpione Di Giada
* Basta Che Funzioni
* Incontrerai L'Uomo Dei Tuoi Sogni
* Provaci Ancora Sam
But I don't know where they were going with this one (unless conjured up after a cult viewing of the desperation that is Withnail and I) :
Io E Annie
Turning Sweet and Lowdown into Accordi E Disaccordi is, to me, a little mystifying, too.
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Damaging or harming?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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10 October
The other day, when I heard that someone was reported to have harmed a painting by Mark Rothko, it did sound quite right - maybe one can harm the natural world, so there is no need for a living creature, capable of being harmed, but would one's first choice for damage to an artwork be that it had been harmed?
The person accused of the act, which he denies was criminal damage, was mentioned on the news again, his name one of many with which Ian Skelly had difficulties to-night. This time the man was said to have damaged the Rothko, which gives rise to this stupid thought :
Could a piece of art be damaged, but not harmed, if the damage were done in the right way? For, what if the damage actually, objectively (in art-critical terms), improved the piece, and, maybe, the living artist approved of it : no point, then, in restoring the work to how it had been before.
Actually, although I do not think that history claims that the fracturing to Duchamp's so-called Large Glass was deliberate, it was a ready-made that he adopted (i.e. rather than making the thing over again from new). But, of course, what Richard Hamilton did in the 60s was to make a re-creation of the work, and, not least as he could not have got the glass to fracture in the same way, it resembles its pre-facture appearance.
Hamilton's piece is on display at Tate Modern, and I take issue with the fact that the label does not draw attention to the fact that the original, some 40 years younger, is in Philadelphia or some such. That said, Duchamp approved what Hamilton had done (and, probably, Hamilton had his agreement before setting out), and I think that he went further, which was to say that, by signing it, it stood for the original for all purposes. My issue? You would only know that, if you knew it, and, if a friend, who had seen the original, asked you what you thought of the cracked glass, you would shake your head, not remembering any.
Finally, on this and as to Francis Bacon, the same Tate advised that he was such a keen reviser of his work that it had had to refuse permission for him to borrow key canvases from its holding : it knew very well that what Bacon would have returned would have been different works from what had been borrowed! If the works were in Gerhart Richter's private collection, no one would deny his right to the practice of overpainting earlier works, but might question his judgement, if not artistic integrity (which is abundant from the film Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)).
If Bacon had broken into the Tate, with the assistance of one of his lovers, and worked on some canvases, would be have harmed them, by causing them to appear differently from the image in the catalogue and what people would expect to see if they wished to view what Turnage called Three Screaming Popes? Or would he have damaged them, but without harming them - and who knows what glories the Tate presented us from seeing to surpass what we have?
In the extreme case of Van Gogh, we might wish to say that his artistic legacy was not safe with him - but do we have a right, as an inheritance gives us, to remember someone for works that he would have destroyed. And so into, sadly, the moral debate about Max Brod and Franz Kafka, which I generally find rather sterile.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 October
The other day, when I heard that someone was reported to have harmed a painting by Mark Rothko, it did sound quite right - maybe one can harm the natural world, so there is no need for a living creature, capable of being harmed, but would one's first choice for damage to an artwork be that it had been harmed?
The person accused of the act, which he denies was criminal damage, was mentioned on the news again, his name one of many with which Ian Skelly had difficulties to-night. This time the man was said to have damaged the Rothko, which gives rise to this stupid thought :
Could a piece of art be damaged, but not harmed, if the damage were done in the right way? For, what if the damage actually, objectively (in art-critical terms), improved the piece, and, maybe, the living artist approved of it : no point, then, in restoring the work to how it had been before.
Actually, although I do not think that history claims that the fracturing to Duchamp's so-called Large Glass was deliberate, it was a ready-made that he adopted (i.e. rather than making the thing over again from new). But, of course, what Richard Hamilton did in the 60s was to make a re-creation of the work, and, not least as he could not have got the glass to fracture in the same way, it resembles its pre-facture appearance.
Hamilton's piece is on display at Tate Modern, and I take issue with the fact that the label does not draw attention to the fact that the original, some 40 years younger, is in Philadelphia or some such. That said, Duchamp approved what Hamilton had done (and, probably, Hamilton had his agreement before setting out), and I think that he went further, which was to say that, by signing it, it stood for the original for all purposes. My issue? You would only know that, if you knew it, and, if a friend, who had seen the original, asked you what you thought of the cracked glass, you would shake your head, not remembering any.
Finally, on this and as to Francis Bacon, the same Tate advised that he was such a keen reviser of his work that it had had to refuse permission for him to borrow key canvases from its holding : it knew very well that what Bacon would have returned would have been different works from what had been borrowed! If the works were in Gerhart Richter's private collection, no one would deny his right to the practice of overpainting earlier works, but might question his judgement, if not artistic integrity (which is abundant from the film Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)).
If Bacon had broken into the Tate, with the assistance of one of his lovers, and worked on some canvases, would be have harmed them, by causing them to appear differently from the image in the catalogue and what people would expect to see if they wished to view what Turnage called Three Screaming Popes? Or would he have damaged them, but without harming them - and who knows what glories the Tate presented us from seeing to surpass what we have?
In the extreme case of Van Gogh, we might wish to say that his artistic legacy was not safe with him - but do we have a right, as an inheritance gives us, to remember someone for works that he would have destroyed. And so into, sadly, the moral debate about Max Brod and Franz Kafka, which I generally find rather sterile.
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Monday, 8 October 2012
Guinness in different glasses
A short appreciation, from old review-notes, of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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9 October
A short appreciation, from old review-notes, of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
Somehow, when a restoration by the Britifish Film Institute (would that they could be known as that, not as BFI!) was released last year, I failed to turn a few notes from seeing Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) into a review. Here ‘tis now…
One cannot argue with the description of this film, in Picturehouse Recommends, having 'the most articulate and literate of all Ealing screenplays'. It is not just dialogue, but Louis Mazzini's (Dennis Price's) sinister narration and how he delivers it as if what he planned and did is the most reasonable thing in the world, wherein, of course, lies the wonder of the piece. If the film gets you to laugh quite naturally at children dying of diphtheria (and their mother dying, too), then that is skilled writing, but even the best writing depends on delivery, and that of the principals is impeccable.
For me, the fact that Alec Guinness transforms himself into eight varyingly inbred members (including one woman) of Mazzini’s mother’s family is the lesser thing, and it is in this connection that I have alluded to it in my review of Holy Motors (2012) (for anyone who believes that even the resources of the limousine suffice, and not a great deal of assistance beside would be needed, is deluding him- or herself). The costume is not the least part not only of the impersonations, but of the whole film, most notably for the two leading ladies:
The character parts are cute, but it is Mazzini interacting with these crucial women that counts, Joan Greenwood as childhood chum Sibella Holland, and Valerie Hobson as Edith d’Ascoyne, the woman whom he has widowed and in favour of whom Sibella just becomes something on the side. The planning just gets a little too clever for its own good, and Mazzini ends up tried before his peers (who are peers), under the darting eyes of Hugh Griffith, and brings us crucially back to a document that he has written whilst telling his tale, and which could unwittingly end up as his confession.
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Sunday, 7 October 2012
A roaming view
This is a review of To Rome with Love (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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6 October
This is a review of To Rome with Love (2012)
Few people might expect so much dialogue in Italian with English sub-titles from To Rome with Love (2012), even after seeing Midnight in Paris (2011) - I hope that the fact will not put off members of a typical Allen audience who are maybe less used to following text and action together in this way, either by their telling friends to avoid the experience, or by having it as a mental reservation for his next release.
(I could speculate as to how the Italian dialogue was arrived at, because it does not quite seem as if Allen wrote the sub-titled speech and it was translated into Italian, but something more complicated than that, and maybe Woody's Italian is much better than mine and he worked on writing the Italian parts of the screenplay.)
A traffic-policeman, balletically directing the thronging vehicles high on a tub in their centre, first introduces us to two of the couples in the stories that we will see, and then thankfully, unlike the narrator in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), leaves us to our own devices. He, himself, is a device, because he purports to be able to see what he shows us from his vantage-point, and he is competing to be important to us.
Moreover, he is a symbol for Allen in exactly bringing the four stories before us beautifully in one timescale, all of them humorous, but all of them, despite the humour, nonetheless serious in some way. One story takes place in a single day, another in a week, and the remaining two in probably two or three weeks, but they begin and end together, and we are never worried that time is running more quickly for someone than for someone else, which is the film’s real triumph, that we can accept what we see so easily because the different lines are woven together, but are separate, happening in their own universe.
We first meet Hayley, an American woman spending the summer in Rome and falling in love with the first Roman whom she asks directions, Michaelangelo. (And, yes, in another strand, Allen gives us Leonardo.) Later, her parents (Judy Davis, being waspish as Phyllis, and Woody Allen being one of his typical creative roles as Jerry) meet his parents, and so begins the most bizarre story of Michaelangelo’s father Giancarlo giving an operatic performance under Allen's bizarre direction. This should not be spoilt, so do not imagine what will come better as a surprise - and even did fine the second time around. Allen calls his film to Rome, and he shows us himself going there, both as an actor (and hating the turbulence), and to bring us there with him.
Pure Italian is used to tell the tale of Milly and Antonio, newlyweds from Pordenone who came to Rome for a honeymoon and a new life with Antnonio’s relatives' company, if only he had something in common with his aunts and uncles! Enter a wish to impress them with a new haircut for Milly, Penélope Cruz as the fortuitous Anna, and chance encounters with the cast of a film, allowed by the running joke of directions to anywhere being endlessly complicated and losing Milly further and further, but somehow bringing her having lunch in the same restaurant with actor Luca Salta as Cruz hilariously stands in as Milly (but - fear not - all ends well!).
Cruz being who she is not, and performing the role so delightfully that she steals virtually every scene, is part of what the story, equally deliciously portrayed by Roberto Beningi, of Leopoldo Pisanello (another painter’s name) is about : suddenly, everyone wants to know all about Pisanello, a little as he had wished, and is whisked off to answer questions about what he had for breakfast. He does not get used to all the attention, all the desire to know his opinions, and comes to see it as a curse. When it has gone, this take on modern celebrity mixed with Warhol’s notorious pronouncement leaves Pisanello a little bereft by the change, and he has to satisfy himself that he once had a chauffeur and people knew who he was.
The last story has an on-screen American narrator in older architect John (Alec Baldwin), who is not ever visible to more than one person (more or less), trying most of the time to share his wisdom with the younger architect Tim, and thereby giving us a great deal of amusement in his ironic comments and predictions, and ultimately proving right when Tim has decided to follow his romantic feelings. Baldwin finds an on-screen equal in the acting presence of Ellen Page as the bewitching Monica, who draws Tim despite what he or John can say to the contrary.
The film is thoroughly charming, but my hesitation is whether two strands in Italian is taking things too far for some potential viewers. It ends with a competing claim, from a man who emerges from behind some shutters near The Spanish Steps, to see everything from where he is, and, a bit like Beckettt ('Oh the stories I could tell if I were easy', from Moran's part of Molloy), the offer to tell some of these stories some other time.
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Thursday, 4 October 2012
Brad and Angelina consider changing names (according to AOL®)
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4 October
That's just a bit silly, isn't it?
So we have to contemplate calling him Angelina, Angelina Pitt, whereas she comes Brad, Brad Jolie...
About as crazy as Fairbanks and Pickford calling their place Pickfair!
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4 October
That's just a bit silly, isn't it?
So we have to contemplate calling him Angelina, Angelina Pitt, whereas she comes Brad, Brad Jolie...
About as crazy as Fairbanks and Pickford calling their place Pickfair!
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Monday, 24 September 2012
Fly Australian Airlines to nowhere
This is a Festival review of Holy Motors (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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This is a Festival review of Holy Motors (2012)
* Contains spoilers *
If you want to see Kylie play a cameo as an airline hostess*, you’re clutching at straws, and would be better off queuing for one of her stage-shows than watching Holy Motors** (2012): if you watched the film first, you’d have no desire to hear her version of any other song. The other song was just mawkish dross about time, regret and the past – or was that Kylie’s song instead / as well, and trauma has bereft me of remembering ?
I have Tweeted that Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and Subway (1985) meet in a mortal embrace, and it is a fight that kills off the best of both, leaving a facile scene in a warehouse-sized garage at the end that was apt to make the ritual close of t.v.’s The Waltons seem profound. It did not even visually convince that so many similar vehicles had been assembled, not least since they insisted on drawing attention to their artificiality by flashing their brake-lights.
Could anything worthwhile have preceded such a banal ending, little better than imputing significance to the fact that the vital club in Enter the Void (2009) is called – wait for it! – The Void? A few moments did, but only a very few in the whole 115 minutes, comprising : an erotic dance; a building that I could swear owes something to the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright (but I could not spot it in the credits); the bizarre pastiche of a beauty, a beast and a photographer; the first of several humorous grave-stones; and a terrific interlude (called such), in which a gathering group of musicians, centred on an accordion ensemble, processed around a large church.
After then, and despite some intrigue concerning a crime and its ritualized repetition, it was a decline, not just musically, as a continuation of the episodic. Simply put, there was simply almost no interest in how (or even why) it all hung together, and it became, if possible, less and less significant. It was as if a premise of The Matrix (1999) that, when plugged in, Neo, Trinity and the others, can enter the machine-world had been stretched out to become some sort of secret, kept to the end.
I would happily have walked out of Holy Motors, at around the point that I describe, but, as my friend did not evince the desire to leave, I stayed so that we would have both seen all of it to discuss afterwards. He thought it a sort of purgatory for M. Oscar, I thought it a purgatory for me in this parade of the pointless, and that any notion that it meant more than the following quotation*** was vain speculation (though I was, also, reminded of Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd):
As the gom yawncher man passed me I recognized him as the man in the broken-rimmed hat who'd spoken to me in the underground when I was on my way home from Istvan Fallok's studio with electrodes all over my head.
'Hello,' I said.
'Nimser vo,' he said.
'You weren't talking like that the other day. How come?'
'I must've been somebody else then.'
'How's that?'
'Economy. You have a little chat with a stranger now and then, right? So do I, so does everyone. How many lines has the stranger got? Two or three maybe. There's really no need for a new actor each time, is there?'
'So you play them all.'
'The same as you.'
'What do you mean?'
'Yesterday you were the conductor on the 11 bus and you also did quite a nice little tobacconist in the Charing Cross Road. Actually London hasn't got that big a cast, there's only about fifty of us, all working flat out.'
'Are you writing a novel?'
'Novel-writing is for weaklings,' he said, and moved on.
After which, not only go to [to come], for an unfavourable comparison with The Night Elvis Died (2010), but here for a further conceit
End-notes
* I have never heard the male equivalent called ‘a host’.
** Surely a take-off of the Batman dialogue.
*** From The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban, Pan Books (Picador), London, 1988, p. 56.
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Saturday, 22 September 2012
Vertiginous Hitch
This is a Festival review of Vertigo (1958)
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22 September
This is a Festival review of Vertigo (1958)
* Contains spoilers *
When the Jimmy Stewart / Alfred Hitchcock collaborations that had been quickly taken out of circulation were released again in the mid-1980s, I went to see two or three, certainly Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). I remember not being much struck by either, the former because I found its device - as it assuredly is meant to be - so limiting, the latter because I just did not get it, and the suddenness with which some films from that era ended, with the words 'THE END' and the studio logo coming up, did not help.
Yesterday, watching Vertigo for the first time since then, I found myself coming at it with the eye of someone who loved Chinatown (1974), and found much that links the two, including a way of viewing that had me questioning who was the client and what had Stewart John 'Scottie' Ferguson been engaged to do and why. The key scene, for this way of thinking, was not at Gavin Elster's office, but the next one, at Ernie's, and questioning for whose benefit it was that Scottie was there, in terms of who was identifying whom.
Thereafter, having postulated that Scottie was the one to be seen by Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), it was easy enough to see him being led a dance, even to the extent of her, more than once, taking a parking-space that left him pulling in where no space existed. When she threw herself into San Francisco Bay, she then did so knowing that Scottie was there. (How all this connects with the foundation novel, D'Entre les Morts, I do not know, but research may tell me without having to look it out.)
In the meantime, it is the way of thinking that relates to Chinatown that interests me. Both films have secrets, a crime, someone pretending to be someone else and in whom a third someone should not fall in love, and all end with the death of that someone. In Vertigo, the private investigator (or PI) as a means to an end not known to him is hardly new*, but we are immersed in his pursuit such that we can be blinded to the fact that he has been blinded and bought a story.
To be continued
End-notes
* In a way it goes all the way at least back to Jonah, with texts such as Sir Gawain, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and G. K. Chesterton's The Man who was Thursday in between.
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Friday, 21 September 2012
More like Pirandello
This is a review of V.O.S. (2009), as screened at Cambridge Film Festival
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20 September
This is a review of V.O.S. (2009), as screened at Cambridge Film Festival (@Camfilmfest) 2012
V.O.S. (2009) (which denotes that it is the original version, but with sub-titles, i.e. not dubbed) was introduced as a film within a film, taken from a play within a play (which is by Carl Lopez), but it is more like Pirandello than anything else, with Brechtian Verfremdungseffekte thrown in for good measure, plus a hint of Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry.
For the four principal characters do not have - are not shown to have - any existence outside of the film, and though they are stepping in and out of the role as scenes are played out (and envisaged, in discussion, as having taken or to take a different course), it's as though their life is on the set or lot, which makes the experience of watching a lot like that of seeing Nine (2009) or Dogville (2003).
Woody Allen is even mentioned by Clara (Àgata Roca), the pregnant partner of Ander (Andres Herrera) who is seemingly writing the film as it goes, as if it were a linear process that leads up to the scene that we see at the beginning : one audience review that I have seen recently at Cambridge Film Festival critiques an accent as if were less convincing at the beginning of shooting and that that fact is necessarily reflected in where the scene appears within the film.
What does the suggestion that the actors have a life beyond the parts that they play add, when doors that we have been shown into a hospital theatre are later revealed as a mock-up, but then have figures dressed for a procedure emerge from them and appear to be received by the crew as if they are real surgeons or the like? As far as I could see, it merely put a layer of doubt as to whether any of the scenes played out have any status, which is something that Allen has explored, for example, with the use of a chorus (in Mighty Aphrodite (1995), with the alternative realities of Melinda and Melinda (2004), and in Harry or Stardust Memories (1980).
That said, the story of how Ander and Clara become a couple is still an engaging one, because it shows how they have interacted with Vicky and Manu, and it is not as if Allen has just done it all before. Those who are interested can read more in Variety.
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