Surrealism, The Orient, and Sollertinsky*

This is a review of At Lunch 4 from Britten Sinfonia on Tuesday 10 March 2015

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11 March

This is a review of At Lunch 4 from Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia), as performed at West Road Concert Hall (@WestRoadCH), Cambridge, on Tuesday 10 March 2015

Piano Trio No. 2, Op. 67 (1944) ~ Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)

-> There is no wasted gesture in this writing, which inhabits the composer's harmonic language of tonal uncertainty. pic.twitter.com/PJacng0Q8F
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 10, 2015

1. Andante
2. Allegro con brio
3. Largo
4. Allegretto


The work begins with high, spidery writing for solo cello, scarcely the easiest place to have a performer be, quietly seeking these harmonic notes right at the top of the range, and probably keenly waiting for the violin part (from Thomas Gould, @ThomasGouldVLN) to come in underneath…

Yet, as throughout, this was playing of great poise from Caroline Dearnley in what, as the movement proceeded to rumination from Huw Watkins (@WatkinsHuw) on piano and ‘bounced’ notes from Gould and her, was really just the prelude to the Andante proper, which was a showcase for excellent communication, both between the three, and to us of their energy and rhythmicity in bringing us the wealth of material here.

The Allegro con brio has some gorgeous, idiomatic string-writing from the man who, although he composed his String Quartet No. 2 in 1944, the same year as this Piano Trio, was going to go on to write another thirteen, and here shows his forte. The players from Britten Sinfonia gave it to us with verve, skill, and endless enthusiasm, and, almost necessarily, with quite a different feel from the chorale-like opening from Watkins to the Largo.

This sets out, in essence, both the chord-structure and the pace behind the beautiful scoring for the string-voices, where we could hear, in the lovely tone of Gould and Dearnley (both separately and together), how the principal sense, again and again, is of falling intervals. In that pacing, there was also the awareness of a heart-beat, and, by the trio’s running the Largo on with the Allegretto, we suddenly had a faster one in the famous opening theme (from when Shostakovich revisited it**) :

@THEAGENTAPSLEY @WatkinsHuw @BrittenSinfonia Glad you've cleared that one up!
— Thomas Gould (@ThomasGouldVLN) March 12, 2015

The trio was immensely sensitive to adjusting its dynamic up and down to suit the ambience, and Dearnley and Gould also acted as a contrast to each other in the mood of their playing, so that the facets of the work were opened up. In this movement in particular, where so much emotion is concentrated by the composer, the ensemble was devastatingly effective, with Watkins bringing out the intensity and motivic qualities of the piano part, and leading into a passage that took him up and down the keyboard, at the same time as violin and cello tapped out the tell-tale heartbeat.

Although bringing back what some have characterized as a Dance of Death treatment of the initial Jewish theme, and also the high writing for cello and the chorale, Shostakovich actually takes this piano trio elsewhere to end, with a harp-like close. The result is a compelling composition, matched by a highly persuasive performance that the audience at West Road Concert Hall (@WestRoadCH) much appreciated.



The stage had been set, in a way, by two shorter pieces (amounting to the same overall length) by Lou Harrison (1917–2003) and Joey Roukens (1982–), the second of which is reviewed first


Lost in a surreal trip (2015) ~ Joey Roukens (1982–)

Ah, @BrittenSinfonia ! Notes for At Lunch 4's yet unwritten Lou Harrison part suggest a misattributed para. 1 in the Joey Roukensreview...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 13, 2015

Reaching under the lid at the start of this piece, Watkins had to pluck some lower strings, but this never felt akin to John Cage’s approach to piano, but highly specified (with other strings to be played with a beater). Roukens, in writing a brief programme-note about the composition, says that :

Lost in a surreal trip evolves not unlike the experience of a ‘trip’

Joey Roukensentitles his @wigmore_hall @BrittenSinfonia commission 'Lost in a surreal trip', but is his trip North by Northwest (1959)... ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 12, 2015

The feel of the opening keyboard-writing is that it is in and out of time-signatures, and never settling, which turned into a stretched-out section, where the piano played shorter note-values than everyone else. The fragmented opening then came back in a vigorous version, reaching a crescendo – with Owen Gunnell prominent on vibraphone – before the score turned to making minute interruptions to, or light accents on, the thematic material.

Next, recursive patterns gave rise to a sense of travel, of movement, and attention was then momentarily passed from vibes to the cello, and from piano to violin. Visually, and in terms of the emergent sound, Gunnell being asked to play certain cylinders of the vibes with a bow was strikingly different from what had gone before, and against which Roukens placed a quiet contribution from Gould, with Dearnley to the fore on cello.

-> The only substance that Roger O. Thornhill(Cary Grant) has, bourbon, is meant to kill him - the rest is surreal. pic.twitter.com/pKcYli8Zhu
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 12, 2015

Chimes of what can only be described as a ‘doomy’ character, accompanied pizzicato, heralded – for a very brief fraction – what closely resembled Bernard Herrmann’s principal theme from North by Northwest (1959) : it was no sooner heard than gone, and melded into a persistent scraping effect from Gould, and, with the alternating presence of snare- and bass-drum, a driving pace and mood was set :

Into it, after a caesura, both loud piano chords and a tam-tam crashed, but were straightaway stilled, and we were taken down to the sound of violin, and plangent, open tones from Watkins. Within several long bowing movements, Gould bent some notes against the sound of the vibes, a section that gave way to faint cello tones, and writing for violin that was almost ghostly.

Complemented by chords from Watkins, Gunnell picked out a theme on vibes, and, as the piano stated some new material, there was a strong sense of expectation in the air – but that was where the piece ended.


One was left, both by hearing it played and by a resultant appreciation of its scope, wanting to hear it again. For it offered such a richness, and one desired – although the title had suggested something rather limited and druggy – to go off with Roukens on an exploration of this cohering notion of the travelling in travel, and – telling words ! – of being 'lost in' a trip that was genuinely Surreal (since the word is much mis- and overused).

This co-commission by the Sinfonia and the Wigmore Hall (@wigmore_hall) was very ably brought to a Cambridge lunch-time recital by these players, as to sense and sound : Maybe not, in fact, the graphic dislocation of tiny figures struggling for life against the backdrop of the huge carvings of Mount Rushmore, but entering into the dream-worlds of Catalan artists Dalí or Miró, or of the Belgians Paul Delvaux and René Magritte… ?


Varied Trio for violin, piano and percussion (1987) ~ Lou Harrison (1917–2003)


1. Gending
2. Bowl Bells
3. Elegy
4. Rondeau in Honor of Fragonard
5. Dance


Going back to before Caroline Dearnley and her cello graced the stage at West Road, we had a trio of violin, piano, and percussion.

Reaching under the lid at the start of this piece, Watkins had to pluck some lower strings, but this never felt akin to John Cage’s approach to piano, but highly specified (with other strings played with a beater). Gending began, thus, moodily and quietly, and with piano and vibes. Yet it was really as the sub-text to elegiac writing for violin (and taps on a gong), ending, as we began, with Watkins sounding a low bass-note, which was allowed to fade.

Bowl Bells (which we later saw emptied of the water that gave them their pitch) began with a sort of ostinato, and with Watkins tapping the case of the Steinway with a beater, as Gould gave us a light pizzicato. This was a movement that revolved around repetitive patterns and rhythmic structures, but which eased off and ended quietly, with Gunnell holding his chopstick-beaters aloft.

It was in Elegy, which linked thematically to the first movement (which, with Bowl Bells, served as a frame for it), that we first had less sense of the oriental, in the writing for violin, and through Gould’s playing, both being more elegiac in a western style. The mood of the ensemble was chromatic, but not dissonant, and one could imagine the marking being espressivo. It concluded quietly, with chimes from Gunnell on vibes.

The Rondeau in Honor of Fragonard opened with ostentatious deployment of, now, a pentatonic scale in the string-writing. However, operating in sonata form, Harrison next gave us, for piano, what sounded like pastiche in the French style : a juxtaposition that, as both moods felt like stereotyped fakes, seemed neither quite a yoking, nor yet pointing up differences. In retrospect, it seemed a little as if it were a foil for the concluding Dance (just as the first two movements had been for the third) :

The restrained feel to the start was not at the expense of a very definite rhythmic quality, which accentuated the writing’s extreme oriental character. The noise of cooking-pans being struck was as of thunder, and Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, with its ‘Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes’ as its sixth movement, was strongly evoked in the writing. The piece as a whole, though, ended with a simple rising cadence (up a third, then a fifth).

Well-executed though the work was, one could not imagine that revisiting it was likely to reward in the way that would the compositions by Roukens, and certainly Shostakovich. By being, even so, an introduction to those other works, it set up points of contrast, which was hardly an unworthy role to have played.


End-notes

* Shostakovich had Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky, his 'closest friend', on his mind at the time of writing his Piano Trio No. 2, Op. 67, as we read (in Jo Kirkbride's helpful programme-note) in a letter to Sollertinsky's widow from February 1944.

** In 1960, with his Opus 110, the celebrated String Quartet No. 8, which Shostakovich wrote in just three days (12 to 14 July) when visiting Dresden.


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

At least I'm not a sexually confused narcissist !

This contains a review of Appropriate Behavior (2014) (@AppropriateFilm)

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7 March (25 March, image added)

This is a pretty sketchy account of the highly diverting Q&A that followed a preview screening of Appropriate Behavior (2014) (@AppropriateFilm) at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse), on Thursday 5 March at 6.30 p.m.

And we had a great preview screening, @ICALondon, and buoyant Q&Aat @CamPicturehouse with @AppropriateFilm from @ DesiMakesMovies, too... !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 6, 2015

Jack Toye, marketing manager at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse), kicked off with a couple of questions about the film’s reception and journey to the screen – in answering throughout, Desiree Akhavan (@DesiMakesMovies) was accompanied and assisted by the film’s producer / co-originator, Cecilia Frugiuele, and we gathered that, from the provision of the first draft of Appropriate Behavior (2014) (@AppropriateFilm), there had been a keen desire from the relevant quarters to fund the film and get it made.

As to the script, we learnt that there both is, and is not, a lot of Akhavan in the film – her feelings about relationships and life, but not the ones that she carefully chose to keep private to her, and that the scenarios are, although they are ones with which she can identify, largely not relating her own experiences*.

We learnt that Akhavan is, over and over, asked about being 'the next Lena Dunham' :

Do these people have functioning spectacles, as she is clearly the next Diane Keaton ?

In the audience part of the Q&A, @THEAGENTAPSLEY had felt obliged to dive in with the first question of Akhavan, having invited a ‘corrective’ round of applause to the seeming notion, imputed by Woman’s Hour, that her work might be pretentious [but Akhavan then gave us the precise context, which was more about precocity ?]. The applause sought, which was straightaway forthcoming, was predicated on whether people endorsed the view of Appropriate Behavior that is contained in this Tweet :

Seen at @CamPicturehouse (Appropriate Behavior (2014) *and* Desiree Akhavan) - inventive & thoughtful, funny & moving pic.twitter.com/WmTSjJ4Zqf
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 5, 2015

For, to slip into reviewing the film a little more, it melds moods in a way that feels utterly natural, and shows what is essentially a grieving process for the loss of something dear : we all know what it is like, if we reach back into our painful pasts, when what has made us feel really bad will not stay shut away in our memory, but insists on breaking back in (as Freud – still an enormous favourite in film circles [if not in therapy-rooms ?] – would say, in our dreams, in our speech, in our hang-ups and inhibitions…). So, this is a film that is assuredly more interestingly engaged with sex than the unwatched Fifty Shades (or, for that matter, the unduly contorted, hysterical even, Volume I (and then Volume II besides) of Nymphomaniac (2013)), where a casual Internet date, fuelled by booze and hints of bondage, takes Shirin (Akhavan) away to a pivotal moment of closeness with Maxine (Rebecca Henderson).

No exact parallels here with, say, Diane Keaton dressing, in Annie Hall (1977) – and to devastating effect – in waistcoat and tie to Woody Allen’s more baggy appearance, at times less masculine than rather androgynous, but Akhavan readily acknowledged, at The Agent’s talking of finding echoes with Allen’s work from this period, that Frugiuele and she had been looking at this precedent for a relationship.

Forgetting whether, in Appropriate Behavior, Akhavan also referenced the way that Allen elsewhere shows us T. S. Eliot’s mixing / memory and desire, though never quite, as twenty years later, as sustainedly, disjunctively and disquietingly as in Deconstructing Harry (1997)**, she also accepted the compliment of comparison with Frances Ha (2012), the realization of whose existence in production, she admitted, gave Frugiuele and her momentary pause.

Though, as becomes quite clear, Frances and Shirin are very different, even if superficially similar in some ways, because – the clue is in the title – the latter’s actions are appropriate, appropriate to someone grieving. And 'we go', rather, to somewhere like the sense of loss in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) (or even that of C. S. Lewis for Joy Gresham in Shadowlands (1993), a treatment, in part [and before even being a play after his death], of Lewis’ moving account of his changing feelings and thoughts in A Grief Observed ?) : joke though Frances (Greta Gerwig) and Sophie (Mickey Sumner) might about their inseparability, they are friends, never lovers (or a couple), and what separates them is far more about independence, and Frances not being ready to do what Sophie seeks (and tries).

All of which was offered by way of compliment - thanks, @CamPicturehouse @DesiMakesMovies @AppropriateFilm, for a great event / screening !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 5, 2015

Importantly, also, Frances has 'issues' that Shirin patently does not (not to be taken for life [and its 'rules' ?] being as confusing for Shirin as it is for Annie (Keaton) and for Alvy*** (Allen)…). Shirin may, though, be a little immature, and so she chooses and delights in seducing Maxine, when first meeting her (and by using flattery outrageously effectively - as we see her put other learnt moves to use elsewhere), on the basis of a quality that, later, she comes to regret [devalue ? denigrate ?] in her, almost throwing that chat-up line in (her own and) Maxine's face (Maxine, contrariwise, has come to resent that aspect of Shirin that is her quick wit and charm...).


And just finally, although the question of coming out, and when (and to whom)****, is one that obviously pressurizes the relationship, too, in Warmest Colour, might there not also be a little hint here – quite off on a tangent – of Asia Argento, dramatizing her life to us, and to herself, in Scarlet Diva (2000) [as Anna Battista] ? :

Akhavan, though, is too savvy to make the moods of Appropriate Behavior any more than appropriate, a mix of the appropriacy of laughter and tears, and much awkwardness and anxiety – and it is Maxine’s quick and ready confession of social anxiety that, perhaps more than we credit it at the time, underlies forging a relationship with Shirin.


Possibly more on the Q&A, and on a much-needed rewatching, to come…


End-notes

* What was less clear, in Frugiuele’s and her eager desire to give T-shirts to the audience – as happened at various junctures, with a number of different, but largely sexually related questions – was whether Akhavan was telling us that she was comparing notes about having had, and what it was like successfully to have had, a threesome, or just curious : nonetheless, the answer from the representative of Queers in Shorts pleased her, that his partner and he had sought to be mindful of [not his exact words] the third person's needs.

** Excepting, of course, the contemporarily unfairly and unwisely critically reviled Stardust Memories (1980), particularly in the splintered account of the hospitalized Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling).

*** A mimesis in the names, even, though we probably do not actually hear them sounded in the same utterance.

**** On which, Akhavan was candid about herself.


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

Media comment : Who’s lost the fucking thumbnails this time ?

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7 March

Commenting, @YahooSports says : * Watch: Rory McIlroytosses club into water in frustration * Plus 'public demonstration of anger' = ???
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 7, 2015

What do you expect of people ‘in public life’ ?*

Sainthood, sanctity, and never dare feel anything ?


Manipulated not a little by reporting (and, more importantly, reporting-style), do we project – stupidly, one might suggest – chucking a golf-club into some water with the subject-matter of Falling Down (1993) or, God forbid, Bowling for Columbine (2002) – do we allow ourselves to feel threatened [disappointed ?] by something only seen on a laptop / t.v. screen ?

Also allowing itself a different slant / description, @YahooSports calls what the golfer did : [L]osinghis cool and hurling a club[...]
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 7, 2015

Is it not similar to when press people, assuredly in the insular comfort of their 'private' offices, rage Who’s lost the fucking thumbnails THIS TIME ?!@*!, in an act of bullying oppression / intimidation of their subordinates (or peers), but write, approve or publish hypocritical cant, about some other person’s foul-mouthed rant !

Gun + guy dressed smartly = Golfer + chucking a club ?

Not even in a non-Euclidean multiverse !


All in all, the moral's clear for our mental well-being :

A campaign such as Time to Change (@TimetoChange) is up against some very articulate voices that tell us what people "acceptably" can - and cannot do - in public...


End-notes

* And, more relevantly, why ?


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

On the go¹

This is a review of Sobre La Marxa* (The Creator of the Jungle) (2013)

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5 March (Tweet and image added, 7 March)

This is a review of Sobre La Marxa* (The Creator of the Jungle) (2013) as screened in the series Catalan Avant-Garde (#CatalanAvantGarde) at the ICA (@ICALondon)

Sobre La Marxa¹ (The Creator of the Jungle) (2013) opened the season of films Catalan Avant-Garde, which screens at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (@ICALondon) in association with the Institut Ramon Llull (@IRLlull_London) and Reel Solutions (@ReelSolutions, whose Ramon Lamarca hosted the Q&A) :

The season opened with this film on 28 February 2015, and runs until Friday 18 December, the full programme being (all screenings at 8.50 p.m.) :

Saturday 28 February
Sobre La Marxa (The Creator of the Jungle) (2013) followed by a Q&A with director Jordi Morató

Tuesday 28 April
El Cafè de la Marina (The Marina Café) (2014) followed by a Q&A with director Sílvia Munt

Friday 26 June
Tots volem el millor per a ella (We All Want What's Best for Her) (2013)

Friday 28 August
Born (2014) followed by a Q&A with director Claudio Zulián

Tuesday 27 October
La Plaga (The Plague) (2013)

Friday 18 December
El cant dels Ocells (Birdsong) (2008) followed by a Q&A with director Albert Serra


General observations
For some, the subject-matter of a [documentary] film is what makes or breaks it (even if such may not be their general approach to film-watching) : one might feel this, say, with The Imitation Game (2014), on the assumption that a desire to celebrate Alan Turing’s achievements may have blinded them to the liberties taken both with history and with portraying him².

For others, taking the example of documentaries such as Blackfish (2013) [whose review has the implausibly high number of page-views, which exceeds 6,000] or The Armstrong Lie (2013), the subject-matter and the footage (both contemporaneous, and shot for purpose) may be as remarkable and worthy as one likes, but that does not make for a good film per se : for one can still wish that the construction of the narrative were tighter or more coherent in terms of the story told (and of organizing the elements employed to tell it), since it seems that it can be too much assumed (because the story is overfamiliar to the director ?) that what the film objectively presents actually tells it...

Q&A with director Jordi Morató, director of 'The creator of the jungle'. Launch of #CatalanAvantGarde film series pic.twitter.com/2Fxbiwgb9N
— IRL London (@IRLlull_London) February 28, 2015

Thankfully, Sobre La Marxa (2013) has been put together with much care. Which is not to say that it does not still pose questions about how it was made (or even how the subject came to be chosen) – indeed, the Q&A, with director Jordi Morató (and hosted by Ramon Lamarca of Reel Solutions (@ReelSolutions)), at The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA, @ICALondon) was enthused by discussing it, and was lively and inquisitive.


Particular comments
Mainly employing footage from the early to mid-1990s and the director’s own, carefully scripted narration (with three script supervisors also credited), the film allows us to discern quite clearly what story is being given to us, whether or not we query (or even wish to reject) the interpretation that the latter contains (overlays the footage with, even), or doubt whether the former can be genuine (as Ramon Lamarca told us that he had done when first watching) : in fact, watching with that eager uncertainty is enriching, not destructive, and is conducive to feeling that one is a co-creator with the film-elements. The quality of the narrative voice is, it was suggested to Jordi Morató, hypnotic in delivering a highly poetic (as well as recursive) text, and he was asked whether it bore some relation, but by contrast, to the impulse in Werner Herzog that had him call his documentary³ (set in a not dissimilar landscape, with, as well as a cave, afforestation, water, and an arched bridge) Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), but where its lyrically poetic content is narrated quite differently.

In fact, Herzog does so in such a way as to heighten our incredulity at what we are seeing, by seeming to have a tone that could perhaps be characterized as one of gentle mockery (or irony) – visually, it is his art to catch those who feature in his films in as fantastical a way as if he were actually directing Klaus Kinski in the title-role of Fitzcarraldo (1982) (even if it was originally to have been Mick Jagger), and it is the juxtaposition of caught sound and visuals with the narration that makes films of his such as Encounters at the End of the World (2007) so memorable. The mesmeric quality of Morató’s delivery of the text is partly accounted for by the fact that, in his answer, he called himself ‘dull’ in comparison with his subject, Garrell (one might be reminded a little of the admiration, at a suitable distance, in which the title-character of [Alan-Fournier’s novel] Le Grand Meaulnes is held ?) :

In a way, one senses that, unlike Herzog (where we are always quite clear whose vision we see in the film, even when Herzog has others before the camera), he does not wish to detract from Garrell, and so is restrained, because – perhaps if he were he not – the mythologizing nature of the words would be a competing force. For example, the language reverts, again and again, to motifs such as the historical precedence of water over fire – as if to reinforce truths at its heart, as might a passage from scripture (or a fairy-story). The narration, then, is Sobre La Marxa’s chosen bond for unifying disparate periods of footage (by the teenage Aleix, by a US academic researcher into outsider arts, and by Morató himself) :

Garrell, when not being himself, is nothing if not in character in his jungle⁴, but he needs Morató to put him in context – to be, as it were, the Laurel to his Hardy. This is what Morató has rightly divined in how he has put this documentary on the screen.

For, at the level of its hypnotic quality, we have to snap out of it, if we are to be at the sort of distance from his subject that Herzog is, rather than - alongside Garrell - integrated with and into his story. That we feel seduced by Morató’s almost flattened, almost expressionless voice [in the Q&A, he seemed to use and endorse such characterizations] means that we can give ourselves to the film, but that is not because (as averted to above in General observations) any film on this subject would be sufficient to convey what this one means, but because this one allows it to speak.

RIP Albert Maysles, truly one of the greatest filmmakers of our time, whose wisdom resonates ever true pic.twitter.com/2sCl7TvoFs
— Melanie Gouby (@Melaniegouby) March 7, 2015

Put this documentary alongside other films, too, and there are useful distinctions (or parallels) to be drawn. So, in Calvet (2011), maybe Dominic Allan fails to put even this respectful distance between his artist, French-born Calvet, and him – we sense that, with the figure of Calvet (and who he is / what his experience means), Allan leaves it less open for us to decide for ourselves (richly inviting and persuasive as Morató’s voice-over may be). In Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011), director Corinna Belz’s desire to immortalize the artist at work is so great that the filming actually spoils him being able to do so – whatever persona Richter may have, it does not (in this respect, at least) thrive before the camera-lens as Garrell’s (and Garrell 'himself') appear to do (though we do question not a little where what seems to be a persecution fantasy, at the hands of the generalization of ‘civilized man’, stems from in Garrell’s fictional, on-screen psyche⁵…).

Where, perhaps, we find a fruitful point of contact is in regarding Timothy’s Spall’s hands, contorted behind his back in Mr. Turner, although Turner himself appears confidently aloof (when confronted by his daughter’s mother with bad personal news) (2014) : Garrell, maybe we sense, is no more really sharing himself with us, in relishing fire and destruction, than Turner is in this front to his estranged family, for (to begin with in the film) Turner only seems truly at ease in his relations with, and in relation to, his father ? Here, Morató’s informed choice is to show us Garrell only in the context of his created world within a world – we can see him treating the forest as a jungle, within which he places himself (as a child might imagine a doll’s hose, or a diorama, the world, and a figure him- or herself within it), and must guess at the rest of him.


Poignantly, in fact, a close similarity may be in Toby Amies' (@TobyAmies') detailed portrait of the man who theatrically calls himself - as he regarded himself as always on stage (and as performing) - Drako Zarharzar (@DrakoZarharzar), in the documentary The Man Whose Mind Exploded (2013). As Oliver Cromwell is said to have directed when he was to be painted, the film gives us Drako warts and all, and, when it was brought to Cambridge Film Festival in 2013 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) with a Q&A, Toby Amies said to The Agent, when interviewed, that someone had told him that he had made the first mistake of documentary film-making, falling in love with his subject.

So Amies' film, though hiding nothing, is very affectionate, and immensely touching. In Morató’s film, he has a man fully as eccentric and even as whimsical as Drako (or, for that matter, Turner), but, despite showing obvious affection and regard for Garrell (actually, probably on account of having those feelings), he only has Garrell present his purely public face(s) - as if the striking figure of Drako, with his cape, waxed moustache and mauve make-up highlights, had paraded around Brighton for the whole film, never returning home.


Closing note : on forests
As Ramon Lamarca had brought El Bosc (The Forest) (2012) to Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) in 2013 [where the forest itself is both a physical and metaphysical escape from The Spanish Civil War], it seemed worth asking whether the idea or experience of the forest had some resonance in Catalan culture (since, in the convenient fiction of British history at least, the forests were cleared and the wolves made extinct in mediaeval times).

In fact, as we heard in contributions from Catalan-speaking members of the audience, making constructions in the forest – which sounded like something more than a tree-house, if not resembling Garrell’s Daedalian-style labyrinths (with all that they invoke) – was something that struck a chord in their past…



End-notes

¹ This is how Ramon Lamarca translates the Catalan title, and Garrell, the film’s subject, is rendered in sub-titles as saying that his approach to creating, within his chosen environment of the forest / jungle, is always going on the go.

² However well Cumberbatch may play the part written, it is hardly faithful to every facet or trait of Turing, and so, as some agree in calling it (e.g. @MovieEvangelist), is caricature.

³ Although those interviewed in the documentary scarcely support Herzog’s interpretation, about the origin and meaning of the artefacts under study (i.e. that the ancient cave-paintings that it features (best viewed in 3D) recorded the makers’ dreams) he used this description as its title anyway : the cave itself has only lately been rediscovered, hence 'forgotten'.

⁴ However, in the Q&A, Morató tells us that Garrell (apparently, in real life, a mechanical engineer) went a year after the two men had been in close contact without mentioning the films that Aleix and he had elaborately put together over several years (because, Morató informed us when questioned, Garrell could not see the merit in them that Morató found, who said that he immersed himself in them for a very long time). (We do wonder, then, what they were for, e.g. in terms of who ever saw them (at the time) ?)

⁵ It is only the fictive ruffians (on quad-bikes, etc.), in some of the films made with Aleix, whom we ever witness as forces of destruction, and the only ‘real’ and gratuitous destruction that we see (rather than have vandalism, and even harm to creatures, reported to us), is when Garrell smashes up his own ground-level building on camera, doing so – as he counter-intuitively explains – to show that anyone can destroy, even he, and that he knows how to do it totally, and will. (The distinction is with times when, nigh gleefully, Garrell topples and torches his own creation [because ‘required to’].) As he says to camera at one point (via sub-title), In order to live decently, I have to complicate my life.

This fits in, in psychological terms, with Garrell’s over-arching, self-proclaimed fantasy as king of the jungle, but he, thus pictured, is unlike his original (who was orphaned in the jungle by chance, but ends up adopted and brought up there by nature – itself a sort of riff on Jean Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about the ‘noble savage’ in the ‘state of nature’ [e.g. in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754)]). In comparison with that king of the jungle, Garrell’s king always seems to have been there – but (not unlike Wagner’s Wotan in Der Ring des Nibelungen ?) has temporal concerns that require a succession (and so Garrell’s real nephew, and a friend of Aleix’s, play his film-son, even a semi-Christ-like character ?).

Yet, as king, Garrell is more a sort of Adam (who maybe once had an Eve), and in whose story civilized man plays the role of seeking to enter Eden from outside to destroy it (a descent, both physical and moral, memorably dramatized in Paradise Lost [where the poet sees his task as ‘to justify God’s ways to man’]). At the same time, we may suspect that it could well amount to a paranoid projection of Adam’s own [internal] disobedience onto outside forces of evil, to distance himself from it [as in and from the world that is situated externally to Adam’s own])… (Something, again, about the nature of the artist’s vision / story of himself, in relation to his art, in Calvet (2011) ?)


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All made up and nowhere to go ~ ‘So lonely’, The Police*

This is a review of Babel (2006)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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1 March

This is a review of Babel (2006)

* Contains some spoilers *

Cinematographically, this film has so much to offer – the variety alone of editing, from conventional montage to cross-cutting to fast-style sequences, promises a lesson in how to make a film that properly uses the natural resources and flexibility of the medium. Or there is Cate Blanchett, showing her class (opposite Brad Pitt**, whose part is more limited and, on immediate sight, played less impressively, although he does bring greater nuance to the intimate scenes) – she evidences why she was heading for all those awards with Blue Jasmine (2013). (Yet we then reasonably ask, on this showing of depth of interpretation, why Blanchett did not get a chance to shine so brightly before being given 2014’s Academy Award (@TheAcademy) and BAFTA (@BAFTA) (except on some conventional notion that you work yourself up from so-called supporting roles, and from nominations for best actress) ?)

That said, Babel (2006) proves to outlive its 143 minutes, and its overly neat wrapping-up and tying-together of the initially disparate strands of Japan, Morocco, and Mexico, skipping between them largely at whim (for, even if one did work out the time-differences, the narrative necessarily dances around in a period of some seven days), leaves one wanting to imagine that its saving grace was parodically being a skit or jam on the principal themes of a range of earlier films from something like Thelma and Louise (1991) to The Sheltering Sky (1990) and even Enter the Void (2009). When doing that, too, it does so delightfully, moving through a range of styles – as well as one moment taking us up close, with a woman (Blanchett) being carried around the narrow, dirt streets of Tarazine by her husband (Pitt), and next giving us an elevated long-view, before, having let us absorb that moment of aloofness, taking us back to something more like a medium shot.

Very promisingly, this use of varying the point of view connotes a thoughtful approach, one that seeks to disengage us from simply submersive uses of the cinematic medium, which can just have us as non-participating, non-questioning consumers of images (and other elements, such as sounds and music)… In the end, though, none of this appearance does amount to fulfilling the initial offer of non-commercial film-making, or, therefore, of being much more than a technical exercise in toto. It is additionally one with diminishing returns, because its underlying story-telling and value-base more and more resemble typical mainstream cinema, not what appeared to be a more unemotional pursuit of using intellect to penetrate how narrative works and persuades.

Thus, one could see its lasting achievement as assuredly in having helped show The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer how to adapt David Mitchell in their film Cloud Atlas (2012), and those film-makers do so with more impact and focus, and less of a pervading sense of banality. So, for example, Jim Broadbent’s (Tim Cavendish’s) strand in Cloud Atlas has variety of light and shade within it, but it does not – any more than, say, does that of Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae and Jim Sturgess) – keep darting around in search of pastiche, whereas this film really does it so much that, by the end, it feels not enlarged as a piece of cinema, but wafer thin. (Except, that is, unless intended as the kind of survey of cinema itself that Holy Motors (2012) was purportedly pleasing us by being ?)

Subverting expectations for the sake of it is one thing, but, when the closing shot came, a clever and daring zoom-out (actually necessarily facilitated by CGI), it was the predictable moment where Babel finally had to conclude, as confirmed by our receding gaze (when we had begun with nothing more than the noise of wind impacting a microphone, a sort of blank slate of the imagination ?) : despite all the artistry of the making, and (fully as importantly) of the unsettling of the status of the story and its telling, it ended with a confirmation of a mundane post-modern world-view.

The suspicion is that it might have been better, if, when screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñárritu had this idea for a film, they had selected better from other ideas available to them. For the philosophy here is the typically sentimental one that glibly believes that, despite the noise, the signal always has to be there (however faintly), and so it is this kind of signal that (implausibly) brings the father (Jack Hall : Dennis Quaid) to the [rescue of] the son (Sam : Jake Gyllenhaal) in The Day After Tomorrow (2004) via IMDb (@IMDb)] – in the truest tradition of stories of human endeavour (let alone of Lassie Come Home (1943) and its once-popular genre) ! Admittedly, Babel spared us the utter cant that is The Day, whose writers actually seem to believe that showing this individual and isolated familial act of striving for, and of making, a connection brings weight (or relevance) to the massive scenario of geothermal disaster, but it is not altogether so dissimilar :

In essence, Babel appears to make an assertion about the nature of the world and of our interrelatedness, but it is one almost without meaningful moral implications or consequences. For, in one case, we are invited to empathize with Pitt, when he tries to plead with his suffering former fellow coach-passengers to wait in the heat without air-conditioning (amongst them, star-turns such as Harriet Walter and a belligerent Peter Wight), but any rationale either what the coach staying achieves, or why the driver could possibly be so low on fuel that cooling the coach imperils their onward travel, is so inadequately established that it really feels more like Pitt insisting that they all stay because he expects that they would, and so believes that they must: My wife was shot when we were with you, so aren’t we all in this together ?

The artificiality of the reasoning makes that sequence fall wide of the mark, and we are, as with The Day, reduced to the idea of the American man fighting, pioneer style, for his family’s needs again. Fine for him to curse and rant at the locals, but (despite all the film’s seeming objectivity, relativism even, at other times) we have scant perspective on this. Yes, we are given the stereotype, when the coach has gone and the air-ambulance arrived, of the moneyed guy who tries to use cash to show his appreciation – not realizing that it is an insult to the true and genuine hospitality and care that his wife and he have been shown – but does anything hang on this passing gesture of Western imperialism / domination (except, maybe, that he is later kind to someone in relation to his children back home…) ?

By all means, we have the fog of war descending on how both the US government slants its interpretation to report a terrorist act against one of its citizens*** (confusingly, Pitt’s fellow tourists, on a coach registered in Casablanca, are talking about Cairo), and what the outcome of the shooting is reported to be, and we are briefly shown how t.v. in the States milks this story of one of its own, but this is small beer, again made little of except in passing. (Not that it needed hammering home, but hardly a Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum) (1975) here, then… ?) Instead, the film seriously seems to endorse a comforting signal that amounts to the tenets of Six Degrees of Separation (though the 1993 film of that name, which adopted the alleged principle, sounds better than one gave it credit for) or stochastic processes (The Butterfly Effect, so called) to show that, somehow, we all count and are not alone… Or, in two words that served E. M. Forster as a motto (and which T. S. Eliot, his Bloomsbury fellow writer, then appears to have aggrandized ?) :

Only connect

Which brings us back to Cloud Atlas, since it dares to show us people dying for their beliefs, and then being vindicated by the mysterious forces that operate in history – rather than a woman who somehow has to be thought to imagine that (whatever her precise immigration status may be) all is bound to be well, if she crosses the border into Mexico (rather than that her adventures will catch up with her, and will see her deported from her home of sixteen years). Still, at least we see her reunited with her nephew, who has inexplicably escaped the consequences of his dangerous actions****.

The wedding that she first went to Mexico for, just as the larking with the boys and going to the disco in Japan, have a free and celebratory feel, which maybe fits with the end of her story being meant to be inspiring after all ?


In closing, perhaps we might think what other films seem to have learnt from Babel, doing, for example, sustainedly what it found expedient only to do in part : one that may owe a debt is Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), for its uninterrupted moods are there, as if they are oases of tranquillity, created to contrast with the frenetic, and so is its convoy of police vehicles, winding their way across a landscape of features unfamiliar to their drivers.

And, in film, dramatic irony can be used very badly, so that knowing what is going to happen negates the experience of watching (whether the irony arises because the script truly shares knowledge with us that is unknown to others, or on account of our spotting a cue (and realizing its significance in the plot’s direction) that was not intended, and so we foresee an action / revelation). Here, knowing the beginning from the end, makes being with the passengers on the coach a moment that is painfully tense, because we know what will happen – even so, it is a tension that the film keeps, but lets slip away, ending up not holding a candle to equivalent scenes of someone else’s hospitality, in the dark, in The Sheltering Sky.


End-notes

* At one point in Gustavo Santaolalla’s score, one could swear Sting’s ‘How fragile we are’ is quoted (from the album Nothing Like The Sun), whose Latin feel and slow tempo fit the adjacent mood…

** Irritatingly, unless actually to satirize Western media domination and power politics (an interpretation of this film’s aims that seems difficult to sustain with much conviction), Pitt and Blanchett are given star billing (but need they have taken it, and so been given pre-eminence in the cast over equally valuable work by, say, Rinko Kikuchi (Chieko Wataya) or Kôji Yakusho (as her father, Yasujiro ?).


Sad, as using a title such as Babel is so resonant, too… :

* Jorge Luis Borges : ‘The Library of Babel’ (damning the Internet before its invention ?)

* Arthur Koestler : His compendious summing up of his life’s written works, Bricks to Babel

* Book of Genesis : Just nine verses (11 : 1–9) !

* Edmund Sears : ‘It came upon a midnight clear’


*** And, a little ropily (unconvincingly, except for this notion of connectedness (? on which, please see the next paragraph)), that brings in Japan, and the true origins and descent of the offending rifle. The reckless use of the rifle (several other scenes try to capitalize on the theme of the irrational, e.g. the wild drive away from the border control) puts one most in mind either of André Breton’s proposal of the ultimate Surrealist act (or maybe another song of Sting’s**** ?).

And of Yasujiro Wataya’s fond memory of Hassan Ibrahim, and asking after him, that translates into our recollection of his brutal interrogation, which proves the opposite point : the rifle links Japan and Morocco, but the man to whom it had been given is only in our mind…

**** Happy ending ? Well, not exactly, but, then again, we are whisked away, and not invited to consider what befalls someone who gratuitously takes pot-shots that endanger someone’s life, and wounds someone else in a fire-fight with the authorities (even if they do call off the attempt to shoot dead his father, brother and him), or the father who sends them off with the gun, or the man who (illegally) sells it ?

Certainly, it seemed to suit the plot that his brother and he decided to loose off a few rounds, but little else (no more, at any rate, than that business, again plot driven (as was Blanchett’s status of health) with the police checking on the rifle). Getting back to Sting, his song ‘I hung my head’ (from the album Mercury Falling) gave a better account of We wanted to test the rifle in :

I saw a lone rider
Crossing the plain
I drew a bead on him
To practise my aim


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You say that, because you’ve been here for a while ~ Rose

This is a review of La Plaga (The Plague) (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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25 February

This is a review of La Plaga (The Plague) (2013), seen at a press-screening at The Institute of Contemporary Art (@ICA) in advance of its series
Catalan Avant-Garde

The season opens on 28 February 2015, and, with La Plaga screening on Tuesday 27 October, runs until Friday 18 December, the full programme being (all screenings at 8.50 p.m.) :

Saturday 28 February
Sobre La Marxa (The Creator of the Jungle) (2013) followed by a Q&A with director Jordi Morató

Tuesday 28 April
El Cafè de la Marina (The Marina Café) (2014) followed by a Q&A with director Sílvia Munt

Friday 26 June
Tots volem el millor per a ella (We All Want What's Best for Her) (2013)

Friday 28 August
Born (2014) followed by a Q&A with director Claudio Zulián

Tuesday 27 October
La Plaga (The Plague) (2013)

Friday 18 December
El cant dels Ocells (Birdsong) (2008) followed by a Q&A with director Albert Serra


The physicality of La Plaga (The Plague) (2013) is evident before the first frame is seen, there in the sound of what could – emerging from a blacked-out screen – have been energetic sex, but is another form of exercising, Iurie* wrestling in a practice session at the gym.

In fact, the notion of the tactile, or the substantiveness of matter and of action, could easily be perceived as the theme around which this film is built – and, on the natural-world side, we are (perhaps inevitably) reminded of Terrence Malick, with (in another era) undertones of The Book of Exodus and Old Testament judgement in Days of Heaven (1978) (or even, before that, in Ingmarssönerna (Sons of Ingmar) (1919))…

However, not least as this is in ICA’s series of films, grouped under the heading Catalan Avant-Garde, it is arguable that the film also, and more subtly, meditates on the nature of choices, whether or not our own : some of them do not always prove to leave us where we expected to be, but, in retrospect, we can still very clearly trace them back to where we started**. It is probably universal to experience the feeling that we have striven to get somewhere (or have been propelled towards it), and almost everyone in this film not only says states what his or her story is, but also has to address it in some way.

This state of knowing why we are where we are is by contrast with our casual, everyday decision-making, where we might easily have forgotten our motivation (or the impulse for change) – much as we might have discarded our rough working for a plan, or a calculation. Here, our original aspiration, what it was all for, has not been submerged, so, if asked to account for living in (or not living in) X, we can frequently say straightforwardly that we moved to this house, took this job, because of Y. Here, all the principal figures know why they are where we see them, even if that explanation no longer really works as a sufficient one for why they have to remain, or choose to remain.

On this level, one is reminded more than a little of another Catalan film in this series, which screened twice (both times with Q&As) at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) : Tots volem el millor per a ella (We All Want What’s Best for Her) (2013). That said, director and co-writer Mar Coll comes at this question differently, and thus it is not from a choice that leads us elsewhere, but from other people’s expectations after a serious accident***. Here, Geni (wonderfully played by Nora Navas) is in the position of finding her relations to her life, her family, her job, her friends all in transition, because she desires what people want for her, but there are things about her now that they do not realize – or will not acknowledge : by contrast, La Plaga has several people on the verge of the unforeseen consequences of their actions, and of the plans that lay behind them.

A closer reference than that in Tots volem, although that film’s intense connection with the experience of the linked issues of physical and mental disability assuredly takes it out of the mainstream, is with the even more experimental film Sieniawka (2013), which also screened twice (with Q&As) at Cambridge (in 2013). The connection is largely in the blurring between acting and footage originally taken for pure (sic ?) documentary purposes, because we emerge from the unexplained happenings outside of a psychiatric institution, whose name (taken from its location) gives the film its title, to quiet, often almost painfully drawn-out sequences in it, before the film finally takes us out again :

One would have to be uncertain about calling Sieniawka a documentary, even in its long central part (where – one is told – it was filmed as it is seen), but one is likewise uncertain about what is captured, what re-created, in La Plaga. The distinction that one could perhaps draw is that it is of far less consequence, in the latter case, which is which****. Likewise because the performances / characters (as themselves), in particular, of Maria Ros and Rosemarie Abella are so strong, one feels for what is happening between them when one is in the care of the other, and more poignantly, since, as Rose tells Maria, neither really had wanted to be where necessity has taken them.

The film appears to unfold essentially chronologically, and some developments (though they are not always explained, not even later on) are shown in a sequential manner. However, it often enough floats free of requiring a structure – for those who watch a film such as Amour*** (2012), and do not desire everything to be spelt out, it will pose no obstacles. None, that is, beyond those of relaxing into trusting one’s intuition, and of learning not to concentrate too much on the detail of some screen-time activity or specificity (e.g. wrestling, or dancing) :

For the more that, at such moments, one observes La Plaga in what seem its intended broad terms (and filters out what is extraneous to the scene), the less one may pose oneself a great effort for low yield. That may sound like a quite negative comment, but it is the truest way to watch kindred types of film to this one, such as Sacro GRA (2013) – with, also, its placing of the rural in relation to the urban (and hints of Aesop’s Fables, with that of ‘The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse’ ?) – or Leviathan (2012), or Samsara (2011).

In essence, then, one could regard these films as long narrative poems, rather than sonnets, which one can hear in under a minute (and almost mentally analyse as they are being read). For that reason, they need to be taken in, as a whole, and without anxiety about, or over-attention to, the content (save in relation to its place in the general form) – for some, perhaps a different way of watching, and of being with, a film ?


End-notes

* Iurie’s name, in a sans-serif typeface, looks as if it begins with a lower-case ‘l’, and he was playing [a version of] himself. (Not that it matters much to an appreciation of the film, but so was everyone.)

** Quite a difficult read, in Samuel Beckettt’s canon from the early 1960s, but maybe one is reminded, in all this, of the schema of his Comment c’est (which Beckettt translated into English from the original French as How It Is) ?

*** I.e. that one can climb back and resume one’s life, and that, if one can, one should. In Amour (2012), Michael Haneke directs Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant in giving us the life after another (less clearcut ?) medical emergency, and, likewise, we have the hard kind of choices that Nora Navas (Geni) is seen making, under Mar Coll’s direction, in Tots volem.

**** The extent to which Sieniawka feels exploitative is one of the topics handled in the Festival review.


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Strange transmissions

This is a review of Father and Son (2003)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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11 February

This is a review of Father and Son (2003)

Sokurov is often referred to as Aleksandr, but is here credited as Alexander. In any case, his directing gives us a screen-world that mixes (as T. S. Eliot has it*), memory and desire, except that it is memory and desire and dream… Dreaming, though, where son can talk to father from outside it (and vice versa), and ask what it is like, which Russell Hoban prefigured by publishing Amaryllis Night and Day in 2001 (hardly uniquely, since it is likewise the stuff of Ursula Le Guin and Earthsea, which has its roots elsewhere).

Ah, @bluenoterecords, but New York City (with The Peter Malick Group) is a great @NorahJones album before that... ! :)
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 11, 2015

In no way repeating Mother and Son (1997), but not disappointing those who watch Father and Son (2003) by the strength of the performances or the writing, Sokurov dwells on the awkwardnesses in life that bring us so close or so far apart (as Peter Gabriel puts it**) : British and Russian politeness / society are not poles apart, and changing the subject is just as much part of (Chekhov or) this film as is suddenly talking about the weather.

A delirious moment, of nigh-febrile intensity, begins the film, bringing us at once inside the physicality of Alexei and his dad’s life and love, both for others and for each other. To this kind of soldierly behaviour, not only Britishness may not easily relate, and so find in it the homoeroticism that Sokurov seems to have wanted to dismiss [NB link is to a review that mentions Sokurov's reaction], even if there is quite intentional ambiguity about so much in what we see.

So, in a beautifully crafted and cut-together scene, where Aleksei Neymyshev (Alexei) talks to Marina Zasukhina through, and around, the narrow aperture of a window, we do not even know for sure – though we may surmise, since this is in a barracks – why the window cannot be opened more widely, let alone who they are to each other, or why Alexei’s father (Andrei Shchetinin) has also come to visit. Later, the script has Alexei almost stumble upon an encounter that almost mocks, perhaps, Shakespeare’s balcony scene, yet at the same time bringing out the tension and sense of daring in wooing, as in any interaction.

To say little more, because the film needs to speak for itself and to a willing recipient, the dialogue, and Sokurov’s tight direction of scenes, both keep at the human level. Even so, the filming introduces visual distortions, say, with the tram, or has us impossibly trying to follow ‘the action’ of Alexei with, and in the company of, his fellow military colleagues, wrestling and struggling in pursuit of exercise and expertise in hand-to-hand, unarmed combat – watching too closely, or trying too much to follow, and missing what else is in the film-frame.

Seen at @CamPicturehouse : thoughtful sound-design, a score meditating on Tchaikovsky, a restricted colour-palette... Father and Son (2003).
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 5, 2015

If Chekhov is a struggle (because we cannot see, or relate to, what is unsaid in all that is said in, say, Uncle Vanya, or The Seagull), or if Pinter’s wordy silences seem awkward (which serve a similar purpose, at times, of making us aware of the underlying sub-texts to our lives and actions ?), that may disincline us to watch Father and Son. Yet one could still try it, but by giving oneself to 83 mins in the undiluted medium of cinema – without trying to understand how the reimagined musical scores or its interplay with the soundscape work, or the heightening and lowering effects with light : so, surrendering, as to a dream-world that is another’s life, to what the camera shows us, chooses to show us.


End-notes

* In the very opening of Book I (‘The Burial of the Dead’) of ‘The Waste Land’ (although only a cursory look at the Faber & Faber facsimile and transcript that Valerie Eliot edited soon has one wondering whether it is Eliot’s poem, or that of Ezra Pound, to whom (in 1925) it was dedicated, and who is credited : Il miglior fabbro). Whilst we are contemplating Eliot, the fact that filming took place in St Petersburg and Lisbon has given something of the effect of his ‘Unreal City’ (via Charles Baudelaire) in Book III (‘The Fire Sermon’, heading the fourth block of lines).

** To quote the lyrics of the track ‘That voice again’ on the album So (or is it So ?).

*** Symbolically, does either desire it – or, rather, to continue to peer through the crack, or through the bottom of the pane ? Cinematically, which is what is posing these questions to us, the effect caught is unnerving, electrifying, and perhaps infuriating both in and outside the action, as we try to address what we are seeing…


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