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10 July
I worked as an advocate for eight years.
When I started, there was no such thing in name as IMHA (Independent Mental Health Advocacy) for people detained under the Mental Health Act 2003 as it then stood (commonly known, for no good reason, as ‘being sectioned’), but our contract, and our arrangement with the mental-health trust, meant that we went onto the wards and could give people just the same help with the Act, but without the powers given to IMHAs, for example, to look at hospital records (I never needed to).
IMHA is a very specific thing. The training to become one, I have to say, is rubbish and factually incorrect or misleading in several places, when, that is, it is not box-ticking and jumping through hoops. That apart, one could and should be very competent in being able to explain a person’s rights to him and her.
Yet that is not because of the training, but because of the limited compass of what one typically needs to know from day to day, whereas the vast numbers who are on supervised community treatment (usually thought of as a Community Treatment Order, or CTO, though it is not an Order as such) indicate either that few people take the chance to have their rights explained, or that (which has to be laid at the IMHA’s door) they do not understand their rights.
Considering supervised community treatment is a triggering event for a person to be advised of his or her rights to see an IMHA, so I should be interested to see figures for how many exercise it. Just a guess, but I imagine few, because it is typically hard, as a patient, to believe that there is a just and fair system and that one has any right that is not compromised.
After all, the person may already have poured his or her heart out to an advocate that he or she should not have been detained under (the civil sections of) the Act, and have been told that, all impressions and intents to the contrary, the psychiatric unit is not a prison or part of the criminal-justice system. Under IMHA, one would be able to know more about the detention, and, safeguarding not telling the person something that would injure his or her health, to pass that reason on.
So that is IMHA, and the typical scope of enquiries that one might have under the Act. Contrast that with, say, a matter of contract or of family law for the same person, whether or not still in hospital. For good or ill, advocates largely ignore the question of capacity, and so will support clients (including seeking to find them, without charge, increasingly unavailable legal representation) to do what they seek. This never happened to me, but he or she may want to give up a tenancy, and, if he or she refuses to have advice on doing so, may be guided through an irreversible process that will later be regretted.
That is one point where I say that advocacy is not better than nothing : with nothing, the person might not get there on his or her own, whereas what, of lasting good, has been achieved in the name of empowering the client ? I had colleagues who had had to help with such folly in the name of empowerment, and who gained some reassurance, by relying on the generalized and self-perpetuating ‘advocacy principles’, that they had, by doing their job, done the right thing. I cannot say or think so – that is the mindset of advocacy, but it is wrong.
Advocacy puffs itself up with the notion that it is a profession. It even uses terms from ‘taking instructions’ to ‘attendance notes’ that are (did one’s colleagues but know it) properly those of solicitors, but with this important difference : The Law Society will not allow a solicitor to proceed, without some independent verification of capacity, if her or she doubts that the client lacks it (in relation to the legal task in hand and the decisions that have, or may have, to be taken). There is no equivalent of The Law Society for so-called generic advocates, but just guidance from bodies such as Action for Advocacy.
Advocacy is not a real profession, although caught by the requirement to provide a service with reasonable care and skill (but advocacy services have scant notion of liability, risk and the scope of a duty of care), and it will sidestep the protection that, as just seen, a solicitor will have to employ to achieve outcomes that can be as damaging, if not more so.
Damaging, if not pointless, for my manager once required me to fly in the face of a direction from a judge in the belief that going to a full hearing would give the client closure* (I had no such belief, and it did not, because he wanted to appeal, and then, when told that he had no grounds for an appeal, wanted a second opinion) : to my mind, if a judge, prior to trial, expresses the view that, without x, a case cannot succeed, one either gets x, or tells the client that one cannot support him to go to trial unless he agrees to get it.
What we did was to go to trial without x, and it was a futile exercise, built on unrealistic ideas that the client would see that the process had been gone through and exhausted, in giving the client the right to ignore a very big judicial piece of advice for no very good reason. Did the client have capacity in relation to these matters ? I rather doubt so, and his ‘instructions’ were of a repetitive, yet not always consistent, kind that was unlikely to find judicial favour in any case. I say all this as a former solicitor (though none of my colleagues had any legal training whatever.)
So on lack of proper safeguards for imprudent decision-making there are concerns, but advocacy is also founded on the shaky basis, touched upon already without calling it such, of giving the person the right to have his or her say. If it’s having a say that rights were infringed, and that hospital staff should not have done what they did, how crushing is it to put all that into a complaint, and then have back from the complaints department that there is ‘no evidence’ that what the client claims happened.
Does one, in hindsight, guard the client’s expectations of the process so that he or she will not be crushed by the outcome, or has the client made his or her own bed ? To make the complaint with the client, it was necessary to come alongside and to empathize with what he or she said, and one is forbidden (despite being permitted to say what is likely to happen from past experience) to express one’s own opinion, because that is a big advocacy no-no except by taking the client, with his or her consent, to someone else such as a solicitor who can express one, and give advice.
If, faced with a client who is upset by what happened and wants to make a complaint, one cannot really say that most complaints procedures are a whitewash and that the client will just be upset more, because that would stray from what is likely to seeking to persuade or advise : the client alone must decide, and one has no opinion to express.
The blind leading the blind ? Sadly, yes, I think so, however well-meaningly grounded in peer support, and little better than kindly do-gooders, unanswerable to anyone much when it all comes unstuck. Add to that people who know things that they do not, such as how one cannot (one cannot ?) be dismissed for being off sick or that, even if the time-limit for bringing an employment claim may turn to be passed, one can simply argue that one could not bring a claim before (and so simply), and the cacophony becomes unbearable.
Either non-IMHA advocates such know more, and be qualified as legal executives, or they should do less. They are not professionals in any meaningful sense, and they should not be allowed to help people without capacity to do objectively undesirable things on some woolly basis of empowering them.
As to IMHA, I reserve judgement, but a five-day training on the Act before IMHA came in was a much better grounding in how it works than the dedicated IMHA module. The advocacy world went soft when the statutory training was announced : there should have been exemptions for existing advocates, more intensive training for new advocates, and none of this vague competency-based accreditation, which does not substitute for solidly understanding the Act and how it applies to different situations.
As if this were not enough, you can now read The Ten Glib Compromises of Advocacy (in retort to The Advocacy Charter)...
End-notes
* It may be explicit enough in what I wrote last night, but I still remember so much of the blinkered vision of advocacy's so-called principles that I was accustomed not to portray that as appalling cynicism - support the client to go to trial, not because we believe that he now, with the stance that he has taken, stands any chance, but just so that we have reason to shut him up !
In the same way, one insulated oneself, in the way that I mentioned earlier on, from questioning whether the principles that had one facilitate someone doing / not doing something just because, at that moment, he or she felt like doing / not doing it were sound or right.
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Tuesday, 9 July 2013
Monday, 8 July 2013
A field of view
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8 July
* Contains spoilers *
People who would find Tarkovsky ‘just boring’ won’t like – or ‘get’ – this film, as I know from glancing at a review on IMDb that churlishly gives it two stars. As if it has broken some sort of naturalistic promise that cinema makes, or one to be exciting (though this film is).
That review claims that being filmed in monochrome makes the English countryside look ordinary. It does nothing of the sort, and is filmed with a real sense of wonder – just look at the short where the four men are first walking down into the space to see why. (Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists are at work, claiming that it stole someone else’s idea.)
I don’t care – though I did stop to wonder – whether a mid-seventeenth century field would be as big as that*, but our sense of time and space are only as big as our capacity to believe that the four main actors have been transported out of the English Civil War to join O’Neill – the hedgerow is to the field as the wardrobe is to Narnia. Apart from a knowing Essex joke, Amy Jump gives us little in her able script to dislocate us, and, for all that I care, the men may be from some other age, though they speak a passably historical English.
I think that the mushrooms / toadstools are a red herring as a way o understanding this film. Again, I don’t much care whether such hallucinogenic fare was to be had (as who is not to say that this is an accident of this field), or whether hardened soldiers (or those living more closely to the land) would not be used to what they were eating. When, although Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) does not eat of it, the men adopt a stew that is already being made (presumably by O’Neil), many of the mushrooms that they add are unremarkable, except at the end, when they are of a more wild nature.
If they have any effect, it is to urge them in the effort to pull up a carved stake – but a stake with a life of its own, whereas my reviewer interpreted them as trying to plough the field – whereas hallucinogenics usually lead to heady inertia and contemplation. Of course, the action may not really have been taking place, as the way in which the stake reels them back in is somewhat magical.
Which brings me to the effects. Stunning in their overpowering intensity, they are at the heart of a film where one never know who is alive, who dead, and some lives are cheaper than others. Power, control, and what one will do to prevent evil are the themes on which this film muses, and it gives us no easy answers or ending.
Inevitably, it reminds of other things such as The Pardoner’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and it has a literary feel that complements the earthiness of a man noisily trying to excrete or of having his genitals inspected to see what ails him, which is also Chaucerian. That link, too, with C. S Lewis is quite strong, with the notion of whether one could have been away an age but no time has past, and of another place where all is played out.
This is a piece of cinema that has well been worth the wait, and which should repay another viewing – I can only guess at what impact it must have been made with those watching on Film 4, but I would not be surprised if they did not take a second look on a proper screen…
End-notes
* The issue of enclosure would probably not have borne on it as such, but this sort of huge field was brought to our landscape by mechanized agriculture and two hundred further years.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 July
* Contains spoilers *
People who would find Tarkovsky ‘just boring’ won’t like – or ‘get’ – this film, as I know from glancing at a review on IMDb that churlishly gives it two stars. As if it has broken some sort of naturalistic promise that cinema makes, or one to be exciting (though this film is).
That review claims that being filmed in monochrome makes the English countryside look ordinary. It does nothing of the sort, and is filmed with a real sense of wonder – just look at the short where the four men are first walking down into the space to see why. (Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists are at work, claiming that it stole someone else’s idea.)
I don’t care – though I did stop to wonder – whether a mid-seventeenth century field would be as big as that*, but our sense of time and space are only as big as our capacity to believe that the four main actors have been transported out of the English Civil War to join O’Neill – the hedgerow is to the field as the wardrobe is to Narnia. Apart from a knowing Essex joke, Amy Jump gives us little in her able script to dislocate us, and, for all that I care, the men may be from some other age, though they speak a passably historical English.
I think that the mushrooms / toadstools are a red herring as a way o understanding this film. Again, I don’t much care whether such hallucinogenic fare was to be had (as who is not to say that this is an accident of this field), or whether hardened soldiers (or those living more closely to the land) would not be used to what they were eating. When, although Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) does not eat of it, the men adopt a stew that is already being made (presumably by O’Neil), many of the mushrooms that they add are unremarkable, except at the end, when they are of a more wild nature.
If they have any effect, it is to urge them in the effort to pull up a carved stake – but a stake with a life of its own, whereas my reviewer interpreted them as trying to plough the field – whereas hallucinogenics usually lead to heady inertia and contemplation. Of course, the action may not really have been taking place, as the way in which the stake reels them back in is somewhat magical.
Which brings me to the effects. Stunning in their overpowering intensity, they are at the heart of a film where one never know who is alive, who dead, and some lives are cheaper than others. Power, control, and what one will do to prevent evil are the themes on which this film muses, and it gives us no easy answers or ending.
Inevitably, it reminds of other things such as The Pardoner’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and it has a literary feel that complements the earthiness of a man noisily trying to excrete or of having his genitals inspected to see what ails him, which is also Chaucerian. That link, too, with C. S Lewis is quite strong, with the notion of whether one could have been away an age but no time has past, and of another place where all is played out.
This is a piece of cinema that has well been worth the wait, and which should repay another viewing – I can only guess at what impact it must have been made with those watching on Film 4, but I would not be surprised if they did not take a second look on a proper screen…
End-notes
* The issue of enclosure would probably not have borne on it as such, but this sort of huge field was brought to our landscape by mechanized agriculture and two hundred further years.
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Saturday, 6 July 2013
That film thing
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6 July
People who mention Spring Breakers (2012) in the same breath as The Bling Ring (2013), as if one complements the other, should have to re-take their cinema licence :
It’s almost as if, because both involve the same number of heroes, one could believe in a comparison of the literary merits of the novelization of Ghost Busters and of The Three Musketeers. Not that I believe that the latter’s claims to them are great, but yet not so scant as to justify the exercise in seeking a likeness.
So I shall watch – the trailer for Breakers was bad enough to confirm me in what to expect – the Sofia Coppola film, and trust that I will find it a good piece of cinema…
Post-script (as of 11 July)
OK, I was wrong - Spring Breakers is the more honest film, because it's quite open in its contract with the members of the audience that they want to see, and will see, scantily dressed young women, amply presented...
Review of The Bling Ring here
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6 July
People who mention Spring Breakers (2012) in the same breath as The Bling Ring (2013), as if one complements the other, should have to re-take their cinema licence :
It’s almost as if, because both involve the same number of heroes, one could believe in a comparison of the literary merits of the novelization of Ghost Busters and of The Three Musketeers. Not that I believe that the latter’s claims to them are great, but yet not so scant as to justify the exercise in seeking a likeness.
So I shall watch – the trailer for Breakers was bad enough to confirm me in what to expect – the Sofia Coppola film, and trust that I will find it a good piece of cinema…
Post-script (as of 11 July)
OK, I was wrong - Spring Breakers is the more honest film, because it's quite open in its contract with the members of the audience that they want to see, and will see, scantily dressed young women, amply presented...
Review of The Bling Ring here
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Friday, 5 July 2013
Enjoyment made cheap
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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6 July
Language is a funny old business – some effectively say that, for want of a better term for it, laissez-faire applies, and therefore that Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty was right :
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.
Leave aside what attitude, policy or belief the celebrated writer may have been typifying (or, as some would say, parodying), this utterance does state the liberal position concerning what words signify, that they change with Time, and that woe betide those who do not move with them (or with it).
Except, of course, that the corollary is that, if I read Troilus and Criseyde of Chaucer, I cannot very well expect him to mean these words as, untutored, I might construe them :
There nys nat oon kan war by other be
On the other side, there are those kindly and neutrally labelled as the linguistic purists, police or even fascists, who seek to preserve meanings.
Anyway, what about this ?
Check out our range of luxury vodkas*
Enjoy two Bombs for £5**
Since I am ancient, I remember the Bowie song where he is talking about boys checking each other out, a very self-conscious reference to another culture in expressing what men do all the time, whether at the bar or the urinal, because they are so desperately insecure that some of them cannot even urinate, if another man is there.
Now, we are urged all the time to check out the video by Z, and for no other reason than it is the latest Z video, and we are enjoined – almost unceasingly – to ‘enjoy’ every paltry damn’ thing, even a coffee and a Danish pastry for £3. Word gits such as I think that I would probably be more likely to enjoy the so-called combo for £2 – or that, if more wealthy, I would still enjoy it for £5…
Enjoy a glass of perfectly chilled South African bubbly on our exclusive terrace
Oh, I bloody ask you – is everything marketing, packaging, and generally turning that ear into a silk purse ? Are we really so bloody stupid as a species that we cannot sense when we are being manipulated into some bloody posture that says how fine and how much better we are because invited by these pathetic jingles and slogans ?
Does one become tempted (as marketingspeak has it), or think what crap is being dressed up as a snobby treat ?
For me, the turning-point was being told that I should Enjoy ! -not the meal, but some unspecified thing, or just generally ? Formally speaking, the verb was transitive, and I could not just ‘enjoy’ in the same way that I can ‘live’, where I can legitimately say I have lived here all my life, but, equally, I have lived a good life, with a direct object, if I so choose.
Do waiting or serving staff still say that ? I don’t know, but I can happily believe that the tendency / habit / fashion just died off.
My preferences apart, I am just interested by this word ‘enjoy’, which I take to be a misunderstanding of what the verb, and of what ‘enjoyment’, meant to other ages – not a casual and trite encouragement to eat and / or drink something*** :
1. ‘To take delight or pleasure in’ – now, there’s a challenge to mediocrity !
Can I really be delighted by that Danish pastry that they bought in by the dozen to serve with coffee ? – isn’t taking pleasure in something other than simply enjoying everything put before one ?
2. ‘To have the use or benefit of’ – a different sense that leads to
3. ‘To experience’, i.e. ‘to enjoy poor health’, which would seem to connote the opposite of meaning 1, if poor health can be enjoyed.
The verb comes to us from Old French enjoier (‘to give joy to’) or enjoïr (‘to enjoy’), via Middle English, and ultimately from Latin gaudēre - a word on which I have commented elsewhere…
The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology**** gives us an obsolete sense, from the fourteenth century, of ‘to be joyful’.
Then, in the fifteenth century, to possess or experience with joy’, and a reflexive meaning of ‘to enjoy oneself’ in the seventeenth century (following se (ré)jouir).
In between, the noun ‘enjoyment’ emerged, in the sixteenth century. We find it in Shakespeare, although sometimes tinged with meaning 2 (above) : quotations to come.
And now, when I am having ordinary meat and drink, am I really meant to enjoy it as such ? Easily save myself, then, £29.95 on a four-course lunch from a good restaurant…
Post-script
The word 'cheap', as in Cheapside, is all to do with buying and selling - the German word kaufen means 'to buy' (and Grimm's Law explains how one becomes the other).
So I say that enjoyment has been sold short...
End-notes
* What about Take a look at ? Doesn’t checking out happen at the supermarket till ?
** What about Get ? How do I know that I will enjoy them ?
*** I quote from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Eighth Edition (1990).
**** Edited by C. T Onions (1966).
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 July
Enjoy a delicious meal in our elegant new dining area ! Well, thick colds apart, they're virtual synonyms : how *not* enjoy delicious food ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 10, 2013
Language is a funny old business – some effectively say that, for want of a better term for it, laissez-faire applies, and therefore that Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty was right :
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.
Leave aside what attitude, policy or belief the celebrated writer may have been typifying (or, as some would say, parodying), this utterance does state the liberal position concerning what words signify, that they change with Time, and that woe betide those who do not move with them (or with it).
Except, of course, that the corollary is that, if I read Troilus and Criseyde of Chaucer, I cannot very well expect him to mean these words as, untutored, I might construe them :
There nys nat oon kan war by other be
On the other side, there are those kindly and neutrally labelled as the linguistic purists, police or even fascists, who seek to preserve meanings.
Anyway, what about this ?
Check out our range of luxury vodkas*
Enjoy two Bombs for £5**
Since I am ancient, I remember the Bowie song where he is talking about boys checking each other out, a very self-conscious reference to another culture in expressing what men do all the time, whether at the bar or the urinal, because they are so desperately insecure that some of them cannot even urinate, if another man is there.
Now, we are urged all the time to check out the video by Z, and for no other reason than it is the latest Z video, and we are enjoined – almost unceasingly – to ‘enjoy’ every paltry damn’ thing, even a coffee and a Danish pastry for £3. Word gits such as I think that I would probably be more likely to enjoy the so-called combo for £2 – or that, if more wealthy, I would still enjoy it for £5…
Enjoy a glass of perfectly chilled South African bubbly on our exclusive terrace
Oh, I bloody ask you – is everything marketing, packaging, and generally turning that ear into a silk purse ? Are we really so bloody stupid as a species that we cannot sense when we are being manipulated into some bloody posture that says how fine and how much better we are because invited by these pathetic jingles and slogans ?
Does one become tempted (as marketingspeak has it), or think what crap is being dressed up as a snobby treat ?
For me, the turning-point was being told that I should Enjoy ! -not the meal, but some unspecified thing, or just generally ? Formally speaking, the verb was transitive, and I could not just ‘enjoy’ in the same way that I can ‘live’, where I can legitimately say I have lived here all my life, but, equally, I have lived a good life, with a direct object, if I so choose.
Do waiting or serving staff still say that ? I don’t know, but I can happily believe that the tendency / habit / fashion just died off.
My preferences apart, I am just interested by this word ‘enjoy’, which I take to be a misunderstanding of what the verb, and of what ‘enjoyment’, meant to other ages – not a casual and trite encouragement to eat and / or drink something*** :
1. ‘To take delight or pleasure in’ – now, there’s a challenge to mediocrity !
Can I really be delighted by that Danish pastry that they bought in by the dozen to serve with coffee ? – isn’t taking pleasure in something other than simply enjoying everything put before one ?
2. ‘To have the use or benefit of’ – a different sense that leads to
3. ‘To experience’, i.e. ‘to enjoy poor health’, which would seem to connote the opposite of meaning 1, if poor health can be enjoyed.
The verb comes to us from Old French enjoier (‘to give joy to’) or enjoïr (‘to enjoy’), via Middle English, and ultimately from Latin gaudēre - a word on which I have commented elsewhere…
The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology**** gives us an obsolete sense, from the fourteenth century, of ‘to be joyful’.
Then, in the fifteenth century, to possess or experience with joy’, and a reflexive meaning of ‘to enjoy oneself’ in the seventeenth century (following se (ré)jouir).
In between, the noun ‘enjoyment’ emerged, in the sixteenth century. We find it in Shakespeare, although sometimes tinged with meaning 2 (above) : quotations to come.
And now, when I am having ordinary meat and drink, am I really meant to enjoy it as such ? Easily save myself, then, £29.95 on a four-course lunch from a good restaurant…
Post-script
The word 'cheap', as in Cheapside, is all to do with buying and selling - the German word kaufen means 'to buy' (and Grimm's Law explains how one becomes the other).
So I say that enjoyment has been sold short...
End-notes
* What about Take a look at ? Doesn’t checking out happen at the supermarket till ?
** What about Get ? How do I know that I will enjoy them ?
*** I quote from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Eighth Edition (1990).
**** Edited by C. T Onions (1966).
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Tuesday, 2 July 2013
Brilliantly together : Tokyo String Quartet at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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2 July
They were always bound to be a class act, this world-renowned group of instrumentalists with forty-four years to their collective name, but they took nothing for granted, not even the famous King’s acoustic. (I heard their leader, Martin Beaver, make an allusion to a just as famous one of the Carols from King’s in this connection.)
Sadly, a travelling mishap with the quartet’s viola-player, Kasuhide Isomura, meant that they were only rehearsing there for thirty minutes before they had to stop for an audience of what must have been around at least 300 to be let in. (I say ‘had to stop’, but, personally, I might have pleaded artistic reasons and begged the indulgence of the audience to delay the concert for half-an-hour to 7.30 – what did significantly hang, other than getting familiar with the delay of around six seconds, on beginning when advertised, and that would have been all to the good for everyone ?)
Where I felt that the brief interval showed its worth was in allowing the players to reflect on the sound of the first half and re-enter the space for the final work : I cannot believe that they did not exchange words of comment and advice on how to perform in it, because Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15* fitted it like a glove.
Starting there, although out of order in the programme, the quality of the Austrian composer’s writing for cello was evident – sometimes, it is a few percussive beats, often enough to be addictive it is in that singing, upper register where the instrument comes into its beautiful best. The work is on a grand scale (with perhaps necessarily the slight exception of the third-movement Scherzo) as all of these later chamber works are – and Schubert shortly dead at just 31.
Broken or repeated phrases or motifs, sonata form bringing back and again back the melodic elements, these are the concerns of these towering works from the end of Schubert’s life, and, but reverentially and with great beauty and delicacy, the Tokyo players offered it to us. It was gladly received – hardly a cough, almost never during a movement, because the audience was hushed. At the end, most joined in the impulse to give a standing ovation, no doubt because this playing had transported them as it did me, just as does glancing up at the angels signifying, maybe, the finite and the infinite, alpha and omega in their instruments, or in the reflective tranquility of King’s stained glass.
In the first half, we had started with Mozart’s so-called Hoffmeister String Quartet No. 20 in D major, K. 499, and, as an initial impression, one was aware of how sunny this semi-adopted Viennese composer (though did Vienna ever take him to its bosom ?) might seem. Now, I do not place much weight on the idea of a major key equalling happiness, a minor one sorrow or depression, but it was quite clear that the beautifully brought-out lower line of the cello was again of great importance.
Its contribution acted, particularly in the first and third movements, as a sort of counterbalance to the seeming good humour – the interaction of one with the other meant that the entire feel (God forbid, I nearly said ‘message’ !) of the music was somewhere in between, almost as if the composition invited one at one’s peril to hear it as one immediately might. Clive Greensmith’s playing was authoritative, and it was difficult not to be magnetically drawn by the ease and dexterity of his fingerwork, watching which enhanced one’s pleasure at his mastery and expressive qualities.
At the same time – and this may have been adjusting to the acoustic (or its effect on an instrument at that pitch), one was sure that the viola was part of the texture, but it was very hard to hear Isomura in the first half : differentiating parts is, as I have indicated, made easier my being able to see the instrumentalist’s position on the neck of the instrument, but even the lack left the viola part immersed in the rest of the writing.
This was a thoughtful choice, though, of quartet, and my impression is that it may be overlooked between the so-called Prussian Quartets and the preceding set of six that was dedicated to Haydn – no reason for that, really, when one typically has no more than one Mozart quartet, often as an opener, almost as if – perhaps not valuing the works – as a palate-cleanser. As the Tokyo Quartet reminded us, Mozart’s string-writing has real depth, and these works, especially in front of an elaborate rood-screen that dates back to around two hundred and fifty years earlier, are more than we might imagine.
Time, perhaps, for further serious evaluations (I know that King’s Place has done something) of Mozart’s creation for this configuration, when going through Beethoven’s quartet œuvre is maybe too much taken for granted ?
As for the Webern, maybe I have heard this quartet from 1905 before, maybe I haven’t, but my recollection was that, in Deutsche Grammophon’s complete Second Viennese School String Quartets, Webern’s entire output fitted easily onto two sides of an LP (yes, I know…).
I couldn’t wonder whether the work that we were hearing was an elaborate hoax, as it dated to 40 years before the composer’s death (but, then, so did much else), and often sounded like nothing so much as early, lyrical Berg, but with characteristic Webern touches here and there. Perhaps this piece from a Webern of around 22 years has come to light (it pre-dates his first work with an Opus number by three years) since I was last seriously in his sound-world, but its luscious writing, with spiky interjections of partial tone-rows, suited this tribute to Vienna and those associated with it.
The Quartet interpreted it to us unfussily, treating the dissonant passages or nascent tone-rows just as they might an expressive passage in the Mozart or Schubert, and it was a good foil to the Mozart, with no depths hidden – except from one’s ear or interpretation – in its musical purpose.
As I have already said, the Tokyo Quartet received warm thanks for their musicianship, and for this choice of works with the Viennese impulse of dance at its heart – a real joy to see them on this final tour of the UK !
End-notes
* In G major, D. 887, Op. 161 (op. posth., 1851).
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2 July
They were always bound to be a class act, this world-renowned group of instrumentalists with forty-four years to their collective name, but they took nothing for granted, not even the famous King’s acoustic. (I heard their leader, Martin Beaver, make an allusion to a just as famous one of the Carols from King’s in this connection.)
Sadly, a travelling mishap with the quartet’s viola-player, Kasuhide Isomura, meant that they were only rehearsing there for thirty minutes before they had to stop for an audience of what must have been around at least 300 to be let in. (I say ‘had to stop’, but, personally, I might have pleaded artistic reasons and begged the indulgence of the audience to delay the concert for half-an-hour to 7.30 – what did significantly hang, other than getting familiar with the delay of around six seconds, on beginning when advertised, and that would have been all to the good for everyone ?)
Where I felt that the brief interval showed its worth was in allowing the players to reflect on the sound of the first half and re-enter the space for the final work : I cannot believe that they did not exchange words of comment and advice on how to perform in it, because Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15* fitted it like a glove.
Starting there, although out of order in the programme, the quality of the Austrian composer’s writing for cello was evident – sometimes, it is a few percussive beats, often enough to be addictive it is in that singing, upper register where the instrument comes into its beautiful best. The work is on a grand scale (with perhaps necessarily the slight exception of the third-movement Scherzo) as all of these later chamber works are – and Schubert shortly dead at just 31.
Broken or repeated phrases or motifs, sonata form bringing back and again back the melodic elements, these are the concerns of these towering works from the end of Schubert’s life, and, but reverentially and with great beauty and delicacy, the Tokyo players offered it to us. It was gladly received – hardly a cough, almost never during a movement, because the audience was hushed. At the end, most joined in the impulse to give a standing ovation, no doubt because this playing had transported them as it did me, just as does glancing up at the angels signifying, maybe, the finite and the infinite, alpha and omega in their instruments, or in the reflective tranquility of King’s stained glass.
In the first half, we had started with Mozart’s so-called Hoffmeister String Quartet No. 20 in D major, K. 499, and, as an initial impression, one was aware of how sunny this semi-adopted Viennese composer (though did Vienna ever take him to its bosom ?) might seem. Now, I do not place much weight on the idea of a major key equalling happiness, a minor one sorrow or depression, but it was quite clear that the beautifully brought-out lower line of the cello was again of great importance.
Its contribution acted, particularly in the first and third movements, as a sort of counterbalance to the seeming good humour – the interaction of one with the other meant that the entire feel (God forbid, I nearly said ‘message’ !) of the music was somewhere in between, almost as if the composition invited one at one’s peril to hear it as one immediately might. Clive Greensmith’s playing was authoritative, and it was difficult not to be magnetically drawn by the ease and dexterity of his fingerwork, watching which enhanced one’s pleasure at his mastery and expressive qualities.
At the same time – and this may have been adjusting to the acoustic (or its effect on an instrument at that pitch), one was sure that the viola was part of the texture, but it was very hard to hear Isomura in the first half : differentiating parts is, as I have indicated, made easier my being able to see the instrumentalist’s position on the neck of the instrument, but even the lack left the viola part immersed in the rest of the writing.
This was a thoughtful choice, though, of quartet, and my impression is that it may be overlooked between the so-called Prussian Quartets and the preceding set of six that was dedicated to Haydn – no reason for that, really, when one typically has no more than one Mozart quartet, often as an opener, almost as if – perhaps not valuing the works – as a palate-cleanser. As the Tokyo Quartet reminded us, Mozart’s string-writing has real depth, and these works, especially in front of an elaborate rood-screen that dates back to around two hundred and fifty years earlier, are more than we might imagine.
Time, perhaps, for further serious evaluations (I know that King’s Place has done something) of Mozart’s creation for this configuration, when going through Beethoven’s quartet œuvre is maybe too much taken for granted ?
As for the Webern, maybe I have heard this quartet from 1905 before, maybe I haven’t, but my recollection was that, in Deutsche Grammophon’s complete Second Viennese School String Quartets, Webern’s entire output fitted easily onto two sides of an LP (yes, I know…).
I couldn’t wonder whether the work that we were hearing was an elaborate hoax, as it dated to 40 years before the composer’s death (but, then, so did much else), and often sounded like nothing so much as early, lyrical Berg, but with characteristic Webern touches here and there. Perhaps this piece from a Webern of around 22 years has come to light (it pre-dates his first work with an Opus number by three years) since I was last seriously in his sound-world, but its luscious writing, with spiky interjections of partial tone-rows, suited this tribute to Vienna and those associated with it.
The Quartet interpreted it to us unfussily, treating the dissonant passages or nascent tone-rows just as they might an expressive passage in the Mozart or Schubert, and it was a good foil to the Mozart, with no depths hidden – except from one’s ear or interpretation – in its musical purpose.
As I have already said, the Tokyo Quartet received warm thanks for their musicianship, and for this choice of works with the Viennese impulse of dance at its heart – a real joy to see them on this final tour of the UK !
End-notes
* In G major, D. 887, Op. 161 (op. posth., 1851).
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Sunday, 30 June 2013
Thirteen kinds of comment : A review of In No Great Hurry : 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2012)
This is a review of In No Great Hurry : 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
29 June
This is a review of In No Great Hurry : 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2012)
* Contains spoilers *
I had not expected simply to enjoy so much Tomas Leach’s documentary, In No Great Hurry : 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2012).
These comments are a snapshot why – if they speak to you at all, I hope that you will see this film:
1. Leiter has a cat – the cat was deliberately incorporated into the film (although not introduced), as if to say something about him, e.g. when comically spread on its back with its paws in the air
2. The stills that we were shown, full screen against black, were very, very effective, very beautiful
3. We were shown Leiter taking photographs, but the temptation was resisted to show us what he took, although he did show us – on the preview screen of his camera – the brilliant shots that he captured of the knees of the girls on the bench
4. We were treated as if this were a feature, and who Soames (Bantry) was, and what she meant to Leiter, was carefully revealed
5. There was a candid provisionality in the shooting as to whether Leiter would approve and allow what we knew that we were watching (and therefore that he must have done)
6. Leiter is an immense trickster, with an unfailing comic timing, which put the largely impeccable Woody Allen in relief
7. We were allowed to watch, but not to forget that we were watching with a licence, with permission – that mattered, and counted
8. The slightly off-putting – because seeming pretentious – sub-title about lessons in life just meant that the film was delicately punctuated by thirteen innocuous captions, often after a moment that had made my companion and me roar aloud
9. This was a better portrait than of Morten Lauridsen, because Leiter’s humour was infectious, his candour and humanity to the forefront
10. At the same time, Leiter’s putting things off, of piling things up, of not throwing things away, was a greater treasure, and he was noble and honest in revealing how such things defeat him, if he starts on a clear-out
11. And all those photographs, those boxes, those contact-sheets – the integrity of keeping on creating, but the immensity of the task of seeking to order it all
12. That inchoate state mirrored Leiter’s willingness to be filmed as incoherent, to start a sentence that he could not finish, or which he interrupted to death
13. Finally, just his photographs again, those aching pictures of his father, his mother, of Soames, with a different intensity from his equally wonderful fashion portraits
Thank you, Tomas and Saul !
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Friday, 28 June 2013
What look does Coogan have ?
This is a review of The Look of Love (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 June (24 March 2015, Tweet added)
This is a review of The Look of Love (2013)
* Contains plenty of spoilers *
I was at a special screening of The Look of Love (2013), with Paul Willetts* present to take part in a question-and-answer session – he is the author of the book now of that name. (It had initially been published, we were told, under the title Members Only.)
One has to take with a pinch of salt whether the older man, looking back over his life in the wake of his daughter’s death, is genuine, or just film schmaltz – engendering a sympathy for Paul Raymond in some realistic mode, whereas significant parts of the rest of the film had Steve Coogan stamped all over them. Coogan, after all (which it took a question from me to elicit, when the Q&A until then had chosen to comment little on the film, how it came into being, or related topics), had approached Michael Winterbottom with the desire to make a film where he played the part.
"My name is Paul Raymond, welcome to my world of erotica." At 11.15pm, Steve Coogan stars in The Look Of Love. pic.twitter.com/HWoUDDCKjn
— Film4.com (@Film4) March 23, 2015What I take from the film is an attempt to show Raymond as a man whose primary (or initial) interest had been in the burlesque, showman side of things. That aim was significantly undermined by other aspects :
* Showing him destroying his own marriage by first taking sleeping with young hopefuls (with his wife Jean’s acquiescence) and coming home to her to tell her about it, and then starting bringing them to the marital bed, in selfish supposition that such swinging was as good for her as it was for him
* Willing – for money’s sake alone – to enter into partnership with Tony Power (even more sleazily played than Raymond by Chris Addison) to start publishing the trademark magazines (and like products)
* Seeming, in fact, to be unable to relate to anyone except on the level of a transaction**, even his beloved daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots) when talking to his advisers forces him to decide that he cannot keep taking the financial losses of the big show that she is fronting (as a singer) : in this scene, Debbie is clearly hurting at the news, but Raymond has nothing to offer her (no suggestions for alternatives or much comfort), and can only question why she is crying, and keep urging her not to, almost as one of Coogan’s most famous creations might
* This coldness was typified by a stiffly awkward and dutiful reception of Derry, his son from a pre-marital relationship, with just Cooganesque utterances*** to cover thinly the lack of anything to say to him – the closing titles tell us that Raymond, in comparison with the millions left to granddaughters Fawn and India Rose, left Derry nothing
Raymond as presenter of spectaclesis there, but more drawn upon by what Willetts had to say, for the film really tries to show Raymond as driven, but pitifully lost in a world of cocaine, sexy women and alcohol. From the moment when Powers persuades him to have another go at publishing, and Men Only is launched, the spectacles become the different and more specific ones of solo women posing for the camera.
(The film casually interjects Powers telling a model not to spread her legs so much with the words This isn’t Germany, thereby establishing both the standards of the day and Powers’ prowess in showing what could be shown. Raymond is often enough shown there, but looking as if having as much fun as on a wet afternoon in Scarborough.)
Powers, until he falls from favour for apparently not being able to handle his coke (he has a sordid fate listed in the closing titles), is just as much a catalyst for change in Raymond’s life as the lion whose interaction with two bare-breasted women lands him in court. Thus another thing that can be seen about how Matt Greenhalgh (who wrote Nowhere Boy (2009) about the young John Lennon) sought to effect is a serendipitous universe in which Raymond lives and which he – with the major exception of Debbie’s death – creates and controls.
Unfortunately, as with the footage where India Rose is in the back of the car with him and quizzing Raymond as to which Soho properties he owns, it all feels like an over-simplification, and then one asks what the point is. So one comes back to Coogan wanting to do this with Geoffrey Anthony Quinn, born 15 November 1925, and I have no idea whether that pre-dates the death in March 2008 (though it is not as if Willetts appears to have rushed out a biography).
A comment in a review on the film’s IMDb page suggests that Coogan had been turned down in favour of Geoffrey Rush for playing Peter Sellers – however, if so, that film was released in 2004, so it seems unlikely that Coogan harboured the loss, and The Look of Love is ‘compensation’. If he had really wanted to play a funny man like Sellers, why not have selected, as a project, a number of other comics who have died in the last decade or before ?
But there were the out-of-place Partidgeisms – as a rich man, Raymond had no need to make ludicrous and highly self-conscious attempts at witticisms to get women into bed (since, whatever Coogan may think about his own magnetic powers, Raymond had more of a power of preferment that rendered him attractive). It was clearly part of Coogan’s desire to play the part that they should be there, even though they did feel tacked on, and not at the heart of the role :
Willetts, who said that he had been a script consultant, agreed, when answering my question, that the film-makers seemed pleased, even boastful, that they had Cooganized it more and more as it progressed, and one certainly cannot claim, whatever merit the ambition possessed, that they failed.
Yet what it does leave us with is a Raymond who, although wealthy and successful, is alone and probably lacking love at the end, self-obsessedly reliving Debbie’s life and the images surrounding her death – as a purely linear device, it is also, of course, a way of inducing suspense into the story for us, leaving us to wonder, as we work back from an orphaned India Rose, when the moment has come for her to die (and how that will be – we are on edge when Raymond closes the show as to whether it is then with a mixture of heroin, alcohol and a broken heart).
By Debbie’s death in 1992 (although we only heard about this), she had been playing the role that she found for herself of taking over from Powers, and her father had started letting her take over the business. Was he lost, as much as anything, by not being able to leave the pornography and property portfolio in her hands, however much he seemed to show that he did really care for her ?
(There was a slightly strange, because undwelt-on, detail in that, when he split with model Fiona Richmond (whose relationship with Raymond had helped break the marriage), she moved in with Debbie.)
It appears that there is to be another film about Raymond, for which this one made way by taking a different from his nickname, The King of Soho. Will it, as Raymond’s other son is involved, give us a less-romanticized account, where he does not end his days grieving over Debbie and, probably, for his past life, and where he is not played by someone quite so keen to mould the title role to his image ?
Post-script
I think that Antonia Quirke's review (in The Financial Times) is quite fun, and spot on about the Britishness, and there is a good little video linked to in Peter Bradshaw's.
Looking at the publicity material, I have no idea whether Raymond ever said something about what he achieved was not bad for a boy from Liverpool who just had a five-bob note in his pocket : if he said it, one nonetheless felt that Coogan was ficitionalizing his own career's success in and around such detail; if not, that it was in the melting-pot of Coogan creating Raymond in his own image.
Coogan is interviewed on film with Winterbottom, but, in what I saw, all that they touch on is the simple riches-are-empty paradigm.
End-notes
* Perhaps seriously, as I do not recall, IMDb credits Willetts as Lord Longford.
** Echoes of Mark Ravenhill’s Fucking and Shopping ?
*** Including the running joke as to who Raymond claimed had done the interior of his flat, which at one point was George Harrison, another Yoko ?
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Monday, 24 June 2013
Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival - Gabby Young and Other Animals
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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1 June
So, here is my attempt to sum up the experience of The Big Top at Cheltenham Jazz Festival, with Gabby Young and Other Animals...
Compared with other days in that venue, when the acts were not compelling (although, literally, Lianne La Havas did let the position go to her head a little, with everyone on their feet and supposed to do something because she required it), this was warm – and one felt for whether Gabby must have been too hot in her flouncy, cotton-wool skirt. As she said, she had always dreamed of playing at the festival, and she had clearly been inspired with her appearance by the feeling of carnival (and striped awnings and lollipops even feature in one of their videos).
The early numbers were much jazzier than as the set progressed, but at least Ms Young did establish some jazz credentials by swinging along to a few tunes (and even scatting a little), before turning a bit lighter and more folky, unlike others whom I heard in that tent.
That said, some songs were of a distinctly ‘psychological’ flavour, as even the title ‘In Your Head’ suggests, let alone lyrics such as ‘Don’t worry – they won’t get you !’ and ‘The paranoia had taken over’. For a good impression of what that was like, although it is a more free and less straight version, take a look at main man Steve Ellis and her in this Tweet*, which is a link to recordings made for Henry Weston’s Cider :
‘We’re All in This Together’ is a less cheery tale (depending on how it is performed, despite the lyrics ‘And I won’t get alive – and they’ll call you up and tell you I won’t survive’), and there is an uneasy quality to music and words of ‘Ones That Got Away’, whose YouTube studio version is quite lively. However, do not get me wrong that there is not plenty of sassy playing with eight or more Other Animals on stage – it may be simply that Ms Young held back a bit on jazz singing as such during the gig, and her classically trained voice came more to the fore.
If one could wrap up ‘a message’ of the show, it was that things maybe are not as bad as they feel (that paranoia may be manageable, and, even if one has fallen down a tunnel, there may be good things at the bottom), and perhaps best done with another song, ‘Male Version of me’, which ends, a little disbelievingly, with the words ‘Perfect for me’.
In every good sense, Gabby Young is and has the true and unselfish energy of a real entertainer, and her talented Animals and she will surely go on to please others wherever they are heard.
And here is a review of the band at Bristol Harbour Festival...
End-notes
* The one on the official web site, www.gabbyyoungandotheranimals.com has that stripy, Yellow Submarine sort of atmosphere.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 June
So, here is my attempt to sum up the experience of The Big Top at Cheltenham Jazz Festival, with Gabby Young and Other Animals...
Compared with other days in that venue, when the acts were not compelling (although, literally, Lianne La Havas did let the position go to her head a little, with everyone on their feet and supposed to do something because she required it), this was warm – and one felt for whether Gabby must have been too hot in her flouncy, cotton-wool skirt. As she said, she had always dreamed of playing at the festival, and she had clearly been inspired with her appearance by the feeling of carnival (and striped awnings and lollipops even feature in one of their videos).
The early numbers were much jazzier than as the set progressed, but at least Ms Young did establish some jazz credentials by swinging along to a few tunes (and even scatting a little), before turning a bit lighter and more folky, unlike others whom I heard in that tent.
That said, some songs were of a distinctly ‘psychological’ flavour, as even the title ‘In Your Head’ suggests, let alone lyrics such as ‘Don’t worry – they won’t get you !’ and ‘The paranoia had taken over’. For a good impression of what that was like, although it is a more free and less straight version, take a look at main man Steve Ellis and her in this Tweet*, which is a link to recordings made for Henry Weston’s Cider :
Some day I might write something about Gabby Young at #cheltjazzfest... In the meantime, here's a backstage session : youtube.com/watch?v=WCKN2i…
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 31, 2013
‘We’re All in This Together’ is a less cheery tale (depending on how it is performed, despite the lyrics ‘And I won’t get alive – and they’ll call you up and tell you I won’t survive’), and there is an uneasy quality to music and words of ‘Ones That Got Away’, whose YouTube studio version is quite lively. However, do not get me wrong that there is not plenty of sassy playing with eight or more Other Animals on stage – it may be simply that Ms Young held back a bit on jazz singing as such during the gig, and her classically trained voice came more to the fore.
If one could wrap up ‘a message’ of the show, it was that things maybe are not as bad as they feel (that paranoia may be manageable, and, even if one has fallen down a tunnel, there may be good things at the bottom), and perhaps best done with another song, ‘Male Version of me’, which ends, a little disbelievingly, with the words ‘Perfect for me’.
In every good sense, Gabby Young is and has the true and unselfish energy of a real entertainer, and her talented Animals and she will surely go on to please others wherever they are heard.
And here is a review of the band at Bristol Harbour Festival...
End-notes
* The one on the official web site, www.gabbyyoungandotheranimals.com has that stripy, Yellow Submarine sort of atmosphere.
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Images pierce our consciousness
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24 June
Piercing Brightness (2013) gives a leading role to Preston, known, amongst other things, as a railway interchange in Lancashire. Another two things that it is apparently known for is the largest population or density of Chinese people in the UK, and, probably unrelatedly, the highest incidence of reported UFOs. (I hesitate to suggest that the link may be that the former group give rise to the high number of sightings, but many an inferred causality has been based on as slender findings.)
Sufficient reason, one may suppose, to set a film concerned with extra-terrestrial life in this city. The resultant photography, around Preston’s buildings and in its natural environment, was strikingly beautiful, both in themselves and as suggestive of connections that were later made more evident. To be honest, too evident, and that mystery and beauty was swept aside in favour of a Doctor-Who-type plot-line and a race to the finish whose inexplicability could only be grounds for suspecting an opening for a sequel.
Though, honestly, they can spare their breath on selling us another one, as even a paper-thin rationale would not have us believe that an exploratory force on Earth would just have contented itself with knowing all about Lancashire, even if it did first arrive there, and then some members of that ‘Glorious 100’ (a bit too much as if something from Blake’s Seven ?) was assimilated in the population by having the facility to choose a human identity (and so, perhaps, become too enmeshed in Earth life (Park Life ?)).
If I wanted value for money from such a force, tasked with some nebulous aim of helping humankind evolve, I don’t think that I’d be content for them to ignore the rest of the planet and seek to achieve it from a former mill-town. Glorious 100, camped out in Preston when there is a world of culture and of forms of life, seems a bit like a rather feeble ill-thought-out given.
For, despite the words and images that we heard at a – forbidden – assembly of some of the hundred, nothing plausible was offered in explanation, when this was supposed to be the participants navel-gazing at what had become of their mission, when the obvious heckle would have been ‘Shouldn’t have started wearing clogs and keeping a whippet’ (with all due apologies for using that regional stereotype !)
When the plot was kept from being real, i.e. not riddled with the ‘Four thousand holes’ that The Beatles located nearby (in ‘A Day in the Life’), the film worked, with, for example, the curious pair in white (Jiang and Shin) rescued from being laughable as they strode across the square by the ever-circling presence of the hooded bikers, or their room, when they are first hosted by Naseer (, being whited out in an unnatural way. Sadly, maintaining intrigue was not part of Shezad Dawood’s purpose.
No, for it was for the gods from Mount Olympus to show their feet of clay by smoking, drinking, and, by smoking indoors, getting slung out. Slung out of a club that, if it had needed as many men on the door, might have had evidence of more than a smattering of fellow clubbers – unless this is deep social commentary on poverty and austerity, but that still doesn’t explain why a club would pay for a disproportionate level of security.
When this film tried too hard, with Chen Ko as Jiang swaggering or downing a large cocktail in one, one just engaged the thinking ‘This isn’t going to go well’, but did not really care, and, even then, not much happened, except his being the worse for wear. Likewise, when Warner (Paul Leonard) is chasing after Naseer with Maggie (Tracy Brabin) in the car, the pursuit is immaterial, because one does not know what he is seeking (or seeking to avoid).
And then, whether it was the aspect ratio of the copy or the projection, there was the issue with seeing the sub-titles, which first of all made it seem as if our duo was uttering the equivalent of figures to each other, and so it did not seem to matter what they were saying, whereas, when the first sub-title spanned two lines, the top line was legible – and earnest, but banal, in the way that seems to typify the communication of alien beings after the original Star Trek series. Jennifer Lim (Shin) did her best to invest her role with the moody character of a Servalan, but the trite nature of the dialogue, when looks were subverted by words, did for that pretence.
As the almost ever-present menace, though, the hooded bikers, because a purely visual element, provided tension and atmosphere, which scenes of Maggie and her colleague stumbling through thickets failed to deliver: ironically, the alien life, which – we were told at one point – had become so adapted to Earth that it had lost its true nature, is more striking when it just seems to be local youth amusing itself, whereas the scenes of supposed sightings lacked impact and any intensity.
At this level, the film did play with the question of whether we would recognize life from another world, if we saw it. However, Dawood and his writer Kirk Lake did so, generally, in a very clunky way, which made it seem to be trying no harder than Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) in creating a futuristic world with which we are meant to engage:
In fact, take that back, because, in that early film, Allen and his collaborator Marshall Brickman have two outstanding inventive conceits in the orb and the orgasmatron, not to mention the automated operating-theatre, the hilarious spooling scene, the equally hilarious scene with the inflatable suit, and Allen himself masquerading as a domestic robot, and baulking when he finds out what happens at the mender’s...
If Piercing Brightness had had a tenth of that energy in the plot, characterization and dialogue to equal the strong visuals, it could have been immeasurably better and matched its opening promise !
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
24 June
Piercing Brightness (2013) gives a leading role to Preston, known, amongst other things, as a railway interchange in Lancashire. Another two things that it is apparently known for is the largest population or density of Chinese people in the UK, and, probably unrelatedly, the highest incidence of reported UFOs. (I hesitate to suggest that the link may be that the former group give rise to the high number of sightings, but many an inferred causality has been based on as slender findings.)
Sufficient reason, one may suppose, to set a film concerned with extra-terrestrial life in this city. The resultant photography, around Preston’s buildings and in its natural environment, was strikingly beautiful, both in themselves and as suggestive of connections that were later made more evident. To be honest, too evident, and that mystery and beauty was swept aside in favour of a Doctor-Who-type plot-line and a race to the finish whose inexplicability could only be grounds for suspecting an opening for a sequel.
Though, honestly, they can spare their breath on selling us another one, as even a paper-thin rationale would not have us believe that an exploratory force on Earth would just have contented itself with knowing all about Lancashire, even if it did first arrive there, and then some members of that ‘Glorious 100’ (a bit too much as if something from Blake’s Seven ?) was assimilated in the population by having the facility to choose a human identity (and so, perhaps, become too enmeshed in Earth life (Park Life ?)).
If I wanted value for money from such a force, tasked with some nebulous aim of helping humankind evolve, I don’t think that I’d be content for them to ignore the rest of the planet and seek to achieve it from a former mill-town. Glorious 100, camped out in Preston when there is a world of culture and of forms of life, seems a bit like a rather feeble ill-thought-out given.
For, despite the words and images that we heard at a – forbidden – assembly of some of the hundred, nothing plausible was offered in explanation, when this was supposed to be the participants navel-gazing at what had become of their mission, when the obvious heckle would have been ‘Shouldn’t have started wearing clogs and keeping a whippet’ (with all due apologies for using that regional stereotype !)
When the plot was kept from being real, i.e. not riddled with the ‘Four thousand holes’ that The Beatles located nearby (in ‘A Day in the Life’), the film worked, with, for example, the curious pair in white (Jiang and Shin) rescued from being laughable as they strode across the square by the ever-circling presence of the hooded bikers, or their room, when they are first hosted by Naseer (, being whited out in an unnatural way. Sadly, maintaining intrigue was not part of Shezad Dawood’s purpose.
No, for it was for the gods from Mount Olympus to show their feet of clay by smoking, drinking, and, by smoking indoors, getting slung out. Slung out of a club that, if it had needed as many men on the door, might have had evidence of more than a smattering of fellow clubbers – unless this is deep social commentary on poverty and austerity, but that still doesn’t explain why a club would pay for a disproportionate level of security.
When this film tried too hard, with Chen Ko as Jiang swaggering or downing a large cocktail in one, one just engaged the thinking ‘This isn’t going to go well’, but did not really care, and, even then, not much happened, except his being the worse for wear. Likewise, when Warner (Paul Leonard) is chasing after Naseer with Maggie (Tracy Brabin) in the car, the pursuit is immaterial, because one does not know what he is seeking (or seeking to avoid).
And then, whether it was the aspect ratio of the copy or the projection, there was the issue with seeing the sub-titles, which first of all made it seem as if our duo was uttering the equivalent of figures to each other, and so it did not seem to matter what they were saying, whereas, when the first sub-title spanned two lines, the top line was legible – and earnest, but banal, in the way that seems to typify the communication of alien beings after the original Star Trek series. Jennifer Lim (Shin) did her best to invest her role with the moody character of a Servalan, but the trite nature of the dialogue, when looks were subverted by words, did for that pretence.
As the almost ever-present menace, though, the hooded bikers, because a purely visual element, provided tension and atmosphere, which scenes of Maggie and her colleague stumbling through thickets failed to deliver: ironically, the alien life, which – we were told at one point – had become so adapted to Earth that it had lost its true nature, is more striking when it just seems to be local youth amusing itself, whereas the scenes of supposed sightings lacked impact and any intensity.
At this level, the film did play with the question of whether we would recognize life from another world, if we saw it. However, Dawood and his writer Kirk Lake did so, generally, in a very clunky way, which made it seem to be trying no harder than Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) in creating a futuristic world with which we are meant to engage:
In fact, take that back, because, in that early film, Allen and his collaborator Marshall Brickman have two outstanding inventive conceits in the orb and the orgasmatron, not to mention the automated operating-theatre, the hilarious spooling scene, the equally hilarious scene with the inflatable suit, and Allen himself masquerading as a domestic robot, and baulking when he finds out what happens at the mender’s...
If Piercing Brightness had had a tenth of that energy in the plot, characterization and dialogue to equal the strong visuals, it could have been immeasurably better and matched its opening promise !
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Thursday, 20 June 2013
b
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 June
Now, a TinyURL for this blog :
http://tinyurl.com/pvnmlbb
Have fub!
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 June
Now, a TinyURL for this blog :
http://tinyurl.com/pvnmlbb
Have fub!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Tuesday, 18 June 2013
Are you an escapee ?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
18 June 2013
Somehow the recognition of the desire to get away from the tosh that is most training, with its 'issues around' the issues that surround the real issues, is part of the culture, with so-called break-out groups...
Any or all of it is enough to make one wish that one could be an absentee, an escapee, but does either of those words make any sense ?
If I run, I am a runner, not a runnee : I am the one doing the running, not having - if that meant anything - it done to me. There are marshalls who make sure that runners, cyclists or whoever is racing knows where to go, but thankfully - as with steward - no one has coined a word for a person who has been marshalled.
Trust me on this : if not, you must read my whole posting Are you an attendee ?
OK, so why isn't the person who escapes from Stalag Luft IV an escaper, and why, when that person is not on parade for the next body-count, isn't he an absenter ? Someone wlse helped the officer escape, but he doesn't become a person who was escaped, as he did the escaping, and he is the one who is absent, because he is crouching behind a bush in Silesia until nightfall.
Absentee, attendee, escapee... There is no getting away from it, and I, at least, can see no more sense in it than calling an author a writee !
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
18 June 2013
Somehow the recognition of the desire to get away from the tosh that is most training, with its 'issues around' the issues that surround the real issues, is part of the culture, with so-called break-out groups...
Any or all of it is enough to make one wish that one could be an absentee, an escapee, but does either of those words make any sense ?
If I run, I am a runner, not a runnee : I am the one doing the running, not having - if that meant anything - it done to me. There are marshalls who make sure that runners, cyclists or whoever is racing knows where to go, but thankfully - as with steward - no one has coined a word for a person who has been marshalled.
Trust me on this : if not, you must read my whole posting Are you an attendee ?
OK, so why isn't the person who escapes from Stalag Luft IV an escaper, and why, when that person is not on parade for the next body-count, isn't he an absenter ? Someone wlse helped the officer escape, but he doesn't become a person who was escaped, as he did the escaping, and he is the one who is absent, because he is crouching behind a bush in Silesia until nightfall.
Absentee, attendee, escapee... There is no getting away from it, and I, at least, can see no more sense in it than calling an author a writee !
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Monday, 17 June 2013
How Time views After Hours (1985)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 June
This story had to be told - one way or another, although it was written for New Empress Magazine's issue (number 10), with the theme of Time in cinema, it resisted inclusion.
Finished, it would have looked at Eraserhead (1977) and seen whether Brazil and After Hours (1985) were both indebted to Lynch, but had gone in different directions with it (a bit like particles flying out from a sub-atomic collision)...
In late 1983, there proved not to be the sustainable will – or, with it, the money – for Martin Scorsese to make The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which he had also insisted had to be shot in Israel (adding to the cost). As he says in Scorsese on Scorsese (Faber & Faber, London, 1996 (updated version)), he sublimated his rage at the studio for thinking Christ ‘not worth the trouble’ (as Barry Diller at Paramount told him, apologizing for not saying before that they were pulling the plug) : he looked around for another film to make.
Not being able to see himself make either, Scorsese turned down Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Witness (1985), and so ended up, again, in the world of independent film with After Hours and, ultimately, with Fassbinder’s cameraman, Michael Ballhaus. Before then, a few things happened on the way…
In New York, Scorsese got to see a script that he liked. It was owned (i.e. they had the film option) by Griffin Dunne (Dunne played Paul Hackett, the male lead) and Amy Robinson (who had appeared in Mean Streets (1973), and was, with Dunne, a co-producer of After Hours). In his own words, Scorsese started reading it and really liked the first two or three pages. I liked the dialogue […].
This is where things got interesting, because Scorsese had apparently been told that it had been written by Joseph Minion in a class at Columbia University (and been given an A in the Graduate Film Program), whereas that seems not to have been the whole story.
Even I, as a fourteen-year-old, learnt the basic rules of plagiarism : even if others had not also decided to lift material for their essay from the introduction to our edition of Julius Caesar, which made ‘the borrowing’ obvious, one could not simply pass off something as one’s own, and had to cover one’s tracks. (Either that, or acknowledge one’s sources, of course*.)
In this case, as blogger Andrew Hearst reveals (linked from the film’s Wikipedia page), there was a radio monologue called Lies, written, performed and broadcast by one Joe Frank for NPR Playhouse in 1982. On Hearst’s blog, it can be heard in full, and runs to around 11 minutes, providing the broad synopsis for around the first one-third of After Hours.
One might just about be able to listen to it and not be spot the relation to After Hours if one had not seen it recently: were it not, that is, that bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights made of plaster of Paris are a bit of a give-away (even if a five-dollar bill flying out of the cash-cradle, and through the window, of a taxi and leaving Hackett without cash is not already). Where I cannot agree with Hearst, because what he writes does not take account of how screenplays get written and end up in production, is what he makes of the evidence.
Hearst writes ‘Minion’s IMDb credits are pretty thin after the early 1990s, so his career seems to have been really hurt by this, no surprise’. It is, of course, an easy assumption to make, but do we know that Minion was credited with the screenplay as the (willing ?) fall guy for someone else’s theft of the plot, because there appears to be nothing against which to check the story about the screenplay and the Columbia course ?
The real mystery is that anyone would attempt to pass off Lies in the guise of After Hours without changing some very significant details, some of the more obvious of which have been mentioned. Is it, so we are being encouraged to understand Minion, that we have to imagine him inexperienced and greedy, and so getting himself a bad name by miring the picture in the litigation that Hearst talks about ?
I have not looked for evidence of the court case, not just because it is so long ago (and I would not know where to look), but also since, if there had been an out-of-court settlement, only the fact of the case’s existence, which we probably suppose, would have been apparent. Scorsese, of course, makes no mention of the issue in interview, and even the injured Frank, according to Hearst, was being reticent to name the film that paid him off.
All that we have to hope is that he got a good settlement, because, comparing his performance and the film, it is all there, right down to the characterization of Rosanna Arquette (as Marcy), whom Hearst described as ‘interested and indifferent at the same time’. As for what happened to Minion, there seems to be a bigger elephant in the room than that :
Dunne makes a perfectly good, nervy Hackett, and the film gets good ratings on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, but, looking at Dunne’s career and judging it from IMDb’s page for him, he seems to have achieved more as director and producer than the rather bitty parts and t.v. work on the other side of the camera.
Yes, things happen - or do not happen - in a career quite unfairly, and maybe After Hours, as the Rotten Tomatoes figures show, had the critical appraisal, but insufficient popular appeal, to allow Dunne to move on from there.
Or maybe there was no moving on from a persecution-complex character such as Hackett, hounded by highly organized vigilantes within hours of visiting the area, giving off signals of being attractive to women, but dangerous, and ending the film dusty and dazed back at the office where he began it.
The all-too-often quoted opening words of ‘Burnt Norton’ from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – which lose significance out of context – have a place here, in looking at what, if I am not mistaken, is a film directed by Scorsese that made too little impact on its release :
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
I have not seen Dunne in anything else, but I am grateful to him for wanting to get this film made and being Paul Hackett, and I am sure that others will be for what he has produced or directed since.
End-notes
* Which I do not think that the film credits do with an even bigger theft, that of a story by Franz Kafka that he incorporated into the scene in the Cathedral in his unfinished novel The Trial (Der Prozess), where Josef K. is told a parable about the law, Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law). The story is lifted straight into the film in the context of the bouncers to the club that Hackett needs to enter, and it feeds into the film's uneasy quality of persecution, witch-hunt and - although Dunne is not Jewish - maybe anti-Semitism.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 June
This story had to be told - one way or another, although it was written for New Empress Magazine's issue (number 10), with the theme of Time in cinema, it resisted inclusion.
Finished, it would have looked at Eraserhead (1977) and seen whether Brazil and After Hours (1985) were both indebted to Lynch, but had gone in different directions with it (a bit like particles flying out from a sub-atomic collision)...
In late 1983, there proved not to be the sustainable will – or, with it, the money – for Martin Scorsese to make The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which he had also insisted had to be shot in Israel (adding to the cost). As he says in Scorsese on Scorsese (Faber & Faber, London, 1996 (updated version)), he sublimated his rage at the studio for thinking Christ ‘not worth the trouble’ (as Barry Diller at Paramount told him, apologizing for not saying before that they were pulling the plug) : he looked around for another film to make.
Not being able to see himself make either, Scorsese turned down Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Witness (1985), and so ended up, again, in the world of independent film with After Hours and, ultimately, with Fassbinder’s cameraman, Michael Ballhaus. Before then, a few things happened on the way…
In New York, Scorsese got to see a script that he liked. It was owned (i.e. they had the film option) by Griffin Dunne (Dunne played Paul Hackett, the male lead) and Amy Robinson (who had appeared in Mean Streets (1973), and was, with Dunne, a co-producer of After Hours). In his own words, Scorsese started reading it and really liked the first two or three pages. I liked the dialogue […].
This is where things got interesting, because Scorsese had apparently been told that it had been written by Joseph Minion in a class at Columbia University (and been given an A in the Graduate Film Program), whereas that seems not to have been the whole story.
Even I, as a fourteen-year-old, learnt the basic rules of plagiarism : even if others had not also decided to lift material for their essay from the introduction to our edition of Julius Caesar, which made ‘the borrowing’ obvious, one could not simply pass off something as one’s own, and had to cover one’s tracks. (Either that, or acknowledge one’s sources, of course*.)
In this case, as blogger Andrew Hearst reveals (linked from the film’s Wikipedia page), there was a radio monologue called Lies, written, performed and broadcast by one Joe Frank for NPR Playhouse in 1982. On Hearst’s blog, it can be heard in full, and runs to around 11 minutes, providing the broad synopsis for around the first one-third of After Hours.
One might just about be able to listen to it and not be spot the relation to After Hours if one had not seen it recently: were it not, that is, that bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights made of plaster of Paris are a bit of a give-away (even if a five-dollar bill flying out of the cash-cradle, and through the window, of a taxi and leaving Hackett without cash is not already). Where I cannot agree with Hearst, because what he writes does not take account of how screenplays get written and end up in production, is what he makes of the evidence.
Hearst writes ‘Minion’s IMDb credits are pretty thin after the early 1990s, so his career seems to have been really hurt by this, no surprise’. It is, of course, an easy assumption to make, but do we know that Minion was credited with the screenplay as the (willing ?) fall guy for someone else’s theft of the plot, because there appears to be nothing against which to check the story about the screenplay and the Columbia course ?
The real mystery is that anyone would attempt to pass off Lies in the guise of After Hours without changing some very significant details, some of the more obvious of which have been mentioned. Is it, so we are being encouraged to understand Minion, that we have to imagine him inexperienced and greedy, and so getting himself a bad name by miring the picture in the litigation that Hearst talks about ?
I have not looked for evidence of the court case, not just because it is so long ago (and I would not know where to look), but also since, if there had been an out-of-court settlement, only the fact of the case’s existence, which we probably suppose, would have been apparent. Scorsese, of course, makes no mention of the issue in interview, and even the injured Frank, according to Hearst, was being reticent to name the film that paid him off.
All that we have to hope is that he got a good settlement, because, comparing his performance and the film, it is all there, right down to the characterization of Rosanna Arquette (as Marcy), whom Hearst described as ‘interested and indifferent at the same time’. As for what happened to Minion, there seems to be a bigger elephant in the room than that :
Dunne makes a perfectly good, nervy Hackett, and the film gets good ratings on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, but, looking at Dunne’s career and judging it from IMDb’s page for him, he seems to have achieved more as director and producer than the rather bitty parts and t.v. work on the other side of the camera.
Yes, things happen - or do not happen - in a career quite unfairly, and maybe After Hours, as the Rotten Tomatoes figures show, had the critical appraisal, but insufficient popular appeal, to allow Dunne to move on from there.
Or maybe there was no moving on from a persecution-complex character such as Hackett, hounded by highly organized vigilantes within hours of visiting the area, giving off signals of being attractive to women, but dangerous, and ending the film dusty and dazed back at the office where he began it.
The all-too-often quoted opening words of ‘Burnt Norton’ from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – which lose significance out of context – have a place here, in looking at what, if I am not mistaken, is a film directed by Scorsese that made too little impact on its release :
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
I have not seen Dunne in anything else, but I am grateful to him for wanting to get this film made and being Paul Hackett, and I am sure that others will be for what he has produced or directed since.
End-notes
* Which I do not think that the film credits do with an even bigger theft, that of a story by Franz Kafka that he incorporated into the scene in the Cathedral in his unfinished novel The Trial (Der Prozess), where Josef K. is told a parable about the law, Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law). The story is lifted straight into the film in the context of the bouncers to the club that Hackett needs to enter, and it feeds into the film's uneasy quality of persecution, witch-hunt and - although Dunne is not Jewish - maybe anti-Semitism.
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Tuesday, 4 June 2013
Lad goes out / Lad gets laid
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 June (updated 4 June)
My e-mail accounts will not talk to Varsity.
At any rate, the following comment, which I sought to add to what Hannah Wilkinson has written, has to reside here because of such lack of dialogue :
This piece is almost entirely predicated on the idea that there is, specifically in Britain (at whose universities students come from all over the world) and as if no men of other nationalities might do what is contended for as usual, 'a lad culture' that somehow dictates conformity. This is said numerous times, in different ways, but it is hard to see how this Alfie-like notch-on-the-bedpost 'culture' of conquest is universally true or, even if it were, what the mechanism is for having reached that point.
The supposition, because the article goes on to make a link with rape, is that women do not also go out 'in packs' and do not seek or engage in one-off sexual acts with men who were strangers before the night in question. If women, coupled with drinking large quantities of alcohol, are doing this - as they give every impression of doing - then what makes the 'culture' actually 'a lad culture', when women are looking for and doing the same thing as a way of 'having a good time' ?
The writer thinks that something is being unpicked and described. In fact, the lazy assumptions of the terminology and of how things are however they are means that the piece needs unpicking as to what is mere conformity itself to a way of picturing the world that bears no better relation to reality than 'a one-night stand' to a loving and understanding sexual and emotional relationship.
Post-script
I now see that Nick Badman Brittlebank, who is ranked (somewhere) as a Top Commenter (and appears to be Dogs body at Rohilla B&B), has added the following :
"Not only in the sense that obviously normalising sexually violent language and being slaves to a pack mentality can lead to potentially dangerous situations"
There were some legitimate points made in this article but this wasn't one of them. It's wildly implausible to suggest there's some causal relationship between 'sexually violent language', which could include describing an innocuous sexual act with violent language for effect, and rape.
I find 'lad' culture annoying because it's obnoxious, and I reject it because I think I can express my masculinity without being obnoxious. But I don't think 'lad' culture is dangerous. Writing a moralising article about the dangers of banter paints it as something other than an irritation and is just going to further alienate people who think that feminism is, itself, an irritation. If you don't like 'lads' then don't associate yourself with them, and certainly don't have sex with them. They're not 'imposing a conformity' on anyone- you don't have to speak to anyone you don't want to speak to or conform to any standard you don't like. It honestly is that simple.
I cannot do more than quote Nick here, as Varsity requires me to have the Arsebook account that I vow never to open, and I cannot much diasgree with how he has framed his riposte.
Thoughts, anyone... ?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 June (updated 4 June)
My e-mail accounts will not talk to Varsity.
At any rate, the following comment, which I sought to add to what Hannah Wilkinson has written, has to reside here because of such lack of dialogue :
This piece is almost entirely predicated on the idea that there is, specifically in Britain (at whose universities students come from all over the world) and as if no men of other nationalities might do what is contended for as usual, 'a lad culture' that somehow dictates conformity. This is said numerous times, in different ways, but it is hard to see how this Alfie-like notch-on-the-bedpost 'culture' of conquest is universally true or, even if it were, what the mechanism is for having reached that point.
The supposition, because the article goes on to make a link with rape, is that women do not also go out 'in packs' and do not seek or engage in one-off sexual acts with men who were strangers before the night in question. If women, coupled with drinking large quantities of alcohol, are doing this - as they give every impression of doing - then what makes the 'culture' actually 'a lad culture', when women are looking for and doing the same thing as a way of 'having a good time' ?
The writer thinks that something is being unpicked and described. In fact, the lazy assumptions of the terminology and of how things are however they are means that the piece needs unpicking as to what is mere conformity itself to a way of picturing the world that bears no better relation to reality than 'a one-night stand' to a loving and understanding sexual and emotional relationship.
Post-script
I now see that Nick Badman Brittlebank, who is ranked (somewhere) as a Top Commenter (and appears to be Dogs body at Rohilla B&B), has added the following :
"Not only in the sense that obviously normalising sexually violent language and being slaves to a pack mentality can lead to potentially dangerous situations"
There were some legitimate points made in this article but this wasn't one of them. It's wildly implausible to suggest there's some causal relationship between 'sexually violent language', which could include describing an innocuous sexual act with violent language for effect, and rape.
I find 'lad' culture annoying because it's obnoxious, and I reject it because I think I can express my masculinity without being obnoxious. But I don't think 'lad' culture is dangerous. Writing a moralising article about the dangers of banter paints it as something other than an irritation and is just going to further alienate people who think that feminism is, itself, an irritation. If you don't like 'lads' then don't associate yourself with them, and certainly don't have sex with them. They're not 'imposing a conformity' on anyone- you don't have to speak to anyone you don't want to speak to or conform to any standard you don't like. It honestly is that simple.
I cannot do more than quote Nick here, as Varsity requires me to have the Arsebook account that I vow never to open, and I cannot much diasgree with how he has framed his riposte.
Thoughts, anyone... ?
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