Tuesday, 7 March 2017

LGBTQ and the new world of F-Rated films (thanks to Holly Tarquini at Bath Film Festival) - a good fit ? (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 March

LGBTQ and the world of F-Rated films : Read more below, and your comments are welcome – is it a good match for those who do not identify with polarity of gender, or see themselves as necessarily having a gender, etc., etc. ? (work in progress)





As a result of the efforts of Holly Tarquini at Bath Film Festival (@BathFilm), a rating for films, F Rated, has not only been used at the Festival, and elsewhere, for a while (@F__Rating, but is now being adopted by IMDb.




IMDb, short for the International Movie Data-base (@IMDb), is both, as in the Bath area, amongst the Festival’s neighbours and one of its collaborators (and owned by Amazon, hence all those promotional banners / links to buy on Amazon…)




However, confusion already exists, by virtue of people assuming – or being told, and not checking – that ‘F’ denotes ‘feminist’. Although the criteria for F-Rating clearly do not say this, and a film can be F-Rated simply by virtue of the fact that a woman directed or wrote it (or both), does whether an F-Rated film is then wrongly taken to be an endorsement of it or its values and ethos need due consideration - not least when IMDb / Amazon start F-Rating films in earnest ?



And, then, does the stipulation of a female director start posing questions, when it was Andy and Larry Wachowski (now, respectively, Lilly and Lana) who made The Matrix (1999), etc. [the IMDb biography for Lana Wachowski, compared with that for Lilly, has greatly submerged the birth-name] ? :








 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 6 March 2017

Certain Women (2016) : When flatness of affect turns leaden, and less could have been more

This is a critique of Certain Women (2016) – as against what it could have been

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

6 March


Spoiler alert - to talk of the film, as here, it is almost necessarily full to the brim with them


This is a critique of Certain Women (2016) – as made, as against what it could have been (work in progress)

There is an approach in cinema, which is almost as much a state of mind for us, as viewers, as for the depicted places and persons, that is best characterized by citing Once Upon A Time in Anatolia (2011) – though, for those with no patience or feeling for mood and reflective space, Sokurov’s much, much shorter Mother and Son (1997) will seem more of an endurance than around three hours ?



In Certain Women (2016), no such ethos is evoked, but there is a flatness of affect to it from the very opening shot :

 A train heads towards the bottom left-hand corner (and, there, the plant that is the only thing in focus). (Even the table-top mountain – and unmoving clouds – look as if unrealistically let into the background to the rail-road in the foreground, and the expanse behind it [i.e. done unconvincingly in post-production].) Then, of sorts, a mood is generated, but not pervasively, by a man dressing post-coitally, extreme right and in another room, and a woman seen just from below her knees, putting on socks – it is the height of trying to create a frisson of dullness around Laura, despite taking time in her lunch-break for an affair.

 Laura (Laura Dern) goes on to be, if she were to have survived in the profession for any time, an implausibly malleable attorney (and Fuller, doing the manipulation, a claimant – they are still called plaintiffs in the States – to resist and reject whose demands, with dignity and justification, she seems quite unused, unsuited, and unskilled). The lingering question why Fuller feels aggrieved may deliberately only ever be given in snatches that are interrupted, and so partial, but, then, this is because the story decides to foreground the element of unreasonable expectation / unreasonable acquiescence – just as the opening image does the train, in motion – and leaves the looming question how he actually could have compromised his injury case for peanuts*.

Maile Meloy, in the stories that are Certain Women’s basis, may have evidenced better understanding of real law (practice and procedure), rather than the pretend variety that litters film and t.v., but it is not here. The boring fact of the matter (i.e. the mountain that, after the fact, has not so artfully been grafted in behind) is that attorneys specifically need and have the protection of standard protocols (because, for one thing, their professional indemnity cover would insist on following them) for dealing with clients who ill-advisedly wish to accept settlement offers that, without being as derisory as this one seems to have been, no one with a duty to advise them could recommend accepting.


 That may be uncharitably against the unrealism of scenarios with a client and an attorney, and it could equally miss something in the kindred setting of Nebraska* (2013) to ask for strict verismilitude, but making a compromise with the tenable has to be for good reason (not just that it is simple to make up and fake). Whereas this story, told with unutterable flatness as if it is a virtue, and with Laura even being casually manipulated by the law-enforcement officers to endanger herself for no good reason, made one long for Steve Coogan’s take on such matters in Alan Partridge : Alpha Papa (2013) : yes, Laura is one of these ‘certain women’ of the title, and she has a particularity, but it is only of not being persuasive that she could, if twisted thus, survive in legal practice, when client-work is ever full of inter-personal traps.

Even so, the story, even in its own terms, is just as much about Fuller, which means that the film has hindered its own credibility, by making scant sense of Laura’s role as his legal adviser (none of which is much assisted by off-hand remarks from one or two others, who suggest some merit in his feeling aggrieved). Even if one shelves Laura, sitting on the floor in the middle of the night and reading out his case-file to him, onto the level of the symbolic, doing so effectively side-lines issues of whether she did right by him, if the court and she in any way wrongly facilitated a settlement that precluded considering the effect of a prognosis where a provisional award for damages was likely to be better : good law, but a poor story - which should counsel against not adapting the story in film ?


The second story takes up some more screen-time (it would have been interesting to have noted how much the first and second occupy in relation to, and before we get to, the third – after two indifferent segments, one with production values that are not just per se better, but wholly quite other, with qualities of performance / presence / poise, cinematography, editing, sound-design…).

 Put more briefly, some awkwardness, along with much more flatness, in a couple’s buying (or being given), some building-stone from a man of 76, whose connection to them is wholly unapparent. (Everyone calls the material sandstone, but it little resembles what that term usually refers to, and more resembles granite ?). The wife (whose wife is she, i.e. who is he ?¹), Gina (Michelle Williams), is the moving force behind asking if they can buy it – yet, at best, it seems to be acquired for no better reason than, as she reasons to herself, if they did not take it, someone else would, because there is somehow too little left, of what was once a school-house, to do much with.


 (Apart from a bit of bogus ambiguity whether Albert, the 76-year-old, feels cheated, a story about precious little, although someone somewhere must believe that it said more : it is as if, on a recommendation that one increasingly doubted, one newly started watching New York Stories (1989), but Scorsese’s incendiary opener ‘Life Lessons’, with Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette, had just been substituted by another segment as trite and unchallenging as what follows it, Coppola’s ‘Life without Zoe’.)

 What we hear said plenty, but in emotionally largely even terms, is to care for Gina, because she does so much for them (e.g. negotiating this pile of building material, with which little can be done ?). Yet the only moment in the whole section that really spoke of anything that seemed felt was when her husband¹ makes a long reverse down to the gate, which she has opened for him, and. in doing so, he talks to their daughter Guthrie (Sara Rodier) in a monologue…

* * *

From a review by Leslie Felperin for The Hollywood Reporter :

 Yet while there’s no doubt this is the work of a filmmaker entirely in command of her craft, there’s something a trifle academic and dry about the whole exercise, and slightly lacking in narrative cohesion given the nature of its origins. Unlike, say Robert Altman’s Short Cuts or other films adapted from collections, this feels like three discrete works laid alongside one another, like pictures in a gallery, not a triptych.



Post-script :

 There is now another perspective to share, after chatting the film over, with someone who – on another day – just happened to have seen the film (this is the stuff of being at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse) – not just during Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest)).

 After agreement that the second story seemed (for want of the words used at the time) inadequately substantial (though leaving the interlocutor keen enough to read the original short stories), there was more interest in Laura, and less being distracted by the plausibility of her career in law : the suggestion is that she is a small-town lawyer, used to small-town matters, and that, when she took on this this compensation case, she had found herself out of her depth, and thus her inability to parry the demands from Fuller results from something different. Maybe…


To some, the title also appears to offer another way of understating the word ‘certain’, beyond that familiar in some forms of narration (or one could naturally say ‘certain types’), such as ’Now there were certain Greeks among those who went up to worship at the festival. Reading Certain Women this way would imply that one can ascribe acting decisively to the behaviour of the women, and – except to the extent that most films depend on something happening – might one look for that quality of certitude in vain ? (It is only essential to find if, if one wants to say that each woman acts with certainty, and that there doing so is important to the film. Words [from a review ?] that are being used to promote the film begin 'Three strong-willed women'.)


End-notes :

¹ One forgets, but state or federal law takes the usual position further that a full and final settlement should not be accepted when the prognosis has not resolved, but an interim payment : here it appears that an employer that makes a payment in settlement binds the employee against the person who might have been sued. It is vaguely enough there in the story, but really skated over.

² As in the past, IMDb, lets us down here : the last character in Laura’s story is Amituana, it then lists Gina, her daughter Guthrie (Sara Rodier), Albert (Rene Auberjonois), but not Gina’s husband, as the next character is The Rancher (Lily Gladstone), and that is the third story…



However, as looked to be the case at the time - but how does one confirm it (in a Montana ID parade, one big man with a big beard, briefly seen, looks much like any other) ? - Neil White (@everyfilmneil) clarifies, in his review : The lawyer's hook-up (James Le Gros) turns out to be the husband of a businesswoman (Williams) who goes on a weekend family camping trip and visit to an elderly man they know.

³ It would be good to have confirmation of this perception (as screen-time is not always possible to judge accurately), but the running-time of the third story may nearly equal that of the other two combined : with reprises of the latter feeling as if they have been tacked on at the end to provide a sense - not a very good one - of a frame. (Plus locating in Laura's law office in the place where Lily Gladstone's character, in the third story, drives to and makes speculative enquiries).






 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 3 March 2017

Mayhem with murderous intent, yet stately and serious of purpose : Neil Brand's orchestral score for Robin Hood (1922)

This is a review of Robin Hood (1922), with new orchestral score by Neil Brand

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

25 February



This is a review of the new orchestral score for Robin Hood (1922) by Neil Brand, as performed by The BBC Symphony Orchestra, under Timothy Brock, at Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden, Essex, on Saturday 25 February 2017 at 7.00 p.m.




Playwright, composer and accompanist of silent fims, Neil Brand (@NeilKBrand) has recently come to a wider audience as a t.v. broadcaster, in and through his series The Sound of Cinema, and The Sound of Musicals

Neil¹ has regularly played silent films at Cambridge Film Festival - including, last year, Buster Keaton for Kids [of all ages] ~ Here we had Neil’s score for more than 90 musicians for Robin Hood (1922), as orchestrated by Timothy Brock (for the second part, alongside Hugo Gonzalez Pioli) : by contrast, in 2011, Neil and percussionist Jeff Davenport had played it between them at #CamFF


First part :

At the start of the film, the scene was given by a glissando, the timpani, and by setting the woodwind against the brass, and lively writing for harp. Later, as tournament was established, a quiet theme was presented, with a hint of horns, and we were already quite clear who were King Richard I (Wallace Beery) and the Earl of Huntingdon (Douglas Fairbanks) [plus the skulking, sullen Prince John], and, amidst trombones, martial sounds, and procession, the gracious sweetness of strings.

 During stately declamations, Lady Marian Fitzgerald was next characterized by a delicate pizzicato, Prince John by deep cellos and basses, and sinuous oboe for Sir Guy of Gisbourne. Gisbourne tries to cheat, to get near Lady Marian (Enid Bennett), but this is the last of Huntingdon’s thoughts (soberly assuming a fair contest of skill ?), and we focus on the merriment (rather than Gisbourne (Paul Dickey) and his henchmen) - because Fairbainks is mobbed by women (in that way of ‘the flower of chivalry’), but has told his king that he is ‘afeared of women’ [which tickles us - it tickles us especially, for the combination of the shame-faced inter-title, with Huntingdon's demeanour !].

 Later, in the huge hall of the castle (Fairbanks' dreamchild), as Prince John (Sam De Grasse) toys with his sinister goblet, and a desire to poison Richard, the latter has more sport at Huntingdon’s expense, by tying him to an upright stone, and at the growing mob of women around him : he breaks away to rescue, and find fascination in, Lady Marian [many of the women around and about him were more obviously alluring - but she must be his type ?], and so make himself an enemy to Gisbourne (Paul Dickey). It is only just at this point that we had become truly aware that this gathering is on the eve of setting out for the Crusades, and as he courts her (with a love theme plus flutes).


With the procession in which King Richard makes ready to go – he appointed Huntingdon to be his second in command, and also urged him to woe a maid during the night before, but, with increasing tetchiness, Wallace Beery peremptorily now calls out for Douglas Fairbanks’ appearance – we hear purposiveness in more subdivided note-values. It is from now on that we become more aware of the vibraphone (or ‘vibes’), and start to notice how it becomes significant : we think of it usually as a relaxed sound, but these are sinuous and sinister vibes, and – in conjunction with the Prince John theme – denote his dread intent, of which we already know…

The army is on the Continent when Marian is bold to pen Huntingdon an uncensored account of life in England under the rule of John, and, in this respect, Robin Hood is a political film for our day, because it shows how quickly what had been taken for granted in life can change and be changed : for John has swiftly moved to tax and otherwise penalize those who already had little to make revenue² for him and those to whom he looks to maintain power. As well as a shock, a love-note for Fairbanks, which comes with the sweetness of oboe and flute.

 Fearful that Richard will abandon the Crusade, if he knows, Fairbanks feels forced to make his request, without giving reasons, to return to England, and we hear the solemnity in the trombones, and the snare-drum. Unfortunately, he then has to repeat it, because the same man who made Huntingdon his second also insisted that he needed a maid at home, for when war is over, and now cannot credit him with any better reason than she : king and knight are not talking the same language, because the former sees it as a big, if impertinent, joke.


Meanwhile, the highly symbolic play is in the sky, with Gisbourne’s falcon bringing down the dove that bears Huntingdon’s message for Lady Marian (at the tournament, Richard had enticed John to wager his falcon on Gisbourne’s tourney defeating Huntingdon). The score to this, Gisbourne’s stopping Huntingdon from deserting, and instead producing the message and other proofs of treason gives weight to the serious purpose, and sense of the stately, and then with eerie effects on vibraphone, and plangent viola and cello.

 Fortunately, Gisbourne is another knight out of step with his king, because the more that he over-eggingly insists that death is the penalty for a traitor, the less Richard wants to do it. Bundling Huntingdon (still with a fresh wound from Gisbourne) and his squire into the tower till Richard’s return looks undignified and painful, but it is worth harp and soft vibes, although the latter become suspensive with the plot ‘then let them rot’, when the convoy has moved on. (Surviving is what proves to have mattered, as the squire then springs them from captivity…) With the process and intensity of the score, we had been able to feel the drama building, which is something special in music for silent film.


For the close of the first part, to which this has been prelude, messages in telegraphese about the mysterious robber-chief (with which Neil Brand made play in Blackmail (1928) [also at Saffron Hall, with this conductor and orchestra], and its computer-brain, seeking incriminatory data), and the impression of lively rebellion from the luminous violins, and their energy and pulse : stealing from the rich to give to the poor, whilst John - when not torturing and persecuting – uses outdated (and fussily tetchy) words, such as ‘meddling’ and ‘tattling’, to describe Lady Marian’s actions.

 From other films (and accounts), we know the fantastical exploits in more detail, and the characters and characteristics of the woodland ‘pals’, such as Will Scarlett : after some merrie frolics and horseplay, Fairbanks’ focus remains on the story of this new life, for Huntingdon, as Robin Hood… (The original inter-title granted an interval of just six minutes, but service at the bar necessitated taking a little longer.)
Second half :

Slow to make good on ensuring that some people did not return from the Crusade, and to flute and harp, and then to the surprise of the deed with vibes, strings and tubular-bells – Gisbourne stabs the sleeping Richard. Except that, to resonant vibes, and then muted trombones and timps, when he turns over the body, Richard finds that his fool (or jester) has been killed in his stead (he tells him that has slept in his bed once too many).

 Gisbourne is hardly ‘a valiant knight’, but, when Richard hears of one in England, he guesses at who it is, and his laughter, and that of Robin, link them (as against the sour John) : to an English dance, and then the tune of ‘Richard of Loxley’, we see good-hearted distribution of dole, and restorative acts, on the greensward.
It is usually said, with versions of the story of Robin Hood and Lady Marian, that she must have thought him dead, when she had no answer to the message that she sent, and she, equally, had spread around the story of her death, although she is actually at the priory of St Catharine’s : in Robin Hood, the moment when they become disabused is exactly that when what has really happened to them - and who and where they are - becomes known to Prince John, mixing Joy with Doom...

With that to work on, in terms of dramatic irony, the second part of the film is where whether escaping, or getting somewhere else to effect a rescue – in time – is in issue, and generates suspense. The first is at St Catharine’s, after Robin Hood has brought back its monstrance and other liturgical items (John’s pretence of raising funds for the Crusade – by raiding a religious order – is shown to be just that), and intercutting with, probably, the Sherriff of Nottingham's men approaching, but about John’s dire retributive work.


 Here, Neil gives us :

 (1) Lady Marian, by water – richness of strings and modulation, (2) another initiate identifies Robin Hood as Huntingdon – swell and woodwind, and brass undertones, (3) the plotting of John – sinister tremolo plus vibes, (4) Robin and Marian – ‘happy’ violin-tone and vibes, (5) cross-cutting, until Robin mistakenly leaves her, as if safe – triangle and soft pizzicato, (6) the militia approaches - a sinister snare-drum pattern, (7) arrival of troops - snare-drum plus triangle and xylophone, (8) when searching - over to glockenspiel, then back to xylophone.


The next long scene is with Lady Marian and the Sherriff of Nottingham (and briefly contrasted with Robin’s mood, thinking that a victory has been won, and that he can carouse – till told news otherwise), and scored with elements that begin with tremolo, with bassoons and trombones, and then enters the territory of ‘spooky’ vibes, heralding the screech of woodwinds, joined by basses, for the Prince John theme - to which are added trombones, plus tubular-bells (as at the fool’s death), and with that ambiguity, as previously, of the beats of the snare-drum.


Momentarily, these disturbing elements are mitigated by the excitement of the stranger’s lusty fight with Little John, who then (and therefore) acclaims the still-helmeted figure King Richard – to the jubilant sound of cymbals. In Nottingham, Robin is happy, joining in, and celebrating its capture - with an ale-horn³ : till he has news of Marian’s, and makes great haste for the castle, which we hear in the use of hectic xylophone. BBC Symphony boasted some half-a-dozen versatile percussionists, watching whose movements served as a guide [as at an all-Steve-Reich concert at this venue]), and clarified what sounds were reaching us at any moment (as well as hoping to keep track of the action). This player moved directly to give us a moody passage on the vibes, and into further telegraphese (with harp and strings), to signify the messages that are vitalizing the counter-assaulting forces.


Now, it is as if, for her tattling and meddling, Lady Marian is no better than some sacrificial victim. (At the time of John’s peeved comments, we had seen her lady-in-waiting or handmaiden tortured, to make her confess what her mistress had written to Huntingdon, but there was no Marian to answer the offences.) The inter-cutting is to Robin’s high daring, notably athleticism on the drawbridge, and we know that he provided Marian with a dagger, expressly in case of her virtue being assailed, so his battling against great numbers is also against the clock.

 At one point, we see Marian speak from under a cross, with xylophone, timps, and string-strokes – perhaps for private devotions, long abandoned in this castle, where Marian is instead supposed to be the agreed reward for ill-doing (although twice bungled) ? Later, she is driven to the window by the menace of Gisbourne's advances, and, looking up, Robin perceives the danger, seeing her at the window : as has been the stuff of theatre since as least Sophocles, and evidently in Lear, there is a leap, but no fall.


Do not ask, as one’s attention was elsewhere, how Neil scored Robin jumping up and Marian’s being caught, but, be it here or with Neo and Trinity in The Matrix (1999), there is something so deeply and primally moving about the other being there, seconds to spare, to effect the rescue. As Huntingdon, Robin promised to crack Gisbourne’s spine, and we heard that sound ring out, after Robin has had his grip around Gisbourne’s neck, exerting force – again, immersion in the drama means that, as is a true credit to conductor’s and composer’s craft, one would have to watch again to know what the scoring did here !

 So, from Marian and Robin meeting again after a year or more (though unaware of the tightening noose), and Robin spurred into energetically saving her from death (we can be glad that she did not trust to the blade that he gave her - please see above, as to when this was...), it is still Robin, alone, and unaided, despite the ‘three blasts’ horn-signal, which promised so much. Initially, the mood is summed up by anxious triangle and quiet xylophone, because Robin's charmed life only got him thus far, and not even Marian is safe again :


This still suggests that Marian may be given the dagger after the mid-air catch - an excuse to watch it all again !


 Against material to match the greatest darkness that Shostakovich conjures in his symphonic works, we see Robin tied to the same post where he was mocked, by Richard’s having placed him at the mercy of the mob of women. The cross-cuts, this time, are more frequent, but, although they offer some hope and even given that the dagger that John is to dip – as a signal to the cross-bolts to fire – obligingly lingers about doing so, too little is at hand. Or so it appears… because the bows fire, and then the tail and stout shield of King Richard interposes, deflecting them from harming Hood / Huntingdon.


It is not too much to say that there is a moment of revelation. The lion-hearted king, whose people his trustworthy patriot and friend has been protecting, and protecting in Richard’s own name⁴, reasserts his regality and his reign. Pulling down the dark drapes on the throne, Richard shows that the three vivid lions are still there, underneath the appearance.

Even now, some might perhaps still think to call it a group hug, but, back to the film’s opening gesture of glissando, Richard, Marian, and Huntingdon cheerfully embrace, as we launch into strings, and the flowering of the theme, with glockenspiel. Prince John is put outside the door, and the drawbridge raised against him.

 The only mutiny is in the matter of matrimony : passing over the question of droit de seigneur, has Richard’s sense of humour gone astray, or is it a test for Huntingdon ? On a wedding-night, we would – pranks apart (or those traditions that demand to see the virginal bed-sheets) – not do such a thing, but this is the third time that Richard has bellowed for his knight, and this at the door behind which he has been shut out.


Wisely, because, whether he wishes to give his personal greetings, he should really read Do not disturb !


As at the end of the first part, the approbation was warm and keen, but this time Neil could come down from his seat, and Timothy Brock and he could each urge that he owed the other more.

A thoroughly satisfying evening, and one commends which other dates this tour de force with Robin Hood screens on !


End-notes :

¹ Neil had comped Cambridge Film Festival director Tony Jones, who in turn invited Ramon Lamarca, its programmer of Camera Catalonia (as well as its Retro 3-D strand), and #UCFF. (This was a rematch, involving some story about winning a pair of tickets, through Silent London (@silentlondon), for the premiere at The Barbican in September 2016, and then Ramon not getting to see the film, because of someone at #UCFF getting the early start-time, of 7.00 p.m., wrong…)

² Forgetting that Crusades were, as all wars are, ways of occupying territory and taking what belongs to others, the usual version of the story says that John exaggerated the cost of the crusading force, and justified such cruel measures by needing to pay for it.

³ In branding terms – no pun intended ! – Huntingdon has caught this hearty, man-of-the-people look, and which has been the making of a trusty, if once unduly serious, knight – and the film thrives on the gaiety of the man who deserts his king’s service to do the proper service of saving his people, and of giving them comfort and hope.

⁴ With paper versions of Richard’s heraldic lions used to promote that allegiance, as well as prankishly belittling those who have been causing enmity and fear – there, again, is that unity in laughter). There is something proto-Aslan to Wallace Beery, though Aslan is more wise, who also enjoys good-natured fun ?




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 23 February 2017

I lost track, somewhere – what was real, what was performance

This is a response to Mica Levi's score for Jackie (2016) and its context in the film

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 February

This is a response to Mica Levi's score for Jackie (2016) and its context in the film


Right from the start of the film, Natalie Portman’s detail-rooted response, as Jackie Kennedy, to the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy – to losing him, and to what his assassination means, because he was also the 35th President of the United States of America – is prefigured and then accentuated by ‘a dying fall’ in Mica Levi’s score¹.


 As we proceed with the elements of Levi’s sound-world and with Jackie (2016), they are multi-layered, with, for example, a cello-part that alludes to when Pablo Casals performed at The White House (as depicted), and, with some material, Levi sometimes seems to be subtly evoking the stateliness of many tributes in music to JFK² (if not the twelve-tone Elegy for J.F.K. (1964) that Stravinsky composed [Cathy Berberian, and three clarinet soloists from the Rome Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by Pierre Boulez, via YouTube] ?).





As mentioned, Neil White’s (@everyfilmneil’s) long-running cinema-blog [everyfilm.co.uk], where he sets himself the challenge every year of watching every film that has any release in the UK [starting from 1 January, Neil’s reviews number 87 at the time of writing], had very usefully set out what this film is, and so caused it to be listed to be watched :

 Portman captures Jackie's essence in a film which is quite different to any which will be released this year. […]

It ought to be made clear that this is not a biopic of Jackie's life with JFK nor does it explore her further life and marriage to Aristotle Onassis.

Instead, it concentrates on the immediate aftermath of the assassination with occasional flashbacks to the shooting and a live TV programme in 1961 in which she revealed changes she had made to the White House.

Greta Gerwig (as Nancy Tuckerman)


Although Jackie is seen through the relative calm of being framed by a fictionalized newspaper interview³ (one of several ‘frames’ within the film, another of which also involves a significant conversation³), the scenes within its chosen strands speak of Jackie’s deep anxiety at the death of her husband, and at The White House, following her life with him there. As alluded to by Neil White, these are lives effectively lived out on t.v. : when Jackie Kennedy gives a tour of what Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig) suggests she call ‘the people’s house’, it is largely on her own, because it has been thought best for her husband only to join her at the end, and we see all the apparatus of the static and wheeled cameras that make this welcome possible, and, behind the illusion, Nancy mouthing reminders and encouragements to smile…


 Director Pablo Larraín and director of photography Stéphane Fontaine have given the meeting with the journalist a very different ambience (with its peaceful location on the edge of water, at a named property in Massachusetts), so the times when we are with them cause other parts of the film – whose shooting-style and camera-movement make them feel highly tense and claustrophobic – more manageable⁴. For us, as much as for Jackie Kennedy : nonetheless, the cumulative effect of the motifs of Mica Levi’s music – and finally seeing the horror, near the end of the film, of being at John Kennedy’s side during the shooting – leave us unsettled.

 The grief, the guilt and the anger at God, which we hear her ruminate and rage on in the moments with The Priest⁴ (John Hurt), are very much her own (could she have shielded her husband, and where was God in it all ?), and we have a very definite sense of place. Yet, in both of these ‘frames’, time seems deliberately elongated and a little unreal, and, when we end up at night-fall, it seems even more unworldly…

Jackie Kennedy with The Priest (John Hurt)


Maybe the anxiety, which in Jackie Kennedy has her mind concentrate on all that is specific (as a way of trying to cope with the reality of what has happened), is not being portrayed because she is different, or set apart from, our experience. The particularities of her hurt and pain apart, can we identify with moments as nonsensical as someone insisting that an autopsy has to take place, because it is ‘required by law’, but not being able – or not being willing – to say what an autopsy entails ?

Is anything familiar to us in that nightmarish moment of her rushing to the doors behind which the autopsy is taking place, only to be caught and turned back by Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) ?




End-notes :

 ¹ That straine agen, it had a dying fall.


Twelfth Night (Act I, Scene 1) [text from the First Folio]




² Though, necessarily, avoiding the obvious sound of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings [Leonard Bernstein conducts The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, via YouTube], which was broadcast over the television at the announcement of Kennedy’s death. (It was an arrangement that Barber had made, in the same year as his String Quartet, Op. 11 (1936), of its slow movement, and which had been heard when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death was announced, and on many public occasions since.)

 We read in Wikipedia® :The Adagio for Strings was one of John F. Kennedy’s favorite pieces of music. Jackie Kennedy arranged a concert the Monday after his death with the National Symphony Orchestra and they played to an empty hall.
³ Neil White comments on this point in his review (please see main text, above), 'Director Pablo Larrain based the movie around an interview which Mrs Kennedy conducted with Life Magazine's Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. who is played by Billy Crudup but not named.' On the film's web-page on IMDb (@IMDb), Billy Crudup is generically credited as ‘The Journalist’, John Hurt as ‘The Priest’.

Jackie Kennedy with The Journalist (Billy Crudup)


⁴ Not the least of the ambiguity, with The Journalist (and The Priest ?), is what, of what we see Jackie Kennedy speak, she is actually saying to him, and what saying, but forbidding him to report (since she had said, at the outset, that she would be editing as they go) – but also the uncertainties between them all along, such as when she asks whether he is giving her career advice, or suggesting that she should hold a party at the house - or when she matter-of-factly tells him, I don’t smoke, so directly denying what we see her do.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 21 February 2017

Further Beyond (2016) : Is Eliot right that we Cannot bear very much reality ? (uncorrected proof)

This is a response to Further Beyond (2016) and a Q&A with Christine Molloy

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 February
This is a response to Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s Further Beyond (2016), which screened at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Tuesday 7 February 2017, and was followed by a Q&A with the former (uncorrected proof)



The review



 At the conclusion of the Q&A (to which we return below), Christine Molloy was asked about Barry Lyndon (1975) – Further Beyond (2016) had itself alluded to director Stanley Kubrick, in a perhaps wry anecdote about location-scouting for the duel at the start of Barry Lyndon. (Specifically, the question was about the use of the narrator (Michael Hordern) as a reference for Further Beyond.)

It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled ; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.

Apart from this levelling remark, Barry Lyndon leaves a measure of uncertainty, with Hordern’s voice-over veiling, near the end of the film, what is known about Redmond Barry after the counter-balancing duel that causes him to lose a leg : Kubrick has deliberately had us follow Barry / him for most of three hours (but, all along, not without quite a little irony in the tone and content of the narration), only to have – as Barry’s leg is – our knowledge curtailed. (For Thackeray’s novelistic purposes, maybe one could believe [until looking at the text... please see below¹, and the Epilogue⁴] that he also had more interest in the first place – and that more anti-Irish feeling was to be maintained or generated ? – by just telling certain aspects of the story of this real-life character (taken from Andrew Robinson Stoney, an Anglo-Irish rake and fortune-hunter).)

In cinematic terms, however, it is as though Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy had pursued Kubrick’s trail from this point onwards, where he had it go cold, in making a film that deals with the earlier parts of their subject Ambrosio O’Higgins’ life, in that they are most drawn to that about which they (or anyone) know least, and making that its matter…


In the English translation of his novel Molloy (written in French, and co-translated by Samuel Beckettt with Patrick Bowles), the second part, narrated by Jacques Moran, begins with – what literary critic Hugh Kenner classifies as – two declarative sentences. At the very close of the book, those sentences are quoted, before its final two sentences calmly put both into the past tense, and (truncating the second) negate them both :

 Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.


 Even for those who know the novel (with all its evasions and qualifications), and that it is leading up to this denial, the effect remains profound, disquieting.

With Further Beyond, unlike Beckettt’s provisionality with consequences (or even Kubrick's), we are perhaps more in the territory of Laurence Sterne, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, where we should know that we are being spun a story to amuse us, but which, taken for a serious account, might vex and infuriate – for example, by having us accord, to a squiggle on the page, a description of the movement of a stick wielded by Corporal Trim.


The directors may not have intended us to be so casual about the just as real-life Ambrosio O’Higgins (just as Thackeray, in Stoney, had his original material). However, in a way, what might the cumulative effect be of repeatedly being told, at various points, what the film ‘would have shown’ next, and of interjections such as It can be a real pain in the arse, all of this !, and could it not leave one – rather than in a Becketttian state of provisional, creative uncertainty – not knowing whether to believe any of the story of Ambrosio (or that of Helen, co-told with his³) ?

If so, might we be, despite ourselves, largely indifferent whether any of it - a field in Meath, or what we are told is [the townland of] Ballynary, Co. Sligo - is true or not... ?



Interlude


 As Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768) might have observed, the attempt to do justice to five or six enquiries - and Christine Molloy's response to them - in a write-up of the Q&A had, on advice, in fact struck a false tone : since it had failed in its own terms, it has now been omitted.





Epilogue


Should the first part of this write-up seem harsh, what we are talking about is not the quality of the film-making, or the subject (Helen and Ambrosio’s real stories) : rather, it is a matter of trying to assess, in the assembly and presentation of the material, what directorial judgements have been made, and – for good or ill – to what effect.

 With regard to the deliberate uncertainties and doubts employed in Barry Lyndon (or in Beckettt’s novel Molloy) (please see above), they do seem more finely balanced. In Michael Hordern’s words or tone, Kubrick is hinting, amongst other aspects of the film, at the question of reliability of the edifice that is / is behind con-artist Redmond Barry’s life⁴, and it is all done so as to enrich and nourish our appreciation of the nature of what telling a story essentially always is, of putting things a certain way – in a certain light.

 In a way, happy though we may be with it, Kubrick’s version of the conclusion of Barry’s life⁴ has him slip away into the unknown (rather than, before a return to England, and Barry’s capture and imprisonment, doing so at that point, as in Thackeray’s novel (with whatever relation it has to the real case of Stoney (please see above)). Whereas, although Thackeray’s novel has no doubt whatever about Barry’s final years, demise, or even cause of death, this is not the stuff of films, and so Lawlor and Molloy have sought to make Further Beyond in full knowledge of that spirit. Others, in watching the film, may not have doubted so much what they were being told that they renounced the enterprise…



Other reviewers

 Finally, two reviews are linked via the film’s web-page on IMDb (@IMDb) :

 That by Tony Tracy [also called ‘Tom’ ?], for Film Ireland, seems to end up in the same place as this posting’s Epilogue (above), by saying [what is quoted is from the beginning of the long last paragraph, and represents two-thirds of it – the review runs to around 1,500 words] :

I’ve included all this detail to communicate that the film is dense and complex, both in its construction and ideas. But while both these individuals are fascinating in their own way and while the film is full of stimulating intellectual digressions (with reference to Barthes, Bachelard, Sontag, Benjamin and others) I was not entirely convinced that bringing them together illuminates the other or the larger themes the film is reaching for. While there is an outline of each narrative ‘journey’ and while there is speculation as to their thoughts, Ambrose and Helen feel like rather strained projections than real people. (Perhaps there was a more solid basis for their thoughts than was revealed). The film ends with the suggestion to ‘make a start’ and while that is in keeping with the tentativeness of the film’s overall approach, it proves deeply frustrating from the perspective of story or even thesis. With so much called into question through form, narration or tone, the film leaves us with little to dwell on or hold onto. And yet, it would not be fair to summarily dismiss it: in its formal experimentation, its memorable characters and its thinking out loud about making cinematic history (particularly of the ‘great man’ variety), it represents an ambitious and engaging intervention about an often deeply clichéd genre.

 The review as a whole, which is detailed and thoughtful, is worth reading, since, for example, the writer argues for it to be seen as an essay film (not a documentary as such), and sheds light both on who Helen is, and on aspects of Ambrosio’s life, which we are not allowed to know : Meeting an expert historian in Santiago, they (but not the audience) hear details of Ambrosia’s complex, adventurer life. (I later look it up online and it is fascinating but largely occluded in the film).


By contrast, for The Irish Times, a review by Donald Clarke, its usual reviewer of films, is so brief – a tenth of the length, as with some of those short reviews in The Guardian, or The Observer - that it can be quoted in full [Clarke gave the film four stars out of five] :

 We have learned to expect the oblique from Desperate Optimists. Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, the co-operative that goes by that name, do not disappoint – although they may occasionally frustrate – with this discursive meditation inspired by Ambrose O’Higgins, the Sligo man who became captain general of Chile in the 18th century. “Certain genres set the alarm bells ringing, and the biopic is one,” the script explains. Thus arrested, the film-makers set out, with Godardian awkwardness, to dismantle the machinery of their own nascent project. The voice-over artists introduce themselves and become involved in satellite plotlines. Robert Flaherty, Susan Sontag and Steven Soderbergh are brought into the conversation.

 The film ponders its own dishonesty in presenting a composite location as a single property. Happily, there is enough wit and imagination on display to dispel the wrong (non-Brechtian) class of alienation. Thomas Sterne might have got on well with it. [Query : Does Clarke mean 'Thomas' Sterne, or is it possible that the review was dictated, and that this is an uncorrected mishearing of 'Laurence Sterne' ?]


End-notes :

 ¹ Compared with The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., Kubrick considerably simplifies the story : he has the return of Lord Bullingdon being at an earlier time in Barry’s life (and for other reasons), and so conflates the outcome of the duel (which, for dramatic purposes, Kubrick invents²) and negotiating an annuity with Barry on the basis that he leave England. (In Thackeray’s fact-based novel, the latter happens sooner, and quite differently (being in the company, and with the complicity, of Lady Lyndon), whereas Barry does not encounter Lord Bullingdon until he has been abroad and sneaked back into the country, and the end of Thackeray’s novel, and of Barry’s life, has quite a different tone.)

 ² Thackeray’s text gives us something quite other : For calling the honour of his mother in question, Lord Bullingdon assaulted his stepfather (living at Bath under the name of Mr. Jones), and administered to him a tremendous castigation in the Pump-Room. (The word ‘assault’ does not, of course, bear its common, modern meaning : the common law still technically calls this ‘battery’, and an assault the apprehension of a battery’s immediately being inflicted (whereas, with a fist pulled back, but not brought forward, it might not be : one would have an assault, but no battery).)

³ When being shown a railing that could be any railing, but being told ‘This one’, do we believe that any more ? Or, when Voice Over Artist 2 (Alan Howley) makes an aside to the effect about Helen not really being his mother, can we then still take her to be not another professional actor, but who she is said to be – candidly caught, on film, for a theatre project ?

⁴ Overall, the significant change that Kubrick brings to adapting Thackeray’s novel is not to have Barry tell his own story : whatever tone it sets in a book, Kubrick has a narrator, Hordern, and can do things that are quite other with that voice, external to the action. (Even if we only know what that action is, because of the voice, of course.)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Sunday, 19 February 2017

Highlights ahead at Thaxted Festival 2017 - Four Friday-to-Sunday weekends (from Friday 23 June)

Highlights ahead at Thaxted Festival 2017 (Friday 23 June to Sunday 16 July)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

19 February
The (accreting) #UCFF choice of highlights ahead at Thaxted Festival 2017 - Four Friday-to-Sunday weekends (from Friday 23 June to Sunday 16 July)

 No, it is not primarily an excuse to provide links to reviews from performances at previous Thaxted Festivals (though they will duly appear below), but part of the blog's wish to celebrate very rewarding opportunities to hear live music in quality venues, in and around Cambridgeshire...


Weekend 1 (23 to 25 June) :

 Saturday 24 June at 7.00 p.m.







A review, by Tweet and in other text, of John Lill's recital at Thaxted Festival, on Saturday 24 June 2017 at 7.00 p.m., is now accreting here...


Sunday 25 June at 7.30 p.m.





Weekend 2 (30 June to 2 July) :

Sunday 2 July at 7.30 p.m.





Weekend 3 (7 to 9 July) :

Friday 7 July at 8.00 p.m.





More to come, but meanwhile Report from Thaxted Festival : The Gould Piano Trio on fine form [reviewing recital on 26 June 2015]...

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