Lord Summerisle, I presume ?

This is a review of The Wicker Man (1973)

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18 October

This is a review of The Wicker Man (1973)

If The Wicker Man (1973) were really a Laplacean fantasy (wicker is produced, because the material is pliant), subverting the notion of free will, one would be better off with The Game (1997), or reading Borges.

As it cannot sustainably be viewed on that level, comparisons with the novel The Magus, even if John Fowles disowned it, are inevitable (and the Anthony Quinn film of 1968, which was made from it, and which pre-dates this one) : an island, beautiful women, playing games, a man in charge who claims to be a channel for other forces, temptation, death.

Only that Quinn is a much better ambiguous conjuror than Christopher Lee's nature-worshipping, free-loving laird, and his discrete retreat is more sinister than a whole island of cult-followers. That said, I would have more time for Edward Woodward any time than for Michael Caine, most of all in these films.


Pondering on the cult following for these cult followers (and their - female - nakedness)...

Not that his shock and anguish at the happenings are not to be more than counterbalanced by the charms of Britt Ekland, Diane Cilento and Lindsay Kemp, in a film that - as films of those times did - celebrates sexual freedom by largely having the bodies of females exposed, with the men's libidos represented by a dimly lit orgy, preceded by bawdy songs in the pub.

Apparently, Ekland complained that the naked gyrations in front of a cupboard, cut with shots of her walking topless around her character's bedroom, were not hers - they were out of keeping stylistically, and almost showed more than they should. That (and the apparent dubbing of Ekland) apart, she acted excellently as a succubus, and Woodward's frustration, desire, were palpable in his acting.


A horror film ? If one had not seen the poster, it might not have been evident where all this was going, and the horror only consists in Woodward's heartfelt cries of grief, grounded on the beliefs that we have seen set in opposition throughout to those of the islanders - I have no notion of the genre, but I cannot see any more than a <i>Lord of the Flies</i> sort of extremity to the drama.

A cult film ? I am told that, as with <i>The Sound of Music</i>, there are sing-a-longs (unlikely to attract the same audience, as the songs are lewd ?), but cannot quite fathom why that would appeal - cult following would suggest that seeing Woodward duped and suffer over and over is a pull, but I do not feel such a desire, as it is not even as if the journey is that clever or brilliantly executed.


Interestingly, screenwriter Anthony Schaffer (Peter's brother) married Cilento in 1985...


Post-script (by Tweet) - 31 October 2021 :

Unless it's, ahem, a broad church¹, I can't see The Wicker Man² (1973) as horror³ :

It's barely⁴ a fable (or parable) about perversely ignoring all the evidence.

¹ Not a 'strait' gate.

² One of the most mispronounced titles (the sense needs stress on the last word) ?

1 / 2

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2021

Unless it's, ahem, a broad church¹, I can't see The Wicker Man² (1973) as horror³ :

It's barely⁴ a fable (or parable) about perversely ignoring all the evidence.

¹ Not a 'strait' gate.

² One of the most mispronounced titles (the sense needs stress on the last word) ?

1 / 2

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 31, 2021

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

What can we learn from Tracy Chevalier... ?

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17 October

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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A new scale of interest ?

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17 October

When saying to Chris last night that I couldn't give Le Week-End a 6, but I couldn't give it an 8, a thought-process began that went beyond a 15-point scale (where one could, at least, have a genuine mid-point) :

I unleash, as Paul Bowles might do, the 102-point scale, inspired by whisky's Jim Murray and his Whisky Bible...


For said Week-End, it would be thus (each rated out of 17, 17 x 3 = 51, x 2 = 102)

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


S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel

Mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17) = 9


The rating is based on a studio version, or the director's cut...


Thoughts, comments, insults welcome - with this result, almost a percentage, the film wasn't a 6, but less close to a 7 than it would otherwise have had to be


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Descent into raggedness - director's cut

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16 October

* Contains spoilery spoilers of a spoiler nature *

* Before getting here, you may have read the version put out by the studio, which is more of a review that can be read before seeing the film / if deciding whether to *


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



Meg has issues with sex, seeks to ration it, or to rationalize it - maybe she cannot relate to Nick's desire for cunnilingus : has it ever happened, or does she tease as shown ?

When he touches her - or tries to - there is an exchange of hurts, and we see him pleading to penetrate her, but she wants to sleep

We hear, in an angry moment (after he has accused her of dressing up for the laptop guy, and she has looked affronted, brought out maybe prepared adjectives of the buy being sweaty and so on - a defence ? has she really not dressed up, etc., and it is all just Nick's projection ?) of an infidelity with a student 15 years ago

Oh, and I didn't like, @LeWeekendFilm, the flippancy of : Nick : You're bi-polar ! Meg : No, I'm tri-polar.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 17, 2013

Initiating, sustaining, enjoying sex / sexual action has become an enormous problem for these two. Nick is attracted by Meg's impulsiveness (having said, just before the quotation, that he likes her when she is like this), and flatters her, when she says that a man was chatting her up, by saying that she is hot, before being reminded that she is cold :

The chasteness of Diana, the allure for Actaeon of seeing her naked, the terrible price. It is not attraction / seduction / temptation with Nick and Meg, but humbling oneself for sex - may I, do I have permission, for what can be offered a glimpse of, then imperiously taken away (Nick's comment of lack of acquaintance with her vagina in the last 5 / 10 years) in self-denying sexual starvation

Maybe the fling 15 years ago is why Nick's latest job was at a former polytechnic in Birmingham (a fall from grace), although we are then talking only 1998 (with scarcely the highest pretended levels of scrutiny and integrity), and there has been a well-trodden path of randy supervisors and directors of studies, and willing undergraduates, that takes in The History Man, Tom Sharpe's books, and probably, between the lines, those of C. P. Snow, not to mention Michael Frayn's Donkeys' Years


This is all interesting. But there is a greater neurosis - on the threshold of the party at Morgan's, Meg is the one wanting to go into it / saying that she wants to go into it. It, though, is not a party party, and she immediately seems like a fish out of water, even saying something quite inept to Morgan's pregnant wife in the long time that we must imagine that Nick allows himself to push off with Morgan (and Morgan does not even think to effect any more than superficial introductions), before finding and meeting his son

Previously, Nick had almost to be dragged into the cemetery, but then, when we see him before Beckettt's memorial, he is / says that he is enjoying it, and wants to find Sartre

When he cannot sleep with Meg, Nick creates a shrine to the things that he loves - through Brodbent, we hear love being talked of, and know that Nick experiences it, although he mistakes helping his / their ? son, by having him at home, with what Meg might want

The flinching, the pain, at hearing about what happened to Morgan's ex-wife is quite unfeigned

Thirty years married doesn't seem long enough, and Nick we can imagine in communes and protests, but not Meg, unless the morbidity of their sex-life is the result of such drives and impulses as the craven way in which we him ask to penetrate her, and they have destroyed each other's simple pleasure in each other as a sexual companion

Introducing Morgan, and Nick's humiliating speech at the dinner, are turned into ways for the film to change direction, and we have to believe in the grace of Meg to hear and approve of Nick making massive admissions about himself and her

I can follow this film to the threshold of this device, but no further, and I see the - admittedly joyous - dancing at the end as acknowledging that it really has nothing to shed on what went before

No, not resolutions for resolutions' sake, but do we suddenly have to divest ourselves of the first half of the film in a way that - although joyous - feels pretty fake ?


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Descent into raggedness - the studio version

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

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16 October

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Shamelessly hitching a ride with The @MovieEvangelist

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16 October

He, otherwise Mark Liversidge, reviewed Project Trident's annual Tridentfest screenings for TAKE ONE - I, has having done the hard work, shall come along afterwards, like Ruth (?), with my gleanings and pickings :


* The Vampire rap was hilarious - well written, neatly delivered, and with a devilish selection of clips and effects to tickle our visual sense, so classic Trident (from Simon and Carl) !

* Simon also works with Andrzej - I hesitate to call it 'manic', so overworked that word is, but there is a conviction to when Andrzej turns up the intensity, which was Gothic and hilarious at the same time last year with Carl's hand in the blender, that I delighted in when he came in with his jumble of overly logical commands of the general type

Do X.

If there is a moon visible or you are wearing black, do Y instead.

Find a cat.

You're wearing black, so just do Y.


Relentlessly funny, and getting ever closer to Carl, so that Andrzej's nose was virtually up Carl's nostril, this was terrific and one of my favourites for the night.


* Mark has brilliantly covered the 48-hour film entry - it and the making-of film (counting as one) were, with The Fabulous Poo Brothers' film, in my favourite three, and there is a link given to it by Mark on his review page

* The film with The Fruit Lady had me in stitches, too, so is the last of my choices - maybe I just have a crush on Simon (since he links them)... ?


A lull ensued with the music videos, and I lost concentration, although the green screen footage was good, but I got trashed with a giant Andrzej and even more giant moustache, so was in no fit state, which was a shame, for Buccanearly from Ryd Cook, and could not take in what was on the screen, or what it might be or mean

The music videos, I could take or leave (I kept getting stuck in highly immutable modes that did not accommodate the flexibility / versatility of the programme), and I just failed to relate to what 90-odd-minute interest there could be in Carl's synopsis (though Anthony Hopkins or Tony Blair sprang to mind for casting the clerical gentleman), but we crashed through with Carl's hoverboard fantasia, and it felt like a good night


No ill will to anyone whose work I did not relate to on the night - I could probably and happily laughed at things throughout, probably because of the tawdriness that I found in My Sweet Pepper Land (2013), and so was not well placed for anything else : those things were gratefully received, and I hope that I can find Buccanearly somewhere and give it the attention it deserved !


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Immediacy of the moment

This is a review of the re-release of Nothing But a Man (1964)

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15 October (updated 22 October)

This is a review of the re-release of Nothing But a Man (1964)

96 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 17 / M : 15 / P : 15 / F : 16


S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel


I could estimate the running time of this film, but I do not wish to - doing so would only satisfy that curious sensation of how much cinema-time has elapsed.

I had heard the re-release of Nothing But a Man (1964) reviewed on BBC Radio 3's Night Waves [now Free Thinking], but nothing prepared me for the perfection of the picture quality - from its age, it must have been restored, and it has been done gorgeously in this digital re-issue.

This is a piece of work that is not afraid to keep you aware that cinema is a social construct, and it has just that remove, that distance to keep us from thinking that we are engaging - or want to engage - with it. By which I mean nothing bad, nothing that did not connect, for a moment, with feeling that we might stray into Georg Büchner's drama Woyzeck, but moved away again. Cinematically, starting with the chain-gang and the laying of railroad tracks, we have just the right level of interest, and the progression of the work seems effortless, with easy, fluid camerawork.

The story - for which I experience no need to seek out what some call a back story - is of a man (Ivan Dixon as Duff Anderson) not prepared to be a white man's nigger, which is what he calls the father (a preacher embodied by Stanley Greene) of the woman whom he marries (Josie, played by Abbey Lincoln), and so not finding things easy.

As the closing words say, it is not going to be so, but there is a finality through the arc of lives that has resolved towards the end. It is set, we are told, eight years since the last racial violence, and after Birmingham, Alabama, has been the home of lynchings : as Duff sees it, those lynchings still go on, but are of a different character.

Contemporaneous with Nothing But a Man, co-writer and director Michael Roemer seems only to have directed one other feature*, and then not to have done anything of this kind except with t.v. twenty years later, so it is hard to know what perspective a Berlin-born child of 1928 brought to these tensions, or how the film was received in the mid-1960s (now see below, on the latter point, and follow the links for how the film came to be made).


End-notes

* According to the Wikipedia® entry for the film, and that given by IMDb for Roemer, he started teaching at Yale University in 1966, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971. He published a book in 1997, and a two-volume work in 2001, both relating to stories.

Despite winning the San Giorgio Prize at Venice Film Festival, being very favourably reviewed at New York Film Festival, and apparently being a favourite of Malcolm X's, the film was essentially only distributed in film theatres (i.e. cinemas) that specialized in independent and foreign films. In 1993, The Library of Congress selected it to be preserved in The National Film Registry, since when it has achieved a wider release and a warm reception.


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Handmaid in China

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15 October

I have posted this short Young Critics review on my schedule of Festival events, with links to the blog, because it says almost everything that I want to say about Unmade in China (2012).


I shall just add :

* We had a lovely Q&A with Kofman via Skype. In my question, I asked whether he had always known, by repute, of the sorts of problems that he experienced, or when he had realized, to which he answered that when he was first there he contacted his friend Tanner to come and start filming what was happening

* One of the members of the audience in Screen 3 was actually from Xiamen city and had allayed my fears that the film might have been perceived as anti-Chinese by saying that she really liked Kofman's film (this one, not Case Sensitive, the film being 'unmade')

* Things that Kofman had to face included turning his script into gibberish, having to take the Communist Party officials to dinner, with much drinking, to get them on side, and at least two cinematographers getting fired, or other persons hired without his approval (or even knowledge)

* He came home for a miserly amount of time allowed for his daughter's graduation, and, to everyone's surprise, went back and got stuck in

* The film, as reviewed, is truly a joy - Kofman is such a natural wit and a prankster that he makes sly comments, expressions, gestures in front of everyone's noses


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Get George HERE !

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15 October

My good friends at @CamPicturehouse now have a confirmation that George MacKay is expected to attend a Q&A after a special screening (in Screen 2*) of For Those in Peril (2013), which screened at @CamFilmfest, recently finished.


It will be at 2.30 on Saturday 19 October (booking information is now posted on the web-site here) - the film is also showing, without the special guest, on the day before and in the week after this screening


Click here for various resources about the film, including a synopsis and a video interview from Cannes. You can also read the reviews written by two of the participants (aged 16 to 19) in the Young Critics scheme, which was run at this year's Festival to promote writing about cinema.


I have not had a chance to see the film, but I understand that it is a challenging drama, and involves elements of Scottish folklore, the stuff of the sea, and a portrayal of mental-health issues...



End-notes

* I am told now that it will be in Screen 3.


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What happened to my Lederhosen… ?

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14 October

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

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


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

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


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

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


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


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

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

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14 October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

It wasn’t just Russ, with his exobrain…

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13 October

Google and the World-Brain (2013) gave me a first notion – I believe – of what H. G. Wells looked and sounded like, a man so set upon technological development that he seemed almost blind to morals, with what he conceived as The World-Brain, and relatively dismissive of human worth when all that we needed was a big machine to determine what we should do

There the comparisons with Google Books have to end. However, as I find myself having mentioned in connection with reviewing The Taste of Money (2013), nothing in this documentary made clear how Google Books persuaded some libraries to allow it to scan works still in copyright, whether the libraries received a fee, or why anyone was so blind – into many millions of such scans – that anyone’s rights (the copyright-holder’s) were being infringed. And so, when the copyright-holders found out, and brought class-actions in the States (and in other jurisdictions), the whole question had first come before a US judge.

When I asked Ben Lewis, the film’s director, in the Q&A, did Google Books do as it did, did he think, to present the world with a fait accompli, he did not appear to disagree. Are things as they should be, in pursuit of some well-meaning higher ideal, if people’s statutory rights are compromised, because this case has highlighted the issue – and since people now, other than Google Books (some of whose scans were actually or virtually worthless on account of the quality), are scanning works in the aim of information-sharing on a global scale, but more linked to the libraries (rather than, say, selling print-on-demand copies made from scans) ?

All that I say about the idea of reading everything into a machine is largely this : read Jorge Luis Borges The Library of Babel, a story about a seemingly infinite library in which Borges foresaw the problems of the Internet, i.e. that it may be there, but, amongst everything else, how does one find it ?

And, also from that story, does the sum of all printed writing actually achieve beyond (although worthwhile in themselves) accessibility, and the prevention of a devastation such as occurred with The Library of Alexandria ? If Plato writes x is true, and then Aristotle writes y is true, where the two statements are inconsistent, what possible software can construe what each writer – in the original Greek text, which we do not have, only later copies – meant and what it – and we – should ‘think’ ? How construe, then, a writer whose work survives in fragments, such as Heraclitus ?

As vain a dream as The Singularity, which the film touched momentarily on, and for which there has been the sort of special pleading usually reserved to criticizing (or making) the claims of religion. (Some may judge that my personal view is closest to that of Internet analyst Evgeny Morozov, who also appeared in the film, and, when edited appropriately (which was lacking on one or two occasions), was able to make some very relevant points.)

This, though, is not just a documentary about books, words, but those in the field who work with printed materials and who have been affected by what happened :

* Calm director of the library at Harvard (Robert Darnton) and the former director of The Bodleian Library (Reginald Carr) – neither, as I recall, said they allowed copyright books to be scanned

* A slightly more excited US lawyer (Mary Sue Coleman, who is the President of Michigan University), who informed us about the progress of the case

* An impassioned Frenchman (Jean-Noël Jeanneney, who, at the time of the events that he relates, when Google Books made an overture, was director of La Bibliothèque Nationale Française, and started the counteroffensive)

* A knowledgeable and uncompromising German scholar (Roland Reuss, Professor of German Literature at the University of Heidelberg), insistent that what Google Books had done was wrong

Plus the people at Google itself (not Google Books, except for a very short clip of Luis Collado, Head of Google Books in Spain and Portugal), such as Sergey Brin and David Drummond, who talked about worthy aims in a somewhat too enthusiastic way to be aware of real-world limitations (see above)…

A film that informed me, and made me reflect. Most of all, I wondered at Google Books, breaking faith with all those people who believed in copyright law, and a judge who might, in his final ruling, determine that those whose rights were ignored are fixed with a bargain that is likely to affect not just them, but the whole world of copyright.


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

Witchcraft wages war on sanity

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13 October

At least, of the two shorts screened before Witchcraft Through the Ages (1968 version), the second made it no longer possible to desire to watch / hear any more, even with the (admittedly minimal) enticement of more of William Burroughs, now as narrator. I am sure that the rarity of being able to see this projected* might have tempted some to proceed beyond around ten minutes…

When I exited from the screening, and was waiting for my companion, another dazed person who had come out asked me how much more there was, and could not conceive of around a further hour. Tellingly, he also commented that he would understand if they used The Cut-Ups (1967) at Guantánamo Bay, as he would tell everything that he knew :

Towers Open Fire (1963) had intercut footage to defy one to tell oneself any more than a basic story, which is what the Festival programme called a ‘vibrant mix of exotic symbols and playful violence’, the latter phrase being an attempted oxymoron, but I have no recollection in relation to what.

That purgative effect is in no small part due to the paralytic diuretic that was to follow, with its soundtrack that was so unbelievable in being irritated that it made a mere twelve minutes seem like an eternity, with repetition without respite of words such as yes hello ? (or was it hello yes ?), which only stopped to give way to such others as Is the effect still subsisting ? or How does that feel ?.

I have no idea whether the film ‘punches straight for the optic nerve’, because the auditory overload left little desire to look at the screen : my impression, before the intense audio left me internally screaming in the hope that it would cease, was that it was qualitatively more of the same, not flashing, multi-layered film frames and sequences, but a provocatively pointless jumble.

I have seen and heard William Burroughs now. I have no further need of him in the near future, I fear…


End-notes

* I have no doubt that it is on YouTube somewhere.


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Three short reviews

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13 October

My Beautiful Country (2012) is a German production whose German name translates as The Bridge on the Ibar, and the English title refers to a Serbian national song that a group of Albanians who have been captured are asked to sing. We see one of them, Ramiz, given the chance to escape, but he ends up on the Serbian side of the river, and Danica, who has been widowed, takes pity on him when she finds that he has broken in.

Both Mišel Matičević and Zrinka Cvitešić are very strong and natural in these roles, and we see Ramiz develop in relation to one of her sons (Danilo), who has not spoken since his father died, whereas his elder brother Vlado has disaffection for life, and ends up behaving dishonestly. Petty jealousy upsets things and sets in train a course of events that provides a fulcrum for the story in the shape of the bridge. It is a powerful film that makes one sees how destructive what divides us can be, but ultimately offers hope.


With Hawking (2013), we had a documentary about the 71-year-old Cambridge professor that received what must have been a premiere, but was not billed as one. After a t.v. film in 2004, it sets out to be Hawking’s own account of his life, based on his script or early writings about his diagnosis with Motorneurone Disease.

The film used actors to represent some scenes, as well as contemporary footage and stills. All in all, just as the expanding universe (the famous Big Bang) was represented schematically by shapes and whirls, so, too, are key moments, with shots of parts of faces, or faces or bodies out of focus.

Once Hawking’s marriage to Jane had been described as breaking down in the face of a private life very different from a public one, much of the nineties and beyond was passed over quickly. So much so that one might be forgiven for thinking that the last thing that Hawking did was write A Brief History of Time in the late 1980s, not that he has made more discoveries about black holes recently.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy presided over question session with Hawking and various people such as film-maker Stephen Finnigan, but Hawking did not seem to be put at the centre of that experience, with Guru-Murthy’s back to him much of the time. Some strategically left before the end, rather than watch what – no reflection on the Festival – was quite embarrassingly weak.


Finally, Woody Allen was in thoughtful mood with Blue Jasmine (2013), with Cate Blanchett striking as a character a little reminiscent both of Tennesee Williams’ Blanche Dubobis (from A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)) and of the mother in Allen’s own drama Interiors, from the late 1970s : though we did not always relate to some of Jasmine’s posturing, and maybe Sally Hawkins as Ginger was a little more uncomplicated (with Hawkins bringing a genuine enthusiasm to the role), Blanchett had a poise and a grace that made her the natural victim of Alec Baldwin’s duplicitous arrangements.

For his part, he was a man one could easily credit as pushing the boundaries of how to use apparent wealth to create businesses on top of businesses – and the film ably walked the tightrope between Jasmine’s memories of a hurtful past and how we see her try to extricate herself from acknowledging it. Ultimately, when she is confronted with it, we understand what she did when she felt herself humiliated, and Allen kept that moment for us : nothing is quite as it seems, and we gather what repercussions Jasmine’s instinct had for all.

There are laughs along the way, notably in the manner of Bobby Cannavale (as Chili), but no one should expect anything near as light as Midnight in Paris (2011) (or, though, as dark as Cassandra’s Dream (2007)).


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

Fruits of the forest

This is a Festival review of El bosc (The Forest) (2012)

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13 October

This is a Festival review of El bosc (The Forest) (2012)

A film festival is one of those rare places where you can talk to the person who has programmed films that interest you*, and, in this case, as last year, it was Ramon Lamarca for his Catalan films, of which I saw three (and managed one of those twice, the beautifully filmed and constructed The Redemption of the Fish (2012)), and it, with another, Eyes on the Sky (2008), were in my Festival top five at Cambridge :

The Forest (El Bosc)) (2012) has kept me thinking since, not since I did not have a chance to try a review until now, when memories have faded, and reviews tend to be shorter... In this time, there are antipathies between church-goers and the non-chuch-goers who largely make up the Republican forces, and between those who support the Republic and, those assumed to be Fascists, because they question it (they are conservatives). There is one notable exception, in the form of the man, who turns out to have falsified orders to protect a lone woman and her baby at this dangerous time by keeping a unit based at her property.

Another man, Coixo (Pere Ponce), is in love with her, and has been since childhood, but seeks to win her love by such means as seeking to starve her, although he has, probably for similar reasons, protected her from the worst excesses of the Republican forces. He and her husband Ramon (Àlex Brendemühl) and Dora (Maria Molins), who said that he would stand firm (and then fled), are the main characters in this drama.

It really wants to imply that nothing is as it seems - we do not know why the anti-Fascist forces are delayed so long until later - and Ramon has experience of another time that leads him to see many things differently. Effectively, although we do no not know what it was exactly like for him, he tells us that there are other worlds where conflicts are going on, and he learns humanity from this : that he has, as Dora urges, solidarity with the beings who looked after him.

Whether the strange fruit or alien creatures that we see distort our vision, I do not know (I hope not), but they serve to make another world more real (as I elicited in the Q&A**), and they also question our notion that everything is so clear on either side of a conflict.


End-notes

* I was interested that one character, Coixo, resembled Trotsky (and Dustin Hoffman) : it turned out that one influence that the training from the USSR had had on the Republican forces was to make leaders resemble Trotsky, by giving him as an example.

** In The Q&A, I referenced Diane Keaton and Woody Allen gorging themselves on enormous fruit (in Sleeper (1973)), and asked whether the director had had great fun designing the fruit. He did not answer as such, but said that it had been on a low budget, and that he knew what he had he had been doing when ordering it.


Read here, a review (with spoilers) from a colleague at TAKE ONE, Robbie Griffiths


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Sympathy for the Vampyr

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13 October (updated 21 October)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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