Thursday, 9 March 2017

On Radio 3 Late Junction, Annette Peacock makes claims for Candy Dulfer's playing

On Radio 3 Late Junction, Annette Peacock makes claims for Candy Dulfer's playing

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

On Radio 3 Late Junction from 11.00 p.m., during International Women's Day (8 March 2017), Annette Peacock makes claims for Candy Dulfer's playing (and, more surprisingly, about childcare¹ [last paragraph])

When, in one of the programme's signature seamless trio of tracks, Annette Peacock played 'Lily Was Here' [at 00:20 mins in, but maybe only for the next 30 days] on Radio 3 Late Junction (@BBCRadio3 #LateJunction) - on the same evening when Kerry Andrew gave us her mix-tape for International Women's Day (#InternationalWomensDay) - one straightaway recognized Dave Stewart with saxophonist Candy Dulfer...

Then, as Peacock spoke to presenter Fiona Talkington (@fionatalkington) and explained / justified her choices, she praised Dulfer, and made a few assertions [at around 23:00 mins in, available to listen to for the next 30 days] about the stature of Dulfer's playing. These were in the context of being asked to say what these three tracks were, which, as Talkington described it, Peacock had Not just chosen, but crafted together, and are transcribed here (and below¹) :

Well, of course, the first track was Diamanda Galás, and, uh, the second was ‘My mama never taught me how to cook’, by Annette Peacock. And, uh, Diamanda’s track, I think, was recorded in 1996, mine was… 19… 78. And the last one, Candy Dulfer, that was 1980, yeah.




I mean, the thing about Candy is that, you know, she’s just the embodiment of effortless joyous expression. She is a consummate musician – she was born to do this, you know. And every phrase is lyrical and definitive, and she is one of the great players on the instrument, beyond the equal of, you know, many of her male counterparts, I think.

You know, those three tracks were all, sort of, done in one take, you know, Diamanda’s, mine and Candy’s – just spontaneously, basically, they were recorded as a one-take sort of jam, basically. So you get that sort of realism when that’s happening, you know – it’s a different sort of approach to recording.

[To consider the matters raised in the above Tweets, the transcript is continued below¹, with comments².]


Yet are Peacock's comments especially borne out by this track by Dulfer, which we will all know - but need not, for that reason, think remarkable (please see below) - or which we may not even like all that much ? :


At the time, it then seemed best to Twitterate the question... :







In a way, one cannot disagree with what Candy Dulfer herself comments, except that :

 (a) The track was, at the time, a hit / it was in the charts

 (b) Which means that, love even what one does, might one still not wish to hear it, over and over, for weeks - or months ?

 (c) The danger with 'Lily Was Here' is that it had grounds to be immensely popular, and there is almost nothing not to like - even so, does the fact remain that something that is lacking reasons not to be liked is a subtly different matter from there being positive reasons to like it... ?




Could one contend, though, that Baker Street – cited on account of its own sax solo, by Raphael Ravenscroft – makes a bigger impact and statement ?



Unlike the Dave Stewart track, and Dulfer’s sax-playing, does Gerry Rafferty’s song, and the place of the solo within it, make a more persuasive case that we should actually approve of it, not disapprove of it ?




End-notes :

 ¹ Fiona T. : I’m so glad, Annette, that you chose ‘My mama never taught me how to cook’, because, uh, there are some absolutely great lines in there, which you deliver with, with such immaculate timing² – I think we’re all sitting there, going, I’m not big in the kitchen, I’m not big on cleaning, and we’re all, sort of, shouting, Yes, I completely agree with you ! Um, would it be OK to take that as a feminist anthem for us, even to-day ?

Annette P. : It is ! I’ve always thought of it as a feminist - I’m so delighted to hear you say that, ’cause that’s what I’ve always thought of it as. You know, My destiny’s not to serve. I’m a woman – my destiny is to create. (Laughs) We are the embodiment of the creative process aren’t we ?

Fiona T. : […] I guess, along with all of that, we ultimately, somehow or other, we do have to clean the kitchen and pick the children up from school, and, and, and balance things. And it’s all those things that make us so good at juggling… ?

Annette P. : That’s true, but I think men are better at those… things, like, you know. I mean, women are brilliant : if you can keep a kid alive to the age of five, you're a genius – so many things can go wrong. And women have a huge investment in, you know, the offspring surviving – much greater than men. But, once a child gets to be the age, you know, where they are self sufficient, in a way, then men can take over at that point. You know, it's a job, a kind of job that men are very suited for, you know : it's, like, disciplined and, you know, they're good at those kinds of things – more than women, I think.


² There are, indeed, some hilarious lines in the song [which can be heard here, on YouTube (@YouTube)], delivered equally hilariously (and not always sung as such, but – amongst other things – wailed, or squealed, or shrieked), which have words stressed, or distended for suggestive emphasis, and defy being taken literally (or seriously), for example :

 My mama never taught me how to cook
That’s why I am so skinny !


The succeeding part of the song, before the singer’s persona has left home and become involved with other men (as at the end of the second section next quoted, or in a line such as I wanna suck your honey), is again rendered with drawled emphasis :

 My mama never taught me how to cook
But my brother, now, my brother, he taught me how to eat
Daddy never taught me to suck seed
That’s why I’m so crazy, crazy, crazy

 And :

 Never had no one to believe in me,
Even though, you know, my brother gave me a head start
Even though, you know, my brother gave me a, a head start
And I’ve had men say ‘Hey, baby, your love is the greatest show on earth !’


However, the text now clearly speaks of incestuous oral sex, neither of which the song’s persona seems to regret, but rather cherish – which, when Talkington refers to ‘some absolutely great lines in there, which you deliver with, with such immaculate timing’, might be what we would more naturally think of than the lines that she quotes, which are relatively indistinct, and where wrily making ‘succeed’ sound like ‘suck seed’, or equally smuttily prolonging the word ‘head’, do not enter into it.

 Peacock is invited to endorse a view of ‘Mama never taught me how to cook’ as a feminist anthem¹, and does so. Both in the last paragraph quoted above¹ from the broadcast, and at this point, someone seems to be being disingenuous on International Women’s Day…




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 8 March 2017

All the raw edges, but with respect and compassion : Cameraperson (2016)

This enthusiastic response is to Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson (2016)

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


This is a response – enthusiastic – to Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016), shown for International Women’s Day by The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Wednesday 8 March 2017





Kirsten Johnson’s film luxuriates spiritedly in the constructed status and quality of cinema, whose nature as artefact, even in documentary, is usually heavily disguised – although, on the borders, there is little divide between documentaries and feature films, e.g. Man on Wire (2008), or the astonishing Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975) (screened in 2016 in the Chantal Akerman retrospective at Sheffield Documentary Festival (Doc / Fest, @sheffdocfest)).



It would not enrich a commendation of this excellent piece of cinema to distend it with an exact catalogue of the ways in which it works or has been assembled – though it possibly says too little that Kirsten Johnson works with juxtaposition and accumulation.

 In a three-line inter-title at or near the start of the film¹, she tells us that the footage is taken from what she has shot for films during the last twenty-five years, but which was not used in the film in question. (Given that a documentary not untypically has more than a hundred hours of material – from which it is edited down to, at most, somewhere between two and three hours² - this is a large amount.) Johnson extrapolates from that fact to call the film that we are about to see, if not a testimony (one forgets her word), then at least describing it in such a way that we appreciate that it is far from being constituted as if it were any sort of demo-reel :

 Johnson, rather, has graciously chosen what to show us not necessarily because it is technically best, but so that we can see, and appreciate, what she does, sometimes including, as she lines up or composes her shot, dialogue with her producer or other person in the production team (presumably actually recorded in situ from her camera’s microphone, which is how she asks us to perceive it).


Johnson shows footage, from which this is taken, for Derrida (2002), where she is negotiating how to film the group of people to whom Derrida is talking as he crosses the road


There are three broad ways in which, as we go, we are aware of Johnson working on documentaries, which are when she is filming on her own behalf, and so being the voice asking questions or engaging with the person on screen (even if through an interpreter), when – which is clearly Michael Moore’s film – working with him, on Fahrenheit 9 / 11 (2004), and somewhere in between, where the conversations that she is having as she shoots suggest that the film is co-directed, co-produced, or made alongside a sympathetic colleague. (On IMDb, Johnson has more credits as a producer than as a director.)


Marine Abdul Henderson and Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9 / 11 (2004)
In the footage shown, Johnson is talking to Moore about the technicalitities of arranging him, in relation to Henderson as his on-screen interviewee, and with The Capitol as a backdrop


Early on in Cameraperson, an assemblage of pieces of footage was presented at a great hurry, and which was also noisy (in the way that that sort of scratchiness of sound can be), which is very untypical of the film, because otherwise this work of editing (with film editor Nels Bangerter) shows that Kirsten Johnson wants to keep the rootedness and immediacy that she had when shooting, be it just a one-off attempt to film illicitly outside a prison for reasons of international interest, or where we see her several times, relating to who she is with and where that is. Nonetheless, it was a moment that suggested both the many places and people that are in her experience from close proximity, and, of them, the noise that news media seek to make for viewers.


Michael Koresky (in the helpful review for Film Comment, cited below - @filmcomment)) conveniently describes what also served as a very telling moment, and which shows what a cinematographer does to get a clear shot – and, naturally, reaching out with her hand, from behind the camera, where we can see what she is doing :


 In Foca, the camera searches rural environs ; the voice comments on the patches of wildflowers ; a shepherd and his flock trail by. When she finds the right composition, a hand emerges from the left, reaches around to the front of the camera and pulls a few blades of grass from the ground, so they’ll sully the frame no longer.



The vivid, fresh water-melon that is cut up by a member of the militia (in Iraq ?), but the men are called away, joking – to one knows not what – before they can eat any of it : such an evocative image. Before, towards the end of the film, we hear someone speaking for dignity, and for it to be applied to injured and dead bodies in the media as ‘The golden rule’, we have already seen it enacted by Johnson in her practice.

 It is there in not gratuitously giving us gruesome insights into the evidence that had been presented to a court-room about how a man came to be dead, but in very deferentially shooting a woman’s knees and hands as she talks, hearing a young man talk plainly about what happened to his injured face, and hearing those who were raped in the occupation of Bosnia, and those who have been investigating these war-crimes.


In the feature film As if I am not There (2010)³, concerning the fate of younger women during The Bosnian War, director Juanita Wilson based it on dramatizing stories revealed during the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague



Now, from colleagues at TAKE ONE (@TakeOneCinema), a review of Cameraperson on the web-site [with a comment from #UCFF]


End-notes

 ¹ Apart from captions that locate us in, say, in Foča, Bosnia, or Kabul, Afghanistan, Johnson usually tells us relatively little about what we are seeing, or why we are seeing it, and has left what she has chosen to put on the screen to talk to other material, not just what immediately preceded or follows it. For example, we are in Brooklyn, New York, a couple of times early on, but the significant and longer clip is near the end of the film, and which sheds light on all that we have seen in between. (The principal exceptions to saying little by way of context are such as for footage of her twins, or of them with her father, or of her deceased mother (and her mother's artefacts and memorial place those things into time).)

 ² Even though many film-makers will edit ‘the rushes’ as they go, to keep on top of the scale and scope of the film.

³ The film had funding from a number of sources, including The Irish Film Board [and appears amongst Fifteen fine festival films].




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