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16 March - views from a train out of King's X
Following the pattern of The Unnamable - English translation (his of his French orgiginal) only? – in many other works, he left out punctuation.
So one might be confronted with a highly ambiguous title Imagination dead imagine, where one could be being urged to imagine one’s own imagination being dead, imagination in general being dead, or, despite one’s or imagination in general being dead, to imagine – maybe all of those at once.
At any rate, such is the confusion with which I met on being first told Enjoy! - since I knew (without being conscious of the facet**) that the verb is only transitive, an object was clearly missing: I cannot just enjoy full-stop in the way that I could be asked to smile or laugh, but I must enjoy something (did you, too, abbreviate that to ‘sthng’?).
that It’s really about as meaningful as saying Laugh me through that one, will you?, only that’s not one lazy word, however well intentioned the utterer.
So if, kindly though it was meant, you miss have been wished that you would enjoy the pint / gig / meal / exhibition, catch that person during the course of said food, drink, event or show, and cryptically say, in a nice friendly way, with a smile, drawing out the syllables En – joy – ing!.
Then, when it is time for another pint or a coffee / dessert or the cheeseboard, or just to go, adopt the same kind approach and, doing your best Cheshire Cat imitation (though not going as far as to disappear in the process!), drawl Ennnn – joyyyyed.
Now, I grant you that you will then be taken for anything from Gollum to Forest Gump (with Mr Bean in-between), but you’ll have had your say / bowl of cherries / magic ring taken away and hurled into the intense fiery heat, and you’ll feel better for it:
Believe! Do! Enjoy!
End-notes
* Maybe not, but he had a working signal-box in the grounds where he lived at Ussy-sur-Marne.
** A variant reading has 'faucet'.
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Saturday, 17 March 2012
Friday, 16 March 2012
Complexity, perplexity and diversity
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16 March
I was feeling left out, with everyone I knew making pacts, leaving me feeling left out - oh, I've already said that, so that just shows that I'd be the perfect patsy for one of these 'I'll be damned!', Yes, you will... arrangements.
Anyway, wanting to know where I was going wrong, I called around on Faust, because, after all, he should know, with a pact named after him and all that. Turns out that he's packed and left for Vienna, wanting a word with Freud.
Quite an angry word, as it turned out when I next saw him, because, not satisfied with one thing to his name, he's upset that, for all the bedding of women that he did and in a highly cynical and opportunistic way (for which, of course, now he's repentant), Freud's only gone and called his relevant complex after Don Juan! Faust swears that the Don, apart from anything else, grossly inflated his tally, and besides he, Faust, isn't fictional.
I tried to intervene with the observation that maybe Oedipus was fictional, but he would have none of it, adjuring by his britches (though I prefer 'breeches') that he'd, many a time, had a session with old Oed down at The Golden Dog, and he could drink most men under the table. (Still, I think it could easily explain that rather gratuitous bit of charioteer rage* that caused him a bit of bother.)
Back at me knocking in vain outside Faust's house, who should come along but Dante! A lot of people stay away from him, because she was really rather young even for his day, and they like to lump him in with that Lewis Carroll, why did he have child friends and take photographs of them? rap, but he's OK, if a bit grumpy too much of the time (something to do with spots on the moon, I gather from Beckettt).
To be continued
End-notes
* I'm told that people, lulled by the alliteration, want to style this after the substrate, but you couldn't call what Laertes was driving on a road, and, anyway, the rage was directed at him, not at the road. When Basil Fawlty's car misbehaves, he breaks off a branch and, logically enough, beats the bonnet - hitting the road, unnecessarily violent as it sounds, is something else again.
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16 March
I was feeling left out, with everyone I knew making pacts, leaving me feeling left out - oh, I've already said that, so that just shows that I'd be the perfect patsy for one of these 'I'll be damned!', Yes, you will... arrangements.
Anyway, wanting to know where I was going wrong, I called around on Faust, because, after all, he should know, with a pact named after him and all that. Turns out that he's packed and left for Vienna, wanting a word with Freud.
Quite an angry word, as it turned out when I next saw him, because, not satisfied with one thing to his name, he's upset that, for all the bedding of women that he did and in a highly cynical and opportunistic way (for which, of course, now he's repentant), Freud's only gone and called his relevant complex after Don Juan! Faust swears that the Don, apart from anything else, grossly inflated his tally, and besides he, Faust, isn't fictional.
I tried to intervene with the observation that maybe Oedipus was fictional, but he would have none of it, adjuring by his britches (though I prefer 'breeches') that he'd, many a time, had a session with old Oed down at The Golden Dog, and he could drink most men under the table. (Still, I think it could easily explain that rather gratuitous bit of charioteer rage* that caused him a bit of bother.)
Back at me knocking in vain outside Faust's house, who should come along but Dante! A lot of people stay away from him, because she was really rather young even for his day, and they like to lump him in with that Lewis Carroll, why did he have child friends and take photographs of them? rap, but he's OK, if a bit grumpy too much of the time (something to do with spots on the moon, I gather from Beckettt).
To be continued
End-notes
* I'm told that people, lulled by the alliteration, want to style this after the substrate, but you couldn't call what Laertes was driving on a road, and, anyway, the rage was directed at him, not at the road. When Basil Fawlty's car misbehaves, he breaks off a branch and, logically enough, beats the bonnet - hitting the road, unnecessarily violent as it sounds, is something else again.
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Thursday, 15 March 2012
Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)
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16 March
A few takes on what could be behind Bel Ami (2012) - or ahead of it...
1. That advert - a distillation from the forest outside Athens?
They talk about the back story*, but, whatever we call it, it imparts essential knowledge:
It used to be that, when the woman had used this body-spray, men around her couldn't help acting on it, spontaneously presenting her, a stranger, with blooms and the like folly. (Men's fragrances didn't really exist, save as after-shave.)
Then came the male equivalent, acceptable to use as a shower-gel, because women would be falling all over the person who had done so. Clearly, Georges was a prescient amateur molecular chemist - or, more likely, knew a female one - and contrived the manufacture of what Puck uses on Shakespeare's human and fairy lovers, a potion so powerful that it acts by being scented.
How else explain KST's, UT's, and CR's characters' instant fascination for him?!
2. The follow-up - Bed, Amies!
Despite his prodigious sex-appeal (so he says) and everything else that he has gained in life at the end of Bel Ami, Georges soon becomes world weary (like Büchner's Danton**), and will do anything for a bet.
We've already seen how, through inefficient timing, he nearly has Virginie and Clotilde in the bedroom, if not in bed, at the same time - a touch worthy of Brian Rix in his pre-Mencap days. Telling these stories to his cronies, and admitting that he stll enjoys his memories of sex with the trio of women, he is put to the challenge of achieving just that, sex with them all at the same time.
He accepts, confident of winning the bet! With his natural cunning (so evident, for example, in assuming that a widow would want to consider an offer of marriage not only from someone with nothing obvious to offer, but also a bare minute or two after she became bereaved), it will be child's play, he reckons...
NB If insufficiently convinced that those who watched Bel Ami could stomach a sequel, go straight to a hard-core version for 'the specialist market'
3. An alternative follow-up - Ami de Freud
World-weary, but interested, when he hears about psychoanalysis, to meet Freud because of his troubling dreams about the three women, Georges goes to Vienna to have a consultation - or, more likely, he pays for an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris - it doesn't matter whether it's plausible, but just that it happens:
They talk, he becomes Freud's patient, and Freud teases out that, a bit like The Fifth Element (1997) (which he has got on VHS), the three essential parts of Georges' psyche are split up amongst the three women:
* One, Clotilde, is essentially benign, and forgives his wrongs (because she cannot miss having sex with him)
* Another, Madeleine, can take or leave sex with Georges (and will put him in his place through it), because she has a longstanding lover, and then, when he is gone, nothing much can replace him
* The last, Virginie, humbles herself for love of him, and he hates her for it, feeling such disgust that he feels compelled to abuse her, orally and physically (although it is, of course, not she whom he wishes to abuse)
You, Freud tells him, will never rest until the three are reunited.
How? asks Georges.
Proceed as scenario for Bed, Amies!, because, as everything is to do with sex, he can never be free until he gets all three women in bed at once...
End-notes
* If I knew who 'they' were, I'd be intrigued to find out from them what, then, is the front story, the side story, the up story...
** Another Georges. The 1983 film is not unworthy, methinks.
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16 March
A few takes on what could be behind Bel Ami (2012) - or ahead of it...
1. That advert - a distillation from the forest outside Athens?
They talk about the back story*, but, whatever we call it, it imparts essential knowledge:
It used to be that, when the woman had used this body-spray, men around her couldn't help acting on it, spontaneously presenting her, a stranger, with blooms and the like folly. (Men's fragrances didn't really exist, save as after-shave.)
Then came the male equivalent, acceptable to use as a shower-gel, because women would be falling all over the person who had done so. Clearly, Georges was a prescient amateur molecular chemist - or, more likely, knew a female one - and contrived the manufacture of what Puck uses on Shakespeare's human and fairy lovers, a potion so powerful that it acts by being scented.
How else explain KST's, UT's, and CR's characters' instant fascination for him?!
2. The follow-up - Bed, Amies!
Despite his prodigious sex-appeal (so he says) and everything else that he has gained in life at the end of Bel Ami, Georges soon becomes world weary (like Büchner's Danton**), and will do anything for a bet.
We've already seen how, through inefficient timing, he nearly has Virginie and Clotilde in the bedroom, if not in bed, at the same time - a touch worthy of Brian Rix in his pre-Mencap days. Telling these stories to his cronies, and admitting that he stll enjoys his memories of sex with the trio of women, he is put to the challenge of achieving just that, sex with them all at the same time.
He accepts, confident of winning the bet! With his natural cunning (so evident, for example, in assuming that a widow would want to consider an offer of marriage not only from someone with nothing obvious to offer, but also a bare minute or two after she became bereaved), it will be child's play, he reckons...
NB If insufficiently convinced that those who watched Bel Ami could stomach a sequel, go straight to a hard-core version for 'the specialist market'
3. An alternative follow-up - Ami de Freud
World-weary, but interested, when he hears about psychoanalysis, to meet Freud because of his troubling dreams about the three women, Georges goes to Vienna to have a consultation - or, more likely, he pays for an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris - it doesn't matter whether it's plausible, but just that it happens:
They talk, he becomes Freud's patient, and Freud teases out that, a bit like The Fifth Element (1997) (which he has got on VHS), the three essential parts of Georges' psyche are split up amongst the three women:
* One, Clotilde, is essentially benign, and forgives his wrongs (because she cannot miss having sex with him)
* Another, Madeleine, can take or leave sex with Georges (and will put him in his place through it), because she has a longstanding lover, and then, when he is gone, nothing much can replace him
* The last, Virginie, humbles herself for love of him, and he hates her for it, feeling such disgust that he feels compelled to abuse her, orally and physically (although it is, of course, not she whom he wishes to abuse)
You, Freud tells him, will never rest until the three are reunited.
How? asks Georges.
Proceed as scenario for Bed, Amies!, because, as everything is to do with sex, he can never be free until he gets all three women in bed at once...
End-notes
* If I knew who 'they' were, I'd be intrigued to find out from them what, then, is the front story, the side story, the up story...
** Another Georges. The 1983 film is not unworthy, methinks.
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Can all text-messages be like this?!
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15 March
I quote (with editing to protect The Innocent):
Dear Xxxxx, PS To-
day's Wordwang is
Hyperbuadfedenti
alltsmiecc. Don't
spend it all at once!
Ciao, Xxxxx
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15 March
I quote (with editing to protect The Innocent):
Dear Xxxxx, PS To-
day's Wordwang is
Hyperbuadfedenti
alltsmiecc. Don't
spend it all at once!
Ciao, Xxxxx
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Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (1)
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15 March
* Contains a splashing of spoilers *
I have no reason to believe that the fault lies with Maupassant*'s novel (published in 1885), on which it is based, but the screenplay of Bel Ami** (2012) - whether or not it does justice to his writing - does not, I believe, to the talents, amongst others, of Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas, as I shall hope to explain.
As depicted, the story (which, in type, is not an unfamiliar one***) references several works, and so, depending on how one chooses to look at it, either disjoints time, by pulling images of Keanu Reeves and / or Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate (1997) out of our (maybe only subconscious) mind and into nineteenth-century (?) Paris, or, perhaps, has us prefigure those roles on the pretext that Georges is archetypal.
As to Paris, we had one shot of a street that, as soon as I saw it, patently resembled London's Kingsway (with a few token signs in French), and not, as the credits admitted, the French capital at all. The give-away, for those with eyes to see, was that the architecture simply was not right for what it was meant for.
So, as I think about it the morning after, I fear that such glibness, of unconvincingly trying to pass one thing off for another**** (which is, in some ways, at the root of the narrative itself), infected the whole production. (Just imagine Allen making Midnight in Paris (2011) without actually giving you, arguably, one of his best features of the film, Paris herself, shining alongside the radiant Marion Cotillard!)
Now, I have a confession of my own. I must admit that I was carried away with writing another posting, which I thought that I could finish, and that meant that, when I realized how late it was, I had missed not only (as planned) the tiresome trailers and the like, but also (I judge) the first minute or so. However, we were clearly enough in Pigalle or some such place, established by a flash of bare breasts, the scene for the sigificant encounter between Philip Glenister (as Charles Forestier) and Robert Pattinson (Georges Duroy).
There was not much to catch up with, to be honest, and the development of the piece (which I refuse to see in terms of Acts, though, as here worked out at any rate, the story has a clear dénouement) did not require labyrinthine thought-processes to follow / predict. And that was one of its major failings: one was expected to believe that Georges actually has some wits and does just not pick up on the scraps, hints and clues that, like the few coins that Forestier gives to him to set him up for a dinner where our three important ladies are all present.
Here, I think, he most resembled Dickens' Pip in being out of his depth. That said, somehow he knows that he needs a suitable set of clothes to be invited to dinner (and so, when given money for it, has some over for time with the prostitute Rachel), but has no clue (and has not troubled to find out) which knife to use. Here, I may have missed something by my lateness, since, for all that Georges gets tasked with writing under the title Diary of a Cavalry Officer, he plainly does not have the manners, social experience or refinement of a typical officer (but, according to Wikipedia®, he is only a non-commissioned officer in the novel - which does not really explain matters, as NCOs usually have their own mess).
This whole episode, with Christina Ricci coming into the room and introducing herself just as Clotilde, virtually required to throw herself (with her eyes at least) at Georges, is, however implausibly set up, the genesis of everything. At dinner, Georges, who has betrayed no talent for anything (and, for a long time, continues in that vein), is supposed to be 'a pull' (of, initially anyway, one sort or another) for Clotilde, and also for Madeleine Forestier (Uma Thurman as the wife of Charles), and Virginie Walter, played by an unfairly aged Kristin Scott Thomas*****, in much of the role, whose true beauty is only allowed to peep out from behind that make-up for a while.
Rather like for Franz Kafka's protagonists in The Trial and The Castle****** [I must search for dates when he was working on both, though Kafka was but a toddler when Bel Ami was published], sex is a strong impulse - in the former, instead of devoting himself to what his advocate wants him to do, Josef K. seduces the advocate's mistress (as with Geroges, he is irresistible to women); in the latter, K. goes out of his way to try to separate the official Klamm from his mistress. (The scene in the church between Virginie and Georges highly put me in mind of the chapter in The Trial that is set in the cathedral, or of the deceit and immorality of Laclos.)
I, at least, would have been reminded of those Kafka characters, blinded to the true course that they should follow for what (they say that) they want to achieve by impulses such as the desire for sex or to sleep (rather than pay attenton): here, it is truly amazing that Madeleine does not throttle Georges, when he obviously does not listen to a word that she says (if he has something else to say or do), and, when she appears to accede to his demand for sex and sits astride him, she effectively castrates his sexuality instead (in Freudian terms, whatever they may tell us), by making what he sought as pleasure a painful or unsatisfying experience, and thus a punishment.
(The sex described at the opening of America has the same quality of being like rape.)
So much for the referents. As to the dialogue, a lot of it passes muster, but too much does not, and to hear highly skilled performers such as the trio of women having to deliver it is painful, as is some of the bogus staging that they are required to act out. And, to their great credit, they do it as best they can, but the set-up for what they have to do is about as genuine as passing off London for Paris.
Too often, I could strip away the music that was trying to create a mood (in one case, utterly unconvincingly, of tension), hear the bare words that were being spoken, and not avoid cringeing: clearly, a soundtrack should not be so obvious and / or the dialogue of such poor quality that they separate from each other. (I say 'clearly', but someone made this film as it is.)
Nor should, unless one is in very sure and safe hands, a transition be made from a person as underdog to avenger, and triumphant one at that, unless it is better set up to be credible (but we could, maybe, just be meant to imagine that it is a drunken dream of retribution). Resources have to be deployed to whisk someone away, have another called on in the middle of the night, and even to get a clean set of clothes, but this was not even sketched in, passed over as if keen to get the whole thing wrapped.
Yes, we know, if we have lived, that apparent talents can be fronts for people who have cowed or manipulated othes (whether or not they knew it), but there has to be some spark for that to live as an idea. Georges, as written, betrays no real evidence of being able to plot to save his life - he imposes himself, at one point, on card-game where he plainly does not know the stakes (for all that flapping bank-notes are deployed on the table), and, for one self-evidently stupid gambit, ends up considerably the worse (witnessed by a character for whom the provision of lines seemed an unnecessary step, until he is eventually surprised, and comes out with an absurd banality, whose only excuse is to feed Georges a retort to deliver).
There is just too much that cannot reasonably unfold as it does. Admitted, Georges has cunning and is deceitful, but he is stupid enough to take Clotilde to where we first saw him; there is no notion that he has negotiated anything reciprocal with Madeleine when she is quite open about what she wants (we just jump until much time has passed); he lets people down and overlooks them, when he needs to stand in good stead with them; and he even writes a poor piece of rubbish and is surprised that it gets him the sack.
Not least being in, all ways, the worse for wear, far too much counts against this Georges for Bel Ami - the film and he, as he is so often called - to reach its ending. It relies on someone being humiliated, when it us unlikely that it would have been acceptable or decorous for a wife to attend a ball unaccompanied in the first place, and also on this overexploited (in cinematic terms) power for Georges to seduce a woman just by existing.
Maybe with a different Georges, but with this one, on paper and in appearance, no - most of the time, he has not just a five o'clock shadow, but palpable stubble and hair that makes mine look kempt (both hair and stubble even advance and recede when, between his utterances, we cut back from a reaction-shot*******) , and he makes no attempt to disguise his lack of manners, lack of then acquiring them, or sheer raw hunger for sex and money. Back with those referents, but in a fairly gross form that makes them seem subtle.
PS At the risk of seeming to rant more, I should say that Thurman's characterization, particularly the quality of the voice, was entirely and artistocratically thought through, and, unlike Pattinson's, did not wander in and out of timbre or speech-pattern. As did Ricci, she looked suitably stunning, and, although to a lesser extent, one thought in both cases that more was being exposed physically by suggestion - Ricci's poses, in particular, on the bed were provocative and cleverly devised (a deliberate contrast to the Pigalle scene, where one did not need to imagine much).
All three women, as I have tried to say, did their best to deliver what was an inadequate set of lines and their part in the plot, but Ricci probably had it easiest, by just having to be open to Georges, irrespective of what he had done, given a little time. It was, as I have remarked, unfair on Scott Thomas to mask her attractiveness, and she also had to make do with some fairly foolish things that she was required to do as it made her seem, at times, little more than an infatuated buffoon, and, ulimately, an intolerable irritation to Georges. Echoes of Steerpike? (Sting has a registered company with that name in the title.)
For a less serious approach to all this, one could - I fear - do worse than visit Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)...
End-notes
* It is now inexplicable to me that we de not call him de Maupassant, but Beethoven is, equally, not van Beethoven.
** For obvious reasons, I cannot name Philip French, but, on this newspaper critic's showing - in a corny crack at the start of (and wasting space in) a tiny piece that passed for a review of Sarah's Key (2011), where he asserted that he had gone into the screening with the belief that he was watching something about Sarah Keays - he will no doubt take his seat, expecting a portrait (what some would call a biopic) of a bearded botanist with a distinctive way of speaking who was on our screens (and, for all that I know, still is) much at one time.
*** For example, Steerpike's devious rise to power (and perdition) from the kitchens in the first two novels of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (and who, then, reads the third, Titus Alone?!). There are even Dickensian echoes, and, for some reason that I cannot explain, I am most drawn to parallels with Pip in Great Expectations (published, in instalments, from 1860 to 1861).
**** Another example: there is a flash of a street, with French written clumsily in red to indicate where a turning to the right leads, but this, too, no more looked like Paris than the frontage of Harrod's. (Actually, I take that back - featuring the exterior of Harrod's might have been more effective than some of what we were shown.)
***** IMDb renders the surname 'Walters' (with an 's'), but I am unconvinced. As to the age question, CR is 32, UT 42, and KST 51 - but I would challenge anyone to know, just from this film, that it is just nine years that separate the latter two.
****** By the time that we come to America (or Der Verschollene, The One who Disappeared), sex is only the driving force for Karl to be forced to leave home, when a housemaid forces herself on him. In this film, we effectively see Georges raped by Madeleine, as I go on to mention.
******* The continuity is truly dire - even the colour-matching went at one point when we looked back to where we had just been!
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15 March
* Contains a splashing of spoilers *
I have no reason to believe that the fault lies with Maupassant*'s novel (published in 1885), on which it is based, but the screenplay of Bel Ami** (2012) - whether or not it does justice to his writing - does not, I believe, to the talents, amongst others, of Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas, as I shall hope to explain.
As depicted, the story (which, in type, is not an unfamiliar one***) references several works, and so, depending on how one chooses to look at it, either disjoints time, by pulling images of Keanu Reeves and / or Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate (1997) out of our (maybe only subconscious) mind and into nineteenth-century (?) Paris, or, perhaps, has us prefigure those roles on the pretext that Georges is archetypal.
As to Paris, we had one shot of a street that, as soon as I saw it, patently resembled London's Kingsway (with a few token signs in French), and not, as the credits admitted, the French capital at all. The give-away, for those with eyes to see, was that the architecture simply was not right for what it was meant for.
So, as I think about it the morning after, I fear that such glibness, of unconvincingly trying to pass one thing off for another**** (which is, in some ways, at the root of the narrative itself), infected the whole production. (Just imagine Allen making Midnight in Paris (2011) without actually giving you, arguably, one of his best features of the film, Paris herself, shining alongside the radiant Marion Cotillard!)
Now, I have a confession of my own. I must admit that I was carried away with writing another posting, which I thought that I could finish, and that meant that, when I realized how late it was, I had missed not only (as planned) the tiresome trailers and the like, but also (I judge) the first minute or so. However, we were clearly enough in Pigalle or some such place, established by a flash of bare breasts, the scene for the sigificant encounter between Philip Glenister (as Charles Forestier) and Robert Pattinson (Georges Duroy).
There was not much to catch up with, to be honest, and the development of the piece (which I refuse to see in terms of Acts, though, as here worked out at any rate, the story has a clear dénouement) did not require labyrinthine thought-processes to follow / predict. And that was one of its major failings: one was expected to believe that Georges actually has some wits and does just not pick up on the scraps, hints and clues that, like the few coins that Forestier gives to him to set him up for a dinner where our three important ladies are all present.
Here, I think, he most resembled Dickens' Pip in being out of his depth. That said, somehow he knows that he needs a suitable set of clothes to be invited to dinner (and so, when given money for it, has some over for time with the prostitute Rachel), but has no clue (and has not troubled to find out) which knife to use. Here, I may have missed something by my lateness, since, for all that Georges gets tasked with writing under the title Diary of a Cavalry Officer, he plainly does not have the manners, social experience or refinement of a typical officer (but, according to Wikipedia®, he is only a non-commissioned officer in the novel - which does not really explain matters, as NCOs usually have their own mess).
This whole episode, with Christina Ricci coming into the room and introducing herself just as Clotilde, virtually required to throw herself (with her eyes at least) at Georges, is, however implausibly set up, the genesis of everything. At dinner, Georges, who has betrayed no talent for anything (and, for a long time, continues in that vein), is supposed to be 'a pull' (of, initially anyway, one sort or another) for Clotilde, and also for Madeleine Forestier (Uma Thurman as the wife of Charles), and Virginie Walter, played by an unfairly aged Kristin Scott Thomas*****, in much of the role, whose true beauty is only allowed to peep out from behind that make-up for a while.
Rather like for Franz Kafka's protagonists in The Trial and The Castle****** [I must search for dates when he was working on both, though Kafka was but a toddler when Bel Ami was published], sex is a strong impulse - in the former, instead of devoting himself to what his advocate wants him to do, Josef K. seduces the advocate's mistress (as with Geroges, he is irresistible to women); in the latter, K. goes out of his way to try to separate the official Klamm from his mistress. (The scene in the church between Virginie and Georges highly put me in mind of the chapter in The Trial that is set in the cathedral, or of the deceit and immorality of Laclos.)
I, at least, would have been reminded of those Kafka characters, blinded to the true course that they should follow for what (they say that) they want to achieve by impulses such as the desire for sex or to sleep (rather than pay attenton): here, it is truly amazing that Madeleine does not throttle Georges, when he obviously does not listen to a word that she says (if he has something else to say or do), and, when she appears to accede to his demand for sex and sits astride him, she effectively castrates his sexuality instead (in Freudian terms, whatever they may tell us), by making what he sought as pleasure a painful or unsatisfying experience, and thus a punishment.
(The sex described at the opening of America has the same quality of being like rape.)
So much for the referents. As to the dialogue, a lot of it passes muster, but too much does not, and to hear highly skilled performers such as the trio of women having to deliver it is painful, as is some of the bogus staging that they are required to act out. And, to their great credit, they do it as best they can, but the set-up for what they have to do is about as genuine as passing off London for Paris.
Too often, I could strip away the music that was trying to create a mood (in one case, utterly unconvincingly, of tension), hear the bare words that were being spoken, and not avoid cringeing: clearly, a soundtrack should not be so obvious and / or the dialogue of such poor quality that they separate from each other. (I say 'clearly', but someone made this film as it is.)
Nor should, unless one is in very sure and safe hands, a transition be made from a person as underdog to avenger, and triumphant one at that, unless it is better set up to be credible (but we could, maybe, just be meant to imagine that it is a drunken dream of retribution). Resources have to be deployed to whisk someone away, have another called on in the middle of the night, and even to get a clean set of clothes, but this was not even sketched in, passed over as if keen to get the whole thing wrapped.
Yes, we know, if we have lived, that apparent talents can be fronts for people who have cowed or manipulated othes (whether or not they knew it), but there has to be some spark for that to live as an idea. Georges, as written, betrays no real evidence of being able to plot to save his life - he imposes himself, at one point, on card-game where he plainly does not know the stakes (for all that flapping bank-notes are deployed on the table), and, for one self-evidently stupid gambit, ends up considerably the worse (witnessed by a character for whom the provision of lines seemed an unnecessary step, until he is eventually surprised, and comes out with an absurd banality, whose only excuse is to feed Georges a retort to deliver).
There is just too much that cannot reasonably unfold as it does. Admitted, Georges has cunning and is deceitful, but he is stupid enough to take Clotilde to where we first saw him; there is no notion that he has negotiated anything reciprocal with Madeleine when she is quite open about what she wants (we just jump until much time has passed); he lets people down and overlooks them, when he needs to stand in good stead with them; and he even writes a poor piece of rubbish and is surprised that it gets him the sack.
Not least being in, all ways, the worse for wear, far too much counts against this Georges for Bel Ami - the film and he, as he is so often called - to reach its ending. It relies on someone being humiliated, when it us unlikely that it would have been acceptable or decorous for a wife to attend a ball unaccompanied in the first place, and also on this overexploited (in cinematic terms) power for Georges to seduce a woman just by existing.
Maybe with a different Georges, but with this one, on paper and in appearance, no - most of the time, he has not just a five o'clock shadow, but palpable stubble and hair that makes mine look kempt (both hair and stubble even advance and recede when, between his utterances, we cut back from a reaction-shot*******) , and he makes no attempt to disguise his lack of manners, lack of then acquiring them, or sheer raw hunger for sex and money. Back with those referents, but in a fairly gross form that makes them seem subtle.
PS At the risk of seeming to rant more, I should say that Thurman's characterization, particularly the quality of the voice, was entirely and artistocratically thought through, and, unlike Pattinson's, did not wander in and out of timbre or speech-pattern. As did Ricci, she looked suitably stunning, and, although to a lesser extent, one thought in both cases that more was being exposed physically by suggestion - Ricci's poses, in particular, on the bed were provocative and cleverly devised (a deliberate contrast to the Pigalle scene, where one did not need to imagine much).
All three women, as I have tried to say, did their best to deliver what was an inadequate set of lines and their part in the plot, but Ricci probably had it easiest, by just having to be open to Georges, irrespective of what he had done, given a little time. It was, as I have remarked, unfair on Scott Thomas to mask her attractiveness, and she also had to make do with some fairly foolish things that she was required to do as it made her seem, at times, little more than an infatuated buffoon, and, ulimately, an intolerable irritation to Georges. Echoes of Steerpike? (Sting has a registered company with that name in the title.)
For a less serious approach to all this, one could - I fear - do worse than visit Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (2)...
End-notes
* It is now inexplicable to me that we de not call him de Maupassant, but Beethoven is, equally, not van Beethoven.
** For obvious reasons, I cannot name Philip French, but, on this newspaper critic's showing - in a corny crack at the start of (and wasting space in) a tiny piece that passed for a review of Sarah's Key (2011), where he asserted that he had gone into the screening with the belief that he was watching something about Sarah Keays - he will no doubt take his seat, expecting a portrait (what some would call a biopic) of a bearded botanist with a distinctive way of speaking who was on our screens (and, for all that I know, still is) much at one time.
*** For example, Steerpike's devious rise to power (and perdition) from the kitchens in the first two novels of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (and who, then, reads the third, Titus Alone?!). There are even Dickensian echoes, and, for some reason that I cannot explain, I am most drawn to parallels with Pip in Great Expectations (published, in instalments, from 1860 to 1861).
**** Another example: there is a flash of a street, with French written clumsily in red to indicate where a turning to the right leads, but this, too, no more looked like Paris than the frontage of Harrod's. (Actually, I take that back - featuring the exterior of Harrod's might have been more effective than some of what we were shown.)
***** IMDb renders the surname 'Walters' (with an 's'), but I am unconvinced. As to the age question, CR is 32, UT 42, and KST 51 - but I would challenge anyone to know, just from this film, that it is just nine years that separate the latter two.
****** By the time that we come to America (or Der Verschollene, The One who Disappeared), sex is only the driving force for Karl to be forced to leave home, when a housemaid forces herself on him. In this film, we effectively see Georges raped by Madeleine, as I go on to mention.
******* The continuity is truly dire - even the colour-matching went at one point when we looked back to where we had just been!
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Wednesday, 14 March 2012
STOP PRESS: Beat-Crazed Boffins trounced by Daniella (3)
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15 March
Not for the first time to-night, I have been asked to put my own blogging aside to give time, energy and words to another's cause, which is the following Official Statement:
Official Statement
I, Stan O'Grady, was drummer of the band Beat-Crazed Puffins ('the Band') more or less without a break for 15 years.
I am now quietly retired, and living in Egham.
I do not know, nor have I at any time known, The Sage of Egham.
On account of the name, the Band (not to be mistaken for The Band or The Banned) was linked, but only in some feeble people's minds, with The Boffins.
I have never knowingly played with The Boffins, although, before, during and after my time with the Band, I did play with other bands ('the bands').
The list of the bands, to the best of my recollection and belief, is in the bureau.
The list itself is of the bands with which, to the best of my recollection and belief, I played.
I do not know, nor have I at any time known, Antropuss O'Rourke.
For safety's sake, I should say that, to the best of my recollection and belief, the list is actually of the names of the bands, not of the bands themselves.
That is all that I wish to say.
Thank you for your time
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15 March
Not for the first time to-night, I have been asked to put my own blogging aside to give time, energy and words to another's cause, which is the following Official Statement:
Official Statement
I, Stan O'Grady, was drummer of the band Beat-Crazed Puffins ('the Band') more or less without a break for 15 years.
I am now quietly retired, and living in Egham.
I do not know, nor have I at any time known, The Sage of Egham.
On account of the name, the Band (not to be mistaken for The Band or The Banned) was linked, but only in some feeble people's minds, with The Boffins.
I have never knowingly played with The Boffins, although, before, during and after my time with the Band, I did play with other bands ('the bands').
The list of the bands, to the best of my recollection and belief, is in the bureau.
The list itself is of the bands with which, to the best of my recollection and belief, I played.
I do not know, nor have I at any time known, Antropuss O'Rourke.
For safety's sake, I should say that, to the best of my recollection and belief, the list is actually of the names of the bands, not of the bands themselves.
That is all that I wish to say.
Thank you for your time
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STOP PRESS: Beat-Crazed Boffins trounced by Daniella (2)
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15 March
A timely comment on the earlier posting (only 11 days after the fact) from The One Who Shall Not Be Named provokes the following response (with the consent and also agreement of Bray King himself). (In the manner of awards ceremonies, we, the undersigned Members of the Grand Order of Walrus, take your three statements in reverse order):
I smell a police horse
We are (as are all careful readers of The Daily Splodge*) already aware, Anonymous Being, of your fondness for not smelling just police horses in the round (as it were), but, specifically, Trojan.
Despite the numerous remonstrations of PC Bob Markham at the nature and duration of what you call your 'olfactory exercises', you have continued these offensive practices. It is, therefore, apt, that Horseferry Road Magistrates' Court has already, in advance of hearing the full case of obstructing Officers Trojan and Markham in the conduct of their duties, granted an injunction with a power of arrest attached to it.
Why you wish to be so candid about your nefarious business we do not know, but it does usefully assist us in demonstrating the kind of person who goes on (if it didn't precede the above statement) to assert:
Something else is going on here, for sure
Pithily, we merely choose to retort that, if it is so clear to you, Anonymous Being, that what you have been told is not to be credited, then you advance no basis for your alternative view of something else [...] going on here.
Our lawyer, Antrobus O'Rourke (no relation) advised us not to state more than that we know where, in the case of your making that comment, here is, and what, almost certainly, 'goes on' at that place, which throws into relief when you propound:
Nah, the Boffins have been clean for years
Mr King tells us that, since he took over the task four years ago, he can vouch as a matter of knowledge that the Boffins have, indeed, been dusted once per week and polished to a high sheen on a monthly basis. He has every reason to believe that an unbroken chain of dusting, polishing and even buffing (before that became invasive), goes back to the time of Gregory Paul (which, as he remarks, is saying something).
However, we simply do not comprehend, Anonymous Being, what Axe you have to grind (to quote the title of BCB's immortal hit).
QED
Signed this 15th day of March 2012
Hilary Apps
Judith Meganwhite-Hurley
Augustus M. McMayhew
Hector Stravinsky
Corinna Steerpike
J. S. Bart
Igor Berlioz
Bob Markham
Trapezoid O'Rourke
Oliver Sackbutt-Morgan
John Sackbutt III
Morgan Oliver
Rhomboid O'Rourke
End-notes
* In which Mr King's shareholding, being below 25%, cannot be considered significant.
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15 March
A timely comment on the earlier posting (only 11 days after the fact) from The One Who Shall Not Be Named provokes the following response (with the consent and also agreement of Bray King himself). (In the manner of awards ceremonies, we, the undersigned Members of the Grand Order of Walrus, take your three statements in reverse order):
I smell a police horse
We are (as are all careful readers of The Daily Splodge*) already aware, Anonymous Being, of your fondness for not smelling just police horses in the round (as it were), but, specifically, Trojan.
Despite the numerous remonstrations of PC Bob Markham at the nature and duration of what you call your 'olfactory exercises', you have continued these offensive practices. It is, therefore, apt, that Horseferry Road Magistrates' Court has already, in advance of hearing the full case of obstructing Officers Trojan and Markham in the conduct of their duties, granted an injunction with a power of arrest attached to it.
Why you wish to be so candid about your nefarious business we do not know, but it does usefully assist us in demonstrating the kind of person who goes on (if it didn't precede the above statement) to assert:
Something else is going on here, for sure
Pithily, we merely choose to retort that, if it is so clear to you, Anonymous Being, that what you have been told is not to be credited, then you advance no basis for your alternative view of something else [...] going on here.
Our lawyer, Antrobus O'Rourke (no relation) advised us not to state more than that we know where, in the case of your making that comment, here is, and what, almost certainly, 'goes on' at that place, which throws into relief when you propound:
Nah, the Boffins have been clean for years
Mr King tells us that, since he took over the task four years ago, he can vouch as a matter of knowledge that the Boffins have, indeed, been dusted once per week and polished to a high sheen on a monthly basis. He has every reason to believe that an unbroken chain of dusting, polishing and even buffing (before that became invasive), goes back to the time of Gregory Paul (which, as he remarks, is saying something).
However, we simply do not comprehend, Anonymous Being, what Axe you have to grind (to quote the title of BCB's immortal hit).
QED
Signed this 15th day of March 2012
Hilary Apps
Judith Meganwhite-Hurley
Augustus M. McMayhew
Hector Stravinsky
Corinna Steerpike
J. S. Bart
Igor Berlioz
Bob Markham
Trapezoid O'Rourke
Oliver Sackbutt-Morgan
John Sackbutt III
Morgan Oliver
Rhomboid O'Rourke
End-notes
* In which Mr King's shareholding, being below 25%, cannot be considered significant.
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BBC accused of faking report of James May battling learner drivers (according to AOL®)
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15 March
Those in the know will be able to tell you what is really faked, as evidenced by the above photograph.
It's not that the traffic* wasn't real, but that James May has finally employed a double**.
For, as those who know him can testify, it is actually The Agent himself, allegedly at the wheel of that seeming vehicle!
End-notes
* I understand that some would feel drawn to write 'the traffic situation'...
** Likewise, some would say 'a body double'.
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15 March
Those in the know will be able to tell you what is really faked, as evidenced by the above photograph.
It's not that the traffic* wasn't real, but that James May has finally employed a double**.
For, as those who know him can testify, it is actually The Agent himself, allegedly at the wheel of that seeming vehicle!
End-notes
* I understand that some would feel drawn to write 'the traffic situation'...
** Likewise, some would say 'a body double'.
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I am the walrus*
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16 March
Ringo, if anyone, looked more and more like a walrus at one point (some, maybe cruelly, would say that such a beast could have better performed his role in the band, whereas modern science has proved that the walrus has a near-congenital (?) tone-deafness, unsuited to a drummer).
On the celebrated cover of the Sergeant Pepper album**, we think that we see Ringo, standing as one of the group at the front. However, microscopic analysis of the cardboard (and also of some DNA from Orson Welles that was knocking around the lab) shows that he is really beneath the surface, having been pulverized to a few microns thick in a freak fishing accident***.
John, not wishing to be outdone, sewed himself into the lining of one of Marilyn's gowns (allegedy, the pinkish one from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), and refused to come out until Paul admitted that, as had been shown by the famous backwards playing of Pepper, he was actually dead.
He then buried Paul in a box of England's Glory, empty except for two used matches and an excessively large piece of cotton-wool, which he liked to squeeze inside, despite the box's protests (the arse**** even went to the House of Lords).
George wasn't interested much in any of this, and slipped off to play squash (in the nude?).
End-notes
* It is now postulated that, on account of the fact that George Martin misheard, taking the uninflected neutral vowel-sound (which peppers spoken English) in the indefinite article (sc. the word 'a') and thinking that it was in the definite article (to wit the word 'the'), and then promulgated this error in the written material for the album (which the boys weren't much bothered about), what should have been understood, more meaningfully, was that the notional singer of the song is saying I am a walrus, which is no longer counterfactual.
** According to Andrew Graham Dixon's latest art-historical study, The Vanishing Socks (London, 2011), it is the unacknowledged work of Pablo Picasso (under the influence of Frida Kahlo, who had just been floating past) .
*** Sadly, as is all too often the case with this sort of fishing exploit, no freaks were caught either.
**** Some assert that this should be emended to read 'case', but a matchbox is clearly no sort of case, so that just doesn't 'make the grade' as a theory.
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16 March
Ringo, if anyone, looked more and more like a walrus at one point (some, maybe cruelly, would say that such a beast could have better performed his role in the band, whereas modern science has proved that the walrus has a near-congenital (?) tone-deafness, unsuited to a drummer).
On the celebrated cover of the Sergeant Pepper album**, we think that we see Ringo, standing as one of the group at the front. However, microscopic analysis of the cardboard (and also of some DNA from Orson Welles that was knocking around the lab) shows that he is really beneath the surface, having been pulverized to a few microns thick in a freak fishing accident***.
John, not wishing to be outdone, sewed himself into the lining of one of Marilyn's gowns (allegedy, the pinkish one from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), and refused to come out until Paul admitted that, as had been shown by the famous backwards playing of Pepper, he was actually dead.
He then buried Paul in a box of England's Glory, empty except for two used matches and an excessively large piece of cotton-wool, which he liked to squeeze inside, despite the box's protests (the arse**** even went to the House of Lords).
George wasn't interested much in any of this, and slipped off to play squash (in the nude?).
End-notes
* It is now postulated that, on account of the fact that George Martin misheard, taking the uninflected neutral vowel-sound (which peppers spoken English) in the indefinite article (sc. the word 'a') and thinking that it was in the definite article (to wit the word 'the'), and then promulgated this error in the written material for the album (which the boys weren't much bothered about), what should have been understood, more meaningfully, was that the notional singer of the song is saying I am a walrus, which is no longer counterfactual.
** According to Andrew Graham Dixon's latest art-historical study, The Vanishing Socks (London, 2011), it is the unacknowledged work of Pablo Picasso (under the influence of Frida Kahlo, who had just been floating past) .
*** Sadly, as is all too often the case with this sort of fishing exploit, no freaks were caught either.
**** Some assert that this should be emended to read 'case', but a matchbox is clearly no sort of case, so that just doesn't 'make the grade' as a theory.
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Tuesday, 13 March 2012
Preparing for death or Living well
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14 March
Out of an honourable sense of duty, you have performed the 5005 required acts of reading, listening to songs, cinema-going, and travel around the world to view buildings and 'natural wonders'. (Your doctor kindly exempted you from the 2002 meals and sex-acts with which the same sense troubled you*.)
They were all a prerequisite to dying, and although you are not - worn down though you are by reading, listening to songs, cinema-going, and travel around the world to view buildings and 'natural wonders' - ready to die on one level, on another you could now happily and dutifully 'peg out'**.
So, to start setting your affairs in order, you go to sell off the invaluable books that have told you what 5005 acts to perform, and, with a neat - if fairly hefty - pile of them by your laptop, you search to find out what to ask for the first of them, your pristine copy of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die***.
Yet, nice though yours is, it weighs probably at least 2 kilogrammes and the cost of posting it, despite an allowance of £2.80, even so cuts well into the modest amount that lesser specimens are set to fetch. Puzzled, you try the same thing with another - very similar - title, whose ISBN is obscured by a luggage-label (which ended up there during your world-tour), and realize that the book about 'natural wonders' is out in a new edition.
Out of duty, you put just that one for now into your basket (although you establish that two other books are in new editions) and buy it. In what seems like minutes, it arrives, and you flick through idly first of all, but that becomes a horrified realization that there are now other wonders that you must see, if all is to be well with your death, and that, also, some that you thought were wonders could not have been so wonderful after all, because they are not in this edition.
You spent at least £10,000 just watching the films alone, let alone all spending on those books, the travel, the downloads... And must you now seek out, amongst that magical tally of 1001****, the new things in the new editions that they say constitute constituent parts of that figure?
No, for you infer that, as it is an almost Sisyphean task, you must, after all, be immortal - immortal, but penniless through having had to go through all this expense to find the truth, and with an eternity to face!
In the face of the intense mixture of elation and regret, so your body deems it apt to call time for you: the books stay piled up by the laptop, and your copy of 1001 Natural Wonders You Must See Before You Die remains lying open, for some reason, at The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
End-notes
* And you, thankfully, did not even know that you were also required to listen to as many albums, and also to play video games.
** A term that, without reference to any (other) authority, I shall allege has its origins in croquet. (After all, Lewis Carroll loved croquet.)
*** Those who wish to know in detail what list Nithan Palal created can go to Movies I Watched Before Dying.
**** The 1001 Nights?
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14 March
Out of an honourable sense of duty, you have performed the 5005 required acts of reading, listening to songs, cinema-going, and travel around the world to view buildings and 'natural wonders'. (Your doctor kindly exempted you from the 2002 meals and sex-acts with which the same sense troubled you*.)
They were all a prerequisite to dying, and although you are not - worn down though you are by reading, listening to songs, cinema-going, and travel around the world to view buildings and 'natural wonders' - ready to die on one level, on another you could now happily and dutifully 'peg out'**.
So, to start setting your affairs in order, you go to sell off the invaluable books that have told you what 5005 acts to perform, and, with a neat - if fairly hefty - pile of them by your laptop, you search to find out what to ask for the first of them, your pristine copy of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die***.
Yet, nice though yours is, it weighs probably at least 2 kilogrammes and the cost of posting it, despite an allowance of £2.80, even so cuts well into the modest amount that lesser specimens are set to fetch. Puzzled, you try the same thing with another - very similar - title, whose ISBN is obscured by a luggage-label (which ended up there during your world-tour), and realize that the book about 'natural wonders' is out in a new edition.
Out of duty, you put just that one for now into your basket (although you establish that two other books are in new editions) and buy it. In what seems like minutes, it arrives, and you flick through idly first of all, but that becomes a horrified realization that there are now other wonders that you must see, if all is to be well with your death, and that, also, some that you thought were wonders could not have been so wonderful after all, because they are not in this edition.
You spent at least £10,000 just watching the films alone, let alone all spending on those books, the travel, the downloads... And must you now seek out, amongst that magical tally of 1001****, the new things in the new editions that they say constitute constituent parts of that figure?
No, for you infer that, as it is an almost Sisyphean task, you must, after all, be immortal - immortal, but penniless through having had to go through all this expense to find the truth, and with an eternity to face!
In the face of the intense mixture of elation and regret, so your body deems it apt to call time for you: the books stay piled up by the laptop, and your copy of 1001 Natural Wonders You Must See Before You Die remains lying open, for some reason, at The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
End-notes
* And you, thankfully, did not even know that you were also required to listen to as many albums, and also to play video games.
** A term that, without reference to any (other) authority, I shall allege has its origins in croquet. (After all, Lewis Carroll loved croquet.)
*** Those who wish to know in detail what list Nithan Palal created can go to Movies I Watched Before Dying.
**** The 1001 Nights?
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Session 4: Open mic
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13 March
When I first saw this - rather punctilious? - qualification of a perfectly sound abbreviation used, I could not quite believe that anyone would want to draw the derivation from the word 'microphone' into such stark relief: I was almost as amazed* as if someone had said to me that it had to be rendered thus, otherwise the unwary might be expecting (or fearing) that a candid man called Michael would be very frank with them**, and they would accordingly flock to (or abandon) the venue in droves.
In my view, this inadequacy of good explanation for something foolish equates to believing that, to avoid confusion, the term 'train station' is a necessary substitution for just 'station'. Besides which, it would follow that anyone called Mike would - because The Name Police would insist obedience or prosecution - have to start styling his name 'Mic', too, 'to throw up' that it shortens 'Michael'; similarly, anyone using the name Mick would have to prove that he had that name from when his birth had been registered, otherwise it would have to become Mich in written form.
Jack, too, should be outlawed, unless the bearer can show that he has borne that name since birth: it is a kid or pet name for John, and anyone called John should be called by that name***.
Oh, and, by the way, Norman Tebbit obviously urged the unemployed to get 'on your bic'!
End-notes
* Possibly akin to the sense of the word in which the shepherds apprehended events 'on Bethlehem Down'.
** Either that, or - perhaps - a huge game of Operation with a patient called Mike.
*** As for Tobacco O'Rourke, well he's just beyond redemption!
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13 March
When I first saw this - rather punctilious? - qualification of a perfectly sound abbreviation used, I could not quite believe that anyone would want to draw the derivation from the word 'microphone' into such stark relief: I was almost as amazed* as if someone had said to me that it had to be rendered thus, otherwise the unwary might be expecting (or fearing) that a candid man called Michael would be very frank with them**, and they would accordingly flock to (or abandon) the venue in droves.
In my view, this inadequacy of good explanation for something foolish equates to believing that, to avoid confusion, the term 'train station' is a necessary substitution for just 'station'. Besides which, it would follow that anyone called Mike would - because The Name Police would insist obedience or prosecution - have to start styling his name 'Mic', too, 'to throw up' that it shortens 'Michael'; similarly, anyone using the name Mick would have to prove that he had that name from when his birth had been registered, otherwise it would have to become Mich in written form.
Jack, too, should be outlawed, unless the bearer can show that he has borne that name since birth: it is a kid or pet name for John, and anyone called John should be called by that name***.
Oh, and, by the way, Norman Tebbit obviously urged the unemployed to get 'on your bic'!
End-notes
* Possibly akin to the sense of the word in which the shepherds apprehended events 'on Bethlehem Down'.
** Either that, or - perhaps - a huge game of Operation with a patient called Mike.
*** As for Tobacco O'Rourke, well he's just beyond redemption!
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Monday, 12 March 2012
Just call me Stetson!
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12 March
For some reason, as I headed to to-night's screening of Eraserhead (1977), I was thinking of accommodating people's wishes, as well as disabilities, at work - out of regard or respect for them.
Someone with whom I once worked, and who chose to be called what is best rendered as Sham (though it was not written that way), was effectively reminding one every time that the abbreviation used meant Fake - not too inapt, as it turned out. (I now know someone else whose choice of name also challenges me to think what can be behind selecting it.)
I went on to think that it would be o so tempting to tell people that I now wanted to be known, say, as Pencil*, and to seek to get them to do so - without explanation.
Or, failing that, without the real explanation**, but with some nonsense about William Penn, founding Pennsylvania and my family's origins being in the stationery business there...
End-notes
* This was the strangely prescient part, in view of the film that I was about to see, with a scene involving the manufacture of pencils, by adding a rubber to the end.
** Although I can be sharp, I also get very blunt.
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12 March
For some reason, as I headed to to-night's screening of Eraserhead (1977), I was thinking of accommodating people's wishes, as well as disabilities, at work - out of regard or respect for them.
Someone with whom I once worked, and who chose to be called what is best rendered as Sham (though it was not written that way), was effectively reminding one every time that the abbreviation used meant Fake - not too inapt, as it turned out. (I now know someone else whose choice of name also challenges me to think what can be behind selecting it.)
I went on to think that it would be o so tempting to tell people that I now wanted to be known, say, as Pencil*, and to seek to get them to do so - without explanation.
Or, failing that, without the real explanation**, but with some nonsense about William Penn, founding Pennsylvania and my family's origins being in the stationery business there...
End-notes
* This was the strangely prescient part, in view of the film that I was about to see, with a scene involving the manufacture of pencils, by adding a rubber to the end.
** Although I can be sharp, I also get very blunt.
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Sunday, 11 March 2012
A voice from my past
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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11 March
It was a surprise to hear Paul Guinery on Radio 3 this afternoon.
Not that he hasn’t been around as a presenter in recent months (unless my mind / memory is playing tricks), but because he was on the air, this time, as a guest of Sean Rafferty’s on In Tune, talking about his CD, Delius and his Circle. In conversation with Sean, Paul talked about composers of piano music such as Percy Grainger and E. J. Moeran, and engagingly played some of their pieces.
Apart from hearing Paul reading the news and announcing of late, I had not known of him in years. Although I do not know when he stopped being a regular voice on Radio 3, I do recall corresponding with him* in the late 1980s, when it was my joy to be able to listen to the radio through headphones when I was at work, which must have been around the time that, for their participation in Comic Relief, I received a photograph of all the presenters with red noses on (and even a rather suggestively placed one for the microphone).
The topic of our exchange of letters was the abolition of the feature Book of the Week, which was essentially a resource for when - one way or another - there were minutes to spare, and then the link person could dip into that week's book and read aloud (as well as at other scehduled times).
A serendipity about it was appealing (to me, at least, and I am sure that Paul said that he missed its passing), and it led to my reading several Books of the Week on the strength of what I heard read. In one case, it was a biography of Thomas More, whose Utopia I already knew (in translation, since I believe that it was written in Latin), and I was also familiar with several images, one famous, in the National Portrait Gallery. Sadly, the only thing that I take from that book is (and I quote from memory):
Equally, another Paul, Paul Griffiths, whom I knew as a writer of books about music (including his Concise History of Modern Music (for Thames & Hudson), turned up as a guest of Ian McMillan on The Verb, talking about his 'labour of love', Let Me Tell You, which had taken years to write (although short):
Taking, essentially, as some sort of principle the notion that less is more, and that, by restricting the means available, one can challenge oneself and produce wonders (which is under the umbrella of what Oulipo**, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, stands for), Paul limited himself to writing a novel about, broadly, Hamlet's story, but told from Ophelia's perspective, and only using the vocabulary of some 400 to 500 words that she has in all her lines in the Shakespeare play.
The result is powerful. Strange, too, but one soon loses the temptation to turn to the text of Hamlet and referee what this other Paul has done. When he talked about the endeavour on air, the inventiveness was patent, and he explained to his host Ian how, for example, the fact that Ophelia only uses the word 'father' (referring, of course, to Polonius) means that circumlocution is always involved in talking about Polonius' wife, Ophelia's mother, which he makes a feature of the book, and of Ophelia's (and Polonius') relations with her.
The words in Ophelia's vocabulary, though, have been used in any sense that they admit: so 'rue', from her famous garland, is not just a noun for a herb, but can appear as a verb, and that is only the simplest example of what has been done by Paul Griffiths in Let Me Tell You. If, as a reader, one knows the play reasonably well, one will be taken short from time to time at just how much has been done with such a small resource, and almost every chapter has a different feel to it, some of them, at the end (almost necessarily), being very dark.
End-notes
* Memory being what it is, and my cat having propelled a pile of papers from off the shelf in 'the office' in such a way that the letter was uppermost, I can now say that Donald Macleod was, in fact, my correspondent: in his letter, added to a standard one dated 31 March 1989, he informed me that the Controller of Radio 3, John Drummond, had objected to having a Book of the Week on the basis that readings from it, in odd gaps, did not relate to the surrounding programmes.
It seems that Donald missed Book of the Week, too, but that the idea of having readings from diaries was that they would relate to the date of broadcast. (True, but Drummond does not seem to have realized that such readings had no more necessary relevance to the programmes being broadcast that day than an abritrary book, and I cannot say how long such readings lasted.)
** Curiously, on the Wikipedia® web-page for Oulipo, the list of members as at 2011 bears this qualification: Note that Oulipo members are still considered members after their deaths.
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11 March
It was a surprise to hear Paul Guinery on Radio 3 this afternoon.
Not that he hasn’t been around as a presenter in recent months (unless my mind / memory is playing tricks), but because he was on the air, this time, as a guest of Sean Rafferty’s on In Tune, talking about his CD, Delius and his Circle. In conversation with Sean, Paul talked about composers of piano music such as Percy Grainger and E. J. Moeran, and engagingly played some of their pieces.
Apart from hearing Paul reading the news and announcing of late, I had not known of him in years. Although I do not know when he stopped being a regular voice on Radio 3, I do recall corresponding with him* in the late 1980s, when it was my joy to be able to listen to the radio through headphones when I was at work, which must have been around the time that, for their participation in Comic Relief, I received a photograph of all the presenters with red noses on (and even a rather suggestively placed one for the microphone).
The topic of our exchange of letters was the abolition of the feature Book of the Week, which was essentially a resource for when - one way or another - there were minutes to spare, and then the link person could dip into that week's book and read aloud (as well as at other scehduled times).
A serendipity about it was appealing (to me, at least, and I am sure that Paul said that he missed its passing), and it led to my reading several Books of the Week on the strength of what I heard read. In one case, it was a biography of Thomas More, whose Utopia I already knew (in translation, since I believe that it was written in Latin), and I was also familiar with several images, one famous, in the National Portrait Gallery. Sadly, the only thing that I take from that book is (and I quote from memory):
Every man thinketh that his own shit smells sweet
Equally, another Paul, Paul Griffiths, whom I knew as a writer of books about music (including his Concise History of Modern Music (for Thames & Hudson), turned up as a guest of Ian McMillan on The Verb, talking about his 'labour of love', Let Me Tell You, which had taken years to write (although short):
Taking, essentially, as some sort of principle the notion that less is more, and that, by restricting the means available, one can challenge oneself and produce wonders (which is under the umbrella of what Oulipo**, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, stands for), Paul limited himself to writing a novel about, broadly, Hamlet's story, but told from Ophelia's perspective, and only using the vocabulary of some 400 to 500 words that she has in all her lines in the Shakespeare play.
The result is powerful. Strange, too, but one soon loses the temptation to turn to the text of Hamlet and referee what this other Paul has done. When he talked about the endeavour on air, the inventiveness was patent, and he explained to his host Ian how, for example, the fact that Ophelia only uses the word 'father' (referring, of course, to Polonius) means that circumlocution is always involved in talking about Polonius' wife, Ophelia's mother, which he makes a feature of the book, and of Ophelia's (and Polonius') relations with her.
The words in Ophelia's vocabulary, though, have been used in any sense that they admit: so 'rue', from her famous garland, is not just a noun for a herb, but can appear as a verb, and that is only the simplest example of what has been done by Paul Griffiths in Let Me Tell You. If, as a reader, one knows the play reasonably well, one will be taken short from time to time at just how much has been done with such a small resource, and almost every chapter has a different feel to it, some of them, at the end (almost necessarily), being very dark.
End-notes
* Memory being what it is, and my cat having propelled a pile of papers from off the shelf in 'the office' in such a way that the letter was uppermost, I can now say that Donald Macleod was, in fact, my correspondent: in his letter, added to a standard one dated 31 March 1989, he informed me that the Controller of Radio 3, John Drummond, had objected to having a Book of the Week on the basis that readings from it, in odd gaps, did not relate to the surrounding programmes.
It seems that Donald missed Book of the Week, too, but that the idea of having readings from diaries was that they would relate to the date of broadcast. (True, but Drummond does not seem to have realized that such readings had no more necessary relevance to the programmes being broadcast that day than an abritrary book, and I cannot say how long such readings lasted.)
** Curiously, on the Wikipedia® web-page for Oulipo, the list of members as at 2011 bears this qualification: Note that Oulipo members are still considered members after their deaths.
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Meditations on Matthew
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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9 March
Tim Brown, whose conducting I always find infectious to watch, brought together the forces of Cambridge University Bach Ensemble and Cambridge University Chamber Choir in to-night’s performance of the perennial Lententime Bach work, which never fails to find an audience.
To-night’s, if it – as I did – needed to read what Tim had written about the piece at the front of the programme to appreciate this truth, would have seen what he said about what determines how it unfolds to be perfectly correct: much about what The Matthew Passion (BWV 244) ends up being in performance is a result of the way in which the recitative of The Evangelist is delivered.
As I noticed for the first time in this performance (though I have heard two or three others before), three times he introduces Jesus saying, with remarkable economy and concision, Du sagest's*:
(1) The first is an answer to Judas, asking whether he is the one to betray him, Bin ich's, Rabbi?.
(2) The second is when Jesus is already before the High Priest, who seeks to compel Jesus to say whether he is The Christ with the words Ich beschwöre dich bei dem lebendigen Gott, dass du uns sagest, ob du seiest Christus, der Sohn Gottes.
(3) The final one is a little further on, when, before Pilate now, he is asked Bist du der Juden König?.
Of course, the threefold repetition chimes with Peter's three denials. Just as much as Judas, Peter betrays Jesus, first by saying Ich weiss nicht, was du sagest, and then, twice, Ich kenne des Menschen nicht. And we are led straight to what is almost certainly the aria in the piece capable of most beauty, Erbarme dich, mein Gott**, which made such an impression on me when Tarkovksy used it in The Sacrifice (1986), his final film.
As to the other two denials, one is by the High Priest, who tears his clothes and accuses Jesus of blasphemy for what he says about how the Son of Man will be seen seated at the right hand of glory and coming on the clouds of Heaven; the other is by the head of the secular authorities, who seems to see through the motives of those who seek for Jesus to be crucified, but ultimately seems powerless to resist the crowd that has been worked up to bay for his blood***.
Enough on the performance for now, save to say that Stefan Kennedy (as The Evangelist) and Nicholas Mogg (as Christus) both showed a feel for delivering recitative where some of the members of the choir, who had solo spots but also a passage of recitative immediately before, appeared vocaly less comfortable, and almost as though it were a chore to be got out of the way before the aria: as becomes quite evident when seeing the work, Jesus does say remarkably little in the quite lengthy time taken before the High Priest and then Pilate, and not because he has nothing to say, but Nicholas Mogg concentrated extremely well to give a cohesive Jesus.
In the case of Stefan Kennedy's recitative, I only felt very occasionally that it was a little rushed (and that only towards the end of the piece), but that it was otherwise carefully and thoughtfully paced to best effect****: I was certainly won over by how he placed emphasis as the interpretation developed, and, with a solid but often silent Jesus, there was an interesting dynamic between them.
All in all, not least with regard to the quality of the instrumental playing from the Bach Ensemble (with a highly solid continuo line from Dan Smith on organ and Kate Aldridge on violone), a very fine Matthew Passion!
End-notes
* The quotations are all taken from the text as it is given in the insert to the first version, on LP, that I owned of this work, as just an English translation was printed in the programme - I largely followed the German in that insert, but referred to the programme.
** Though this is not the only time that this verb is used, because it is in a passage of recitative that recapitulates that Jesus has been given over by Pilate to be scourged, ready for crucifixion. In the meantime, Judas has repented of his actions in accepting money to betray Jesus to the religious authorities, and there is a telling bass aria after he has thrown the money back at them and gone away and hanged himself:
Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder!
Seht, das Geld, den Mörderlohn,
Wirft euch der verlorne Sohn
Zu den Füssen nieder.
*** I was reminded a little how the Tribunes in Coriolanus (most recently seen as a film directed by Ralph Fiennes, who plays the title role) also stir the crowd.
**** With a few vowel-sounds, there seemed some variance from the text that I was following, but the score being used may have adopted a different editorial policy with regard to rendering past tenses in eighteenth-century German.
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9 March
Tim Brown, whose conducting I always find infectious to watch, brought together the forces of Cambridge University Bach Ensemble and Cambridge University Chamber Choir in to-night’s performance of the perennial Lententime Bach work, which never fails to find an audience.
To-night’s, if it – as I did – needed to read what Tim had written about the piece at the front of the programme to appreciate this truth, would have seen what he said about what determines how it unfolds to be perfectly correct: much about what The Matthew Passion (BWV 244) ends up being in performance is a result of the way in which the recitative of The Evangelist is delivered.
As I noticed for the first time in this performance (though I have heard two or three others before), three times he introduces Jesus saying, with remarkable economy and concision, Du sagest's*:
(1) The first is an answer to Judas, asking whether he is the one to betray him, Bin ich's, Rabbi?.
(2) The second is when Jesus is already before the High Priest, who seeks to compel Jesus to say whether he is The Christ with the words Ich beschwöre dich bei dem lebendigen Gott, dass du uns sagest, ob du seiest Christus, der Sohn Gottes.
(3) The final one is a little further on, when, before Pilate now, he is asked Bist du der Juden König?.
Of course, the threefold repetition chimes with Peter's three denials. Just as much as Judas, Peter betrays Jesus, first by saying Ich weiss nicht, was du sagest, and then, twice, Ich kenne des Menschen nicht. And we are led straight to what is almost certainly the aria in the piece capable of most beauty, Erbarme dich, mein Gott**, which made such an impression on me when Tarkovksy used it in The Sacrifice (1986), his final film.
As to the other two denials, one is by the High Priest, who tears his clothes and accuses Jesus of blasphemy for what he says about how the Son of Man will be seen seated at the right hand of glory and coming on the clouds of Heaven; the other is by the head of the secular authorities, who seems to see through the motives of those who seek for Jesus to be crucified, but ultimately seems powerless to resist the crowd that has been worked up to bay for his blood***.
Enough on the performance for now, save to say that Stefan Kennedy (as The Evangelist) and Nicholas Mogg (as Christus) both showed a feel for delivering recitative where some of the members of the choir, who had solo spots but also a passage of recitative immediately before, appeared vocaly less comfortable, and almost as though it were a chore to be got out of the way before the aria: as becomes quite evident when seeing the work, Jesus does say remarkably little in the quite lengthy time taken before the High Priest and then Pilate, and not because he has nothing to say, but Nicholas Mogg concentrated extremely well to give a cohesive Jesus.
In the case of Stefan Kennedy's recitative, I only felt very occasionally that it was a little rushed (and that only towards the end of the piece), but that it was otherwise carefully and thoughtfully paced to best effect****: I was certainly won over by how he placed emphasis as the interpretation developed, and, with a solid but often silent Jesus, there was an interesting dynamic between them.
All in all, not least with regard to the quality of the instrumental playing from the Bach Ensemble (with a highly solid continuo line from Dan Smith on organ and Kate Aldridge on violone), a very fine Matthew Passion!
End-notes
* The quotations are all taken from the text as it is given in the insert to the first version, on LP, that I owned of this work, as just an English translation was printed in the programme - I largely followed the German in that insert, but referred to the programme.
** Though this is not the only time that this verb is used, because it is in a passage of recitative that recapitulates that Jesus has been given over by Pilate to be scourged, ready for crucifixion. In the meantime, Judas has repented of his actions in accepting money to betray Jesus to the religious authorities, and there is a telling bass aria after he has thrown the money back at them and gone away and hanged himself:
Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder!
Seht, das Geld, den Mörderlohn,
Wirft euch der verlorne Sohn
Zu den Füssen nieder.
*** I was reminded a little how the Tribunes in Coriolanus (most recently seen as a film directed by Ralph Fiennes, who plays the title role) also stir the crowd.
**** With a few vowel-sounds, there seemed some variance from the text that I was following, but the score being used may have adopted a different editorial policy with regard to rendering past tenses in eighteenth-century German.
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Saturday, 10 March 2012
What, if anything, can we learn from Project X?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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11 March
To-night, I read Joe Walsh's condemnation of this film* on New Empress Magazine's web-site - at http://newempressmagazine.com/2012/03/in-review-project-x-2012/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewEmpressMagazine+%28New+Empress+Magazine+|+The+film+magazine+that+breaks+convention%29 - and it has prompted me to write the following (in addition to the comment made there):
What is the purpose of film?
Or does it have a variety of purposes, not all of which need be served at all - or not in the same scene?
I ask these questions, because Joe, in what he wrote, is clearly looking to what Project X might have been saying - but, in his not finding a 'moral arc', it neglects (did not seek?) to say - about responsibility and the consequences of our actions.
Reading between the lines of what he describes, I'm just guessing that the film didn't care** about anything more than a tokenistic reproof in the form of the simple slap on the wrist, which Joe, given what has gone before, finds inadequate.
Right, so what about Haneke's Funny Games (1997)***? The interview with Haneke that is included as 'an extra' on the DVD shows him saying two things:
(1) If one wants to stop watching the film, then it has served its purpose - and if one wants to watch it to the end, that is actually (he does not use these words) a less healthy impulse than saying that one has had enough.
(2) Relatedly, he reports what happened when Funny Games was shown at Cannes, at the moment when the mother, after her husband, son and she have been terrorized for a long time, succeeds in getting hold of the shotgun (some such gun) and kills one of the two teenagers. There was keen applause and acclaim from those present.
However, as they watched what happened, the other teenager swears a bit, rummages around for the t.v. remote-control, and - amazingly - winds back the action (as, in those days, one would a VHS cassette) to before his accomplice's killer gets the weapon, and ensures that she does not get near it a second time.
Cinematically, of course, that sequence is doing many things (as are the occasional addresses to the camera), but what concerns me is that it highlights the unremitting, unstoppable course of the reign that Tom and Jerry (or Peter and Paul - they have no real names) have over this family: they do what they do, because they enjoy it, and because they can.
I am not saying that there probably is any connection with whatever Project X may be, but neither film is going to make you feel at the end, as Spielberg almost invariably wants, gooey and that humanity has been redeemed - definitely not in Funny Games, where the pair of torturer killers just go on to further victims (whom they set up earlier).
In the same interview, Haneke is quite candid that his pair are stereotypes, his response to hearing reports that there were numbers of disaffected young people who committed such crimes for the sheer hell of it. In that case, then, really quite a straightforward 'moral arc', being the depiction of the ultimate absence of positive affect, unlike, say, Alex's journey through A Clockwork Orange (1971) (or, following the same actor, in O Lucky Man! (1973)).
Project X, I must infer, really is not in the same league, and sounds as though it is the vehicle - albeit a rather uncomfortable one - for jokes that did not pay off for Joe. So, essentially, the primary purpose of the film - even if it proves to have failed - is entertainment, and maybe a challenge in the form of being confronted with what the trio get up to.
Returning to Haneke for a moment, two of his films, Code Unknown (2000) and Hidden (2005), are related in being likely to provoke one of two reactions: either irritation that one is not being presented with a clear and unambiguous story, or seeing how he uses the medium to show what is uncertain or even unknowable about life, yet we have to - or are tempted to - fill in the gaps.
Which, of course, leads to 10 (1979), the impulse to pursue Bo Derek at any cost, just as Joe concludes that the message of Project X could be to say that similar abandonment of moral thinking is justified by the enjoyment to be had from one's actions.
In one film, though, the place that said Derek has occupied to the exclusion of Julie Andrews is seen for the mistake that it is (even if that realization on Dudley Moore's part may just seem a sop for all that has gone before), whereas it seems that Project X embodies a moral void, where maybe unnaturally rich and / or indulgent families overlook the excesses of the young (and I gather that they are quite excessive excesses).
Neither of these is a Pilgrim's Progress, neither a Crime and Punishment, and they do not bear further examination. But, in closing, they do make me think of this:
For all that Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck (unfinished at his death in 1837), however we come to approach it (e.g. through Berg's opera or Herzog's film), is, in study circles, routinely looked at as a piece of some sort of social archaeology (as Büchner studied the evidence of what had happened to the real Woyzeck in 1821), seeing the causes of Woyzeck's thoughts, and the actions resulting from them, in how he is treated as less than a person. (Black Swan (2011), more than 170 years later, appears to have very similar preoccupations, in considering how pressures can impact on an individual.)
Yet, in many ways, our psychiatric care in England and Wales often seems to struggle to comprehend those truths, which maybe the general public think self evident in Natalie Portman's portrayal, and that talking to a person and coming to understand his or her fears and concerns might be more humane than simply dosing up with haloperidol or the like: if you can imagine walking through treacle, or picture crossing a ploughed field and your feet gradually getting heavier and heavier, you will have some idea of what haloperidol does to a person and his or her self-worth.
End-notes
* I had previously satisfied myself that there would be 'no lasting benefit' from watching it, just by the cursory glance at a write-up that I recommend (in a mere five postings, beginning with The Future or How do you choose a satisfying film? (Part 1)): in this case, the 140 words or so in the booklet that the Arts Picturehouse produces every six weeks or so.
I deliberately use the phrase no lasting benefit, because, by text-message, I wished my friend Chris something to which the opposite applied when he was recently attending a conference in my home town.
He replied the following morning, wondering whether (since there is no such thing as 'an attendee') those words might apply in a different way from which it was intended to some of his fellow delegates: they would still be feeling, in all probability, every drop of how heavily they had been drinking, and doing so till 4.00 a.m.
** OK, I know that a film can't care or not care about anything (but it might have hurt feelings if it doesn't get shown very much), but a team of people put the thing together as a product and seek to market it for distribution - if that proves harder than it should be, the product gets changed (to the extent that it can be). The people who corporately bring the film into being and into circulation have intentions for it and how (pun intended!) it will be viewed.
*** I still find it bizarre that Haneke remade this film in English 10 years later, but I am referring to the original version (in German).
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11 March
To-night, I read Joe Walsh's condemnation of this film* on New Empress Magazine's web-site - at http://newempressmagazine.com/2012/03/in-review-project-x-2012/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewEmpressMagazine+%28New+Empress+Magazine+|+The+film+magazine+that+breaks+convention%29 - and it has prompted me to write the following (in addition to the comment made there):
What is the purpose of film?
Or does it have a variety of purposes, not all of which need be served at all - or not in the same scene?
I ask these questions, because Joe, in what he wrote, is clearly looking to what Project X might have been saying - but, in his not finding a 'moral arc', it neglects (did not seek?) to say - about responsibility and the consequences of our actions.
Reading between the lines of what he describes, I'm just guessing that the film didn't care** about anything more than a tokenistic reproof in the form of the simple slap on the wrist, which Joe, given what has gone before, finds inadequate.
Right, so what about Haneke's Funny Games (1997)***? The interview with Haneke that is included as 'an extra' on the DVD shows him saying two things:
(1) If one wants to stop watching the film, then it has served its purpose - and if one wants to watch it to the end, that is actually (he does not use these words) a less healthy impulse than saying that one has had enough.
(2) Relatedly, he reports what happened when Funny Games was shown at Cannes, at the moment when the mother, after her husband, son and she have been terrorized for a long time, succeeds in getting hold of the shotgun (some such gun) and kills one of the two teenagers. There was keen applause and acclaim from those present.
However, as they watched what happened, the other teenager swears a bit, rummages around for the t.v. remote-control, and - amazingly - winds back the action (as, in those days, one would a VHS cassette) to before his accomplice's killer gets the weapon, and ensures that she does not get near it a second time.
Cinematically, of course, that sequence is doing many things (as are the occasional addresses to the camera), but what concerns me is that it highlights the unremitting, unstoppable course of the reign that Tom and Jerry (or Peter and Paul - they have no real names) have over this family: they do what they do, because they enjoy it, and because they can.
I am not saying that there probably is any connection with whatever Project X may be, but neither film is going to make you feel at the end, as Spielberg almost invariably wants, gooey and that humanity has been redeemed - definitely not in Funny Games, where the pair of torturer killers just go on to further victims (whom they set up earlier).
In the same interview, Haneke is quite candid that his pair are stereotypes, his response to hearing reports that there were numbers of disaffected young people who committed such crimes for the sheer hell of it. In that case, then, really quite a straightforward 'moral arc', being the depiction of the ultimate absence of positive affect, unlike, say, Alex's journey through A Clockwork Orange (1971) (or, following the same actor, in O Lucky Man! (1973)).
Project X, I must infer, really is not in the same league, and sounds as though it is the vehicle - albeit a rather uncomfortable one - for jokes that did not pay off for Joe. So, essentially, the primary purpose of the film - even if it proves to have failed - is entertainment, and maybe a challenge in the form of being confronted with what the trio get up to.
Returning to Haneke for a moment, two of his films, Code Unknown (2000) and Hidden (2005), are related in being likely to provoke one of two reactions: either irritation that one is not being presented with a clear and unambiguous story, or seeing how he uses the medium to show what is uncertain or even unknowable about life, yet we have to - or are tempted to - fill in the gaps.
Which, of course, leads to 10 (1979), the impulse to pursue Bo Derek at any cost, just as Joe concludes that the message of Project X could be to say that similar abandonment of moral thinking is justified by the enjoyment to be had from one's actions.
In one film, though, the place that said Derek has occupied to the exclusion of Julie Andrews is seen for the mistake that it is (even if that realization on Dudley Moore's part may just seem a sop for all that has gone before), whereas it seems that Project X embodies a moral void, where maybe unnaturally rich and / or indulgent families overlook the excesses of the young (and I gather that they are quite excessive excesses).
Neither of these is a Pilgrim's Progress, neither a Crime and Punishment, and they do not bear further examination. But, in closing, they do make me think of this:
For all that Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck (unfinished at his death in 1837), however we come to approach it (e.g. through Berg's opera or Herzog's film), is, in study circles, routinely looked at as a piece of some sort of social archaeology (as Büchner studied the evidence of what had happened to the real Woyzeck in 1821), seeing the causes of Woyzeck's thoughts, and the actions resulting from them, in how he is treated as less than a person. (Black Swan (2011), more than 170 years later, appears to have very similar preoccupations, in considering how pressures can impact on an individual.)
Yet, in many ways, our psychiatric care in England and Wales often seems to struggle to comprehend those truths, which maybe the general public think self evident in Natalie Portman's portrayal, and that talking to a person and coming to understand his or her fears and concerns might be more humane than simply dosing up with haloperidol or the like: if you can imagine walking through treacle, or picture crossing a ploughed field and your feet gradually getting heavier and heavier, you will have some idea of what haloperidol does to a person and his or her self-worth.
End-notes
* I had previously satisfied myself that there would be 'no lasting benefit' from watching it, just by the cursory glance at a write-up that I recommend (in a mere five postings, beginning with The Future or How do you choose a satisfying film? (Part 1)): in this case, the 140 words or so in the booklet that the Arts Picturehouse produces every six weeks or so.
I deliberately use the phrase no lasting benefit, because, by text-message, I wished my friend Chris something to which the opposite applied when he was recently attending a conference in my home town.
He replied the following morning, wondering whether (since there is no such thing as 'an attendee') those words might apply in a different way from which it was intended to some of his fellow delegates: they would still be feeling, in all probability, every drop of how heavily they had been drinking, and doing so till 4.00 a.m.
** OK, I know that a film can't care or not care about anything (but it might have hurt feelings if it doesn't get shown very much), but a team of people put the thing together as a product and seek to market it for distribution - if that proves harder than it should be, the product gets changed (to the extent that it can be). The people who corporately bring the film into being and into circulation have intentions for it and how (pun intended!) it will be viewed.
*** I still find it bizarre that Haneke remade this film in English 10 years later, but I am referring to the original version (in German).
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My unusual job
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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19 March
I live under one of the bridges of the Île de la Cité - I'm not saying which, and I change from time to time, but that's where I sleep, and have my home.
I choose to live there, as I have an important duty to carry out, and it's just that I feel more comfortable with this way of life.
By day, my business is bananas, 'hands' of bananas they call them in English (but not in French), and I inspect them wherever they are to be found, and they are even to be found in very small quantities in Les Halles, an area where once they abounded.
I smell them, feel them, taste them, so that I know where the best specimens are to be found at any time - the bananas that are most fresh, most juicy, and more like a peach than many one knows.
The true Frenchman and -woman value this information, because they have a native passion akin to that of Gauguin, so they scan my column, which tells them everything that they need to know, first by arrondisement and by the style of fruit within each (because there is no one such thing, o no, as a banana any more than 'a white wine').
But I also give links to the neighbouring arrondisements, so that my readers can choose: someone in the fifth might be the wrong side, and be nearer to a good supplier on the sixth, so I think that through for him or her and have a feature that cross-references in that way.
And I do very well on it. I remain anonymous, with a wealth of disguises to make my visits, and I receive a big bag of letters every week from those grateful to me for what I do, so I am content.
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19 March
I live under one of the bridges of the Île de la Cité - I'm not saying which, and I change from time to time, but that's where I sleep, and have my home.
I choose to live there, as I have an important duty to carry out, and it's just that I feel more comfortable with this way of life.
By day, my business is bananas, 'hands' of bananas they call them in English (but not in French), and I inspect them wherever they are to be found, and they are even to be found in very small quantities in Les Halles, an area where once they abounded.
I smell them, feel them, taste them, so that I know where the best specimens are to be found at any time - the bananas that are most fresh, most juicy, and more like a peach than many one knows.
The true Frenchman and -woman value this information, because they have a native passion akin to that of Gauguin, so they scan my column, which tells them everything that they need to know, first by arrondisement and by the style of fruit within each (because there is no one such thing, o no, as a banana any more than 'a white wine').
But I also give links to the neighbouring arrondisements, so that my readers can choose: someone in the fifth might be the wrong side, and be nearer to a good supplier on the sixth, so I think that through for him or her and have a feature that cross-references in that way.
And I do very well on it. I remain anonymous, with a wealth of disguises to make my visits, and I receive a big bag of letters every week from those grateful to me for what I do, so I am content.
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Keep your Bolly heart on - she's a heroine! (According to AOL®)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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Dramatic departure for Emmerdale star
Holly Barton will soon suffer an overdose of heroin on screen
Since I knew nothing about Emmerdale - other than the obvious Linda Lusardi connection - it took good old Wikipedia® to put me right that the person pictured is not the said Barton, but the person (with a challenging surname) who plays her:
Holly Barton is a fictional character from the British soap opera Emmerdale, played by Sophie Powles. She made her first on-screen appearance on 17 July 2009
What I'm wondering is of a manifold nature:
* Whether AOL®'s 'people' had any idea who this Barton about whom they wrote was
* In any case, why they chose to use a photo of Sophie P. standing in front of the logo of a duscredited and defunct newspaper
* Unrelatedly, why the item just days ago that reported Lorraine Kelly falling off her horse appeared weeks after a small mention in i newspaper around a week before the end of February*
End-notes
* I have checked, and it was in the edition on Thursday 23 February. So much for 'breaking news' (pun probably intended)!
The full item, under the heading Lorraine Kelly hurt falling from horse (which pretty much is the story), read:
TV presenter Lorraine Kelly said she got a "real fright"** after falling from a horse, which then stamped on her leg. The 52-year-old lost a lot of blood and was rushed to hospital for surgery after the accident on Tuesday [i.e. 21 February]. Ms Kelly tweeted that the horse had made a deep wound that would take several weeks to heal properly [sc. around the time, then, that AOL® reported it as if it were, at least, recent].
** Why this isn't "a real fright" is beyond me (or, although it may be i's house-style, with single quotation-marks).
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Friday, 9 March 2012
My 'favourite' browser (2)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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10 March
Looking, as I have not done in a while, at the audience - or the apparent audience - for or of this blog, I have found a new browser: Debian
It connects more to my posting (somewhere - I shall try to find a link) about names that sound forcedly made up, but never mind, I can rest content in the knowledge that there is a browser with such a name.
And I am reminded how, as much out of superstitition as any real belief that it would shock my 'actual' browser into co-operation, I used to call up one called NetShark (or some such) - if NetShark itself had actually been compatible, it might have been brilliant!
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 March
Looking, as I have not done in a while, at the audience - or the apparent audience - for or of this blog, I have found a new browser: Debian
It connects more to my posting (somewhere - I shall try to find a link) about names that sound forcedly made up, but never mind, I can rest content in the knowledge that there is a browser with such a name.
And I am reminded how, as much out of superstitition as any real belief that it would shock my 'actual' browser into co-operation, I used to call up one called NetShark (or some such) - if NetShark itself had actually been compatible, it might have been brilliant!
* STOP PRESS *
12 September
New browser sighted. Goes by the name of OS;FBSV, just like typical virus name...
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