A historically informed and painterly work of cinema

This is a review of Born (2014) for the ICA's #CatalanAvantGarde series

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 August

This is a review of Born (2014) for the #CatalanAvantGarde series
at The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)

Tickets can be booked here

Note on the title of the film* :

Born is nothing to do with birth, but denotes an area of Barcelona known as El Born (or El Bornet), sometimes conflated with that of La Ribera (meaning ‘the bank’ (of the coastal variety)) in such a way as to denote both areas by the term ‘Born’.

A late-nineteenth-century building survives, called the Mercat del Born (constructed from iron, and formerly a public market), and on its site, when development was planned there (in 2002), extensive remains of the mediaeval city were discovered. Amongst other people, Albert Garcia Espuche has written about this area’s history, and his La Ciutat del Born was an inspiration for this film.


Two years ago, at Cambridge Film Festival (2013) [@camfilmfest / #CamFF], there were two screenings of Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008) in the Catalan strand (Camera Catalonia) :

That film centred on memories of, and one’s present relationship to, the time when the Italian Air Force was helping Franco’s fascist forces by bombing Barcelona (16 to 18 March 1938), and is described in What is Catalan cinema ? as Movingly mixing documentary, acting, and faux-documentary to dig into past pain. Born evokes that period in Catalan history by observations that one of the characters makes in tidying up the wreckage, and whatever can be salvaged, during the city’s bombardment in the War of [the Spanish] Succession (1701–1714) :

First time was ten years ago. Then it was the French. Now the British. And they will do it again. And every time it will be worse. And us, the poor… the people who only want to earn an honest living, will always be under the bombs. Until we say enough.


In this one way, the writers of the screenplay [credited as including Albert Garcia Espuche (please see the note on the film’s title (above)), and director Claudio Zulian] momentarily step outside the period, making a reference that necessarily reaches forward in time to those both attacking, and trying to defend, Barcelona more than 220 years later [and, in turn in Eyes on the Sky, to the lives of combatants, on each side, 70 years later].

The cover of Albert Garcia Espuche's publication

Not that concerns such as whom to trust, borrowing money to feed one’s family, and being subject to external forces, influences and events are not, now as then, what we will recognize as part of life, but – in every other respect than this passing allusion – Born does what it can to keep closely to its period : the approach of Claudio Zuliano, with which both his cast and crew show themselves to be quite in accord, seems to be not to convince us that the action is in the early 1700s, but for them to believe it themselves. So, not for the first time with Catalan film-making, one finds oneself referencing a piece by Borges (previously, it was with Hammudi Al-Rahmoun Font’s Otel.lo (2012) (@otel_lo), from this blog's review of which this is quoted) :

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, composing a story, in essay form, that touches on the life of the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes (Pierre Menard, ‘Author of the Quixote’ (‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’)), imagined how someone (in this case, the fictional Pierre Menard) becomes as Cervantes, partly, at first, by living in exactly the same circumstances as Cervantes and then ends up recreating, word for word, parts of his most famous oeuvre (so, maybe, Borges mocking - amongst literary and intellectual fashions and factions – the Laplacean theory of determinism (as well as the writer(s) whom academics consider the model(s) for Menard) ?)


Not method acting as such necessarily, but, as one looks at these locations and how the actors are deporting themselves, one never has in mind that stagey character of, say, some BBC adaptations of Dickens, where one just senses that a street of Georgian properties has been doctored to look as if it is now being occupied in Victorian times [sometimes, one recognizes the Inns of Court in disguise, as they have been well preserved by the legal profession]. Much more, one thinks of how Ralph Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman (2013) looked and felt, and because it was so beautifully lit: Born has a painterly regard for how its scenes are composed, and in the use of light and dark*** (another point of contact with Otel.lo (and also El Cafè de la Marina, which screened earlier in the #CatalanAvantGarde series – please also see below).

The film falls into three sections, named after Bonaventura (Bonaventura Alberni : Marc Martínez), his sister Marianna (Vicky Luengo), and Vicenç (Josep Julien), an ambitious businessman, who is one of the former’s creditors : in this respect, as well as in the interconnectedness of people who live in proximity to one another, one is reminded of Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille trilogy (on which there is more information here in relation to El Cafè de la Marina (2014) (another film in #CatalanAvantGarde)) : the first two parts, in Daniel Auteuil’s version, screened at Cambridge Film Festival in 2013, Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013).


Unlike, though, Auteuil’s films of gorgeous technical clarity of image, this film resembles Otel.lo, by making good use of an edgy, documentary style, which really first comes into its own after fifteen minutes : we track Bonaventura, following a confrontation with his landlord, and the immediacy involves us in his inner workings, through the language of demeanour and expression, as he walks the streets.

As we will see both Marianna and Vicenç do, we are with Bonaventura when, after refreshing himself with water from the spring, he makes an important realization / decision in his life, and not conveyed in speech – no moment of soliloquy, but in his look, and then in his movements and gestures, until his purpose becomes clear with what the Notary announces a couple of minutes later. For those who like this sort of approach, and realize that a really good piece of cinema may have been made with dialogue not in English, Born has great dramatic quality, and all the rootedness in how ships and trade govern people’s lives and fortunes that we esteem in a play such as The Merchant of Venice.

Tickets can be booked here

End-notes

* Derived from the Wiki articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercat_del_Born and http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrio_de_La_Ribera.

** Essentially, to see whether Charles III or Philip V would rule Spain (amongst other countries).

*** The director of photography and art director are, respectively, Jimmy Gimferrer and Lali Canosa. One is reminded of the use of darkness in masterpieces by Caravaggio, such as The Supper at Emmaus :

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

Useful footage on the Thatcher premiership – if you already know the contexts ?

This is a review, by Tweet, of Generation Right (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 August

This is a review, by Tweet, of Generation Right (2015)

The film was seen as a result of Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 (@sheffdocfest), on Videotheque

And Thatcher is said to have described immigrants as 'swamping' Britain. Nothing about The Falklands, no reference to her ceasing as leader.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 20, 2015

Society does things – things happen – because of inequality.

Norman Tebbit (Lord Tebbit)

Footage of Scargill/ Orgreave/ strikers, but with fleeting mention of civil liberties, and no irony in MT condemning mobs / using police ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 20, 2015

We’ve privatized industry after industry. Government ought not to control business – it doesn’t know how to do it, it interferes.

Thatcher

-> Does it err too much on t.v. interviews and Party Conference speeches, and pretending some sort of vague balance with Tebbit, Howard...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 21, 2015

I don’t believe that economic equality is possible. Indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy, and keeping up with the Joneses and so on, that is a valuable spur to economic activity.

Boris Johnson

All in all, touches on too many topics in 41 mins, and only establishing Blairiteroots in Thatcherism’s tenuous claims to personal liberty

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 20, 2015

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

This is an hard saying; who can hear it ?¹

This is a pre-Festival review of Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

16 August

This is the original pre-Festival review [ahead of what was published] of Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2015)

‘Now go, for one sole will is in us both,
Thou Leader, and thou Lord, and Master, thou.’
Thus said I to him ; and, when he had moved,

I entered on the deep and savage way.

Inferno², Canto II, 139–142

Two men in a forest does not sound as though it has significant filmic possibilities. [Sadly, in the case of Prince Avalanche (2013), one would be right (because one yearned for what makes The Odd Couple (1968) alive).]

A Catalan film for @camfilmfest will be amazing full size : its atmosphere, tension, uncertainty, and reminders of Beckettt, Dante, Borges !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 16, 2015

In the case of Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014), though, one’s cultural resonance is not even with that play about which, in 1955, Philip Hope-Wallace thought himself drily observing that if about anything, [it] is ostensibly about two tramps who spend the two acts, two evenings long, under a tree on a bit of waste ground ‘waiting for Godot’. What it evokes more is Molloy, the two-character first part of the trilogy of Samuel Beckettt’s great mature novels (to which we return below), regarding which Beckettt described En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) : written as a relaxation from the rather awful³ prose I was writing at the time :

In our being with Judes (Marc García Coté) and Oriol Pla (Iu), we know, if not from the opening scene of the film (Jan Cornet’s sole appearance, with Coté), then from the quotation from The Bible that directly follows (Matthew 27 : 3–5), that, taking us from The Mount of Olives onwards, there is a scriptural grounding for what we see : as one will, it is exegesis, re-imagining, or re-interpretation of Judas, betraying Christ with a kiss for money, and how those pieces of silver weigh on him (in English, we refer to 'pieces of silver', because of the King James’ Version). (At times, they fascinate, horrify or even seem to reassure Judes (though he wanted to repel them), yet he also fears them being taken, so they give him care about losing them.) And, with cultures where there is a Spanish-speaking tradition, even if the language of the film is firmly Catalan, one is never far from Jorge Luis Borges – thinking, most immediately, of his daring short-story-cum-scholarly-paper from 1944, ‘Tres versiones de Judas’ (‘Three versions of Judas’) [the link here is to the Wikipedia® web-page for the story, and here to an English translation].

Not uniquely for him, Borges mixes fact and fabrication, bogusly ascribing quotations at the same time as presenting real ones (many a short story of his is headed with quoted words, such as ‘El milago secreto’ (‘The Secret Miracle’), citing The Koran). Yet there is also the level on which, not just through the transmission of thought down the centuries, different times merge and become confused in his canon : in ‘El milago secreto’, the miracle is the relativity of Time, where the writer Jaromir Hladík’s divine petition is answered by its stopping for one group of people, but not for him). So it is that, towards the end of the third of the learned footnotes to ‘Tres versiones de Judas’ (Borges, in – and in spite of – his academic poise and style, is always prompting us to consider How much is jest, and how much am I in earnest ?), we read the passage that probably connects Borges most to Tots els camins de Déu⁴ :

He [Erik Erfjord] writes that the crucifying of God has not ceased, for anything which has happened once in time is repeated ceaselessly through all eternity. Judas, now, continues to receive the pieces of silver ; he continues to hurl the pieces of silver in the temple ; he continues to knot the hangman's noose on the field of blood.


And the foot-note ends with a comment in parentheses : (Erfjord, to justify this affirmation, invokes the last chapter of the first volume of the Vindication of Eternity, by Jaromir Hladík.) Yes, Borges (through this [real or imagined] Erik Erfjord, is relying on the same Jaromir Hladík who, in ‘El milago secreto’, prayed for a miracle concerning Time, and was granted one…



Self-referentially, whether this work by Borges was per se known to, and prompted, director Gemma Ferraté and her co-writer Eduard Sola then becomes immaterial, because the patterns of ideas themselves, as of events, will be subject to circularity, repetitiousness, even recursivity… Regarding the place that their film partly inhabits, Judas, as Borges’ quoted words have it, ceaselessly through all eternity […] continues to hurl the pieces of silver in the temple. And, in the same way, the spirit of Dante is present here.

For, in his great Divina Commedìa, right at the start of Inferno (and within just the first of a further thirty-three Canti) his personified self, too, finds himself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost, meets Virgil, his guide through Inferno and Purgatorio (as far as Canto XXX), and learns that he will be enlightened as to God’s perspective on his and other human lives. In the title of the work, the word ‘Commedìa’ is better understood as a cosmological, rather than a comedic, view [even if Dante does, of course, also delight in settling scores with political and other opponents in what he presents (e.g. in Canto XXXIII)] :

‘Through me the way is to the city dolent ;
Through me the way is to eternal dole ;
Through me the way among the people lost.’

Inferno², Canto III, 1–3

Those who know their Dante will know that the most lost of all – not exactly an Orwellian All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others – are beheld in Canto XXXIV, in the three mouths of Cocytus. They are those who betrayed : Brutus, Cassius, and our own Judas Iscariot, so, in recursive terms, the film feels Dante-esque, and, by invoking Dante, leads us back to Judas ?

But also back to Beckettt, a talented linguist³, who relished Dante, and some of whose texts from the 1950s to the 1970s deliberately conjure up hellish place (or spaces, one even being called The Lost Ones¹ (Le Dépeupleur )), and whose two narrators, in his novel Molloy, are inextricably linked with each other [and with those of Malone Dies (Malone meurt) and The Unnamable (L’Innomable)] : Moran is sent to bring Molloy back, and Molloy has an other-worldly awareness that help is on its way. Both travel on foot (or end up travelling thus – both had bicycles at one point), if not, becoming more and more decrepit, crawling. Both have sinister encounters with others, en route, that feel close to the sometimes taut interplay between Judes and Iu, but there is also the more explicit co-dependency of Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) in Godot, although they do struggle with a desire for freedom / separation [as foreshadowed in Mercier et Camier].


In these terms, then, several dimensions away from the connotations of Prince Avalanche, and rather, in its cinematic resemblance, close both to the emotional darkness of the work of another Catalan director, Hammudi Al-Rahmoun Font, with Otel.lo (Othello) (2012), and to its intriguing approach to an established text. [Before Preti Taneja’s (@PretiTaneja’s) article appreciative of the film appeared in The Guardian (@guardian), Al-Rahmoun Font (@Al_RahmounFont) was interviewed at last year’s Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) (before, of course, having a punting lesson)].

Despite the physicality of Judes’ journeying⁵, this film is less like others such as How I Live Now (2013) and Lore (2012), though, where what we see Eddie and Lore, respectively, endure is part of what changes who they are when they get ‘home’ (but at least as big a part is reacting to what war does to them). Nor is it the Everyman-type temporal and scenic progress of Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man ! (1973), but rather a voyage in the inner territory of the mind :

Nearly at the very end of the film, there is an exchange of dialogue, which the film, to begin with, makes us keep out of except to see it develop through gesture and body language. Then, when we are able to hear their utterances, we find that Judes and Iu have touched now on eschatological topics that have been present to our mind all along, and which a closing image, quoting Michelangelo, makes clear : Dante, Borges, Beckettt are all part of it, but there is also confirmation of how relevant, in some of the locations and the overall feel, all along has been the remarkable piece of film-making that is Hors Satan (2011).

‘Thee it behoves to take another road,’
Responded he, when he beheld me weeping,
‘If, from this savage place, thou wouldst escape […]’

Inferno**, Canto I, 91–93


The music of the film has been sparing and subtle [from two instrumentalists (Jens Neumaier / Maik Alemany) on guitars and keyboards (piano / synthesizers), and Sandrine Robillard on cello], but it is used to prevent us being in the early part of that conversation between Judes and Iu. At the start of the film, it only emerges, as snatches of sound that we catch at whether we have heard, and marking the first real point of contact between the men.

Previously, we have seen Judes, hesitating as to whether someone is really there behind him, and with long shots that linger until, from his point of view, maybe we see movement. At two other significant moments, which signal the place where a change of heart / mind then occurs, the kinds of motion are mirrored differently, first with a degree of energy by guitar and synthesizer, and, then with tentative elegiacism of keyboard arpeggios, against which the cello weaves its line. All in keeping with a film that is not so much meditative as contemplative – a reflection, as the literary parallels are, on life and its mysteries, and an encouragement to give due heed to the latter in evaluating the former.


Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him ; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord

Isaiah 55 : 7–8 (King James' Version)



End-notes

¹ John 6 : 60, in the King James’ Version, which both ends the section that began with 6 : 25 (at 6 : 44, No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day), and links with 6 : 61–71, which concludes with a parenthetical mention of ‘Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon’.

² The first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedìa, in Longfellow’s translation.

³ Not least since Beckettt begrudged deriving recognition for his works from Godot, it is unlikely that he meant ‘awful’ to mean bad in the sense of ‘of poor quality’ (and maybe actually in that of full of awe) ? He may well have written these words originally in French, his preferred language (although he was Anglo-Irish), since he had a master’s degree in foreign languages from Trinity College, Dublin, where he had studied Dante. (In Beckettt’s early prose work More Pricks Than Kicks, one of the stories / sections is even called ‘Dante and the Lobster’.)

⁴ Though there is also the poem ‘Matthew XXVII : 9’.

⁵ In the passages of rough-going, we are right there (through use of a close microphone and hand-holding the camera without a stabilizer) with Marc García Coté’s breathing, and the ups, downs and stumbles of the way, whereas we are more steady, and at a distance, for some shots when he seeks repose.


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

Light floods in : through windows, and into souls

This is a pre-Festival review of El Cafè de la Marina (2014)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 August

This is a pre-Festival review of El Cafè de la Marina (2014)
(for Cambridge Film Festival 2015)

Funny how a few words on a ticket can say so much

[Claudi]

It is a tribute to a cinematic adaptation of a play, let alone of a celebrated one in verse, when such a film feels cinematic, and when there are not great traces of its origins : the review, on these pages, of August, Osage County (2013) was probably not alone in finding that the film badly failed both tests (so did Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure) (2013)).


The place on the Catalan coast that director Sílvia Munt, when in conversation, said that she had been scouting for has, as we will movingly see at one point, a history, but meaning more than that what once happened here : recognizable individuals, who made a living from the sea, and had families and their community on this shore. It is two centuries on from the time of Born (2014), also showing in Camera Catalonia (at @camfilmfest / #CamFF), but we have that same sense of how the past is still with us, and has given us what we call the present*.

For those who know it, the story of Josep María de Sagarra’s play El Cafè de la Marina has similarities to that of Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille trilogy** (coincidentally referred to in the informal interview with Munt, before the film screened for the first time in the UK). (The first two parts in Daniel Auteuil’s adaptation, Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013), screened at the Festival in 2013, with Auteuil playing César, the anxious father.) The resemblances are there, though it is hardly as though de Sagarra’s status should depend on this single play or its origins. (In company with A. A. Milne, he seems to have been prolific as poet, playwright, novelist, translator and journalist, even if Milne is forgotten for those things.)

Four great films on one #CamFF 2013 page : Not only the Pagnol / Auteuil adaptations, but the colourful Drako Zarharzar (@DrakoZarharzar) [and a Q&A with the equally colourful Toby Amies (@TobyAmies)], and the best film missed (in error) at the Festival

Moreover, from Chaucer – using dream poetry in French to found his own – to Shakespeare – never seeming to have a plot (even of plays such as Lear or Hamlet) for which he had not relied on one or more sources – writing can be far more about the telling than the story itself (and we do not denigrate One Thousand and One Nights, or The Decameron, for that). Just as de Sagarra wrote a play in verse form, what we need to respect is that Munt has distilled its essence into a film of around eighty minutes.


We begin with two young friends, larking around in what turns out to be the cafè of the title (a bar, to the edge of the foreshore, rather than what English means by the word), on the beach, and in the village : back at the bar, one of them (Rosa) is our means of introduction to her sister Caterina, and Libori, their widowed father, and it is the eve of Rosa’s wedding (to Rafel). Already, Munt has taken us out to the fishing-boats and around about, and, although much time is concentrated in the bar (or on tables outside for the wedding), the film feels liberated from having had an original stage-setting.

An important element is in the soundtrack, which is partly Joan Alavedra’s original melody ‘Marinada’ (and his arrangements for accordion of other compositions), partly a traditional Catalan fishing song, and partly Xavier Capellas’ compositions for himself on piano and various combinations of six other instrumentalists (including Josep Vila Campabadel ?? on accordion). When we meet Rosa and her friend Gracieta, their excitement – whose exact cause is unknown to us – is there in what sounds like a zither, mandolin, and guitar. Later, when Caterina is first talking about her life, as Gracieta makes herself up, we just have soft guitar that does not detract from a visual encapsulation of her position : in focus, just Gracieta’s reflection, and, blurred, Caterina (seen in the mirror (right)) and Gracieta (foregrounded (left)). Likewise, as bride and groom leave the reception, accordion and the chalumeau register of the clarinet catch Caterina’s feelings.

Rosa, and her father

The film is all about feelings. We may, though, have seen – during Camera Catalonia at the Festival in 2014 – in Tots volem el millor per a ella (We All Want What’s Best for Her) (2013), and Ficcío (Fiction) (2006), that there is a reserved side to Catalan behaviour, morals and personality that is not so different from British equivalents (or, for that matter, traditional Russian ones ?), and the playing helps guide us : when someone is being looked out for, we have quiet guitar, piano and cello, but the same instruments, with energy and rhythms, comment on a scene where encouragement has been offered. (Likewise, there is the intensity of light, both when it penetrates into the bar, and in its heightened quality on the walls of the inescapable buildings.)


Ultimately, it is in highly poetic imaginings (easily delivered as more than the equal of those of Marius in Auteuil’s film), and otherwise just in silence, that what matters most is going to be spoken in El Cafè de la Marina. However, Munt has, twice before, effected a wholly filmic transposition between parallel scenes, where the scoring (or, in the latter case, the use of accordion), by leeching from one into the other, has helped prepare the ground for us.


Maybe more importantly, we also gain, in this act of cinema, a sense of a world of events where our connectedness is not mere cause and effect, or consensus rationality [@russellhobanorg], and where what we dare to do, or hope for, matters : utterly different references, admittedly, but the sort of message that continued to attract The Wachowskis in making Cloud Atlas (2012) (or, even if others may have disparaged it, Jupiter Ascending (2015)).


End-notes

* Through the histrionics of the mother (Meryl Streep) in August, Osage County (2013), maybe we are meant to see something other than the stage-ridden behavior of an aggressive and abusive woman, who has tried to dominate her daughters, and about history… However, dislike it though the contemporary critics may have done, Woody Allen achieved far more in Interiors (1978) (and then in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) [first seen at Cambridge Film Festival]), the former of which influenced Mar Coll with the look of Tots volem il millor per a ella (We All Want What’s Best for Her) (2013), which screened twice at last year’s Festival (both screenings had Q&As afterwards).

** Those who have the desire – and a good grasp of Catalan – can find on the Internet what is thought to connect Pagnol and de Sagarra, whereas this link (to the Wikipedia® web-page) tells one fairly little : http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josep_Maria_de_Sagarra.


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

A historically informed and painterly work of cinema

This is a pre-Festival review of Born (2014) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2015)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

This is a pre-Festival review of Born (2014) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2015)

Note on the title of the film* :

Born is nothing to do with birth, but denotes an area of Barcelona known as El Born (or El Bornet), sometimes conflated with that of La Ribera (meaning ‘the bank’ (of the coastal variety)) in such a way as to denote both areas by the term ‘Born’.

A late-nineteenth-century building survives, called the Mercat del Born (constructed from iron, and formerly a public market), and on its site, when development was planned there (in 2002), extensive remains of the mediaeval city were discovered. Amongst other people, Albert Garcia Espuche has written about this area’s history, and his La Ciutat del Born was an inspiration for this film.


Two years ago, at Cambridge Film Festival (2013) [@camfilmfest / #CamFF], there were two screenings of Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008) in the Catalan strand (Camera Catalonia) :

That film centred on memories of, and one’s present relationship to, the time when the Italian Air Force was helping Franco’s fascist forces by bombing Barcelona (16 to 18 March 1938), and is described in What is Catalan cinema ? as Movingly mixing documentary, acting, and faux-documentary to dig into past pain. Born evokes that period in Catalan history by observations that one of the characters makes in tidying up the wreckage, and whatever can be salvaged, during the city’s bombardment in the War of [the Spanish] Succession (1701–1714) :

First time was ten years ago. Then it was the French. Now the British. And they will do it again. And every time it will be worse. And us, the poor… the people who only want to earn an honest living, will always be under the bombs. Until we say enough.


In this one way, the writers of the screenplay [credited as including Albert Garcia Espuche (please see the note on the film’s title (above)), and director Claudio Zulian] momentarily step outside the period, making a reference that necessarily reaches forward in time to those both attacking, and trying to defend, Barcelona more than 220 years later [and, in turn in Eyes on the Sky, to the lives of combatants, on each side, 70 years later].

The cover of Albert Garcia Espuche's publication

Not that concerns such as whom to trust, borrowing money to feed one’s family, and being subject to external forces, influences and events are not, now as then, what we will recognize as part of life, but – in every other respect than this passing allusion – Born does what it can to keep closely to its period : the approach of Claudio Zuliano, with which both his cast and crew show themselves to be quite in accord, seems to be not to convince us that the action is in the early 1700s, but for them to believe it themselves. So, not for the first time with Catalan film-making, one finds oneself referencing a piece by Borges (previously, it was with Hammudi Al-Rahmoun Font’s Otel.lo (2012) (@otel_lo), from this blog's review of which this is quoted) :

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, composing a story, in essay form, that touches on the life of the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes (Pierre Menard, ‘Author of the Quixote’ (‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’)), imagined how someone (in this case, the fictional Pierre Menard) becomes as Cervantes, partly, at first, by living in exactly the same circumstances as Cervantes and then ends up recreating, word for word, parts of his most famous oeuvre (so, maybe, Borges mocking - amongst literary and intellectual fashions and factions – the Laplacean theory of determinism (as well as the writer(s) whom academics consider the model(s) for Menard) ?)


Not method acting as such necessarily, but, as one looks at these locations and how the actors are deporting themselves, one never has in mind that stagey character of, say, some BBC adaptations of Dickens, where one just senses that a street of Georgian properties has been doctored to look as if it is now being occupied in Victorian times [sometimes, one recognizes the Inns of Court in disguise, as they have been well preserved by the legal profession]. Much more, one thinks of how Ralph Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman (2013) looked and felt, and because it was so beautifully lit: Born has a painterly regard for how its scenes are composed, and in the use of light and dark*** (another point of contact with Otel.lo (and also El Cafè de la Marina – please see below)).

The film falls into three sections, named after Bonaventura (Bonaventura Alberni : Marc Martínez), his sister Marianna (Vicky Luengo), and Vicenç (Josep Julien), an ambitious businessman, who is one of the former’s creditors : in this respect, as well as in the interconnectedness of people who live in proximity to one another, one is reminded of Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille trilogy (on which there is more information here in relation to El Cafè de la Marina (2014) (another film in Camera Catalonia 2015)) : the first two parts, in Daniel Auteuil’s version, screened at Cambridge Film Festival in 2013, Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013).

Vicky Luengo as Marianna

Unlike, though, Auteuil’s films of gorgeous technical clarity of image, this film resembles Otel.lo, by making good use of an edgy, documentary style, which really first comes into its own after fifteen minutes : we track Bonaventura, following a confrontation with his landlord, and the immediacy involves us in his inner workings, through the language of demeanour and expression, as he walks the streets.

As we will see both Marianna and Vicenç do, we are with Bonaventura when, after refreshing himself with water from the spring, he makes an important realization / decision in his life, and not conveyed in speech – no moment of soliloquy, but in his look, and then in his movements and gestures, until his purpose becomes clear with what the Notary announces a couple of minutes later. For those who like this sort of approach, and realize that a really good piece of cinema may have been made with dialogue not in English, Born has great dramatic quality, and all the rootedness in how ships and trade govern people’s lives and fortunes that we esteem in a play such as The Merchant of Venice.


End-notes

* Derived from the Wiki articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercat_del_Born and http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrio_de_La_Ribera.

** Essentially, to see whether Charles III or Philip V would rule Spain (amongst other countries).

*** The director of photography and art director are, respectively, Jimmy Gimferrer and Lali Canosa. One is reminded of the use of darkness in masterpieces by Caravaggio, such as The Supper at Emmaus :

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

Seen at – or adjacent to – Cambridge Film Festival (its earlier, one-screen venue of The Arts Cinema)

Seen at (or because of) Cambridge Film Festival in the mid-1980s

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 August

Seen at (or because of) Cambridge Film Festival in the mid-1980s

It was necessary to borrow Hugh Taylor’s copies of Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) programme-booklets from the early to middle 1980s (two of which, within Apsley Towers (@THEAGENTAPSLEY), are conveniently to hand), so one, almost necessarily, has not located ticket-stubs that could clinch whether one did watch any film, listed below as seen at around that time, at the Festival itself : hence ‘at – or adjacent to – Cambridge Film Festival’ in the title of this posting…

That said, one just knows as fact that one chose to see Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) in what, then, would have still been called a Festival gala performance (not ‘a screening’) : the Festival atmosphere – even then with enviably comfortable seats in the snug premises in Market Passage* – was so good, and one wanted to be part of it, rather than waiting for the film to come on release.

And, before anyone talked about ‘ear-worms’, that is what the catchy, jazzy principal theme of Hannah already was, on leaving the cinema after the credits, to both one’s fellow viewer (@AJRigbyTweet) and one's self (and for a number of days or weeks), courtesy of Dick Hyman’s arrangements, band, and leadership / playing**. The same had been true of the score of Broadway Danny Rose (1984), for which IMDb® (@IMDb) does give Hyman credit as the ‘music supervisor’ : the themes from both films have such a hook to them that one easily recalls them now. (However, at the time that when the Festival booklet had been printed, that film was said to be ‘unconfirmed’ (as may be legible, in the image below, in the column next to that for El Norte), so it did not have a date / time slot in the programme of events at the back, but was later confirmed and came on sale.)


All that being said, and for the two years in question (being those of the 8th and 10th Festivals, respectively), here was what was seen, if not at the Festival in 1984 and 1986, then as a result of it – in each case, the date and time are given simply of the first performance listed in the programme (except for Danny Rose, where one is having to guess when it would have ended by being shown) :

8th Cambridge Film Festival (15–29 July 1984)

Sunday 15 July

* 3.00 The Dresser (1983)

* 6.00 Swann in Love (1984)

* 8.30 El Norte (1983)

Thursday 19 July

* 6.30 The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum) (1975)


Saturday 21 July

* 2.00 Cal (1984)


?? Friday 27 July ??

* ?? Broadway Danny Rose (1984) ??


Saturday 28 July

* 1.30 Paris, Texas (1984) [referenced in The Night Elvis Died (La Nit Que Va Morir L’Elvis) (2010), and referred to in What is Catalan cinema ?]

* * * * *

10th Cambridge Film Festival (10–27 July 1986)

Thursday 10 July : Opening night

* 8.00 Mona Lisa (1986)

Sunday 13 July

* 6.30 Plenty (1985)


Friday 18 July

* 11.00 After Hours (1985) [How Time views After Hours (1985)]

Saturday 19 July

* 11.00 Sid and Nancy (1986)

Sunday 20 July

* 8.45 Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

* * * * *

Twenty-five Festivals later (this will be the 35th), Director of #CamFF
Tony Jones is still in charge

End-notes

* Which runs between Market Street and Sidney Street, when that separated Joshua Taylor from Eden Lilley (one fantasized that they were lovers, cruelly separated by Victorian parents. [Or later ? One thinks of the lyrics of ‘They Can’t Take That Away from Me’ – whose meaning Tommy Smith queried at The Stables lately…]).

Well, anyway, before that became bar / club land, and when, upstairs, had been Angeline’s, a lovely restaurant in which to be made very welcome, and luxuriate in continental cuisine.

Who - of a certain age - remembers this about Cambridge... ? [From the programme-booklet of the 10th @camfilmfest] pic.twitter.com/Z37HEJXmDS

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 12, 2015

** Although not credited by IMDb®, proving unreliable again (and making one doubt oneself and one’s memory, despite owning the soundtrack (on LP)).

*** Probably less famous than Hannah, although with Allen magic of its own, Broadway Danny Rose is a super film in monochrome : with Allen as Danny (an indulgent theatrical agent), his star turn Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte), Mia F. as Lou’s unsympathetic secret lover (whose life-or-death attitude Danny finds immediately and alarmingly frank), and gangsters, in the funniest shoot-out in a hangar that you will ever see !


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

Yorick and Ludwig’s Thanksgiving* at Robinson

This is an account of Tanya Bannister's recital for Cambridge Summer Music Festival

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

7 August

This is an account of a recital given by pianist Tanya Bannister, as part of Cambridge Summer Music Festival, in the chapel of Robinson College on Wednesday 29 July at 8.00 p.m.

There were two UK premieres in the hour-long programme for Cambridge Summer Music Festival (@cambridgemusic) :

Handel (1685–1759) ~ Suite No. 2 in F Major, HWV 427

Harold Meltzer (1966–) ~ Iconography

Sidney Corbett (1960–) ~ Yorick’s Skull

Beethoven (1770–1827) ~ Piano Sonata No. 31 in A Flat Major, Op. 110

Of course, no Cambridge audience without someone being superior to the music or the performance, @cambridgemusic, with slighting comparisons

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 29, 2015

Tanya Bannister (@TanyaBannister) had mounted the scores of both premieres on large pieces of cardboard – not elegant, but eminently practical (as she told us) to avoid relying on a page-turner being able to follow them (and so daunting him or her) :

One was reminded, not a little, of Pierre-Laurent Aimard's sensational recital at Aldeburgh Festival (@aldeburghmusic) in 2014, passing folded-out score after score of Études by Debussy, Chopin, Bartók, Scriabin, and, most of all, Ligeti from in front of him – all in his determined order of playing – to the music student next to him.

(Or, during this year’s Aldeburgh Festival, of the fragments that – indeed – confronted Florent Boffard (except that, a few double-takes apart, he seemed to be confidently in control of them) on the music-stand for Boulez’ Piano Sonata No. 3 during the Boulez Exploration, hosted highly informatively by Julian Anderson (with knowledge about, and recordings of, all things Boulez)**.)


The second work, not just through being longer, made a stronger impression : it felt as though Sidney Corbett might have been studied with Messiaen (or just have studied his work ?), because one heard some of the latter’s typical, mature chordal structure (and even sounds that occur in some of Messiaen’s more inaccessible works for piano). However, Corbett also made much use of repeats, both repeated passages, and chords that were played several times, and those repeated chords were handled very well by Bannister, making them meaningful, and not in any way merely dutiful :

Her playing, and the chapel’s acoustic, suited Yorick’s Skull perfectly, and, fearless of the density and challenge of the work (as was Bannister), it was well received by the Cambridge audience. Despite the programme-notes for (Meltzer’s and) Corbett's works, one might not have been able to hear much of Beethoven’s Opus 110 in the composition, but it was certainly a fitting preparation for its spirit and sensitivities, and one would welcome the opportunity to hear it again.


If one had felt that Bannister was not in touch with Handel***, one had no hesitation in realizing that this was not only untrue of Beethoven (or of these contemporary composers with whom she had collaborated), but that this was actually one of the so-called late Beethoven sonatas with which one was not very familiar. (Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111, and the one known as Hammerklavier (Piano Sonata No. 29, Op. 106) do tend to steal the limelight ?)

One listened for the material from / via Corbett and Meltzer a little, but most one listened to Bannister playing music that must have presented some puzzle to contemporaries (as one had remarked, the week before, with Melvyn Tan’s playing of the immediately preceding work with Opus numbering, Piano Sonata No. 30 in E Major (Op. 109) (as part of a concert in the Festival with The Škampa Quartet)) :

The playing convinced one of a connection with Beethoven, and what he was about here with this sometimes fragmented (and often thought-provoking) music, although much of the detail has been lost to – what legal circles call – effluxion of time. Suffice to say, though, and before going on to what else marked it out, that the performance deserved better than the reluctantly middling approval of the woman (referred to by the opening Tweet) who had facetiously dismissed the new works with a laconic phrase each : one has to be strong to restrain homicidal thoughts that anyone could be so grudging of pianist and composer’s work.


The very open sounds of the ruminative first movement feel, in harmonic terms, as if they are buzzing to modulate and develop, and Bannister gave direction to that emanation : through such things as being assured both in executing runs and in establishing the role that Beethoven had given them there, throughout she showed a very definite sense of the work as a whole. Even into the brief second movement, Beethoven is keeping much material in reserve, rather than ‘opening it out’ : it may begin with a definite impression of itself, but it is one that proves far less certain, even tentative (in ways that slow movements in sonatas from ‘the middle period’, although likewise in the minor key, are not).

With the closing Adagio ma non troppo, just as we could hear Bannister bringing out some of the inner parts in the writing, which meant that we did not just follow the upper line(s), so the programme-notes also usefully drew our attention to elements of the construction of the fugal sections (not just by describing it as an elaborate slow-movement-plus-fugue sandwich, but by expanding on that summary, and analysing the use of thematic material).

Perhaps, unlike the sonata (from 1820) that Tan had played days before, which found comparative freedom in the variations with which it closed, this one (whose autograph score is dated 25 December 1821) elaborates a mixture of complexity and finding resolution by employing the form of the fugue. (Just as Beethoven was to do in 1825, with its original placing within the String Quartet in B Flat Major (Op. 130) of what separately became the Grosse Fuge, Op. 133.) In Bannister’s rendition, not only was the performance of extremely high technical quality, but, in its musical arc, we were able to trust her to guide us, and the emotional depths of the work were therefore always readily apparent.


End-notes

* The notes about the pieces, in the Festival programme, had reminded one of ‘the historical nexus’ against which Beethoven wrote latter works of this kind (i.e. his life – please see below), and [der] Heiliger Dankgesang of the third movement of his String Quartet No. 15, Op. 132. [In full, Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart (not to be mistaken, by non-Germanists, for the earlier Heiligenstadt Testament… – please see below).]

One reads on the web-page for the quartet on Wikipedia® :

Beethoven wrote this piece after recovering from a serious illness which he had feared was fatal because he had been afflicted with intestinal disorder during the entire winter of 1824–5. He thus headed the movement with the words, "Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart" (Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode).


** One thing, amongst many, that we learnt about the Piano Sonata from Anderson was that contemporaries of Boulez had condemned him for using something as eighteenth century as the trill (just as Boulez had sought to correct Xenakis and Cage – without referring to them by name, in an essay, before producing this work – by showing how a piece could be written whose structure would vary between performances, but without resorting to chance). However, it is a sound that one associates with his writing for piano, without it ever seeming like a relic of the baroque or classical past, and a device that Corbett was happy to use.

(In the morning session of Boulez Exploration, also in The Britten Studio at The Maltings at Snape, Anderson had been with Quatuor Diotima, for a presentation about, and performance of, Livre pour quatuor.)

*** In all honesty, before Tanya Bannister explained her programme (and how Beethoven had looked to Handel, more than to Bach, for his fugues), one could already tell that she does not normally play Handel.

NB The paragraphs that follow are principally for those who wish to know more in a critical vein Movements that resembled what Scarlatti sonatas sound like, when over-romanticized by a modern style of playing, had alternated with Glenn Gould’s fast Bach take on, say, movements of The Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) [or French Suites (BWV 812–817)], i.e. Handel had marked it Allegro, but it was being played more like Vivace, if not Presto :

Somehow, though, Gould has an air about him that carries it off (or, depending on one’s point of view, he ‘appears to get away with it’), but there is, of course, a debate to be had about what ground there is for expecting Mozart, say, to be performed in more or less the same way that we perceive to be Mozartian - with or without modern performance practice / instruments.

Yet, at Aldeburgh in 2014, Ian Bostridge gave us A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times, effectively so. However, on the other hand, one had to say of Sollazzo Ensemble, the winners of the Young Artists’ Competition at York Early Music Festival in 2015 : If one were told that this was not meant to be a Balkanized take on works by fourteenth-century composers, or that they had set texts in Italian, one could not credit it.



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