Gala with a glitch

This is a Gala review of Underground (1928), screened in NFT1 at the BFI

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10 January

This is a Gala review of Underground (1928), screened in NFT1 at the BFI

Confession : I am not very practised (or confident) with how to view silent film :

* self-perpetuating lack of exposure to the field

* which means that my lip-reading* never gets better

* and disinclines me to make the effort to choose silent


For I find the concentration needed even greater than for a poorly subtitled film, where there is the anxious race to read and make sense of captions before the next ones come up (and, necessarily, the one in hand disappears).

None of this deterred me from this gala screening:

Catch Anthony Asquith’s beautifully restored Underground, a tale of love, jealousy and murder: bit.ly/WqdTmi
— BFI (@BFI) January 11, 2013

It had all the elements : a Q&A (and hosted by Francine Stock, to boot); the buzz of a first night at the BFI; in Underground, the restoration, by the BFI, of a film 85 years old; the involvement of silent-film musical interpreter Neil Brand, not as accompanying musician this time, but as composer of the score; and the tie-in with the 150th anniversary of the tube, with a film that almost made a character of its tunnels, staff, trains.

It brought out all sorts, from the train enthusiasts (there was one on the panel, with a looping presentation of stills) to, as it were, the silent crowd, and, of course, film buffs in general (into the latter two categories of which Brand and Stock** fitted, as did Bryony Dixon (curator at the BFI) and ?? Ben Thompson ?? (from the team of restorers)).

However, there were only two drawbacks, the minor one that, with a panel of four, each of whom had to be given a say, there was only time for five (it may have been four) audience questions, and the major hitch, which had Brand leaping from his seat and disappearing within minutes, which was that the soundtrack was no longer in synch with the projection (which, apparently, it had been earlier).

So, for example, an urchin playing on some sort of whistle was heard before he was seen. As Brand had, of course, carefully scored each moment of the 84 minutes, it was immensely distressing for him (hence his sudden exit to voice his concern), but it seemed from the apology at the end from the BFI’s director that there had been a lack of confidence that stopping the film would have allowed the problem to be remedied***.

I asked for a complementary ticket to allow me to see it as it should have been, because, although there was no doubt of the power and skill of the scoring (and of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s performance****), the concentration involved in hearing a soundtrack that did not match the visuals compounded my interpretative impairment.
That apart, it was a grand evening, and I was pleased to be able to talk briefly to Neil Brand again and offer my congratulations (and commiserations). This is why :

@bfi Othello's plot always strikes me as flimsy - #Underground has the power of an Iago figure heightened by realist obsession / great music
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2013

I had heard Brand talking to Sean Rafferty last year, on Radio 3’s late-afternoon programme In Tune (one could equally say early-evening, as I choose not to say ‘drive-time’), and was very interested both in what he had to say about the film’s dynamics, and to hear not only some of the music, but also how it had been composed. So I knew that Anthony Asquith, son of the prime minister of that name, had been the art director, I knew a skeletal amount about what the film dealt with, and I had heard Brand’s palpable enthusiasm for this commission.

I knew, therefore, that I wanted to see it, and, when I saw Brand at the Silent Film Festival (I only managed to see one film, though, where he had been playing with Mark Kermode’s band The Dodge Brothers) and then at Festival Central, I learnt that all the attention was focused on a likely release timed with the tube anniversary.

This film – including in its original sense - is terrific, and there is no doubt that the patient work of restoration, of composing the score, and of recording and tracking it has been an excellent use of resources. I want only to say enough about it that is consistent with leaving it to unfold to a new viewer, but showing what there is to be appreciated.

My Tweet will have alerted to the scheming and self-centredness of Othello, but (in no particular order) there is also, as Bryony Dixon put it, a love quadrilateral, a fight and other moments of tension, shots of trains and escalators in and around Waterloo tube-station, a magnificent chase, and a picture of the metropolis and a romantic trip to (as a member of the audience asserted, since no one knew) Hampstead Heath. What more could one want... ?


End-notes

* It is a useful adjunct to indistinct speech, as a clue (or cue) to what is being uttered, but a different proposition, I find, with no speech sounds. A film of this kind has few inter-titles (have they always been called that?), and for me, used as I am to the dialogue driving many a scene, there’s a frustration at not knowing what is said.

** Aurally, it has the ring of a partnership, warehousing, maybe, designer goods.

*** When I talked, at a later date, to Cambridge Film Festival director Tony Jones, he was confident both as to the nature of the problem, and how the technology caused would have made it not capable of easy remedy : he also seemed to know, but lost me in the detail of the technicality, how it should have been done, and so would not have been beyond repair on the spot.

**** Brand provided information about how the recording from a live performance at a screening last year, once the audience noise had been taken off, had to be intermixed with taping from that event’s rehearsal. Here, too, there had been a technical issue, because the frame-speed of the projection when the two had been recorded differed !


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Drab git - or summat !

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9 January

According to AOL, Bard Pitt tweets cryptic message !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 8, 2013

Oh, I know that there is that grand old tradition of The Grauniad, and I'm the worst for checking over my own postings before they go live, but I'm scarcely trying to tout celebrity stories to a global audience with this blog, whereas a typo in the relevant person's name might just damage the interest in or credibility of the guff in question, and thereby be to the detriment of the named Big Players !

Bard Pitt - I like the sound of that (much better than Brad), and wonder if he'll follow AOL's lead by adopting it...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 8, 2013

As it was, quite a lot of people couldn’t have been doing their job of checking the web-site’s appearance and content, because the link was there for a long time. Yes, we do read what we expect to be there, and, for that and other reasons, reading a proof properly is harder than many imagine*, and I even think that some promotional material panders to the incorrect by using lazy English, which may be what their target customers would use :

Laying, dfs ? Makes laying about look glamorous - or is that good enough for dfs customers ?!
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 8, 2013

Another gem from AOL : Mum fights python attacking child, where the unnecessarily extreme elision makes you believe it says python-attacking
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 9, 2013

By contrast with dfs, the unmistakable voice of Victoria Wood, sounding earnest and a bit posh, is now the voice of the Dyson brand (a few weeks ago she was, anyway, in the irritating pop-up advert before I could sign in and reach the comparative safety of my in-box), which one might not have envisaged – did our celebrated inventor leave that choice to others, or make it himself in an engineered way, one might wonder… ?

And, as some must know, from Freddie Starr ate my hamster in The Sun of late last century to some fire-fight or cattiness where X rubbishes Y’s work [interchangeable with looks], if X and Y agree (for others) to let it be known that they have their differences over these things (or how one of them supposedly treated Z), then it doesn’t matter a damn that it’s a made-up dispute as long as they do nothing to destroy the illusion that it is real.

And the newspapers, the Internet news-sites, the t.v., they know that it’s all hooey, but it goes all the way back to the closely kept secrets of Tinseltown, such as everyone knowing, and no one saying, that Rock Hudson was gay until the manner of his death (and choices that must have been made, leading up to it) made it known. We only know what we are meant to know, and, likewise, it was just generally accepted that it was better to interview Mary Pickford in the morning, before she had consumed ‘lunch’.

Just for good measure, that world of the law is no different : the various Companies Acts require various things of a company established in England & Wales, including that certain business (e.g. appointments of company officers) be transacted at the first meeting of the company. As one commercial lawyer, deputy senior partner in a City firm, said If Mr D. and Mr D.’s brother say that they met on such and such a day at such and such a time to conduct a meeting, who is to say otherwise ? - it was just for the Messrs D. to consult their diaries and say, for the purpose of the minutes, where this paper meeting took place.

Lying, any more than the story where Pitt sends some Tweet (as if a Twitter account were so personal to the individual that no one else could send it on his behalf, or at his cost) ? A legal fiction versus fabricated grudges, infatuation or rivalry ? Celebrity land and the world of law keep a foot in each camp, for who, other than the PR crowd (whose job, like the devil’s, is to persuade you that they do such extreme things that the innocuously everyday ones pass unnoticed), advises on the legal niceties of the deals that are struck behind the scenes for A to have it appear that B called her some name or whatever in return for payments to B and B’s sworn secrecy ?

Makes Bleak House and its grinding Chancery case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce seem like a fairy story !


End-notes

* Besides which, it becomes terminally uninteresting, in the way that it does for a commercial solicitor who never sets food in a police station (except to reclaim lost property) to explain how his colleagues can represent someone in court whom they ‘know is guilty’, to point out why a proofreader is not responsible ‘for all these grammatical mistakes that there are in books nowadays’


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Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain I

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6 January

Having been to Tate Britain for the last day of The Turner Prize show, I am not surprised that Elizabeth Price’s nomination won it for her in 2012: to say that there were no real contenders is a rather unhelpful way of asserting that she outclassed them all.

I already knew that to be true of Luke Fowler’s 93-minute film, which simply wasn’t art, even if it was going to have the massive draw of footage of Laing, the psychiatrist whom so many people have heard of (or feel that they know about, Fowler probably included). Fair enough, by having All Divided Selves (2011) in the show, Tate was committed to coming up with the means to provide a space in which people could be for that long, and, from what I could tell the solution was effective. That said, there were people sitting on the floor, and, although some of them may have been not only transient, but also the result of last-weekend numbers, that is scarcely something that many would choose to do at the cinema (where I think that Fowler’s film belongs, not in a gallery).

There are several things that bother me still about how a full-length film distorts such a show, not least when the exhibition-space persists on being on the corridor model:

(a) attrition / fatigue / pacing, when one gets to the entry for Fowler’s film first, and, although entry is not exactly limited to the screening-times (and, unlike a gallery of displayed work, one does not have to pass through it), they require one to take that part out of one’s visit to plan to get somewhere to sit* ;

(b) even if Price’s and Fowler’s films were of the same quality, is more than four times as much better, just by virtue of being longer ? ;

(c) on the same question of comparison, how weigh Paul Noble’s drawings with All Divided Selves, even if one did not think that, assuming if the latter were art (not just slightly arty documentary), the Laing factor wins it in a way that Fowler’s film about Cornelius Cardew would not.


Although no one, of course, is going to admit it, I’d be very surprised if a show has another film that long in a hurry. (Or that anyone makes one – not, at least, without being much closer to the spirit of film-making that being a recipient of the Derek Jarman Award might suggest.)

Paul Noble’s work was fine, but it just did not have the virtuosic command of its medium that Price did of hers. As to Spartacus Chetwynd, let’s just say that I have seen better work of this carnivalesque kind, and that I really did mean to watch the whole performance, but it was so much more inviting to go back to the room with the mini-features about the nominees…

This survey concludes with a review of Price's award-winning work


End-notes

* If they do not have the benefits of coming in and out, as a Tate member, visitors are obliged to stay inside when they have bought a ticket, however much a coffee may call.


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The face of things to come

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5 January

There are many ways in which we use this word face, of which I was encouraged to think of by glancing at a kitchen-clock (which I never look at for the time, as it is stopped at 2.10) :

* He looked at the clock-face

* She did an about-face

* Cromwell’s men defaced* many religious statues

* I can’t face it this time

* We will face out this embarrassment

* This tomb-stone has been defaced*

* This is the face of things to come

* The new face of Gucci

* The new face of Thatcherism

* Facing forward

* Facing into the storm

* At last, she is facing up to her past

* They have always been a two-faced pair

* Don’t deface these posters again !


End-notes

* Certainly in the first case, the word means that the faces have been taken off, which is what de-facing literally means, and it might have been done, too, to the top layer of stone of a grave-marker.


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Fabette's Beast

This is a review of Babette’s Feast (1987)

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4 January

This is a review of Babette’s Feast (1987)

* Contains spoilers *

Babette's Feast, newly released by the BFI (British Film Institute), is not exactly a suspenseful film, but there are tensions, and they have kept me pondering it, and so not writing this review, for several weeks. (Which is very often a sign of a good film, i.e. that it should defy instant analysis.)

When one does not have an original screenplay, but an adaptation, one never quite knows not just what has been changed*, but also how things made manifest in the written work (which may be so ambiguously, provisionally or tangentially) have been embodied on the screen. In some ways, cinema can be more indefinite than a novel, in others it almost cannot fail to state things.

One is the location. Quite apart from what the narration tells us, we can see that it is a small community in a remote spot, and we might subconsciously, even before shown anyone who lives there or, less still, having mention of a sect, infer qualities in those who (choose to ?) live there - and not be so far wrong ?

As to the buildings that, real or specially constructed, we see, no amount of lulling the senses can conceal the fact that they are smaller on the outside – this, though, is not Doctor Who**, and the scenes with which we are presented could often not be accommodated by these modest dwellings, even allowing for the cinematographer being the other side of where a wall should be.

There may be several reasons for having the exterior shot in a way that draws attention to proximity, intimacy and even claustrophobia, but I shall choose the fact that the isolation and vulnerability to external forces are heightened by the smaller scale, giving a sense both of how precarious life there is and that it may be prone to further influences for change. At any rate, that is how I interpret it.

This is Jutland, in Denmark, in – in the present, as shown – the early latter half of the nineteenth century, but what I need to find out is how the various wars between the Scandinavian countries had affected the population geography (I refuse to say ‘demographics’), and whose territory this island had been at various times. I say this because the spirit of August Strindberg hovers over this film for me, and I want to understand things a little better. That inquiry must wait for another time…

Strindberg is first very evident when Babette goes away to make arrangements for the feast, and the sisters have to take over duties that they last performed before she came, in the caricatured responses of those on the receiving end of their charity to the food presented and the fact that it is late, but the whole notion of this sort of meals-on-wheels generosity chimes with later works, too, such as his A Dream Play from 1902. (Does one, though, attribute that feeling to Babette’s Feast because of Karen Blixen or because of the screenwriter?)

Where the feeling is most relevant is at the feast itself, with the sharply defined moments of what neighbour says (or whispers) to neighbour, which is a sort of kaleidoscopic one for me, because I did not feel myself tasked with keeping track of who had a specific grudge with whom until shown them again, but of having an impression of the levels of unrest or discontent – the Strindbergian element is in people saying to each other what, dreams apart, they ordinarily would not reveal, and goes all the way back to a puzzling little play such as Easter.

They most discomfort the two worrying sisters (and they, too, I found it hard to distinguish from each other, though not for want of concentration*), who appear to see any ignoble behaviour or sentiment as ultimately a bad reflection on their father, without seeming to appreciate that maybe, even if he was not a charlatan who just wanted power and authority, he knew these people’s nature better than they do.

That is one of the tensions, but, preceding it, has been the sisters’ regret of allowing Babette to prepare this meal, which they have come to see as beastly and probably satanic, after encountering the live ingredients: in a paranoid response – and the elderly sisters are highly skittish – they come to suspect that the act of kindness is for their ill, and tell all the guests so, who are ready to believe it.

As I see it, the general unrest could, depending on our disposition and mood, affect us differently – we could reject it as their baseless superstition, or think that there might be, in the unfolding of this feast (the English word is laden with significance from Belshazzar to The Last Supper to the feast that is Christmas) be something sinister. As to the latter response, for example, why is the instruction for General Löwenhielm’s glass to be kept topped up, and is he meant blessing by it, or some harm of over-indulgence ? In those terms, indeed, what does this elaborate food and drink for these simple-living people mean ?

That question we come to later, but the night itself embodies dissension and enmity, which almost seem brought on by the feast and clearly disquiet the passive and peaceful daughters of the pastor : to what, one imagines them thinking, has all his work come, if the reaction to this meal in his honour takes the form of the uncovering of deep grudges and hatreds ? Is that the truth, or is there some more magical act of redemption going on, which means that, when the guests (other than Löwenhielm and his aunt, who have already left for home) dance around the well-head and sing, they are truly and fully reconciled to each other, rather than this being a papering-over the cracks ?

At any rate, the naive pair, with no idea how much such elaborate food and expensive wine would cost, have been blessed by Babette (along with the villagers), and had not figured that she could possibly have spent her whole winnings on it all. They had been mean enough to wonder how they would manage without her, if she went back to France – and, indeed, we are shown them struggling, and with the grumpy reactions of those to whom they give charity.

The fact that she did not have anywhere to go to in France does not explain the staggering decision not to buy herself an easier life somewhere else, and that generosity is so baffling that it almost only works on the level of parable, very much in what we are told of Griselde in Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale. It remains a puzzle to me, even on some reading (as I have heard critics advance) that wants to see the feast itself as the healing sacrament that these people needed : if there is a synthesis between the pious, remote North and the South of the warmer Parisian lands, then this is really no more than Löwenhielm says, who maintains a commentary on food and drink, both at the level of identification, and at that of gourmandizing wit and wisdom.

It is his presence at table, he who is used to this quality of food from when Babette worked elsewhere, that strikes an alternative note, and, whilst he might guide the others into enjoying the food, he seems as if in a dream, not being amazed at how such things could be in a poor and remote place. He leaves without seeing Babette, and, outside her kitchen, she takes no part in the feast, since she directs the others what to serve and how. It has all led up to the sisters learning that she is not to leave them, with and because of this meal, and there the graciousness of the gesture remains, for me, at the level of allegory.


End-notes

* For example, I know that Tove Jansson was Finnish, but she came from the Swedish-speaking part of Finland, and had Swedish as her primary language. However, this map delineating the extent, at various times, of the Swedish empire shows that, although it encompassed parts of Norway and Finland, and even Bremen and Riga, it did not touch Denmark, for some reason.

However, as flicking through one of these books of the type 385 Films You Must See Before Breakfast revealed, I now know that the story has been translated to Denmark from Norway anyway.

** TARDIS – to come…

*** I could not swear that the daughter whom her father delights in having subject to the philandering of the French musician Papin, just so that he can impiously delight that he has been snubbed, is not the same one whom Löwenhielm seeks to court, even if parity would have one disappointed suitor for each.


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Shortcuts to perfection

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3 January

Remember those 'statistics'* that told us that, on average, cat-owners were x% less likely to have something horrible happen, or, as it might have been put, were y% more likely to have some health benefit ?

(The bogus inference, which might have ended up benefiting animal shelters, was that, if you got a cat, you would buy yourself the good thing, or (as the case might be) avoid the bad one - nothing to do, it appeared, with whether the sort of person who would choose to have a cat would probably be of a certain disposition, and would, say, accept an enforced time of rest when he or she favoured one's lap with his or her presence.)

That's what I mean by a shortcut to perfection here, and I want to explore that notion with regard to this painless proposition:

Oddly, the tin of Heinz Beans (not 'Beanz') says that it's 1 of my 5 a day, so I'll have a large dram and call it 2 as it's made with barley
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 3, 2013

The tin in front of me (I haven't hit the single malt just yet !) says, on the back of the label, just ¼ of a can = 1 of your 5 a day, with a little measure that divides the notional contents up (apparently, they are green) into four, in the way that a petrol-gauge does (no doubt, with all the overtones of fuel and energy). On the front, I am told that the product is Baked beans in a deliciously rich tomato sauce.

No slur on that invention of a cuddly Uncle Heinz who prepares these strangely British recipes in his nonetheless Bavarian kitchen, knee deep in pasture, or how this brand has become a premier one (if not the premier one for these mysterious 57 varieties, which are mentioned on this tin, as usual), although feelings ran high about The War well into the 1970s, with such a patently German name.

However, no one who has ever had any variety of spaghetti, baked beans or anything else that comes tinned can really mistake the syrupy, sweet liquid that accompanies those things for anything else, or for having very much to do with tomatoes. So what qualifies one-quarter of this tin of 415 g as being 1 of my 5 - is it meant to be the beans, the sauce, or both?

Whatever it is, I find it quite improbable that the Chief Medical Officer's guidance to us ever intended such a product qualifying, when, unless I completely misunderstood the idea behind it all, it was to encourage us to eat fresh fruit and vegetables, and a good mixture of them, not food that I do not need to eat until March next year.

A shortcut to perfection, a bit like the cat that makes you healthy, but, here, literally re-labelling something that we might eat anyway, and which we could be encouraged to do more, by believing that we are absolved from a few of our 5 a day ? Which is where I come in with my generous dram, which is far more pure than this tin of beans, with just spring water, malted barely, yeast, and a little peat imparted by drying off the malt - same's true of beer, in theory, with just the addition of hops, so when are bottles going to start announcing how many of our 5 a day we can deal with in a pint ?

Oh, and the 5 a day - they knew that, whatever our initial intentions to do it might be, we'd end up on 3 a day**. However, according to those much-to-be trusted supermarket portions of prepared fruit, even a large container only seemed to account for at most 2 portions (and somehow seemed designed, oddly enough, to make you buy more and more fruit), so maintaining 5 at the outset was probably too high, and they should have made it 4 a day, so that we did not feel so defeated by it all***.

That so-important balance between doing something that makes us much healthier overnight, or less prone to be attacked by free radicals, and making it simple - in short, a shortcut to perfection !


STOP PRESS : That deliciously rich sauce must make Heinz spaghetti, another product immersed in some sort of goo that bears little resemblance to tomatoes, somehow worth another one of one's five a day (the whole tin, I gather), since (little though it resembles pasta) the spaghetti clearly doesn't...



End-notes

* Which I cannot believe any feline charity would have promoted.

** 3 a day is what they wanted all along, though.

*** Whereas a 415 g tin  of fruit cocktail containing 4 such portions just seems a little too easy...


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Watching Steve

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2 January

You know the scene. Steve McQueen. On his looted motor-bike. The border. Barbed-wire fence on high trestles.*

I forget what he went through to get there, who is in pursuit, whether this (accurate or not to the realities of war) is meant to be the border into Switzerland, and what he must have thought the plan was.

Maybe, heading for the border, he did not think that wire-cutters would be needed (and so did not procure them), and let’s assume that they were somehow not easily-made standard issue for what are normally called - although it makes no sense - escapees**. If so, then we have our given:

Steve’s bike isn’t really going to be as much help getting over the barbed wire as snipping the top couple of strands would be and a quick hop over. In fact, for all that he is 20 yards from the border, he might as well be 20 miles away, but that is all part of the so close, and yet so far motif of his part of the story, of seeing what he cannot, any more than Tantalus, reach***.

Is he then, as Camus might have said, heroic, but heroic in the way that Sisyphus, and so, looked at coldly, attempting the absurd in thinking that he can get the angle and terrain right to cross the barbed wire on the bike ? Does he represent someone who is so far from being able to achieve what is necessary to complete the escape for which he has struggled that he might as well not be there, when he is there without the means to mitigate the problem, and his predicament does not even resemble having no hammer, but only a milk-bottle, to put up a picture-hook, where thinking might find a solution ?

All this may always have been obvious in the lead-up to the scene, it may all be desperation, but what is the reason for it symbolizing heroism, unless we don’t – or don’t choose – to think those other thoughts ?


End-notes

* In The Great Escape (1963).

** They are clearly escapers (those who escape), and those whom they escape are escapees.

*** The film-makers, of course, put him in this impossible position, of not being able to cross to where he can see.


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Watching Union City (1980)

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Christmas Day

* Contains spoilers *

When you are watching Union City (1979) because it is an earlier occasion of Deborah Harry acting than you know, and the DVD sleeve credits some unheard-of organ with calling it 'an unqualifed masterpiece', one's expectations may not be great. (One mistake was to think that there was a clear connection with Blondie's 'Union City Blue'*.)

Undeservedly so, because, with its modest resources (sufficient, though, to the task), this is a very strong film about what makes someone snap, fear and try to flee, and about the relationships that tie. The mood of the film is created by the work of two men in particular, the intensity of Dennis Lipscomb as Harlan, and by Harry's husband Chris Stein's atmospheric score, which has one's nerve-endings a-tingle, especially in the long sequence at the centre of what happens.

The film credits the estate of Cornell Woolrich, a writer of stories, but it surely transcends the original material, with the variety, yet claustrophobia, of the decor, the touches, not just in the nightmarish moments, of the bizarre, and of the dreamy insubstantiality of the world, which does not so much run away from Harlan as slip through his fingers, often with caricatures of bystanders or watchers : they feel as if they are infused by German expressionism, and, even if they may be types, they are all individual.

Ultimately, having scraped around trying not to acknowledge it, we are brought up against the sordidness of everything, and Lillian (Harry) has to admit, with a crash, that her dreams of another world with Larry, the amorous caretaker played by Everett McGill, are no more than that in the face of it.
To summarize this, the synopsis that IMDb has used seems highly inept, and is best ignored by those easily put off something worthwhile by a fatuous description : A man is so obsessed with finding the person responsible for stealing his milk bottles** that he ignores his beautiful young wife, who has other ideas on her mind.

The feature runs to 82 minutes, but the tragedy is not only that it was cut down to gain [the equivalent of***] a PG certificate, but that that material has been lost forever. What remains are Harry's screen-tests (where she is far more she than in the film, where her general quietness makes the times when she erupts or is defiant far more intense, although, absolutely, nothing reaches the heights of Harlan and his fantasy), and some mute takes, whereas what has gone was necessarily of a more forceful nature.

The ambiguity of Harlan and Lillian's 'marriage', which is suggested to be one of convenience, and the playful way in which Larry, her regular film partner, has coffee with her all work very well, and a strict Freudian could probably quite happily point to Harlan as neurotic and emasculated, even if the film works on many other levels, and deserves attention for its power, despite the lost possibility of restoring the original edit.


End notes

* There is a connection, in that (as writer / director Marcus Reichert's sleeve-notes make me aware) Blondie's 'Heart of Glass' went to number one halfway through shooting, and Harry wrote the other song as an account of performing the role of Lillian Harman : Reichert says that she was forbidden by contract from singing on the soundtrack, but that the song was a superb gift to the film.

** No one is stealing the bottles - it is the contents !

*** I forget how long they've been around.

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Dalí's soft watches, slipping through your CPU

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Christmas Eve



Software is instructions for computers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_(disambiguation) tells us sagely so that we can safely rip up that dictionary thing


There would never have been computer hardware without software, but it's nice to imagine that there was a time when the machinery was jokingly first called 'hard', as if straight from the toolshop, and someone parried by calling the programs that were being run 'soft'.

I like to think that that is what happened, but I know that finding out The Truth, at this remove, is impossible anyway, so who are you to doubt me on the basis of some Internet version of it ? (Unless Richard P. Feynman, or Enrico Fermi, wrote about it in his diary.)

And where those famous watches came into it, I do not know, although one can more easily track when they first made an appearance, slung over a branch...


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Not Haneke's way

This is a reaction to seeing Michael Haneke's Amour (2012)

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21 December

This is a reaction to seeing Michael Haneke's Amour (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

Michael Haneke shows something, but leaves it to us what it means, what happened, and he has not deviated from it with Amour (2012). This is something that I value and regard as honesty, that he wants us to be co-creators of the film, and, in interviews that are the ‘extras’ on DVD releases, he has talked clearly about this aspect of film-making, e.g. with Hidden (Caché) (2005) and its ending.

That said, a friend of a friend thought the film was depressing and that it was obvious - not open to question - what had happened and why that was, so one can’t please everyone : on that view, the path had been shown, and was an inevitable and downwards one, and the response was to feel that the film itself was gloomy.

I disagreed, not because, for its own sake, I embrace the depiction of someone deteriorating (although, obviously, people do deteriorate, and that is not unrelated to death and mortality, but Amour is not a documentary), but since deterioration was not, as I saw it, the point of the film, but, rather, that it said something about Anne and Georges, about their relationship : this, too, was an account of the film to which this other viewer could not relate.


If one doubted that there are ambiguities, here are some examples :

* Anne does not tell us why she asks Georges to turn off the new CD of her former pupil Alexandre Tharaud (as himself) playing Schubert – she does not explain the request, so we could infer one of several things, such as that she does not wish to be reminded of Tharaud’s recent visit (for any number of reasons), or of her own inability to play

* When Georges is playing the piano, why he stops, and does not continue or explain, when Anne asks him why he has stopped

* Why Georges dismisses the second nurse whom he engaged – is it really because he is disgusted with her care of Anne, or because he does not want her around and invents a pretext to pay her off ?

* What becomes of Georges and why he chose to do as he did (then and now)


I do not think that I need go on. The point is that Haneke and his film are silent on these things – he is not telling us the answers, and we have to decide for ourselves the rationale in these two people’s minds and hearts. He may have a choice in mind that they made, but he has left it to us to make inferences and not pointed to it. So the viewer who finds the film depressing may be projecting a trajectory onto it, but I say that it is not the only one, and that maybe it was hoped that we would feel more torn, not just about the judgements that we may find ourselves making here, but more generally in life.

Not, though, a didacticism in film-making, I would say, but merely mirroring the complexity of our being, that I may guess at what you mean or your actions, but can I be sure? And was Emmanuelle Riva as Anne ever really helpless ? She was defiant, in pain, stubborn, she was a person, and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), her husband (and another person), was caring, bewildered, resigned, and even frustratedly angry with her.

The film, on my view, was about them and only about what happened to Anne in how it affected them : at the outset, when Georges has been trying to determine what has happened to Georges, she says that he is a monster, but that he is also (I forget the exact word) kind (or caring), and that description rang with me, in a quiet way, as I saw him during the film, and saw her for seeing him that way.

Both actors were in these roles fully, Trintignant, for example, with his trainers about the flat and his varying facial expression, and the reality that Anne and he brought to the everyday made the moments of imagination, memory, dream and even terror that came more powerful – a seeming naturalism against which their unusualness could come to the fore.

As I have suggested, we felt that we were on the inside of Anne’s experience, not that something was happening to her and she was a victim : when she desires her death, there is even a recollection of the grim humour of Samuel Beckettt’s novel Malone Dies, where he writes (Malone is the writer / narrator) that, if he had the strength, he would throw himself out of the window.

Their daughter Eva, played by Isabelle Huppert, seemed on the outside of it all, not just because she was kept out, but because her belief in medical science meant that she was to slow to acknowledge what had happened and was happening (and that led to her being kept out). Tharaud, too, concentrating too much on what had happened to Anne and not on being with her, almost seemed to doubt that Anne, whom one felt he viewed as her wheelchair, could benefit from hearing him play for them.

This film contains beautiful French, beautifully spoken, and with subtitles that intelligently interpret the dialogue. As to why it is called Amour, not L’Amour, I have puzzled over that one. Thanks to http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amour_(homonymie), I know, though, that a film of the same name in 1971 also dropped the article (although the title of the novel by Marguerite Duras did not):

I still busy myself with whether, as I suspect, the meaning ‘love’ is changed by the omission to be of less general application, as in amour fou, where one knows that Love is not embodied, but a type (or example) of love.




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Psychopaths - or just killers ?

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21 December

* Contains spoilers *

It might be a cover-all - or a cop-out - to have psychopaths who are just crooks or who have some need to kill, or to have them interchangeably mixed up with 'the mental and deranged', yoking in anyone, indeed, who might have been in hospital, but I think that, as a product, Seven Psychopaths (2012), had no starting point for knowing what one is.

The States muddles up anyway the notion of psychosis and psychopathy, but there was nothing to suggest that this confusion was really responsible. Not that the film fared any better, in its own terms, as my various Tweets have suggested...


And now, at the risk of repeating the above, the review of Seven Sycophants :


There are many films, few as famous as 8½ (or even La Dolce Vita), where the film is about making a film (or the like), from Shakespeare-dervied and Cole-Porter-instilled Kiss Me, Kate (1958) to On the Road (2012) or recent Catalan film VOS (2009).

The makers of Seven Psychopaths must have believed – or wanted us to believe – that they were doing something new with the notion of a film that is either within, or which is, the film, but VOS is much more engaging and inventive, and Hit and Run (2012), for all its unevenness, had more laughs - or, rather, had laughs, rather than spaces for them, since I snorted just a dozen times through the course of the film, and six of them were purely in disbelief at the writers’ apparent estimation of my credulity.

The States has its own definition of what the word ‘psychotic’ means, denoting psychopathology (hence Hitchcock’s Psycho, whose Norman Bates kills woman for little reason other than that he can, and had a bad time with his mother), but this film used a very generalized notion of the latter concept, little more than the violent (and / or crazy) bloke in the local who famously ‘is a real psychopath’.

Perhaps for this reason of being confused (which can also be excused on the basis that it is a comedy), the poster had the tag-line ‘They give demented psychotics a bad name’, insulting though that would be to anyone in the UK with an experience of psychosis, and even though this film is funded by Film Four. Now I’m not saying that organized crime might not give opportunities for those who like killing or hurting people, or that it is really of any importance whether Marty (Colin Farrell) or Billy Bickle* (Sam Rockwell, who keeps trying to muscle in on the screenplay), understand what either a screenplay** or a psychopath is, because the clever conceit is meant to be that the film is writing itself or they are writing it as it goes, and so that doesn’t matter.

It then becomes conveniently irrelevant whether what Marty waves around in the desert is a draft of a script, whereas he was previously working on – and not getting very far on – an outline (and, in the only moment where he gives any evidence of writing or being a writer, had not got beyond writing ‘Ext.’ and another couple of defining characteristics of the opening of the scene).

Before that, a message being left for him asks for where what he is working on (as if he had never been required to pitch more of a concept than a numerical group of crazies to interest this unknown caller). Again as if, in a world where a writer writes his friends and himself in a film and they have no independent existence, anything can happen, not the realities of how, in the prominently displayed letters of ‘H O L L Y W O O D’ at the start, its studios work.

This might be for the rationale behind how, in successive shots, it is night and the Buick has just exploded, and then it is abruptly day and it is still on fire, i.e. that in some sort of meta-fictional world anything can happen, but that theme is played far more effectively in VOS, and without the sentimentality allowed here, but with distance : when Hans is with Myra, his dead wife, we have sad music and even a clarinet in its chalumeau register, and, later, plangent solo piano when we are asked to feel something for a dead or injured person.

Farrell’s part is to look shocked and, often enough, to drink to induce reactive amnesia, Rockwell’s to have a suppressed smile always playing rather irritatingly on his face (and be a very unlikely choice of friend), whereas Christopher Walken (as Hans***) is – almost literally – a wraith with a husky voice, with a twisted sort of humanity to match Marty’s.

Against all three, Woody Harrelson as Charlie Brooker is a scarcely mould-breaking combination of the seemingly ruthless and abusive leader, who, although his mouth is the vehicle for much maligning of races and creeds, is soppy about a dog. This is where the comparison with Hit and Run comes in, because Bradley Cooper’s Alex is a far more sinister gang-leader than Charlie, because, even if Charlie shoots Hans’ wife, he is allowed to drop his front far too soon, as if the writing is playing it for (non-existent) humour.

Irrespective of how many psychopaths the film does actually deliver, Billy appears to invoke and encourage danger and killing just for its own sake, or, supposedly, to help the plot along for his friend Marty. Claiming, as Marty does twice, that he is just Billy’s friend may seem an implausible passport to safety, but Farrell’s character has very little to offer, except non-violence and to be an anchor, except in the shade of Billy and to be known as his friend, who is the real originator and creative force, his passing marked by plangent piano…



End-notes

* Yes, you read that surname aright !

** That said, they are meant to be in film, that alleged industry, so they should, of course, know.

*** To me, not a very Polish name, even if meant to naturalize ‘Jan’.


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Apocalypse No !

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16 December

No, I didn't fail to depress the 'w' key (or manage to press the backspace by mistake), because I am the author of this heresy* (to be found at New Empress Magazine) :


The Agent Apsley December 14, 2012 at 15:51

I wonder if there is scope for a view that says one can read Heart of Darkness and find it as unremarkable as The Secret Agent, because, for all that Conrad performed the feat of writing flawless English, his English and his subject maybe aren’t that interesting after all.

Or even for the view that says that translating the former into Apocalypse Now (1979) really leaves one none the wiser, but that maybe no one dare say so with a film of such towering repute…


End-notes

* On the strength of it, I considered myself a likely founding-member of Cinematics Anonymous** (or, perhaps, Cinematica Anathema).

** At our meetings, we would introduce ourselves in this way I am The Agent Apsley, and I'm an ex-cinema-goer who couldn't see the point of Being There (1979).


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Are headlines always written by idiots ?

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15 December

Take this utterance from Parent Dish* (AOL® Lifestyle) :

Dramatic increase in rickets in children. Lack of Vitamin D blamed.


Does the person who typed this have any notion that :

1. Unless conventional wisdom is off beam, not having enough vitamin D** is the cause, not merely something 'to blame'

2. Following on from that, because insufficient - or insufficient take-up of - vitamin D means that the strength and integrity of developing bones are at risk, the resultant condition of rickets is necessarily one that occurs in children


So, to anyone who learnt these facts as a child, the writer appears to even less informed, and yet to be telling us what's what - I despair !


End-notes

* Whatever that means as a name !

** Some months back, I heard the daughter of the chap who coined the term 'vitamin', who was (amongst other things) berating the ignorance that has changed the pronunciation from vight-amin to vitt-amin...


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Better as it was…

This is a review of Quartet (2012)

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14 December (Tweet added, 3 December 2014)

This is a review of Quartet (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

Ronald Harwood, in the Q&A that followed the gala screening of Quartet (2012) to support the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund, did not really explain why he had written a film-script based on his stage-play (though I imagine that he had preferred to do so himself) - and, because it was by live relay from Leicester Square or the like, I did not have the means to ask.

Quartet : Not Ronald Harwood's film for the Verdi centenary (http://t.co/je1Kdj2jgH), but the play at @camartstheatre pic.twitter.com/MAXJgsx7BT
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 3, 2014

Tweeted, the cover of the programme from Cambridge's Arts Theatre (@camartstheatre)...

I need to check, but I believe that Sir Ronald confirmed what I recollected, that the play just has the four characters, two men, two women, who constitute the quartet [now checked - correct (please see image above)]. By contrast, the film is busy with people, the residents and staff of a fictional (so we were told) Beecham House, which was located in a property near Taplow*, Hedsor House.

For me, that (unavoidable**) creation of an atmosphere in which the foursome of Jean (Maggie Smith), Cissy (Pauline Collins), Wilf (Billy Connolly) and Reg(gie) (Tom Courtenay) can play out their drama did not enhance, but diluted the play’s strength: not quite in the way that some people find their favourite novel pictured awry on the screen, because I had no real notion of what the four were or – should be – like, but simply in terms of how the staging (in the production that I had seen) deliberately minimized the extraneous. With this film, it was as if Harwood were reinventing the depiction of a musicians’ retirement home, which he had hinted at and so, I believe, portrayed more effectively by its absence on stage***.

One of the biggest inventions, the larger-than-life impresario Cedric (played by Michael Gambon in finest Poliakoff-style excess), on his own swallows up the intimate nature of Harwood’s theatre, let alone the whole machinery of employees and their head, the – for me – implausible Dr Cogan, because, whatever she is a doctor of, Sheridan Smith did not seem to be it, evincing just a sweet feeling of being nice as the one in charge of the home, not of being capable of managing, whether domestic or medical.

For every minute that Cedric was bawling at people and posturing, though we were being given a classic Gambonesque treatment, we were not advancing the scenario of the original, but, perhaps unnecessarily, having demonstrated how a cock will rule the roost, and, therefore, steal the show from almost everyone except Dame Maggie. The quartet itself was, in consequence, diminished, rather than built up as the plausible class act that would close the proceedings.

In fact, director Dustin Hoffman's team filmed and recorded our quartet of British stars for two days, and then decided that we would not see that footage, but rather just their rapturous reception to the stage. In the Q&A, we were reminded that the play had the quartet miming to a recording, but that had been decided against, as was - in the event - the quartet’s bid to sing, in favour of a cut-away reverse-out of the lit-up Beecham House with a slow fade and a celebrated recording.

Would I have felt differently about this film, if Connolly had been nearly as funny as Wilf as he was in the Q&A ? Maybe, but he still would never have made me believe that he’d been in a legendary production of Rigoletto, any more than Courtenay or Collins did. Put against a real opera singer, Dame Gwyneth Jones as everyone’s pet-hate (especially Jean’s), Anne Langley, no one came close to resembling any opera-singer I’ve ever heard speak except Smith herself.

(Even looked at on the publicity flyer****, only Courtenay's anguished look and muffler come anywhere near to creating a feel of a tenor, supposing that Connolly is meant to be the bass - which is, though, unlikely to be the case, as Connolly's voice tends to the shrill, and the tenor is, of course, always the clown.)

The quartet number had to end the film, had to be the star turn in which I didn’t believe (or in the paucity of instrumentalists to provide the accompaniment, quite apart from whether accommodating an audience barely more than a handful could make any financial difference to the continued running of the place). And so the film felt as though it failed in its own terms - even though it sought to have the four's performance come out of the muddle and mess of life in the home as some sort of pleasing crowning glory : I can remember, with the version on stage, that one was almost willing them on to their triumph, which I truly lacked feeling here.

It could not have been different, however Harwood had cut the cake, and in writing an unexceptional film he has ruined any posterity for a perfectly good play : probably he put it on the screen because its life has run, but I do wish that he had just turned his energies to something, like The Dresser (1983), that transferred to film with less loss of concentration. If, though, I am wrong, and what I have already suggested was his motivation, to work over a piece with which he could no longer rest content, then I feel little different, that, in trying to breathe life into it, he has effectively buried it.


End-notes

* There is now no such retirement home for musicians, though there may have been, but there is one for actors, to which this fictional one owes some detail, we were told. (Rather irrelevantly, perhaps, Taplow is the name of the schoolboy in The Browning Version (Rattigan).)

** Cinema that just reproduces a play is, for me, a waste of the medium – the film had to give the backdrop in a way that the literal backdrop of a stage does not require.

*** That said, maybe Harwood was writing for cinema out of a dissatisfaction, at some point, with his stage work : if it was out of that impulse, to give the richness here that a realization on stage could not do (except with some elaborate cast and machinery more redolent of the big musical, when the play is a chamber work), I sense it as a clash with, not as a complement to, the quartet and that the pared-down was more eloquent.

**** Even assuming that he may not have approved it, how can Harwood not squirm at the tag-line ? : Four friends looking for a little harmony.


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This is a Festival review of Aufzug (2012) (A long overdue review)

This is a Festival review of Aufzug (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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14 December

This is a Festival review of Aufzug (2012)

The review was started at the time of the Festival, and not finished (and approved by the film's director) that long afterwards, but I have kept failing to put it on here :

In Emily Kuhnke’s short film Der Aufzug (2012), the lift to which the title refers is not so much everything’s setting as an ever-present character, eavesdropping – even when the lift-boy feigns not to – on what people’s words and actions portend. It is the eccentric sort of lift that would have delighted Franz Kafka – who gave us other lifts at the Hotel Occidental in his novel Der Verschollene – and which he might have imagined.

Unlike, though, Kafka’s Karl Rossmann, our lift-boy is not slow to take everything in or to pretend to be part of the furniture, and he does not always need to be told where to take his passengers (we might infer that they are not all strangers, even if they may believe in their anonymity).

The script, by Billy MacKinnon (whom I know from Hideous Kinky (1998), but also Brilliantlove (2010) (on which he was script editor, and which came to Cambridge Film Festival)) is a fairly sparse one, but it covers a lot of ground, and the way that it has been realized, sparing us a lift-door, allows us to concentrate on the lift, who is in it, and occasionally the whirring and clicking mechanism – a contrast with the simplicity of the fore-and-back lever that is used to engage it.

We are no more meant to wonder at how it works or why it is as it is than we are at the era, which could be the 1930s or 70s, because the characters are dressed, and almost behave in, a style reminiscent of painters such as Otto Dix or, probably more likely, Max Beckmann, and their stylization hints at a signification beyond their own individual character.

Nothing is wasted in the direction, and there are no unnecessary pauses, so twelve minutes seem quite intense, and, although the lift-boy seems unconcerned about being relieved, there is the pent-up sense of a trap (He claims to have inferred the external world correlating with what has appeared in his conveyance (but he might just be showing off to the other boy – or he may have read too much Hume).)

Kuhnke makes us glad to see outside, but whether it is Fasching, Wahnsinn or alien invasion is open to interpretation...


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