Thursday, 8 January 2015

The audience on Blogger® for the past month

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 January

In mental-health roles, as well as those in nursing or social care, it will be quite common to encounter reflective practice, which has even become the stuff of [the obligation to undertake] CPD (or Continuing Professional Development, as, say, a practising lawyer or doctor) :

This posting is nothing much to do with reflective practice, yet - the phrase has it (which Eliot made unavoidable - ineluctable, if you are a Joycean character and / or adherent) - Everything connects.


For (1) Google® owns (2) Blogger®, (3) Amazon® owns (4) IMDb®, and Tweeting a link from (2) on (1) soon leads to potential purchases on (3) being promoted in adverts on (4)... - just try it and see !

Meanwhile, for the statistical month just gone, this indicates where visitors to this blog have come from, in a Top Five by Page-View :


1. United States ~ 29,621

2. France ~ 5,988

3. Germany ~ 958

4. United Kingdom ~ 685

5. Czech Republic ~ 664



And, for the lifetime of the blog, we have a changed perspective - as to players and priority :


1. United States ~ 200675

2. France ~ 46652

3. Russia ~ 37539

4. United Kingdom ~ 13915

5. Germany ~ 13668


Maybe more Tweets / blogging about Svetlana might bump Russia back into prominence for the month (placed only sixth, on 350)...



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, 6 January 2015

Shakespeare in Love : Sonnet 155 [Apocryphal]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

6 January*


To Stella


Than Stella, with her limpid pools,
(Whereon the poet fondly looks)
No better cure for bitter fools
And if these lines, so careless wrought,
Wring pity from her fulsome dart –
No better place than what we sought –
Then Heav’n above, for all its heart,
Demand this tribute : That the mules
(Which evermore the Christ shall cart,
As long as Gospels be our books)
May bless thee as they ever ought,
And bray this message to the cooks :

Rejoice ! Come in ! And let the feast ensue –
Dear nuptials blessed by God, and fit for you.



© Belston Night Works 2015



End-notes

* Allegedly Twelfth Night, but that seems to reshash the argument that (as it is) 1 January 2001 was the first day of the millennium...





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Friday, 2 January 2015

A rag-bag of bits (not yet a review) about Tim Burton's Big Eyes (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 January (Tweets added, 6 and 10 January)


* * *


There's a point where the latter, maybe, over-reach themselves in their enthusiasm for their story : is it worth telling just because true ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 18, 2015


* * *


Actually, it's gonna stay like this - mimetic of the dead weight to which probably ~250 souls were yoked... :




Introductory : Tim Burton and MDH Keane :







guilt / eyes on stalks / supermarket / confession
-> Dalí / Spellbound / David Lynch














Yes, she is in shadow – in the dark, till she leans forward with her portfolio to force out a pitch for this unsuitably demeaning job, a feeling hammered home by drawing back to show countless others painting that image on the head of a cot : oh, but no explaining how the cots all got in and out of that big room, once each one had been finished…

 And, hey, people seemed to have staple-guns in the late 1950s, and to use them to display posters on tree-trunks, so where were the (high-quality) transfers that, in this age - endlessly stressed to be of mass production à la Warhol (it’s a wonder that his ‘fifteen minutes’ utterance was not shoe-horned in !) - would have superseded most hand decoration ? The point being that there were impossibly too many workers (i.e. painters) to sustain whatever market for hand-decorated furniture there would likely have been…

So what is it, then, to draw back to show Margaret Keane amid so many fellow workers ? A momentary Hello to Welles’ The Trial (1962), or Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), which plays unnecessarily heavily, just for a moment, the ‘one amongst many’ card, the pathos / the destitution of Margaret’s position – and to hell with (as above) it makes any sense, because it is a sort of irresistible sight-gag, best resisted ? After all (in this joke of an interview), the boss of the furniture business could just as easily have said The job’s yours, but you’re just painting motifs on bedheads like everyone else :

 Why not ? Well, the film’s writers / makers are too busy thinking that everyone will have fun with their half-hearted telling of what is based on a true story, complete with opening endorsement (no doubt, if real, written for him by someone at The Factory ?) of Walter Keane from Warhol. In the scene in the gallery with Ruben (Jason Schwartzman, trying very hard with some very slim script pickings), where Keane loses him a sale and then fatuously implausibly proceeds to try to get Margaret’s and his work taken, it is just so that the two men can have a conversation about fashions in art.



When Walter opens his own gallery, which proves to be directly opposite where Ruben is, we have another limp sight-gag – and we were supposed to keep in mind, Tim Burton, the throw-away remark that (very occasional) narrator, journalist Dick Nolan (Danny Huston), makes about the nature of his writing in relation to this ragbag of a film (to signify a doubtful reliability) ?

 nature

 Gives us a break but even Clive James, calling one volume of his Unreliable Memoirs (and known to entertain), flags up the possibility of invented content more adeptly* - or Martin Scorsese (in an overlooked speech by Jordan Belfort at the opening of The Wolf of Wall Street), drawing attention to how, as he speaks, he can change the colour of the car that we see…



At root, the argument is : should we praise Holy Motors (2012) for (the fun of) its inter-textuality and reference, or say that it is an uninspiring sequence of essentially similar impersonations, tenuously linked, with casual, picaresque-style looseness, by who cares what ? Even if the mask at the near end, as all the white limousines are parked (and wink at each other), is, as is said, that from Eyes Without a Face (19??), so what… ?

 In this film (as, in many ways, with Wolf), Leos Carax is so gratuitously flashy that one mistakes it for no sort of naturalistic presentation (of whatever it is, Kylie or no Kylie with a comatose cameo...)








* * * * *









But, if it (instead) is homage, all is forgiven… ! :






End-notes

* Let alone the quips as to textuality, historicity and authorship throughout the trilogy Molloy / Malone dies (Malone meurt) / The Unnamable (L’Innomable) by the great Samuel Beckettt…




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A hasty little response to the latest cancer stories [incomplete]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 January

On this day, there are Two ‘cancer stories’ for the price of one on Yahoo !




But how do such news items even get to us ? :




And, when people comment (who might stand to lose... ?), where is the bias (sc. ‘the truth’) ? :











Other than Woody Allen famously saying (through characters in his films, i.e. in the script) Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with the person I love most ! [Annie Hall (1977), we also have this (from Sleeper (1973)*) :


Female doctor : What we have done, Miles, is highly illegal and, if we get caught, we’ll be destroyed – along with you.

Miles Monroe: Destroyed ? What do you mean… ‘destroyed’ ?

Male doctor : Your brain will be electronically simplified.

Miles : My brain… ? – (wistfully) it’s my second favourite organ…


To be continued…


End-notes

* Both films were co-written with Marshall Brickman, as Allen has sometimes done (even recently) with Brickman and others…




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, 1 January 2015

All in one place : Reviews and previews at The Corn Exchange, Cambridge (@CambridgeCornEx)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

6 January (under construction)


In, as they say, reverse chronological order (= most recent first) :


* Artist Gilly Marklew's impressions of Ockham’s Razor’s show Not Until We Are Lost at The Corn Exchange, Cambridge * :

Watercolourist Gilly Marklew at the dress rehearsal for Ockham’s Razor’s (@AlexOckhams’s) show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange, Not Until We Are Lost


* Ockham's Razor at Cambridge's Corn Exchange : Not Until We Are Lost * :

A new show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange by aerial theatre group Ockham's Razor


* I am to Mozart (and Haydn) as Schubert and Brahms are to me * :

This reviews Noriko Ogawa’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3


More to come...





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Sunday, 28 December 2014

Revisiting City of Angels (1998) after The Matrix (1999) (and Drive (2011))

This is a review / exploration of City of Angels (1998)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 December

This is a review / exploration of City of Angels (1998) (re-watched on DVD)




Appearing just before The Matrix (1999), City of Angels (1998) somehow inhabits a benign version of its city of also black-costumed guardians : there, Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo enter it from their reality, based in a submarine-like craft*, beyond The Matrix itself** – and are effectively (in the sense of an immune system) infections that Agents Smith, Brown and others (the guardians of that system) seek to locate and destroy. In City of Angels, Seth, unseen with his fellows, is a guardian of the angel variety (hence Los Angeles).

However, the idea of being watched over might not yet be counter to the spirit of enjoyment that is willing to entertain the framing-story of Capra’s now-classic It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), with Clarence (Henry Travers) ‘getting his wings’ (against a divine backdrop) through the saving of George Bailey and family (James Stewart, Donna Reed (Mary Bailey) and Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy)). It’s A Wonderful Life supposedly was a failure on its release, but is part of Christmas for many***. After the opening sequence, the God perspective, which is present throughout Meg Ryan’s (Dr Rice’s) involvement with Seth (Nicolas Cage), is downplayed in, and into, some moments of comedy (or fun).

Even so, when we have George, surveying the world that there would have been without him – a befuddled, slow-to-comprehend George**** (partly under the influence of cheap booze) – the mood, of course, is dismal, stark, chilling. And, for some, seeing how George has been put upon, disappointed, and ended up making sacrifices is too much to be balanced by how the film eventually closes : cruel vignette after vignette that show the optimism and hope of youth turned to 'service' and 'duty'*****.


Which brings us back to the angels, and whether contemplating them is a help to us : Messenger (Dennis Franz) and Cassiel (Andre Braugher) are the ones whom we come to know (alongside, and in relation to, Seth). Some of us, in a God-empty universe, might revolt at the notion that, in a lapse of attention, an air-traffic controller could, by the unfelt touch of an invisible angel, be brought back down to ground (pun not intended, but still included) – from thoughts of domestic matters to a flight on his screen that he has overlooked.

For some have to rejoice instead in asserting a post-Nietzschean world – preferring that to what are viewed as the empty comforts of religion (and ignoring the force of logic in Pascal’s Wager ?). In this film, Maggie Rice is seen, seeking to be rationalistic about the world and mortality (and even talking to herself, trying to get herself to believe it), but hurting with the fact of ‘losing’ her patient (Mr Balford) on the operating-table – whom Seth was, in parallel, tasked with taking to eternal realms.

Only a little licence that Maggie should take it so personally, because cardiac surgeons may well be bound, at times, both to examine themselves for what they may have done wrong, and to feel solely responsible for battling against death. Seth says that he has been struck by how hard Maggie fights, and believes that she could see him, ready to take Mr Balford away. From there on, and with Messenger’s help, their appreciation of the realities of their positions occupies the bulk of the film, with Seth (as does Neo) needing to test his powers to find out who he is.

It is a film infused by the theology and iconography of Milton in Paradise Lost, and, if considered in the context of the Matrix trilogy as a whole, it also ends with reconciliation, telling a story of loss and love : Seth, who had not even been heeding his own needs, ends up affirming the positive that there is in life by plunging into the sea, as Messenger earlier showed him how…

The New Testament’s First Letter of Peter seems to speak of the curiosity of the angels in desiring to know what will happen to mankind, and there is the same sense of the angels Seth and Cassiel, existing on the outside of their own experience – sitting together, as buddies, high above the city (on a sign or a statue), and marvelling at the nature and order of things :

Wonder not then, what God for you saw good
If I refuse not, but convert, as you,
To proper substance; time may come when men
With Angels may participate, and find
No inconvenient Diet, nor too light Fare:
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit
Improv'd by tract of time, and wingd ascend
Ethereal, as wee, or may at choice
Here or in Heav'nly Paradises dwell;
If ye be found obedient, and retain
Unalterably firm his love entire
Whose progenie you are. Mean while enjoy
Your fill what happiness this happie state
Can comprehend, incapable of more.


(John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book V)



End-notes

* Thankfully, the Nebuchadnezzar is not a yellow craft.

** Unlike The Wachowskis’ machine-city, where the only outside (at least in the first part of the trilogy) is that of the rebels’ quasi-submarine, the final section of City of Angels takes us beyond LA (and even Drive (2011), with its similarly impressive noctilucent cityscapes, has a brief interlude of respite).

*** Though there are interesting, lesser-known alternatives such as The Bishop’s Wife (1947) (Cary Grant, Loretta Young, David Niven), or even Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) (Judy Garland).

**** One is almost reminded of Macduff, feelingly denying the acceptance that all my pretty chickens and their dam have been lost.

***** Pot o’ Gold (1941) (later known as The Golden Hour) has Stewart as a character (Jimmy Haskel) who seems to move in the opposite direction from the battles with Potter (Lionel Barrymore) that embroil George Bailey :

Jimmy gives up the happy, but parlous, mayhem of the music shop that he runs to go to work for his music-hating uncle, Charley Haskel (a CJ decades before that of David Nobbs’ Perrin). Music then becomes the symbol around which the warm-hearted unite, and which the bigoted CJ despises (largely to comic effect, as when he is obliged to try to sing by Jimmy’s former cell-mates, and ends up – thanks to Charles Winninger’s skill – amusingly hoarse).






In a plot that makes no / few pretensions to hang together (except through music, and centred for no very obvious reason on Ma McCorkle’s orderly yet anarchic boarding-house), Pot o’ Gold still revolves entertainingly around chucking a rotten tomato, gratuitous off-screen violence, proud lovers, and just as stubborn neighbours…



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, 27 December 2014

Some sort of insomniac response to Benedict C. as Alan T. ...

The beginnings of a review of The Imitation Game (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 December

* Contains some spoilers *

This has the beginnings of a review of The Imitation Game (2014)



It was not the first visit to Bletchley Park (@BParkPodcast), but a friend who had not already been and who came to an excellent amateur production (at The ADC Theatre (@adctheatre)) of Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code was then taken there that same weekend : we easily agreed, seeing The Imitation Game (2014) together (@ImitationGame), that it could have given no such impetus, because it is best watched by someone knowing little about BP or Alan Turing (and unprepared to know more) :




It is fanciful in the extreme to show people trying to crack a code who not only have no notion what would / should happen, if they did so, but who are also – in consequence, and as if such decisions could would be left to them – left squabbling about what to do.

Not only that, but it is presented as if, finding out in the middle of the night on the edge of what is now Milton Keynes in the early 1940s, that someone’s mother is about to be eaten by a shark on a remote beach, one can simply summon up a passing shark-hunter (via the offices of the beneficent Steven Spielberg, no doubt)…








Some film-posters make more fanciful claims than others :



The worst thing about the film (because there were not just half-a-dozen codebreakers, and only one woman amongst them) was also a source of the best : Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) reaching out to what he found kindred in Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), and the sense of their valuing and encouraging (the best in) each other.

Though, that said, it did feel as if one had been there before, with the premiere of Dimensions : A Line, A Loop, A Tangle of Threads, at Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) in 2011… :









Of course, the film has a number of good things about it, from Alexandre Desplat's score settling down nicely, after seeming too prominently like the tappings of Morse Code (even if he is made to over-egg the sentiment at the end ?), to evoking in miniatures the horrors and hypocrisy of Sherborne, but they feel in the significant minority.







So the friend (a former animator) had the same reservations about the doom-laden flights / convoys in impossibly tight formations - that they were designed to have an instant content for those who know nothing about The Second World War, and sought thereby to make a virtue of their alien look and qualities* :




End-notes

* Almost as if machines themselves were waging war, whilst, quite clearly in the editing, we have counterpointed the quiet, calm Turing (supposedly infuriating everyone's patience by being unnecessarily fastidious), but biding his time to rob such machines of their brutal power with a different sort and class of machine...

Yawn ! (Facile sub-Matrix juxtaposition to enliven any in the audience who are uninformed about Turing (and who he was for our times) with a subliminal notion of those things, i.e. that he is Neo to Agent Smith's machine-world...)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, 26 December 2014

A poem near Christmas

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


Interpretation

For Anne Sixsmith



When I say that singers of carols
(one carol, and a quick Figgy Pudding)
Woke me on the last Sunday of Advent –
Heaven sent,
You say that it’s my interpretation…
But it still did me good to believe it


When a beat police officer
(maybe ‘beat’ in some several senses)
Finds me on my last legs at Christmas –
In distress,
I say that it’s her interpretation…
To think me better off, locked in a cell


When, in Strasbourg or New York
(representing our global views, perhaps),
Hearers respond to what others say –
In good faith,
They view it not as interpretation…
That nation should thus speak unto nation


When, transported from Hebrew
(maybe Veni, veni Emmanuel),
We hear a special name for Christ –
At Advent,
Isaiah says what they shall call his name,
Which, being interpreted, is God with Us




© Copyright Belston Night Works 2014




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, 19 December 2014

Artist Gilly Marklew's impressions of Ockham’s Razor’s show Not Until We Are Lost at The Corn Exchange, Cambridge

Artist Gilly Marklew's impressions of Ockham’s Razor’s Not Until We Are Lost

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

18 December

Watercolourist Gilly Marklew at the dress rehearsal for Ockham’s Razor’s (@AlexOckhams’s) show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange, Not Until We Are Lost



Moonlight Sonata (© Copyright Gilly Marklew 2009)


It is a pleasure, which is ever present, to retire in contemplation of this watercolour, and to be wakeful with it after sleep :

The best art, whatever its apparent simplicity may be, one can live and grow with, because it has this quality to it that it never ceases to give as the eye explores, and re-explores, the felicities of construction and execution.

Partly, that is a question of the richness that keeps coming to the eye, but that richness is not simply in the work, but came from somewhere : Gilly Marklew has been known as a dear and gifted friend for more than half-a-dozen years, and, much as she might play down her intellectual side, her essential gifts of copying in image, word and sound, and her love of inventiveness and fun, are central to what makes her work special and alive – coupled, of course, with a strong sense of line, form, colour, and the dynamic power within a composition*.


It was a special pleasure, by invitation from the marketing team at The Corn Exchange, to bring Gilly along to the wonderland of expression that was last night’s dress rehearsal by aerial-theatre group Ockham’s Razor. In the event, she did not find herself with enough light to make use of her supply of sketching material, and the action anyway proved a little too swift for the medium, but she relished the clarity with which the subjects in the performance had been lit, and she took in image after image through her camera-lens, some of which have been shared in the original response to the evening.


Image by, courtesy of, and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

A pose and a face such as this, that of the group’s Telma Pinto in the solo opening of the show, is classic material for Gilly Marklew : the timelessness of the expression, look and gesture


Since last night, the show has been seen again, and a short discussion with cast and crew took place, and Gilly has been making sketches after the fact, using what attracted her when she saw through her lens. On this first one, she comments :

I wanted to play up the interconnected movement and love story as I saw it, [without the climbing] poles, to emphasize the aetherial.


An original sketch, by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014,
based on images taken at the dress rehearsal


The other sketch available so far is an ensemble piece, about which Gilly says This is a bit rougher, but there was more energetic movement in this scene, so it merited a more vigorous approach.


An original sketch, by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014,
based on images taken at the dress rehearsal


In some key-words, after the matinee, this Tweet sought to use language to describe how this part of the performance looked and felt :




With her painterly perspective, here describing her artistic approach and process, Gilly uses these lovely phrases ‘vigorous approach’ and ‘interconnected / energetic movement’ : for us, those descriptions may be in the same relation as are our internal attempts to encompass, through our senses, the performers’ work in Ockham’s Razor, and to find ourselves touched and emboldened in our responses :

In the live show (as against with a smaller audience at the dress rehearsal), we had this sense of atmosphere from sharing what we felt about the different scena as they unfolded – all at once and in the moment : for they do unfold, not as origami figures might, but with the delicacy and precision that we might, say, associate with the construction and appeal of a Fabergé egg.


After the show, in response to questions about working with Graham Fitkin on his score (as beautifully performed by harpist Ruth Wall), Alex Harvey said a little about what had gone on, after they had met him, between Alex’s fellow directors Tina Koch, Charlotte (‘Lottie’) Mooney and Graham, seeking to communicate through the language of moods a conversation about the score, and helping it to take shape. Now that we have it, though unfortunately at this venue Ruth cannot be present to play live, the music feels integral to the piece...


The life of the work is in its performance, and its performance is inseparable from the immersive participation of us being there, reacting to sound and visuals (from, all the time, the actors, from Ruth, and from each other), and to the sheer drama of limbs and bodies that are flying and interacting through space and time – the actors knowing their parts and abilities so well that they are in, and simultaneously are, the vigour and interconnectedness of which Gilly speaks :

In her pastel interpretations of moments from Ockham’s Razor's Not Until We Are Lost, in finding her own relatedness to the energy and imagery, Gilly shares with us wonder and amazement that even the performers themselves seem to feel just about being alive in, and having such power of motion within, our physical world.


Artist, and Bauhaus lecturer, Paul Klee is famous, in art circles, for opening his Pedagogical Sketchbook** with this proposition (from which the work, and its teaching, develop) :

An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal.
A walk for a walk’s sake. [emphasis added]


In the second scena on the large apparatus (whose first reaction to seeing which Telma Pinto delightedly described to us as like a playground), when it becomes hinged as like a gate, we have yet another moment of discovery – it is as if another Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy (from the Narnia novels) were playing as Lucy does with Aslan (after The Stone Table), all four enjoying a game of chicken with it :

Running, as one does on a beach, towards the roarers of the ocean, and then squealingly away again, even more quickly (if possible), at a sudden appreciation of the sea’s might. All its nimbleness and experimentation – as if for the first time – caught in the hope of Graham’s score, and in the magic depicted by Ruth’s playing.


Whether evoking metallicized percussion, the picked notes of guitar, or of plucked instruments (as of a lute or thumb-piano), the boundless sound-world of Ruth and Graham's music, just as with the variety and variation of Gilly's palette, are all emblematic of the richness in Not Until We Are Lost, that we

begin to find ourselves [...], to learn the points of compass again as often as [we] awake, whether from sleep or any abstraction

[Henry Thoreau, Walden, chapter 8, 'The village']



End-notes

* As Gilly shared just on the night of the dress rehearsal, Moonlight Sonata relates to an image by Henri Cartier-Bresson that she once found and pasted into her source-book : she had seen, in his photographic image, the classicity of The Three Graces, and had – with some of her favourite sitters (not least the one placed centrally) – created her own version, looking back, beyond him, to what she thought had inspired him.

** So published in the UK by Faber & Faber Limited, London, 1953, in translation of Klee’s Bauhaus text from 1925, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, 17 December 2014

Ockham's Razor at Cambridge's Corn Exchange : Not Until We Are Lost

A new show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange by aerial theatre group Ockham's Razor

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 December (closing Tweet added, 28 December)

Glimpses of the dress rehearsal of a new show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange (@CambridgeCornEx), by aerial theatre group Ockham’s Razor (@AlexOckhams) : Not Until We Are Lost



Although sounding like it could quote the works of Samuel Beckettt, the title derives from Henry Thoreau’s Walden*, but no knowledge of Emerson’s or his transcendentalist thought (or of Beckettt) is necessary to an appreciation of what is to be seen and heard…

In around half-a-dozen scena, which seem to defy transparent and scaffolding materials by the forces that are exerted on them (though this is no lesson in dynamics or Newtonian principle), aerial theatre group Ockham’s Razor (@AlexOckhams) tell a series of stories – the exact meaning, though, is for us to interpret, even as it would be if we had words, rather than actions and interactions, to construe…


Afterwards, co-director Alex Harvey said that what appears before the audience is open to interpretation, and fellow directors Charlotte Mooney and Tina Koch even felt that saying that there is a choir as part of the musical accompaniment is not a give-away, so here goes :


Image by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

Some of the scena (involving all four performers (Alex plus Hamish Tjoeng, Grania Picard and Telma Pinto) on a giant scaffolding climbing-frame, which later becomes a swing) seem euphoric, even utopian, with a triumph of collective behaviour and what modern jargon calls ‘working together’, but not all of them.

One seems to revolve, more unfortunately, around the conjoined roles of Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, another that of a young woman pestered by the attentions of two similar men, who appear to be hunting her as if in a pack and to win her confidence : it all ends with seemingly innocent fun and enjoyment, but what has she been cajoled into, and for what reason ?


Image (of Telma Pinto) by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

Paper rips and tears, and the performers bodies fly between or across the face of, blunt scaffolding-poles, with no room for error, no avoiding the consequence of a mistake, and, as already alluded to, the transparent material is tested, seemingly to its limits :




It is in that medium of a clear tower, which sometimes seems more than merely a box in cross-section, that we have scope both for what seems survival of the fittest pushed to its extremes, and for the greatest elation. In the latter case, maybe a release from a – maybe Narcissistically-created – invisible prison that could be what we conveniently call 'depression', and where love, and responding when another reaches out, are part of the healing.


Image (of Alex Harvey and Telma Pinto) by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014


Never pulling its punches, in the fitness of the guitar- or harp-like melodies, dissonances, arpeggios, the physicality and riskiness of the performances, and the theatrical content of the scena, Ockham’s Razor (@AlexOckhams) give more than an entertainment :

All at once, something that, by turns, can be seen as encouraging, cynical, or appalling, but always thought provoking, and never compromising with the belief in realiz[ing] where we are and the infinite extent of our relations (Thoreau*).


A follow-up piece, featuring Gilly's sketchings from her images after the event, is linked here ...


The show runs at Cambridge's Corn Exchange from 18 to 21 December.




End-notes

* Specifically, chapter 8 (‘The village’), where Thoreau starts by talking about being physically disoriented, and having to put one of several visitors on the right track in the dark, being guided rather by his feet than his eyes.

Following the observation It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time, Thoreau develops the thought ,with the effect of snow, and of night added to it, ending the section where the words occur, first in a different form, then as quoted (but he is clearly no longer to be read as writing just about the visual world and mistaking one’s way, any more than Canto I of Inferno) :

In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round — for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, 10 December 2014

A review by Tweet of Renaissance’s recital for York Early Music Christmas Festival

A review by Tweet of Renaissance’s recital for York Early Music Christmas Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

10 December

A review by Tweet of Renaissance’s (@RenaissanceBenR's) recital for York Early Music Christmas Festival (@yorkearlymusic) at All Saints’ Church, North Street, York, on Wednesday 10 December 2014























 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)