More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 February
* Contains spoilers *
I did like the conception of where this film geographically and historically placed Rome and Antium, and I missed noticing who the person credited with screenwriting is, but which I now know was Ralph Fiennes' co-producer, John Logan. Those credits also made me aware that Fiennes had directed.
Leaving aside this notional carve-up between director and screenwriter as to who crafts what we see, since Logan and Fiennes were clearly in this together up to the hilt - a bit, maybe, like Aufidius and Martius - I really did feel that using news reporting (with a wonderful cameo and lovely verse-delivery by Jon Snow) and a modern setting didn't harm Shakespeare at all. He, like Bach, is a pretty tough bird, and, if it's done with love, it'll - probably - work.
As to this play, over the years I have engaged with it a few times, and - as I have remarked elsewhere - caught a young(ish) Toby Stephens in the role under the RSC at Stratford. Slippery though it is, I probably haven't locked horns with it since - and there is, which may have drawn Fiennes / Logan to it, a quality of otherness about the play, and about its title character, that is more like the so-called late Beethoven string quartets, if King Lear is a sort of Winterreise of the soul.
And yet, there, there is a connection, because I was struck, this time, how like Cordelia Coriolanus is: in Lear because, loosely quoting, Cordelia will not heave her heart into her mouth, the division of the kingdom proceeds, but proceeds all wrong, because Lear - who should know how much she loves him - is vain enough to want her to say so before everybody. An impossible stand-off, just as, with Coriolanus, his refusal to demean himself to fawn before the people leads to his banishment and joining with the Volscian forces against Rome. (So Cordelia and her husband's forces against those of Goneril and Reagan under their husbands.)
As with all of Shakespeare, he had his sources for this story (and I want to research them), but it was, with Lear, a given of his source that Cordelia cannot speak to secure her 'more opulent' share (I quote from memory) - it is not 'will not', but cannot: she is almost literally choked by the hypocrisy of his sisters in this absurd set-piece that Lear has arranged for her to fail at, though, if he looked into his heart, he would know that she loves him best.
All of this is so close to unlocking Coriolanus, and yet so far. It is not so much his mother's crazy upbinging - what happened to his father? it may be in the full text - as this constitutional inability to pander to people, to represent what is not as what is. Tragic weakness if you like, but he cannot do it, any more than Cordelia can, and he - for all his warlike strategy - plays straight into the hands of his enemies in politics (with both a big and small 'p').
As to whether Fiennes, with his deliberately - it seemed - restrained affect for the soldier when not in the height of battle (urging his men on to bloody, noble and glorious victory), but in the first key scene, before the grain stores, where she speaks so chillingly calmly to the mob - has caught the right note, others may judge differently. For me, though, there was too much a sinister air of Hannibal Lecter, or of Fiennes' recent role as Lord Voldemort, in that rather inward reading of the verse - beautiful, but too much with psycopathic undertones, which I honestly do not believe are there in the original.
Yes, Martius is a man torn in his allegiances, but who looks, most of all, to valour and honour (his mother's incalcation), not to killing or the thirst for blood for their own sake (however much we are reminded, again vividly in this film, of the opening scenes of Macbeth, and of Macbeth himself as some bloody slaughtering priest, blind to his own safety in service of his king and is foes - Macbeth, too, has a heart and conscience, and has to be mightily persuaded by his wife to kill Duncan, and that under their own roof).
So, I felt, that Fiennes' overlayering of an awkward man, ill at ease with social situations, with the icy qualities of speaking up to the other side in a stand-off and keeping his calm when an exlosive utterance of the lines could have been just as possible, just did not gel, except in the psycopathic personality, which I do not think is that of the real Coriolanus. He struggles to do what he believes in, consistent with his own limitations, but has only the awareness of what to do on the battlefield, not on the political field of human life.
Too much has been said about Fiennes' characterization, and something should be said of that of Gerard Butler as Aufidius, whose character's role has to run only the gamut from admiration to hatred to (in this version) a clearly homoerotic compassion for Coriolanus to envy and revenge, but which he ran nicely and smoothly enough, giving Fiennes the space to do what he needed to flesh out his notion of his own figure. Ultimately, nothing falls by that doubt about whether Fiennes has pitched Coriolanus the man right, and much could have been weaker if Butler, Brian Cox (Menenius), and James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson (as tribunes Sicinius and Brutus) had not been so reliably strong.
They gave the film the space to live, but the real honour must go to Redgrave for the half-mad Volumnia, who has had a part in making her son what he is - a man whose passions and whose dignity she can only half understand, but ultimately call on.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Written by a sixteen-year-old Mozart
Written by a sixteen-year-old Mozart : Evidence for time-travel and / or multiple selves
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 February (8 April, emphases and Tweet added)
Written by a sixteen-year-old Mozart : Evidence for time-travel and / or multiple selves
If you were like me, you'd imagine that Mozart proudly showing the score of his new string quartet to the five-year-old Mozart, while twenty-two-year-old Mozart looks on and yawns (or, probably, worse) - just a quirky turn of phrase from Jonathan Swain, who is presenting Through the Night on Radio 3.
And it interacts with a recent realization that the daytime schedule (by chance or design) is now dominated by female presenters, and those all of a certain age and apparent class - yes, there is Sean Rafferty still, hanging on in his very enjoyable spot on In Tune, and there is the excellent Donald Macleod following on (the less-excellent DM goes and picks grapes instead), usually straight after, with Composer of the Week.
Otherwise, though, it's Sara Mohr-Pietsch (2.5h), Sarah Walker (3h), then DM for 1h (for his first airing at noon), then, this week, it was Suzy Klein as, I think, both afternoon anchor and hosting In Tune in Sean's absence, which would be I don't know how many hours.
Where are the male presenters of that age isn't my question, but why, when one goes from SW to SM-P to SK to Katie Derham, the utter death-knell of my interest in listening (if I can help it), is there - what I may not be alone in finding - a gradient of irritation with their self-satisfaction?
Added lately to a more elderly posting, a comment that might sting the adherents or acolytes of some on @BBCRadio3 : http://t.co/vMBysCSKPP
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 8, 2015I confess that I mistook SK for the dreaded KD this week - it's something, for me, not far off the renowned oiliness of the Reverend Chadband in Bleak House, it's an expression of an opinion that goes beyond the bounds and tells me what I think (or should think) of what I have just heard, or what, in the case of something to be played or to be heard, what I will think.
Sorry, but I want to make my own mind up! I don't mind the odd 'Listen out for what the piccolo does in the opening of the slow movement, which might sound like a bird / which many have thought resembles a bird', but not being told piccolo = bird = fact. Music isn't like that, and, maybe, I resent the surface knowledge that seems to claim some sort of superiority, some sort of passport to understanding a piano sonata or a concerto - we all know that presenters are just presenters, but the ones whom I mention seem to have this edge of seeming to want to be too keen to tell you what's what in case you don't think that they're doing a good job.
That, I think, might be the underlying motivation - which I can understand, as few things are secure - but I perceive it as smugness, of glad-handing it with my mates Brahms or Bach, and - if you're lucky - Tag along with me and you might learn something. To which, without saying it or putting it into words (until now), I feel like saying: I welcome being told facts or details that might enhance my enjoyment, but Please don't teach your grandma to suck eggs.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
With apologies to Shaun...
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
I caught Shaun Jefford’s stylish film when it was first shown at Cambridge Film Festival (England) in 2010 – an impromptu adjournment to the bar before the screen was ready both gave everyone who still wanted one the chance to buy a drink to take in (a wonderful feature of the Arts Picturehouse cinema), and allowed informal contact with the director. That opportunity was extended by a Q&A, both after the screening, and back in the bar, so this review is informed by what he had to say.
[Through what must be some obscure weighting and / or averaging, and despite having topped the audience top 10 during and immediately after the close of the festival, Beijing Punk finished. (The top film had only three reviews, none written by an ordinary member of the audience, but all of which awarded five stars out of five.)
Although this is a creditable placing, it is not immediately apparent how one can understand its not having been higher still, when it had twenty audience reviews (including a 500-word one, on which this is based) on the festival web-site. By contrast with those of the top film, none of them had been written by those on the festival staff or its student reviewers, and all but one gave it five stars (the other being four stars).]
The enthusiastic first festival reviews alone made clear that Beijing Punk – the title neatly tells one everything to expect! – deserves a wider audience than many art-house documentaries, and, with the increasing identification of and also with its merits that it is gaining, it is likely to reach one. (That recognition is by no means just because, at one point, Shaun daily downed two bottles of Madame Pearl’s codeine-laden cough-medicine to get it made – although that obviously wins respect! – and I must return later to what has been called his ‘immersion’ in the totality of the life of the bands whom he features here!).
I call Shaun’s film ‘stylish’, because I see it as in the nature of punk rock that it has its own, specifically anti-establishment, style. It was Siouxsie’s distinctive sound, look and eye make-up, for example, that made me such an adherent (acolyte?) of The Banshees from the early days, along with her inescapably hip way of doing just about everything. Of course, her image was a unity with that of the whole band’s provocative lyrics, moody and suitably jolting harmonies (including edgy multiple-tracking), a strong drummer, and evocative lighting, both on stage and heightening atmosphere in videos. All those, amongst other things, were part and parcel of what made the songs’ delivery so effective, whether the doomed ‘Christine, the strawberry girl’, or the not-so-happy ‘Happy House’.
(For the benefit of those who might think that this review has simply gone off the rails, please try to trust, and without doubting, that there was more than a little echo of Siouxsie’s spirit – for want of a better word – in the girl drummer of featured band Hedgehog.)
Others would, responding to what ‘punk’ means to them, more naturally go to the more clearly raw and untamed (or even often untuned) sounds of punk, but this truly is ‘a broad movement’. For me, Don Letts is clearly right, in his documentary about this scene called Punk: Attitude, to home in on this question of the bands’ stance towards life, which is established by quoting key players talking about what punk is.
For this reason, I would argue that two-tone had just as much the attitude or spirit of this era as more aggressive or maybe threatening bands such as The Pistols or The Clash, and the times could, happily and largely without strain, embrace (or, more likely, those bands could) music as diverse as that of Madness, Blondie, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, and The Jam.
This apparent diversion from directly talking about Shaun’s achievement is actually to allow commentary on how it is that ?, Demerit and Hedehog are all a completely recognizable part of punk and yet still quite different from each other. What the bands, as groups and as their members, share is an attitude to the world that might loosely be called that of non-acceptance of the status quo and even of rebellion.
This is truly what brings a skinhead whose consumption of substances is phenomenal into the same arena as a hard-hitting female drummer, because the images of her with boxing-gloves and a furious look that is disquietingly hard to characterize further are in the same juxtaposition to the norm as his lifestyle. And where that comes out is in the protesting tone and lyrics of these bands’ music, whether they are high on life or on a mix of chemicals.
That means that you can, after all, be so much on the edge that you’re in the real centre, as there’s really an Einsteinian continuum that loops around on itself (not any sort of discworld). Saying that may, itself, seem literally eccentric (in its true sense of ‘out of the centre’), but I do believe that it’s just as much relevant to punk as to art and anti-art under the Dadaists or Surrealists: the essence of punk is not far from those origins in the post-war time of 1918 on, with the linking theme being not satisfied with the world as it is, and, more importantly, dissatisfied with everyone else for putting up with it.
After all, if it wasn’t André Bretton, poet and unchallenged spokesman of Surrealism, who said that the true surreal act is to take a loaded gun and go out into the street, shooting at random, it’s thereabouts. In that statement, there’s very much the feel of Lee, the lead-singer of one of the three bands with whom Shaun came into close contact - self-destructive and chaotic though he is, and despite what Lee puts into his body and ‘helps’ others to put into theirs whilst seeking to live as a skinhead in China, he’s obviously really just a pussy-cat. (After all, even cats fight, scrap, but eventually sleep.)
What matters most, though, about this film is not the bands’ lifestyles, or Shaun the worse for wear, or his often indisposed camera-man, but the music, which is so much in the punk idiom that one wonders that it was first caught so fully by trawling the Internet. For example, the drummer of Hedgehog is compelling in her playing, and though justly described as hitting really hard, is so truly in punk fashion.
Unlike the explosion of punk in the UK and US, though, there is no one to latch on, making money out of bondage-trousers or whatever, and, as far as I could see, no other media manipulators in the mode of those behind the Pistols would have scope for
doing that in China. The excellent music is what counts, and, despite underground sales of recordings, there’s no hope of a wider home audience.
Thanks for showing us, Shaun - if they want, maybe those bands can find unleashed fans elsewhere...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
I caught Shaun Jefford’s stylish film when it was first shown at Cambridge Film Festival (England) in 2010 – an impromptu adjournment to the bar before the screen was ready both gave everyone who still wanted one the chance to buy a drink to take in (a wonderful feature of the Arts Picturehouse cinema), and allowed informal contact with the director. That opportunity was extended by a Q&A, both after the screening, and back in the bar, so this review is informed by what he had to say.
[Through what must be some obscure weighting and / or averaging, and despite having topped the audience top 10 during and immediately after the close of the festival, Beijing Punk finished
Although this is a creditable placing, it is not immediately apparent how one can understand its not having been higher still, when it had twenty audience reviews (including a 500-word one, on which this is based) on the festival web-site. By contrast with those of the top film, none of them had been written by those on the festival staff or its student reviewers, and all but one gave it five stars (the other being four stars).]
The enthusiastic first festival reviews alone made clear that Beijing Punk – the title neatly tells one everything to expect! – deserves a wider audience than many art-house documentaries, and, with the increasing identification of and also with its merits that it is gaining, it is likely to reach one. (That recognition is by no means just because, at one point, Shaun daily downed two bottles of Madame Pearl’s codeine-laden cough-medicine to get it made – although that obviously wins respect! – and I must return later to what has been called his ‘immersion’ in the totality of the life of the bands whom he features here!).
I call Shaun’s film ‘stylish’, because I see it as in the nature of punk rock that it has its own, specifically anti-establishment, style. It was Siouxsie’s distinctive sound, look and eye make-up, for example, that made me such an adherent (acolyte?) of The Banshees from the early days, along with her inescapably hip way of doing just about everything. Of course, her image was a unity with that of the whole band’s provocative lyrics, moody and suitably jolting harmonies (including edgy multiple-tracking), a strong drummer, and evocative lighting, both on stage and heightening atmosphere in videos. All those, amongst other things, were part and parcel of what made the songs’ delivery so effective, whether the doomed ‘Christine, the strawberry girl’, or the not-so-happy ‘Happy House’.
(For the benefit of those who might think that this review has simply gone off the rails, please try to trust, and without doubting, that there was more than a little echo of Siouxsie’s spirit – for want of a better word – in the girl drummer of featured band Hedgehog.)
Others would, responding to what ‘punk’ means to them, more naturally go to the more clearly raw and untamed (or even often untuned) sounds of punk, but this truly is ‘a broad movement’. For me, Don Letts is clearly right, in his documentary about this scene called Punk: Attitude, to home in on this question of the bands’ stance towards life, which is established by quoting key players talking about what punk is.
For this reason, I would argue that two-tone had just as much the attitude or spirit of this era as more aggressive or maybe threatening bands such as The Pistols or The Clash, and the times could, happily and largely without strain, embrace (or, more likely, those bands could) music as diverse as that of Madness, Blondie, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, and The Jam.
This apparent diversion from directly talking about Shaun’s achievement is actually to allow commentary on how it is that ?, Demerit and Hedehog are all a completely recognizable part of punk and yet still quite different from each other. What the bands, as groups and as their members, share is an attitude to the world that might loosely be called that of non-acceptance of the status quo and even of rebellion.
This is truly what brings a skinhead whose consumption of substances is phenomenal into the same arena as a hard-hitting female drummer, because the images of her with boxing-gloves and a furious look that is disquietingly hard to characterize further are in the same juxtaposition to the norm as his lifestyle. And where that comes out is in the protesting tone and lyrics of these bands’ music, whether they are high on life or on a mix of chemicals.
That means that you can, after all, be so much on the edge that you’re in the real centre, as there’s really an Einsteinian continuum that loops around on itself (not any sort of discworld). Saying that may, itself, seem literally eccentric (in its true sense of ‘out of the centre’), but I do believe that it’s just as much relevant to punk as to art and anti-art under the Dadaists or Surrealists: the essence of punk is not far from those origins in the post-war time of 1918 on, with the linking theme being not satisfied with the world as it is, and, more importantly, dissatisfied with everyone else for putting up with it.
After all, if it wasn’t André Bretton, poet and unchallenged spokesman of Surrealism, who said that the true surreal act is to take a loaded gun and go out into the street, shooting at random, it’s thereabouts. In that statement, there’s very much the feel of Lee, the lead-singer of one of the three bands with whom Shaun came into close contact - self-destructive and chaotic though he is, and despite what Lee puts into his body and ‘helps’ others to put into theirs whilst seeking to live as a skinhead in China, he’s obviously really just a pussy-cat. (After all, even cats fight, scrap, but eventually sleep.)
What matters most, though, about this film is not the bands’ lifestyles, or Shaun the worse for wear, or his often indisposed camera-man, but the music, which is so much in the punk idiom that one wonders that it was first caught so fully by trawling the Internet. For example, the drummer of Hedgehog is compelling in her playing, and though justly described as hitting really hard, is so truly in punk fashion.
Unlike the explosion of punk in the UK and US, though, there is no one to latch on, making money out of bondage-trousers or whatever, and, as far as I could see, no other media manipulators in the mode of those behind the Pistols would have scope for
doing that in China. The excellent music is what counts, and, despite underground sales of recordings, there’s no hope of a wider home audience.
Thanks for showing us, Shaun - if they want, maybe those bands can find unleashed fans elsewhere...
Monday, 6 February 2012
The Guard on New Empress Magazine's web-site
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
If you saw The Guard (2011), or might get it on DVD, have a look here for a review (and maybe an Agent's comment):
http://newempressmagazine.com/2012/02/02/in-review-the-guard-dvd/
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
If you saw The Guard (2011), or might get it on DVD, have a look here for a review (and maybe an Agent's comment):
http://newempressmagazine.com/2012/02/02/in-review-the-guard-dvd/
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
STOP PRESS: University of Padua, I mean Portsmouth, distances itself from Plymouth
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
Saddled Hodgkiss, the Chief Prelate of the university, has issued the following declaration:
(1) We, the university, and I, the Chief Prelate, are heartily Narked by people coming up and asking 'Where's Drake's Bar, then?'.
(2) Let it be henceforth known that:
(a) Such enquiry shall result in instant death;
(b) Death by Chocolate shall not be considered an equivalent penalty;
(c) The above stipulations shall apply equally to the mention, without good cause, of Padua (e.g. studying The Taming of The Shrew, wanting to dissect a few naked students, etc.).
(d) The university changes its longitude to place it 100 nautical miles to the east, and its postcode accordingly, to distance itself from any unfortunate misunderstanding.
(e) Fortunate misunderstanding shall still be welcomed, and may even result in the award of an honorary doctorship.
(f) There is no f, not around here, thank you very much!
(3) This convocation is hereby dissolved: the yoghurts are on me, and no making up words and seeing if I can find you out!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
Saddled Hodgkiss, the Chief Prelate of the university, has issued the following declaration:
(1) We, the university, and I, the Chief Prelate, are heartily Narked by people coming up and asking 'Where's Drake's Bar, then?'.
(2) Let it be henceforth known that:
(a) Such enquiry shall result in instant death;
(b) Death by Chocolate shall not be considered an equivalent penalty;
(c) The above stipulations shall apply equally to the mention, without good cause, of Padua (e.g. studying The Taming of The Shrew, wanting to dissect a few naked students, etc.).
(d) The university changes its longitude to place it 100 nautical miles to the east, and its postcode accordingly, to distance itself from any unfortunate misunderstanding.
(e) Fortunate misunderstanding shall still be welcomed, and may even result in the award of an honorary doctorship.
(f) There is no f, not around here, thank you very much!
(3) This convocation is hereby dissolved: the yoghurts are on me, and no making up words and seeing if I can find you out!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Fickbereit
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
I was trying to find out the source of the interest (which I see 'in the stats') in the posting Schlafzimmer.
Now that, in my list of top search-results from Google®, I have found the following, all has become clear:
Sie ist fickbereit und wartet auf dich
If only! - as if anyone could be kept in that state of readiness indefinitely...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
I was trying to find out the source of the interest (which I see 'in the stats') in the posting Schlafzimmer.
Now that, in my list of top search-results from Google®, I have found the following, all has become clear:
Sie ist fickbereit und wartet auf dich
If only! - as if anyone could be kept in that state of readiness indefinitely...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Bucking fizzy
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
That's what it feels like sometimes, especially when you receive a grand e-mail, called Tankard Oil Delivery Confirmation (304503), and you truly wanted to know about delivery no. 304506, which Amanda Holden had placed. (All that when trying to place a reverse-charge call to the phallus below which Kafka's remains are allegedly interred.)
In Stretham, such matters are viewed more casually, and with an element of abandon, and many have a Gaol Scar from their encounters with liquefied fuel (a matter that they lightly brush off if anyone is foolish enough to remark on it).
'The brain,' Oscar Wilde used to quip, 'is a remarkable organ: some day, I must acquire one of my own!'. A strict Freudian, before his day, but then he came from Coward Isle, he mixed with 'the aisle crowd'*, and he rode low in his sidecar (get my meaning?!).
On another note, it can be said that his social drew from all manner of artists, and that anyone, if they chose, could have a cordial sew, or seek where Carol Dew is to be found. All too often, though, he laid an escrow upon jollity, and a drunken soldier would caw vainly in the night in search - ahead of his time - of Kafka.
So, from Elephant and Castle, head pretty much in any direction - you're bound to have a good time, and might even find The Cinema Museum!
End-notes
* Indeed, it is said that he would never enjoy cheese unless he could eat it with oat-cakes.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
That's what it feels like sometimes, especially when you receive a grand e-mail, called Tankard Oil Delivery Confirmation (304503), and you truly wanted to know about delivery no. 304506, which Amanda Holden had placed. (All that when trying to place a reverse-charge call to the phallus below which Kafka's remains are allegedly interred.)
In Stretham, such matters are viewed more casually, and with an element of abandon, and many have a Gaol Scar from their encounters with liquefied fuel (a matter that they lightly brush off if anyone is foolish enough to remark on it).
'The brain,' Oscar Wilde used to quip, 'is a remarkable organ: some day, I must acquire one of my own!'. A strict Freudian, before his day, but then he came from Coward Isle, he mixed with 'the aisle crowd'*, and he rode low in his sidecar (get my meaning?!).
On another note, it can be said that his social drew from all manner of artists, and that anyone, if they chose, could have a cordial sew, or seek where Carol Dew is to be found. All too often, though, he laid an escrow upon jollity, and a drunken soldier would caw vainly in the night in search - ahead of his time - of Kafka.
So, from Elephant and Castle, head pretty much in any direction - you're bound to have a good time, and might even find The Cinema Museum!
End-notes
* Indeed, it is said that he would never enjoy cheese unless he could eat it with oat-cakes.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 4)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 February
* Contains spoilers *
Of course, it helps if those short write-ups are accurate.
These, taken from one of my local free newspapers (actually, the only one that now delivers), are not:
For anyone who has seen Another Earth (2011), it might be a struggle to justify the opening proposition 'Astrophysicist Rhoda kills most of a family* [...]', because, although, later on, the contents of her bedroom show an interest in outer space**, all that we know from the film is that, just before the accident, she has got a place at MIT***.
Here, nothing depends on the assertion, but, even if that's all that the place were concerned with, that doesn't make her an astrophysicist. What about the second half of the description, though?:
After discovering it's [sc. a mysterious giant planet] a duplicate of the earth, she tracks down victim John, befriending him without revealing their connection, while on a mission to discover the planet's mystery.
If I had read this first (rather than the spread from The London Standard), I think that I might feel misled by (a) the account of cause and effect, by (b) the language, and by (c) what is anterior to what...
Take another example from the same feature, in relation to My Week with Marilyn (2011), and at which the same criticisms can be levelled at the following excerpts:
* It's the height of Marilyn Monroe's fame - factually, was it? The sentence continues with:
* and her new husband Arthur Miller has to make a brief trip to Paris - well, I didn't register where he was going, or whether it was only briefly, but I am already unsure about this even if true, and of what relevance is it where Miller has to go...?
* I also didn't notice whether (as he was) the film says that Colin Clark was a graduate from Oxford, but he is said to:
* [s]pend [in Miller's absence] a week introducing the star to the joys of ordinary British life
Which is why one scene shows him taking her to his old school, Eton, where she is virtually mobbed, and leading into an unannounced visit to Windsor Castle, where he turns out able to gain access because his godfather is librarian there (or some such).
In both cases, and (apart from a picnic and some bathing - for one of them, inevitably, nude) we see them discovering nothing else (as far as I recall), hardly ordinary British life.
So the write-up has to be worth reading, even if one doesn't (as I don't) do more than glance at it, because otherwise it is a set-up for a film that is different (or even very different).
Not just because I like Woody Allen's work, some write-up - in Picturehouse Recommends, I think - meant that I expected to enjoy Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), so I was highly disappointed to find out what it was - and probably, because of that, have come down hard on it ever since.
To be concluded - promise!****
End-note
* A note of scrupulous accuracy amidst the rest?
** No, on second thoughts, that phrasing isn't felicitous, is it?! (Rhoda has the interest in outer space - the contents of her room do not, but they evidence hers.)
*** Did the person who wrote this even know what MIT is?
**** I mean that Part 5 will be the end of it, that is! - now available here...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 February
* Contains spoilers *
Of course, it helps if those short write-ups are accurate.
These, taken from one of my local free newspapers (actually, the only one that now delivers), are not:
For anyone who has seen Another Earth (2011), it might be a struggle to justify the opening proposition 'Astrophysicist Rhoda kills most of a family* [...]', because, although, later on, the contents of her bedroom show an interest in outer space**, all that we know from the film is that, just before the accident, she has got a place at MIT***.
Here, nothing depends on the assertion, but, even if that's all that the place were concerned with, that doesn't make her an astrophysicist. What about the second half of the description, though?:
After discovering it's [sc. a mysterious giant planet] a duplicate of the earth, she tracks down victim John, befriending him without revealing their connection, while on a mission to discover the planet's mystery.
If I had read this first (rather than the spread from The London Standard), I think that I might feel misled by (a) the account of cause and effect, by (b) the language, and by (c) what is anterior to what...
Take another example from the same feature, in relation to My Week with Marilyn (2011), and at which the same criticisms can be levelled at the following excerpts:
* It's the height of Marilyn Monroe's fame - factually, was it? The sentence continues with:
* and her new husband Arthur Miller has to make a brief trip to Paris - well, I didn't register where he was going, or whether it was only briefly, but I am already unsure about this even if true, and of what relevance is it where Miller has to go...?
* I also didn't notice whether (as he was) the film says that Colin Clark was a graduate from Oxford, but he is said to:
* [s]pend [in Miller's absence] a week introducing the star to the joys of ordinary British life
Which is why one scene shows him taking her to his old school, Eton, where she is virtually mobbed, and leading into an unannounced visit to Windsor Castle, where he turns out able to gain access because his godfather is librarian there (or some such).
In both cases, and (apart from a picnic and some bathing - for one of them, inevitably, nude) we see them discovering nothing else (as far as I recall), hardly ordinary British life.
So the write-up has to be worth reading, even if one doesn't (as I don't) do more than glance at it, because otherwise it is a set-up for a film that is different (or even very different).
Not just because I like Woody Allen's work, some write-up - in Picturehouse Recommends, I think - meant that I expected to enjoy Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), so I was highly disappointed to find out what it was - and probably, because of that, have come down hard on it ever since.
To be concluded - promise!****
End-note
* A note of scrupulous accuracy amidst the rest?
** No, on second thoughts, that phrasing isn't felicitous, is it?! (Rhoda has the interest in outer space - the contents of her room do not, but they evidence hers.)
*** Did the person who wrote this even know what MIT is?
**** I mean that Part 5 will be the end of it, that is! - now available here...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Philip French rides (roughshod) again! - A summary
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 February
For those in a hurry, a digest of the main points of that posting (Philip French rides (roughshod) again!):
* Philip French claims that Francine Stock has 'borrowed' from Martin Scorsese a description of her book In Glorious Technicolor as 'a personal journey'
* This is not only ludicrous, because there is nothing distinctive about that phrase (it is arguably just a cliché), but it only appears on the dust-jacket, describing Stock and her book in the third person
* Much of what he does quote is from the book's five-page Prologue (hardly the most important thing about it), but he also comes up with a quotation of around thirty words, which, if it appears anywhere, would naturally appear there, but does not
* Nonetheless, after giving a fleeting idea of what the book is, French goes on to use the phrase and quotation to say why the book is not 'personal' (Stock does not assert that it will be - in that sense), the choice of films is not 'idiosyncratic' (it is never claimed that it is - quite the opposite, if one reads the Prologue properly), and why Stephen Hughes (who contributed to the book, though French claims that he is a co-author, for which there is no evidence) and Stock have not done something new at all
* By way of a close, French delights in a typo in his proof copy (doubtful whether he looked at the published book before publishing his piece?) - 'photagonist' for 'protagonist' - and, because of it, forgives Stock for something else from the dust-jacket, which he fails to put in context in a six-page section about fashion, which is in part of a chapter about Annie Hall (1977)
Can there be true joy in reviewing something that you haven't read (or watched) properly?**
End-notes
* Because of a typo?! Does Stock, then, moonlight as a typesetter?
** Certainly not in reading the review!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 February
For those in a hurry, a digest of the main points of that posting (Philip French rides (roughshod) again!):
* Philip French claims that Francine Stock has 'borrowed' from Martin Scorsese a description of her book In Glorious Technicolor as 'a personal journey'
* This is not only ludicrous, because there is nothing distinctive about that phrase (it is arguably just a cliché), but it only appears on the dust-jacket, describing Stock and her book in the third person
* Much of what he does quote is from the book's five-page Prologue (hardly the most important thing about it), but he also comes up with a quotation of around thirty words, which, if it appears anywhere, would naturally appear there, but does not
* Nonetheless, after giving a fleeting idea of what the book is, French goes on to use the phrase and quotation to say why the book is not 'personal' (Stock does not assert that it will be - in that sense), the choice of films is not 'idiosyncratic' (it is never claimed that it is - quite the opposite, if one reads the Prologue properly), and why Stephen Hughes (who contributed to the book, though French claims that he is a co-author, for which there is no evidence) and Stock have not done something new at all
* By way of a close, French delights in a typo in his proof copy (doubtful whether he looked at the published book before publishing his piece?) - 'photagonist' for 'protagonist' - and, because of it, forgives Stock for something else from the dust-jacket, which he fails to put in context in a six-page section about fashion, which is in part of a chapter about Annie Hall (1977)
Can there be true joy in reviewing something that you haven't read (or watched) properly?**
End-notes
* Because of a typo?! Does Stock, then, moonlight as a typesetter?
** Certainly not in reading the review!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Young 'lack attention for Dickens' (according to Yahoo! News)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
There is a huge range of comments on an article under this heading at:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/young-lack-attention-dickens-044309473.html
Claire Tomalin, the most recent biographer of Dickens, has attacked the educational system and its effect on young people's literacy (and Dr Christopher Pittard of the University of Portsmouth, where Dickens was born (Portsmouth, that is, not the university), also commented on the significance of these works*):
What Dickens wrote about is still amazingly relevant. The only caveat I would make is that today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.
As I say, there is a wealth of opinion about whether Dickens is - or should be - read, and, if he is not, why that could be...
To which I shall but add:
(1) Think of my attention span what you will, but, in an earlier generation (or two), I grew up in a house where there was a t.v. from when I was very small - my father's business was selling, renting and repairing them (which, for those renting, was covered by the rental charge) and radios.
(2) The quality of programmes when I was a teenager and now bears no comparison - how anyone could be compelled to watch, let alone pay attention to, some of the output that our multi-channelled world has given us is beyond me.
(3) I used to do my homework whilst watching t.v. (but, as my mother reminds me, that third ingredient of holding a conversation and still concentrating was beyond me), although I am sure that homework - as have 'A' levels - has become harder since.
(4) I have even read many a long novel, and, in one week at university, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones in full.
(5) Reading such a book, unless you have to do it to that timescale, is nothing to do with the so-called 'attention span' - your attention is not uniterruptedly on Bleak House for its however many hundred pages, which will depend on the edition, but you will read it as and when you can (or can make time for it). That simply is not an issue that relates to attention span, except to the obvious extent that, if one can only - given the best opportunity to do so (see point (6), below) - read a short section at a time, then covering the whole text will take longer, in terms of the accumulating intervals between such a section and resuming, and prove more disheartening to the reader: I'll never finish this!.
(6) Some, particularly the cheaper, versions of 'The Classics', such as Dickens, are such poor photographic reproductions of earlier editions that anyone would rightly struggle to read them: it should not take William Morris or Eric Gill to tell Ms Tomalin how important the choice of typeface and the design of a book are both to the enjoyment of reading, and, thus, to the likelihood that one will persist with the activity (especially if the book is long).
End-notes
* Dr Pittard's view is that 'while his novels have a very definite shape to them, there's a hidden structure which isn't comprehensible at first, they are more like the DVD boxset of their time', thereby, sadly, perpetuating the belief that this, not 'boxed set', is the correct term.
As to the university, this appears (but I might be wrong) to be the most noteworthy thing** in the news about it (since it ceased being known as the University of Padua):
29 Sep 2011 – A STUDENT naked calendar is facing the chop following complaints that unedited photos of girls were leaked onto a pornographic site.
You don't want an unedited photograph at any cost - if it hasn't been 'touched up', it really shouldn't be visible!
** SIlly me, I missed this, but I'll let you, dear reader, look yourself at:
New Chancellor for former University of Padua
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
There is a huge range of comments on an article under this heading at:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/young-lack-attention-dickens-044309473.html
Claire Tomalin, the most recent biographer of Dickens, has attacked the educational system and its effect on young people's literacy (and Dr Christopher Pittard of the University of Portsmouth, where Dickens was born (Portsmouth, that is, not the university), also commented on the significance of these works*):
What Dickens wrote about is still amazingly relevant. The only caveat I would make is that today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.
As I say, there is a wealth of opinion about whether Dickens is - or should be - read, and, if he is not, why that could be...
To which I shall but add:
(1) Think of my attention span what you will, but, in an earlier generation (or two), I grew up in a house where there was a t.v. from when I was very small - my father's business was selling, renting and repairing them (which, for those renting, was covered by the rental charge) and radios.
(2) The quality of programmes when I was a teenager and now bears no comparison - how anyone could be compelled to watch, let alone pay attention to, some of the output that our multi-channelled world has given us is beyond me.
(3) I used to do my homework whilst watching t.v. (but, as my mother reminds me, that third ingredient of holding a conversation and still concentrating was beyond me), although I am sure that homework - as have 'A' levels - has become harder since.
(4) I have even read many a long novel, and, in one week at university, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones in full.
(5) Reading such a book, unless you have to do it to that timescale, is nothing to do with the so-called 'attention span' - your attention is not uniterruptedly on Bleak House for its however many hundred pages, which will depend on the edition, but you will read it as and when you can (or can make time for it). That simply is not an issue that relates to attention span, except to the obvious extent that, if one can only - given the best opportunity to do so (see point (6), below) - read a short section at a time, then covering the whole text will take longer, in terms of the accumulating intervals between such a section and resuming, and prove more disheartening to the reader: I'll never finish this!.
(6) Some, particularly the cheaper, versions of 'The Classics', such as Dickens, are such poor photographic reproductions of earlier editions that anyone would rightly struggle to read them: it should not take William Morris or Eric Gill to tell Ms Tomalin how important the choice of typeface and the design of a book are both to the enjoyment of reading, and, thus, to the likelihood that one will persist with the activity (especially if the book is long).
End-notes
* Dr Pittard's view is that 'while his novels have a very definite shape to them, there's a hidden structure which isn't comprehensible at first, they are more like the DVD boxset of their time', thereby, sadly, perpetuating the belief that this, not 'boxed set', is the correct term.
As to the university, this appears (but I might be wrong) to be the most noteworthy thing** in the news about it (since it ceased being known as the University of Padua):
29 Sep 2011 – A STUDENT naked calendar is facing the chop following complaints that unedited photos of girls were leaked onto a pornographic site.
You don't want an unedited photograph at any cost - if it hasn't been 'touched up', it really shouldn't be visible!
** SIlly me, I missed this, but I'll let you, dear reader, look yourself at:
New Chancellor for former University of Padua
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Saturday, 4 February 2012
Philip French rides (roughshod) again!
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
Not for the first time (By way of apology for never reviewing Sarah's Key (2)), I find Philip French's reviewing not just perverse, but wilfully at odds with the nature of the matter about which he is meant to be informing me. In the case that I shall go on to discuss, I think that it is, actually, just plain laziness.
In his review of In Glorious Technicolor, the book that Francine Stock brought out last year, in The Guardian, French takes much time in seven paragraphs not talking about the book at all (or, at any rate, telling us where Stock and her collaborator Stephen Hughes, both on The Film Programme (on Radio 4), and on the idea for the book and its content, are wrong to think that their book is needed):
* Paragraph 1 - Responses to films from Gorky and Kipling - both affected by, and writing about, films
* Paragraph 2 - Reminding us first, perhaps unnecessarily (and maybe even in a snobbish way!), that Stock is 'a former BBC TV current affairs reporter' (well, yes, but she left Newsnight in 1993, and people such as Paxman and she were by no means just reporters), French sets out his stall about what he thinks the book to be, and brings in Hughes*, before a quotation of more than thirty words** - this paragraph is where, as I will go on to say, French misses what Stock says that the book is
* Paragraph 3 - An exposition of the structure of the book (after French seems to have taken trouble to pin down another connection (this time in the Prologue), that of the evacuation of a cinema during Stock seeing Chinatown (1974), to the Guildford pub bombings, whereas Stock just mentions, to give necessary context, that she was sixteen when there was a bomb in 'an adjacent pub' (Prologue, p. 3), French has seemingly gone overdrive on being detective) - Stock takes three key films per decade for ten decades (and French cannot help reminding us, in comparison, how many films he has seen: 'a total of 30 pictures, the number shown nowadays in an average month to the London critics', but surely not pulling rank?)***
* Paragraphs 4 and 5 - An opening statement that Stock and Hughes are wrong, but nothing more about the book, just two paragraphs about what others have thought and written (surely not showing off learning, though!)
* Paragraph 6 - A continuation of this digression halfway down this paragraph eventually brings us back to the book, or, rather, how it appears and what is shown on the dust-jacket****), and some anecdote that Stock appears to have related about being at a screening of Avatar with James Cameron***** (although, flicking through the section under that title, I could not find it ('2000s Turning Inwards' , pp. 304 - 311))
* Paragraph 7 - A closing paragraph (complete with a terminal joke about the proof copy - how 'protagonist' became 'photagonist', but, to French's disappointment, was corrected, as it redeemed this: 'Stock does, however, repeat the canard that Clark Gable had a catastrophic effect on the underwear industry during the depression, when he appeared without a vest in It Happened One Night******), which otherwise imparts a little damning with faint praise:
Still, there is much to enjoy in this book, and nuggets of information on recent cinematic developments to be mined.
This, along with the following, is all that French wants to say that is positive:
[... D]iscursive discussions of her three chosen films, which are never less than intelligent, though rarely more than perfunctory until the last couple of decades
'Never less than intelligent' - what is that? Irony?
Right at the outset, French had tried to pin on Stock 'borrowing the title from Martin Scorsese's film centenary documentary and book, "a personal journey"', but, as ever (never judge a book by its cover, I mean dust-jacket), he is ascribing to her what does not appear in the book itself.
Even if there were anything distinctive (which there is not) about the phrase that he means, he is quoting from the inside front of the dust-jacket again:
In this fascinating, entertaining and illuminating book Francine Stock takes us on a personal journey through a glorious century of cinema, showing in vivid detail how film both reflects and makes our world.
A 'personal journey' with which French beats her is not even Stock's claim. Yes, she does say 'This book is an attempt to record snatches of the conversation that has been taking place between us and film for the past hundred years. It is also a very personal contribution to that discussion', and she does also say 'The reason for taking this idiosyncratic journey through a century of film is precisely to provoke argument and further exploration' (both from Prologue, p. 5), but that is nothing to do with Scorsese.
French, who too much limits himself to the contents of this Prologue, when not studying the design and wording of the dust-jacket (matters that, rather naively, he imputes to Stock), wants to say (in his third paragraph) 'In the event, it is not a deeply personal book' (before being personal and delving into where and when Stock saw Chinatown, as mentioned above), and 'And there is little that is idiosyncratic about her choice of films'. So he missed the paragraph above, where she wrote:
This book is neither a comprehensive history of cinema nor an attempt to extend the sometimes daunting territory of film studies. [...] The films selected here may not necessarily be the best of their kind or even personal favourites, although many are. Rather, they are films that exert a particular power [...]
So, no claim that the choice of film was idiosyncratic, no claim that this was a personal journey, and a supposed review that spends at least half of our time in reading it in talking about what French thinks that the book should have been. Others must judge how much he actually read, but he's certainly pretty familiar with that dust-jacket and the book's five-page Prologue at least...
For those whose attention span isn't up to Dickensian convolution*******, here is a summary of the above...
End-notes
* Whom he says is 'named as co-author on the title page but not on the cover', whereas the copy that I have, a first edition (not a proof copy), quite clearly states 'with Stephen Hughes' under Stock's name and in a type-size, even if the words already were not, that is inconsistent with an acknowledgement of co-authorship (and which is not claimed in the usual assertion on the imprint-page).
** The quotation is 'We had both searched without much luck for writing on the way cinema intersects with what you might distinguish separately as life: to us it seemed an endlessly fascinating and important aspect of cinema's history'.
Except that those exact words do not seem to appear in the book, unless I am mistaken, but rather 'How could something as patently artificial as film seem so real? We all know that what we see on a screen is not real and yet we experience it so intensely that it provokes a physical response. Might there be particular effects on our behaviour - both public and private? Ways in which we had become indoctrinated by this most seductive medium? Researching for a series on film some years ago, we hunted in vain for a book that tackled these ideas' (Prologue, p. 4).
*** However, she talks about much else, because the two-column index runs to fifteen pages, and talks about other films and their actors, directors, cinematographers and the like in relation to them.
**** With the issue of Hughes being co-author, French was talking about 'the cover', but he has now found the right word.
***** With what accuracy I do not know, French asserts that 'There are more references to James Cameron than to any other moviemaker'. (In the index, The Terminator (1984), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009) are all referenced, but only the last of these has its own titled section.)
****** Whether French took that point of criticism just from the inside front of the dust-jacket is open to question (and how a typo, for which Stock would have no responsibility, could make up for the offence to French's sensibilities is unclear), because it appears in context, in the section on Annie Hall (1977), in paragraphs about fashion and films ('1970s Just when you thought it was safe...', pp. 223 - 227).
******* In other words, a reference to the posting Young 'lack attention for Dickens' (according to Yahoo! News).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
Not for the first time (By way of apology for never reviewing Sarah's Key (2)), I find Philip French's reviewing not just perverse, but wilfully at odds with the nature of the matter about which he is meant to be informing me. In the case that I shall go on to discuss, I think that it is, actually, just plain laziness.
In his review of In Glorious Technicolor, the book that Francine Stock brought out last year, in The Guardian, French takes much time in seven paragraphs not talking about the book at all (or, at any rate, telling us where Stock and her collaborator Stephen Hughes, both on The Film Programme (on Radio 4), and on the idea for the book and its content, are wrong to think that their book is needed):
* Paragraph 1 - Responses to films from Gorky and Kipling - both affected by, and writing about, films
* Paragraph 2 - Reminding us first, perhaps unnecessarily (and maybe even in a snobbish way!), that Stock is 'a former BBC TV current affairs reporter' (well, yes, but she left Newsnight in 1993, and people such as Paxman and she were by no means just reporters), French sets out his stall about what he thinks the book to be, and brings in Hughes*, before a quotation of more than thirty words** - this paragraph is where, as I will go on to say, French misses what Stock says that the book is
* Paragraph 3 - An exposition of the structure of the book (after French seems to have taken trouble to pin down another connection (this time in the Prologue), that of the evacuation of a cinema during Stock seeing Chinatown (1974), to the Guildford pub bombings, whereas Stock just mentions, to give necessary context, that she was sixteen when there was a bomb in 'an adjacent pub' (Prologue, p. 3), French has seemingly gone overdrive on being detective) - Stock takes three key films per decade for ten decades (and French cannot help reminding us, in comparison, how many films he has seen: 'a total of 30 pictures, the number shown nowadays in an average month to the London critics', but surely not pulling rank?)***
* Paragraphs 4 and 5 - An opening statement that Stock and Hughes are wrong, but nothing more about the book, just two paragraphs about what others have thought and written (surely not showing off learning, though!)
* Paragraph 6 - A continuation of this digression halfway down this paragraph eventually brings us back to the book, or, rather, how it appears and what is shown on the dust-jacket****), and some anecdote that Stock appears to have related about being at a screening of Avatar with James Cameron***** (although, flicking through the section under that title, I could not find it ('2000s Turning Inwards' , pp. 304 - 311))
* Paragraph 7 - A closing paragraph (complete with a terminal joke about the proof copy - how 'protagonist' became 'photagonist', but, to French's disappointment, was corrected, as it redeemed this: 'Stock does, however, repeat the canard that Clark Gable had a catastrophic effect on the underwear industry during the depression, when he appeared without a vest in It Happened One Night******), which otherwise imparts a little damning with faint praise:
Still, there is much to enjoy in this book, and nuggets of information on recent cinematic developments to be mined.
This, along with the following, is all that French wants to say that is positive:
[... D]iscursive discussions of her three chosen films, which are never less than intelligent, though rarely more than perfunctory until the last couple of decades
'Never less than intelligent' - what is that? Irony?
Right at the outset, French had tried to pin on Stock 'borrowing the title from Martin Scorsese's film centenary documentary and book, "a personal journey"', but, as ever (never judge a book by its cover, I mean dust-jacket), he is ascribing to her what does not appear in the book itself.
Even if there were anything distinctive (which there is not) about the phrase that he means, he is quoting from the inside front of the dust-jacket again:
In this fascinating, entertaining and illuminating book Francine Stock takes us on a personal journey through a glorious century of cinema, showing in vivid detail how film both reflects and makes our world.
A 'personal journey' with which French beats her is not even Stock's claim. Yes, she does say 'This book is an attempt to record snatches of the conversation that has been taking place between us and film for the past hundred years. It is also a very personal contribution to that discussion', and she does also say 'The reason for taking this idiosyncratic journey through a century of film is precisely to provoke argument and further exploration' (both from Prologue, p. 5), but that is nothing to do with Scorsese.
French, who too much limits himself to the contents of this Prologue, when not studying the design and wording of the dust-jacket (matters that, rather naively, he imputes to Stock), wants to say (in his third paragraph) 'In the event, it is not a deeply personal book' (before being personal and delving into where and when Stock saw Chinatown, as mentioned above), and 'And there is little that is idiosyncratic about her choice of films'. So he missed the paragraph above, where she wrote:
This book is neither a comprehensive history of cinema nor an attempt to extend the sometimes daunting territory of film studies. [...] The films selected here may not necessarily be the best of their kind or even personal favourites, although many are. Rather, they are films that exert a particular power [...]
So, no claim that the choice of film was idiosyncratic, no claim that this was a personal journey, and a supposed review that spends at least half of our time in reading it in talking about what French thinks that the book should have been. Others must judge how much he actually read, but he's certainly pretty familiar with that dust-jacket and the book's five-page Prologue at least...
For those whose attention span isn't up to Dickensian convolution*******, here is a summary of the above...
End-notes
* Whom he says is 'named as co-author on the title page but not on the cover', whereas the copy that I have, a first edition (not a proof copy), quite clearly states 'with Stephen Hughes' under Stock's name and in a type-size, even if the words already were not, that is inconsistent with an acknowledgement of co-authorship (and which is not claimed in the usual assertion on the imprint-page).
** The quotation is 'We had both searched without much luck for writing on the way cinema intersects with what you might distinguish separately as life: to us it seemed an endlessly fascinating and important aspect of cinema's history'.
Except that those exact words do not seem to appear in the book, unless I am mistaken, but rather 'How could something as patently artificial as film seem so real? We all know that what we see on a screen is not real and yet we experience it so intensely that it provokes a physical response. Might there be particular effects on our behaviour - both public and private? Ways in which we had become indoctrinated by this most seductive medium? Researching for a series on film some years ago, we hunted in vain for a book that tackled these ideas' (Prologue, p. 4).
*** However, she talks about much else, because the two-column index runs to fifteen pages, and talks about other films and their actors, directors, cinematographers and the like in relation to them.
**** With the issue of Hughes being co-author, French was talking about 'the cover', but he has now found the right word.
***** With what accuracy I do not know, French asserts that 'There are more references to James Cameron than to any other moviemaker'. (In the index, The Terminator (1984), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009) are all referenced, but only the last of these has its own titled section.)
****** Whether French took that point of criticism just from the inside front of the dust-jacket is open to question (and how a typo, for which Stock would have no responsibility, could make up for the offence to French's sensibilities is unclear), because it appears in context, in the section on Annie Hall (1977), in paragraphs about fashion and films ('1970s Just when you thought it was safe...', pp. 223 - 227).
******* In other words, a reference to the posting Young 'lack attention for Dickens' (according to Yahoo! News).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Eric Morecambe and the evils of e-mail (2)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
I was going to come back to this topic of Eric Morecambe, and someone - to-day or yesterday - has been looking, so here goes:
A good deal of Eric Morecambe's stage business, however much of it was actually worked out by Eddie Braben* (rather than, spontaneously or otherwise, by him - as Ernie Wise made a fine art of looking taken aback and confused), revolved around the incongruous: in the Cleopatra play (as in every one of Ernie's plays), although we are in Ancient Egypt, his signature spectacles and no less sock-suspenders are undeniable and out of place.
With the item thrown into the air and caught in the bag, I believed - and still like to believe - that what is tossed up is real, but only leaves a trace by the noise that it makes entering the bag.
There are levels on which e-mail (or a text-message) isn't real, but it betrays its presence in the list of the contents of one's inbox. The phantom e-mail, the one that one could almost swear that one had written (or that one can swear did not reach one's inbox), but it just doesn't show up in the 'sent' folder, is not so far distant from Eric's stone - or coin.
Another incongruous aspect of e-mail is that a person can get so familiar, in a way that - one hopes - he or she wouldn't think (or dare?) to do face to face: e-mailers can burn their bridges, nail colours to their mast, or take pot-shots in a way that, if one could be divorced from the person to whom their messages are directed, would make one wish that they had, instead, made an about face, abandoned ship or sheathed their weapon.
In a way, these hostile - or unexpectedly amorous - exchanges seem, to some people's mentality, to have a different status (and that precisely because they are deemed to happen in that non-existent reality that some call cyberspace). It is as if, in due course, meeting the person to whom the things were written will somehow erase, unwrite, them, or as if both were undisclosed players in an on-line game who encountered each other. Or it's just a bit like - deliberately, who knows? - getting drunk and letting rip.
For what it's worth, my practice is to treat every e-mail that I write as if it were a letter - I remind myself that it could have the same consequences as a letter, and that it should only contain what I would be happy for a letter to contain, and I do so by pausing
* To put the date at the top, and
* Then by addressing the intended recipient properly: 'Dear Helen' or 'Hi, John!'
Whether I am right about the effect that this has (and whether it would work for anyone else - anyone else who hates getting an e-mail (or text-message) that could have been meant for a different person), I do not know, but I do it.
It is a gesture, just like hoping that the stone - or coin - that cannot be seen will land in my waiting paper-bag...
End-notes
* Whose eighty-second birthday falls on Hallowe'en.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
I was going to come back to this topic of Eric Morecambe, and someone - to-day or yesterday - has been looking, so here goes:
A good deal of Eric Morecambe's stage business, however much of it was actually worked out by Eddie Braben* (rather than, spontaneously or otherwise, by him - as Ernie Wise made a fine art of looking taken aback and confused), revolved around the incongruous: in the Cleopatra play (as in every one of Ernie's plays), although we are in Ancient Egypt, his signature spectacles and no less sock-suspenders are undeniable and out of place.
With the item thrown into the air and caught in the bag, I believed - and still like to believe - that what is tossed up is real, but only leaves a trace by the noise that it makes entering the bag.
There are levels on which e-mail (or a text-message) isn't real, but it betrays its presence in the list of the contents of one's inbox. The phantom e-mail, the one that one could almost swear that one had written (or that one can swear did not reach one's inbox), but it just doesn't show up in the 'sent' folder, is not so far distant from Eric's stone - or coin.
Another incongruous aspect of e-mail is that a person can get so familiar, in a way that - one hopes - he or she wouldn't think (or dare?) to do face to face: e-mailers can burn their bridges, nail colours to their mast, or take pot-shots in a way that, if one could be divorced from the person to whom their messages are directed, would make one wish that they had, instead, made an about face, abandoned ship or sheathed their weapon.
In a way, these hostile - or unexpectedly amorous - exchanges seem, to some people's mentality, to have a different status (and that precisely because they are deemed to happen in that non-existent reality that some call cyberspace). It is as if, in due course, meeting the person to whom the things were written will somehow erase, unwrite, them, or as if both were undisclosed players in an on-line game who encountered each other. Or it's just a bit like - deliberately, who knows? - getting drunk and letting rip.
For what it's worth, my practice is to treat every e-mail that I write as if it were a letter - I remind myself that it could have the same consequences as a letter, and that it should only contain what I would be happy for a letter to contain, and I do so by pausing
* To put the date at the top, and
* Then by addressing the intended recipient properly: 'Dear Helen' or 'Hi, John!'
Whether I am right about the effect that this has (and whether it would work for anyone else - anyone else who hates getting an e-mail (or text-message) that could have been meant for a different person), I do not know, but I do it.
It is a gesture, just like hoping that the stone - or coin - that cannot be seen will land in my waiting paper-bag...
End-notes
* Whose eighty-second birthday falls on Hallowe'en.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Friday, 3 February 2012
Another successful search with Google®
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
4 February
It couldn't just have been hearing Mary Ann Kennedy to-night presenting a largely live show, the last of those that have been on during the week, from events at Celtic Connections (in Glasgow), but I was reminded a little while back of the name Shona Spurtle.
Now, I knew perfectly well what the name meant (to me) - and I will wager that it doesn't mean a whole lot to many others - but I didn't know if it was spelt Spirtle (as I don't remember paying any attention to when I could have seen it written). So, rather than putting into my search-box the name of where Shona comes from, I put in that spelling - setting a challenge.
Obscure though it is - but I might, although I doubt it, find a plethora of fan web-sites in my search-results - Google® knew what I meant, and has taken me straight there:
I now know that there is a clip on YouTube, and that someone liked the name enough to have it as a user-name to comment on a story connected with the Scottish Parliament.
Amazon®, ever ready to please, even claims to have a web-page called www.amazon.co.uk/spurtle, which won't be the laugh that I hope for it to be, as I think that I have clicked such advertising links before...
No, it turns out that I am wrong, for, although it looked like a page of ball-point pens, it is some sort of culinary stick - it could be a magic-wand, for all that I know! - in connection with porridge (the making of, I have to think, as I have no conception how (or why) one could eat that dish with something looking like this).
In any case, they go for nearly £5.00 (well, more than that with postage - is there a standard Amazon® charge for a spurtle?), the best ones boast of being made of beech* (how that can matter to anything?), and you can even buy a box of six. Plus there's a hardback book, but it's miserably not available, called Mrs Spurtle goes South, which, I think, precedes this other appearance as a name.
Bizarrely, there is even a double of the Wikipedia® web-page for the vehicle in which our Mrs (or Ms) Spurtle appeared. It is called Wikipeetia, and it claims to exist solely because 'you spelled someting wrong'**, so:
For your amusement, we've also included a copy of the entire Wikipedia article misspelled
Helpfully, as I am obviously a remedial case for making such an error (?), there is a link that will take me where I can learn to spell English, or just to the unprocessed Wikipedia® piece.
As yet, though, nothing to lure me to buy a recording that shows Siobhan Redmond's exploits as Shona, but she may have gone on to use that 'handle' on Arsebook® and Twitter®, both of which claim that Shona has a presence.
No, again I speak too soon (what a rich vein this is: or is that the - I kid you not! - Glayva talking?), because I can buy a pirate DVD, and there is a web-site with a quotation (and they don't even know where it's from!), which I shall use by way of an ending of all this - for want of a better word - craic:
You are a waster, Sebastian! You are a lying cheat! You are a fibster, a fabulist, an equivocating shim-shammer, a cousining cardsharp, a pathological mythomaniac, a yarner, a palterer who perjures, a whited sepulchre, a cantering serpent, a rat!
Yes, she likes him!
End-notes
* Then again, it is traditional for wash-backs to be made from pine, and not just any old pine, but Oregon pine. We are talking of - if you know what I'm talking about - a very conservative means of producing a drinkable spirit, where they reproduce the dents in the copper-stills, when they have worn so thin that they need repair.
That said, some have taken the view that this Oregon pine approach adds nothing to the all-important taste (too much liquid in there for too short a time to make a difference - except, perhaps, at the leve of homoeopathy), and have gone for stainless-steel vessels. Which you would have no way of knowing when you buy the product, unless you have visited.)
** This seems a tenuous reason to have gone to the trouble of having such a dual text (even if, in it, for example,the word not is turned into 'nto', in a restless attempt to misspell everything, whereas what is really presented is often enough just a meaningless rearrangement of the letters).
I cannot believe that the reason applies in all cases, since this is not the only time that I have looked at what is just the fourth page of search-results, and I do not reall seeing such a thing, although I am often enough searching for a name precisely because I do not know how it is spelt. However, I shall attempt to find the famous Helen Mirran... Well, it didn't surface in the first hundred search-results, but I now know that 66-year-old Mirren, the famous typing error, has - seemingly by her much-vaunted posing nude - earnt the title of having 'the sexiest body on [the] planet' (according to www.salon.com), and also wants not only to appear in Doctor Who, but to be the first female Doctor***.
*** Doubtless her part-time role appreciating art for MOMA (the Museuem of Modern Art in New York) fits her for such a role (I cannot wait for the first Cubist Doctor Who). In the commentary on a clip that she filmed for the museum, which I might have to resist watching (after such a write-up), we are told:
Truth be told, I’m a huge fan of the dame. In addition to being a fantastic actor, she’s beautiful, smart, and completely unpretentious. She’s an art lover, and she is especially enamored of the pioneering abstract paintings of Vasily Kandinsky, whose work is represented in MoMA’s collection and whose “Four Seasons” were very fortuitously on view on the day of her visit. [...]
Like these amazing works, Helen does not disappoint, and in this interview she talks passionately about her great love of painting—particularly her “lovely friends” the Kandinsky paintings—and about the connections between painting and her work.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
4 February
It couldn't just have been hearing Mary Ann Kennedy to-night presenting a largely live show, the last of those that have been on during the week, from events at Celtic Connections (in Glasgow), but I was reminded a little while back of the name Shona Spurtle.
Now, I knew perfectly well what the name meant (to me) - and I will wager that it doesn't mean a whole lot to many others - but I didn't know if it was spelt Spirtle (as I don't remember paying any attention to when I could have seen it written). So, rather than putting into my search-box the name of where Shona comes from, I put in that spelling - setting a challenge.
Obscure though it is - but I might, although I doubt it, find a plethora of fan web-sites in my search-results - Google® knew what I meant, and has taken me straight there:
I now know that there is a clip on YouTube, and that someone liked the name enough to have it as a user-name to comment on a story connected with the Scottish Parliament.
Amazon®, ever ready to please, even claims to have a web-page called www.amazon.co.uk/spurtle, which won't be the laugh that I hope for it to be, as I think that I have clicked such advertising links before...
No, it turns out that I am wrong, for, although it looked like a page of ball-point pens, it is some sort of culinary stick - it could be a magic-wand, for all that I know! - in connection with porridge (the making of, I have to think, as I have no conception how (or why) one could eat that dish with something looking like this).
In any case, they go for nearly £5.00 (well, more than that with postage - is there a standard Amazon® charge for a spurtle?), the best ones boast of being made of beech* (how that can matter to anything?), and you can even buy a box of six. Plus there's a hardback book, but it's miserably not available, called Mrs Spurtle goes South, which, I think, precedes this other appearance as a name.
Bizarrely, there is even a double of the Wikipedia® web-page for the vehicle in which our Mrs (or Ms) Spurtle appeared. It is called Wikipeetia, and it claims to exist solely because 'you spelled someting wrong'**, so:
For your amusement, we've also included a copy of the entire Wikipedia article misspelled
Helpfully, as I am obviously a remedial case for making such an error (?), there is a link that will take me where I can learn to spell English, or just to the unprocessed Wikipedia® piece.
As yet, though, nothing to lure me to buy a recording that shows Siobhan Redmond's exploits as Shona, but she may have gone on to use that 'handle' on Arsebook® and Twitter®, both of which claim that Shona has a presence.
No, again I speak too soon (what a rich vein this is: or is that the - I kid you not! - Glayva talking?), because I can buy a pirate DVD, and there is a web-site with a quotation (and they don't even know where it's from!), which I shall use by way of an ending of all this - for want of a better word - craic:
You are a waster, Sebastian! You are a lying cheat! You are a fibster, a fabulist, an equivocating shim-shammer, a cousining cardsharp, a pathological mythomaniac, a yarner, a palterer who perjures, a whited sepulchre, a cantering serpent, a rat!
Yes, she likes him!
End-notes
* Then again, it is traditional for wash-backs to be made from pine, and not just any old pine, but Oregon pine. We are talking of - if you know what I'm talking about - a very conservative means of producing a drinkable spirit, where they reproduce the dents in the copper-stills, when they have worn so thin that they need repair.
That said, some have taken the view that this Oregon pine approach adds nothing to the all-important taste (too much liquid in there for too short a time to make a difference - except, perhaps, at the leve of homoeopathy), and have gone for stainless-steel vessels. Which you would have no way of knowing when you buy the product, unless you have visited.)
** This seems a tenuous reason to have gone to the trouble of having such a dual text (even if, in it, for example,the word not is turned into 'nto', in a restless attempt to misspell everything, whereas what is really presented is often enough just a meaningless rearrangement of the letters).
I cannot believe that the reason applies in all cases, since this is not the only time that I have looked at what is just the fourth page of search-results, and I do not reall seeing such a thing, although I am often enough searching for a name precisely because I do not know how it is spelt. However, I shall attempt to find the famous Helen Mirran... Well, it didn't surface in the first hundred search-results, but I now know that 66-year-old Mirren, the famous typing error, has - seemingly by her much-vaunted posing nude - earnt the title of having 'the sexiest body on [the] planet' (according to www.salon.com), and also wants not only to appear in Doctor Who, but to be the first female Doctor***.
*** Doubtless her part-time role appreciating art for MOMA (the Museuem of Modern Art in New York) fits her for such a role (I cannot wait for the first Cubist Doctor Who). In the commentary on a clip that she filmed for the museum, which I might have to resist watching (after such a write-up), we are told:
Truth be told, I’m a huge fan of the dame. In addition to being a fantastic actor, she’s beautiful, smart, and completely unpretentious. She’s an art lover, and she is especially enamored of the pioneering abstract paintings of Vasily Kandinsky, whose work is represented in MoMA’s collection and whose “Four Seasons” were very fortuitously on view on the day of her visit. [...]
Like these amazing works, Helen does not disappoint, and in this interview she talks passionately about her great love of painting—particularly her “lovely friends” the Kandinsky paintings—and about the connections between painting and her work.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Greetings to The Ukraine!
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
For some reason, as I have very recently discovered, Blogger can distinguish Ukraine from the former Soviet bloc, all of which it blithely calls 'Russia':
For it is reporting page-views, and also lighting up the region on the map, not least, since at 8, to-day's number of page-views is the highest from anywhere.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
For some reason, as I have very recently discovered, Blogger can distinguish Ukraine from the former Soviet bloc, all of which it blithely calls 'Russia':
For it is reporting page-views, and also lighting up the region on the map, not least, since at 8, to-day's number of page-views is the highest from anywhere.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Shoes and Hitler
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
I doubt it, but there could be a chapter on what shoes Adolf liked to wear in Der Schuh im Nazionalsozialismus (Shoes in the Time of the Nazis - 1933 to 1945), because the book does run to some 900pp. (well, 876 actually).
It represents a revision of a doctoral thesis (submitted to the technical wing of the University of Munich) by one Anne Sudrow (b. 1970), and apparently is a product history, which makes a comparison of Britain, the States and, of course, Germany - or should that really read The Third Reich (as I imagine that the suppressed populations were brought under the aegis even in this respect)?
If this is not an exhaustive study, it has still probably cornered many of the arguments and research angles, but might have been more manageable as three (or more) volumes. It probably comes with a hefty price-tag, so (forgive me!) not really for those on their uppers.
And, no - for those who might be asking - I didn't get the impression that the book was illustrated*, although (forgive me again!) shoes at this time are its sole subject. Amazing what you can discover on the top floor of a copyright library in a row of books, though why it has it, when it is not seemingly a UK title (and so a copy would not have to be supplied free), I do not know...
End-notes
* In fact, consulting the on-line catalogue tells me that there are 44 tables (but some hold to the view that shoes should not be put on them), and even 92 illustrations, whereas it did not look like that sort of book.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
I doubt it, but there could be a chapter on what shoes Adolf liked to wear in Der Schuh im Nazionalsozialismus (Shoes in the Time of the Nazis - 1933 to 1945), because the book does run to some 900pp. (well, 876 actually).
It represents a revision of a doctoral thesis (submitted to the technical wing of the University of Munich) by one Anne Sudrow (b. 1970), and apparently is a product history, which makes a comparison of Britain, the States and, of course, Germany - or should that really read The Third Reich (as I imagine that the suppressed populations were brought under the aegis even in this respect)?
If this is not an exhaustive study, it has still probably cornered many of the arguments and research angles, but might have been more manageable as three (or more) volumes. It probably comes with a hefty price-tag, so (forgive me!) not really for those on their uppers.
And, no - for those who might be asking - I didn't get the impression that the book was illustrated*, although (forgive me again!) shoes at this time are its sole subject. Amazing what you can discover on the top floor of a copyright library in a row of books, though why it has it, when it is not seemingly a UK title (and so a copy would not have to be supplied free), I do not know...
End-notes
* In fact, consulting the on-line catalogue tells me that there are 44 tables (but some hold to the view that shoes should not be put on them), and even 92 illustrations, whereas it did not look like that sort of book.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Thursday, 2 February 2012
Colin Matthews or Does the world need more orchestrations?
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
Presumably, to be consistent, Matthews would just have to go along with it, for, if he did not, what I heard on Radio 3 in mid-December would seem to be hypocrisy :
For the concert, in the Afternoon Performance slot, featured what the web-page describes as 'exquisite versions' of six of Debussy's preludes (three in each half), including such prominent ones as 'The Girl with the Flaxen Hair' ('La fille aux cheveux de lin') in the first part, and 'The Submerged Cathedral' ('La cathédrale engloutie') in the second. (Whether 'versions' is a choice of word that came from Matthews, I do not know.)
Now, I must have been very busy with what I was doing - and I was at work on something - or even asleep in my wakefulness, because, although I heard the concept announced (and marvelled, later, when told that all 24 preludes had been given the same treatment²), I failed to identify either piece that I have named (and I couldn't have missed them both). All that I actually registered was an inundation rather akin to that which did for the cathedral - it all sounded like some murky seascape, and did not sound unlike Debussy in that regard, but I cannot say that it added, for me, in a helpful to what Debussy wrote in 1910 :
Oh, the audience at City Halls in Glasgow seemed appreciative enough, but I do wonder what they had gained from the experience. For I cannot honestly say that, even in an exercise to challenge the too familiar³, these preludes are calling out to be listened to in a different way. (And, for that matter, maybe The Planets didn't need Matthews to produce a Pluto - although I believe that, since he wrote it, it is no longer deemed a planet.)
As it is, Mussorgsky's piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition may stand as part of the virtuoso repertoire (though one hardly ever hears it broadcast) and, I would equally argue, was in no need of embellishment, that ever-present arrangement by Maurice Ravel (in which, admittedly, 'The Great Gate of Kiev' is very powerful and stirring)⁴ is what many people probably only ever hear, and miss out on the beauties of the original suite.
Mussorgsky wrote it in 1874 as a tribute to his artist friend Viktor Hartmann. Without what Ravel did (and Henry Wood apparently withdrew his own orchestration, made in 1915, because he thought Ravel's version superior), many people would not know of this work, but do they ever, in fact, hear it, if they never come to a knowledge of the piano original ?⁵
Well, none of us chooses what he or she is remembered by - the successful writer, who had something like forty West End hits to his name, is thought of as having written Winnie-the-Pooh, after all.
Postlude³ :
End-notes
¹ As, having heard it played live, Mahler rather pointlessly seems to have done with Schubert's String Quartet No. 14 in D minor (amongst other works) - he does not take liberties, thankfully, but what is gained by having more instruments to produce the sound, when that is not what the quartet, in my view, is about ?
(According to Michael Kennedy's book about Mahler, that arrangement, although one of two made in Hamburg, rankled with the orchestra in Vienna when he took up the baton, because they were viewed as complicit in what he had done with the likes of Beethoven and Schubert in these arrangements. I believe that some reckoned that Beethoven had known well enough how to orchestrate his Symphony No. 9, without an extra little beefing up here and there.)
² The Radio 3 web-page says that they were 'orchestrated for the Hallé Orchestra between 2001 and 2007.
³ And, to chip away the veneer on Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, I found Liszt's piano transcription very rewarding. His other such works, including the concert paraphrases, similarly endear themselves to me.
⁴ And there are at least twenty others, including one by Vladimir Ashkenazy (in 1982) that takes issue with what Ravel did (in 1922, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky).
⁵ Even Night on a Bare Mountain is usually in the edition by Rimsky-Korsakov, and, for Fantasia (1940), Stokowski orchestrated it afresh.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
I wonder what Colin Matthews would say if I commissioned another composer to orchestrate one of his very fine string quartets¹...
Presumably, to be consistent, Matthews would just have to go along with it, for, if he did not, what I heard on Radio 3 in mid-December would seem to be hypocrisy :
For the concert, in the Afternoon Performance slot, featured what the web-page describes as 'exquisite versions' of six of Debussy's preludes (three in each half), including such prominent ones as 'The Girl with the Flaxen Hair' ('La fille aux cheveux de lin') in the first part, and 'The Submerged Cathedral' ('La cathédrale engloutie') in the second. (Whether 'versions' is a choice of word that came from Matthews, I do not know.)
Now, I must have been very busy with what I was doing - and I was at work on something - or even asleep in my wakefulness, because, although I heard the concept announced (and marvelled, later, when told that all 24 preludes had been given the same treatment²), I failed to identify either piece that I have named (and I couldn't have missed them both). All that I actually registered was an inundation rather akin to that which did for the cathedral - it all sounded like some murky seascape, and did not sound unlike Debussy in that regard, but I cannot say that it added, for me, in a helpful to what Debussy wrote in 1910 :
Oh, the audience at City Halls in Glasgow seemed appreciative enough, but I do wonder what they had gained from the experience. For I cannot honestly say that, even in an exercise to challenge the too familiar³, these preludes are calling out to be listened to in a different way. (And, for that matter, maybe The Planets didn't need Matthews to produce a Pluto - although I believe that, since he wrote it, it is no longer deemed a planet.)
As it is, Mussorgsky's piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition may stand as part of the virtuoso repertoire (though one hardly ever hears it broadcast) and, I would equally argue, was in no need of embellishment, that ever-present arrangement by Maurice Ravel (in which, admittedly, 'The Great Gate of Kiev' is very powerful and stirring)⁴ is what many people probably only ever hear, and miss out on the beauties of the original suite.
Mussorgsky wrote it in 1874 as a tribute to his artist friend Viktor Hartmann. Without what Ravel did (and Henry Wood apparently withdrew his own orchestration, made in 1915, because he thought Ravel's version superior), many people would not know of this work, but do they ever, in fact, hear it, if they never come to a knowledge of the piano original ?⁵
Well, none of us chooses what he or she is remembered by - the successful writer, who had something like forty West End hits to his name, is thought of as having written Winnie-the-Pooh, after all.
Postlude³ :
He does the opposite of Colin Matthews in symphonic arrangements of Debussy, and one feels that one hears more in Gould's piano than from an orchestra - as against 'La fille aux cheveux de lin' and @the_halle / Mark Elder, closing yesterday's @BBCInTune ?https://t.co/4i4tFQQNAL— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 22, 2018
Or Symphony No. 6, in F Major, Op. 68 :https://t.co/hwHuNPEs4K https://t.co/y5rb8bmTYu— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 22, 2018
End-notes
¹ As, having heard it played live, Mahler rather pointlessly seems to have done with Schubert's String Quartet No. 14 in D minor (amongst other works) - he does not take liberties, thankfully, but what is gained by having more instruments to produce the sound, when that is not what the quartet, in my view, is about ?
(According to Michael Kennedy's book about Mahler, that arrangement, although one of two made in Hamburg, rankled with the orchestra in Vienna when he took up the baton, because they were viewed as complicit in what he had done with the likes of Beethoven and Schubert in these arrangements. I believe that some reckoned that Beethoven had known well enough how to orchestrate his Symphony No. 9, without an extra little beefing up here and there.)
² The Radio 3 web-page says that they were 'orchestrated for the Hallé Orchestra between 2001 and 2007.
³ And, to chip away the veneer on Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, I found Liszt's piano transcription very rewarding. His other such works, including the concert paraphrases, similarly endear themselves to me.
⁴ And there are at least twenty others, including one by Vladimir Ashkenazy (in 1982) that takes issue with what Ravel did (in 1922, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky).
⁵ Even Night on a Bare Mountain is usually in the edition by Rimsky-Korsakov, and, for Fantasia (1940), Stokowski orchestrated it afresh.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Escaped lion kills camel at zoo (according to AOL®)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
Sadly (actually, probably not), the item - whether it is a news report or even some gruesome footage - is spending minutes allegedly loading, so I am none the wiser. However, two questions therefore remain pertinent:
1. If the lion were being regularly fed, what reason would it have to attack another creature?
2. And how would it kill one of such a size that many a passenger needs a leg-up to get onto it?
I shall have a quick look in search of answers...
Well, an ITN report that is available on YouTube informs me that all this was in Indonesia, and that, after cleaning the lion's cage and feeding it, the zoo-keeper failed to lock it. In consequence, two camels were attacked, with one fatality.
But I still don't believe that the lion could have been being fed properly, and this very brief ITN item is all that there seems to be to flesh out (pun intended) what happened and why. Leaving the cage unlocked is not, I think, a sufficient explanation, though necessary to what happened.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
Sadly (actually, probably not), the item - whether it is a news report or even some gruesome footage - is spending minutes allegedly loading, so I am none the wiser. However, two questions therefore remain pertinent:
1. If the lion were being regularly fed, what reason would it have to attack another creature?
2. And how would it kill one of such a size that many a passenger needs a leg-up to get onto it?
I shall have a quick look in search of answers...
Well, an ITN report that is available on YouTube informs me that all this was in Indonesia, and that, after cleaning the lion's cage and feeding it, the zoo-keeper failed to lock it. In consequence, two camels were attacked, with one fatality.
But I still don't believe that the lion could have been being fed properly, and this very brief ITN item is all that there seems to be to flesh out (pun intended) what happened and why. Leaving the cage unlocked is not, I think, a sufficient explanation, though necessary to what happened.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Google® has its uses
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
For some reason, not that the scrolls on any of the string instruments were in any way exceptional, I was reminded of a film that I had seen - and which I couldn't place - where a teenager saws, almost hacks, the scroll off a violin in a symbolic gesture regarding his relationship with, as I recollect, his father.
My first thought was to ask the friend who might have seen the film with me, but the e-mail didn't even get drafted, because I tried searching with the following, and, much to my surprise, got what I wanted as item 7 on my list of results:
"scroll"+"violin"+"film"
The film, it turns out, is Adoration (2008), and, courtesy of About.com's DVD section, I have very quickly been reminded of it. However, other than telling me that a scroll made by the teenage main character's (Simon's) father 'decorated' an instrument played by his mother, I am none the wiser just now...
Still, if only all searches were as succesful!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
For some reason, not that the scrolls on any of the string instruments were in any way exceptional, I was reminded of a film that I had seen - and which I couldn't place - where a teenager saws, almost hacks, the scroll off a violin in a symbolic gesture regarding his relationship with, as I recollect, his father.
My first thought was to ask the friend who might have seen the film with me, but the e-mail didn't even get drafted, because I tried searching with the following, and, much to my surprise, got what I wanted as item 7 on my list of results:
"scroll"+"violin"+"film"
The film, it turns out, is Adoration (2008), and, courtesy of About.com's DVD section, I have very quickly been reminded of it. However, other than telling me that a scroll made by the teenage main character's (Simon's) father 'decorated' an instrument played by his mother, I am none the wiser just now...
Still, if only all searches were as succesful!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
All sorts of echoes
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
To-night, I listened - live - to three pieces for (or incorporating) a piano trio (The Sitkovestsky Trio), the first (Haydn’s Klavertrio No. 43 in C major, Hob. XV/27) and last (Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor, M. 7) of which reminded me of other things.
Regarding one, I have a hypothesis to make, whereas the other gives rise to an observation:
In a motif in the opening movement of the Haydn (marked Allegro), and in a certain quality in the string writing, I could hear Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat major*, Op. 44, and I should be surprised not only if this work of the former were not known to the latter, but also, if so, to learn that the reminiscence is not a deliberate one.
For this, I must search for some evidence.
Regarding the Franck, this was not a work that I knew – because, as far as I recall, I have only heard the familiar works: the Symphony in D minor and the Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major** – and yet I heard themes, especially in the outer movements (marked Molto moderato and Allegro non troppo), that seemed to emanate from those of the symphony, and the power of the tutti was such as to remind one of orchestral forces.
But which came first...?
End-notes
* In full (according to the work quoted below), the Quintet for Pianoforte and Strings.
** At any rate, it appears that the Schumann was influential on Franck in writing his quintet, but that needs further looking into:
Talking of the finale of Schumann's piano quintet***, J. A. Fuller-Maitland writes (in Schumann's Concerted Chamber Music (Oxford University Press, London, 1929) 'we are irresistibly reminded of a chime of bells, an effect that must have been in César Franck's mind when he wrote the ending of his violin sonata.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
To-night, I listened - live - to three pieces for (or incorporating) a piano trio (The Sitkovestsky Trio), the first (Haydn’s Klavertrio No. 43 in C major, Hob. XV/27) and last (Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor, M. 7) of which reminded me of other things.
Regarding one, I have a hypothesis to make, whereas the other gives rise to an observation:
In a motif in the opening movement of the Haydn (marked Allegro), and in a certain quality in the string writing, I could hear Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat major*, Op. 44, and I should be surprised not only if this work of the former were not known to the latter, but also, if so, to learn that the reminiscence is not a deliberate one.
For this, I must search for some evidence.
Regarding the Franck, this was not a work that I knew – because, as far as I recall, I have only heard the familiar works: the Symphony in D minor and the Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major** – and yet I heard themes, especially in the outer movements (marked Molto moderato and Allegro non troppo), that seemed to emanate from those of the symphony, and the power of the tutti was such as to remind one of orchestral forces.
But which came first...?
End-notes
* In full (according to the work quoted below), the Quintet for Pianoforte and Strings.
** At any rate, it appears that the Schumann was influential on Franck in writing his quintet, but that needs further looking into:
Talking of the finale of Schumann's piano quintet***, J. A. Fuller-Maitland writes (in Schumann's Concerted Chamber Music (Oxford University Press, London, 1929) 'we are irresistibly reminded of a chime of bells, an effect that must have been in César Franck's mind when he wrote the ending of his violin sonata.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Wednesday, 1 February 2012
Akanksha is - allegedly - a doctor
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 February
She may or may not be 25 and 5' 10", but she keeps coming up in some shady side-banner to a sign-in page of mine.
She is also said to be in the States:
She must have chosen some really worthy part of the medical profession to be being paid just $35,000 p.a.!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 February
She may or may not be 25 and 5' 10", but she keeps coming up in some shady side-banner to a sign-in page of mine.
She is also said to be in the States:
She must have chosen some really worthy part of the medical profession to be being paid just $35,000 p.a.!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)