More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
16 October
Inspiration strikes in strange places! (More often, it doesn't strike at all.)
My poem about Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks
Invariably thanks
Cast and crew,
Getting through
Some-another damn' film (or two)
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A bid to give expression to my view of the breadth and depth of one of Cambridge's gems, the Cambridge Film Festival, and what goes on there (including not just the odd passing comment on films and events, but also material more in the nature of a short review (up to 500 words), which will then be posted in the reviews for that film on the Official web-site).
Happy and peaceful viewing!
Tuesday, 16 October 2012
Monday, 15 October 2012
Crucifying The King
This is a Festival review of La nit que va morir l'Elvis (The Night Elvis Died) (2010)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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15 October
This is a Festival review of La nit que va morir l'Elvis (The Night Elvis Died) (2010)
* Contains spoilers *
Forget the ludicrously low rating on www.imdb.com, definitely the weak-point with The Night Elvis Died (2010) is the title*, which would not matter, but, when it comes to people choosing whether to watch film X or Y or Z that are on at a convenient time this evening, they do not pay much attention to detail, and this one just sounds like a documentary about burgers, Gracelands and The King of Rock'n'Roll before anyone gets to read something saying otherwise - so film X or Z will fight it out as to which gets viewed.
Now, I don't say that it's right, but, particularly with a foreign-language film and translating its title into English, something judged dead right, like Holy Motors (2012), which - whatever it is - sounds swish and appealing, will get an audience, whereas this much better film didn't close the festival (in Screen 1), but was in Screen 3 one evening.
The comparison with Motors is not just incidental, as this review may go on to make clear, but Motors is on release, and, when I last noticed, showing twice per day locally, whereas those of us that night with Toni Espinosa for a screening and Q&A were the lucky few to be seeing it at all. Forgetting the investment of money, talent and time in making a film, the purpose of any creative act is for it to be seen.
What, then, is Elvis? Well, in a sort of Hitchcockian way, we have a character (Aureli Mercader, hauntingly played by Blai Llopis) with certain experiences, and we know - as the film goes on, but early on that he has issues with anxiety and that something has happened to me - that he had a breakdown. So his credibility is automatically if not written off, then in doubt, because that goes with the territory, which is often a filmic struggle for the person who had ill-health, to amass enough evidence to overcome the weight of the sceptical standard of proof. Classic Hitchcock, too, he has amnesia about what happened on the crucial night, although he knows the outcome and why that night was significant.
Alongside Hitchcock, though, there is also a feeling of Chinatown, because part of seeking for the answer, the breakthrough, is to visit a woman who might be unfairly treated as if she has dementia, when she seems reasonably coherent. Are people pretending to be mentally ill to protect themselves, have others drugged them to make them unwell for their own protection, or was there a real trauma? The film has us play with all three ideas, and when (as in Spellbound) a visual stimulus unlocks Aureli's memory, there is a psychologically convincing remorse that has him put the blame on himself for a death.
Part of the unfolding, where supernatural elements take over, and Aureli can wander into the behind-the-scenes part of a theatre and emerge from vegetation comprising props into a real wild space, is the working out of that assumed guilt. Aureli is in the theatre at all because the historic amateur passion play that has its home there is at risk, and his amnesia and the forces that threaten the play's existence are bound up together. There is a patchiness in the extent to which these hints at dimensions beyond our habitual ones feature, and they seem to go silent at one point when the machinery of a murder and clearing up after it are under way, but, in the final development, although rather mysteriously and highly symbolically at times, the floodgates open of worlds beyond possibility.
The guilt reaches an obvious conclusion with Elvis, so called because he had played Jesus in the passion play (and so was The King), seen on the cross and Aureli at the foot of it. He asks Elvis to forgive him, and so is literally both beseeching the crucified Christ, as one of the thieves does in one gospel account, and his supposed victim.
Maybe not an easy film to follow, especially in the closing scenes, but there was no doubt that something was being worked out, understanding which might be repaid by a second viewing. Producer Tony Espinosa is to be thanked for coming to the festival with his film, and also the programmer of the Catalan strand (Ramon Lamarca) for inviting him to come. (He did answer questions, but my recollection of that session is not clear enough just now to try to record the main points discussed,although I do recall that, when I asked about the Hitchcock parallels, there had not been any deliberate reference.)
End-notes
* As Elvis is Jesus, calling the film The Night Christ Died might be OK.
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Holy Motors is another Funny Games
This is a review of Holy Motors (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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16 October
This is a review of Holy Motors (2012)
By which I mean (in the title)... ?
Well, if you've ever looked at the extras on the DVD of the original German version of Funny Games (1997), writer / director Michael Haneke doesn't expect you to go through the unremitting torture right to the end, which, itself, is just the beginning of the next cycle of it, which was set up during the film.
In fact, he suggests that it's a normal reaction to get to a point where you have seen enough. So, too, with Holy Motors (2012), and I have already indicated that, for me, that point would have been not long after the interlude, and thereby cut my losses.
After all, although there is a pretence that the contents of the day that we see are in real time, by the end of the third of M. Oscar's nine appointments, night has already unaccountably fallen, and nine appointments, despite a schedule to keep, do not get kept. But as if one cares, just as, with Haneke, as if one cares to keep willing evil to be defeated, whereas callous, pointless, calculated persecution is not going to be that easy - so why witness it all, just in the hope?
With Motors, arbitrary acts that are, at best, morally neutral have been stipulated for the day, but what is the point of following this diary through to an end? For it to mean something, when it is just a construct in Carax' mind, and, if he chooses not to explain it (or, at the end, to hint at banality), then it is hardly amazing that such withholding will occur or be foreseeable.
The DVD blurb for Haneke's film almost has a strapline of How fare will you go? I believe that Motors implicitly has the same one...
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Robin Holloway's Gilded Goldbergs are given a rare live performance (Radio 3)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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15 October
Pretty nauseating if for you have any feeling for The Goldberg Variations BWV 988, but probably meant to be, to hear Huw Watkins and Ashley Wass, who are no doubt engaged in an exercise of stripping away the veneer, playing what Robin Holloway has done to the piece with two pianos, a plastic carp, a buoy and 80m of fishing-line (after all, Cambridge, Faculty of Music, etc., etc.).
From what I judge, the effects, when not simply those of subverting the harmonic structure, are such that any imprecision juts out like a promontory, since these ones sound like performance errors - full marks to Holloway for making himself seem admirably postmodern, but why couldn't he (despite his peeling away layers) have chosen something else to get his treatment?
Why not even get a poor piece of music and arrange for trombone and walking-stick if you like, but get the thing to work, rather than maul Bach in a way that, all the time, makes you wish that you could only hear the original? Or is it like getting an image of the sun on your retina, but it bizarrely makes what you've taken for granted look better...? If I spin Richard Egarr's two-CD Harmonia Mundi set on harpsichord, will it seem dazzlingly more alive, after the ritual slaughter - like Aslan, bigger and better for submitting himself to a night on The Stone Table?
Nearly done, with the aria being mangled as if by Les Dawson, in what are better called Gelded Goldbergs, which make Mahler mucking around with Beethoven symphonies seem almost laudable. Our reward, seemingly, to hear the Aria (after the repeat of the Aria chez Holloway) unbuggered, but it may just be an excuse for a final raspberry..., which it is, in terms of RH now prettifying the texture with adornments from some quite other age, now thankfully over.
Twaddle to close from presenter Tom Redmond, and, thanks to him, I can rest happy that RH, at least, looked absolutely delighted with having heard his own burning, I mean gilding.
STOP PRESS A review, by the fetching entitled Jed Distler (who is surely an anagram), of a recording of this work...
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15 October
Pretty nauseating if for you have any feeling for The Goldberg Variations BWV 988, but probably meant to be, to hear Huw Watkins and Ashley Wass, who are no doubt engaged in an exercise of stripping away the veneer, playing what Robin Holloway has done to the piece with two pianos, a plastic carp, a buoy and 80m of fishing-line (after all, Cambridge, Faculty of Music, etc., etc.).
From what I judge, the effects, when not simply those of subverting the harmonic structure, are such that any imprecision juts out like a promontory, since these ones sound like performance errors - full marks to Holloway for making himself seem admirably postmodern, but why couldn't he (despite his peeling away layers) have chosen something else to get his treatment?
Why not even get a poor piece of music and arrange for trombone and walking-stick if you like, but get the thing to work, rather than maul Bach in a way that, all the time, makes you wish that you could only hear the original? Or is it like getting an image of the sun on your retina, but it bizarrely makes what you've taken for granted look better...? If I spin Richard Egarr's two-CD Harmonia Mundi set on harpsichord, will it seem dazzlingly more alive, after the ritual slaughter - like Aslan, bigger and better for submitting himself to a night on The Stone Table?
Nearly done, with the aria being mangled as if by Les Dawson, in what are better called Gelded Goldbergs, which make Mahler mucking around with Beethoven symphonies seem almost laudable. Our reward, seemingly, to hear the Aria (after the repeat of the Aria chez Holloway) unbuggered, but it may just be an excuse for a final raspberry..., which it is, in terms of RH now prettifying the texture with adornments from some quite other age, now thankfully over.
Twaddle to close from presenter Tom Redmond, and, thanks to him, I can rest happy that RH, at least, looked absolutely delighted with having heard his own burning, I mean gilding.
STOP PRESS A review, by the fetching entitled Jed Distler (who is surely an anagram), of a recording of this work...
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Video: Has Russell Crowe called time on marriage? (according to AOL®)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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15 October
If some actor doesn't want to get married (again), do I care? It's only what he says.
If, though, he is revealing hiself as a Supreme Being, declaring that no one, anywhere, can now get married, then maybe I'm interested - I might even watch the video-clip of this Great Astronaut of the Universe...
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15 October
If some actor doesn't want to get married (again), do I care? It's only what he says.
If, though, he is revealing hiself as a Supreme Being, declaring that no one, anywhere, can now get married, then maybe I'm interested - I might even watch the video-clip of this Great Astronaut of the Universe...
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Sunday, 14 October 2012
Trash that SLR !
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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15 October
Not my entire thoughts about going digital, but nearly :
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15 October
Not my entire thoughts about going digital, but nearly :
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 14, 2012
It does befit the quality of much photography that people's 'weapons for taking photos' are crappy phones, but why ever are cameras there ?
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The Russ whom I knew...
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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14 October
Some industrious people, since the death of Russell Hoban in December last year, have been putting together a web-site in his memory and in service of the future of the books that he wrote (for adults and for children): I should name them, but the one of whom I am aware is Richard Cooper, who appears to have been at the helm of the Good Ship Russ.
This is all to be found at www.russellhoban.org, but I just wanted to share this link to a page intended to steer (nautical theme) the new reader in some possible directions.
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14 October
Some industrious people, since the death of Russell Hoban in December last year, have been putting together a web-site in his memory and in service of the future of the books that he wrote (for adults and for children): I should name them, but the one of whom I am aware is Richard Cooper, who appears to have been at the helm of the Good Ship Russ.
This is all to be found at www.russellhoban.org, but I just wanted to share this link to a page intended to steer (nautical theme) the new reader in some possible directions.
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Saturday, 13 October 2012
The Perfection Thing - over at Writer's Rest
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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14 October
Lindsay, again, has set off some interesting talk in the realm of AI with a recent case of applying The Turing Test.
To read your correspondent's and other people's comments, go to The Perfection Thing.
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14 October
Lindsay, again, has set off some interesting talk in the realm of AI with a recent case of applying The Turing Test.
To read your correspondent's and other people's comments, go to The Perfection Thing.
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What things do I point to in Laing and Szasz's thought?
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13 October
Following on from Ronnie, gae hame!, I have some thoughts to share about Drs Laing and Szasz and their place in the order of things...
1. Dignity and respect - talked about in recent days, as if just invented with applicability to being an in-patient, but the story tells us that Ronnie was alongside, literally, someone who, naked, just rocked and would not engage, so he did the same. But, for all these schemes such as Star Wards, because it's not in the culture of mental-health nursing, nothing much is different, not least at the level of patients feeling that they're in an underclass because of being 'ill': on a crude scale, a sort of pecking order, anything that the relatives have to say (and so they can support, and speak up for, the patient about troubling side-effects, because, unlike the patient him- / herself, those people count) carries far more weight, and the status of anything said by the patient is less important than the family pet's views of his or her care.
2. Coercion - if I compel you to do or suffer something, even for your own good, how is it likely that you will feel about the thing that you did (or suffered), about me for forcing you, and about myself for having been a person who is legally allowed to be treated in that way? Whatever a breakdown is, if it leads to an admission, being dehumanized by hospitalization and institutionalization makes for far more trauma for the in-patient (whereas his or her aberrant behaviour hacked off friends, neighbours, relatives and /or the police, and so, for their sake, he or she gets detained) than the breakdown itself. I think that Thomas questioned why, if someone has to be coerced, there can be therapy, rather than distrust, resentment, fear, pain, on the part of the patient towards the detaining authorities - my analogy, but a bit like trying to carry out dentistry on someone who is not willingly opening his or her mouth.
3. Compassion - much more than those basic things at 1, above, - partly involved in doing what Ronnie did in rocking with that patient, and which feeling for and honouring the respect and dignity of patients would not, in itself, lead to. Compassion wholeheartedly and without reservation puts your lot in with the other person's*, often thought of as unconditional love, and is almost at an opposite pole to psychiatric practice of Ronnie's time - you wouldn't have found many endorsing the rocking anecdote as concordant with their views of patients.
4. Criminality - if I lock you up, whether you're drunk and have smashed some things, or in psychosis and have done the same, and you don't appreciate the situation (in the latter case, thought of as lack of insight), you will nonetheless - at some level - know that you are being treated as if you have done something wrong. As I look at what Thomas might have meant at 2, above, and think of mental health in England and Wales, the police can (forcibly) take you to a place of safety, they may be involved in any sectioning process or in taking you to hospital (if you do get sectoned), and they are the people who take you back, if you escape (or try to). In our own system, then, the coercion and the criminal taint are linked, even though, under the Minstry of Justice's control, there is quite separate legal provisions for the foricble detention of people on remand for or convicted of criminal offences: the in-patient not only feels imprisoned, mistreated, misunderstood, misrepresented, but has a perception that some criminal wrong is the reason for all this punishment. And, amidst all this, he or she is supposed to recover, respond to treatment, and - which is itself ambiguous as to health and character - get better.
For what it is worth, those are my thoughts on what Thomas and Ronnie still have to say to us, decades on...
End-notes
* In Ronnie's case, I suggest that he probably took compassion too far, rather than the approach of being empathic, which, for anyone with mental-health issues, is a less costly and, literally, less soul-destroying way of relating to patients. Whatever happened to him in later life, with booze - but he was a Glaswegian - and the effect of efame or whatever, I guess that he may have given too much of himself, and in a way that Adrian, one of his sons, likes to report (he has written a biography) that Ronnie did not do at home, by usually describing home life as a crock of shit.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
13 October
Following on from Ronnie, gae hame!, I have some thoughts to share about Drs Laing and Szasz and their place in the order of things...
1. Dignity and respect - talked about in recent days, as if just invented with applicability to being an in-patient, but the story tells us that Ronnie was alongside, literally, someone who, naked, just rocked and would not engage, so he did the same. But, for all these schemes such as Star Wards, because it's not in the culture of mental-health nursing, nothing much is different, not least at the level of patients feeling that they're in an underclass because of being 'ill': on a crude scale, a sort of pecking order, anything that the relatives have to say (and so they can support, and speak up for, the patient about troubling side-effects, because, unlike the patient him- / herself, those people count) carries far more weight, and the status of anything said by the patient is less important than the family pet's views of his or her care.
2. Coercion - if I compel you to do or suffer something, even for your own good, how is it likely that you will feel about the thing that you did (or suffered), about me for forcing you, and about myself for having been a person who is legally allowed to be treated in that way? Whatever a breakdown is, if it leads to an admission, being dehumanized by hospitalization and institutionalization makes for far more trauma for the in-patient (whereas his or her aberrant behaviour hacked off friends, neighbours, relatives and /or the police, and so, for their sake, he or she gets detained) than the breakdown itself. I think that Thomas questioned why, if someone has to be coerced, there can be therapy, rather than distrust, resentment, fear, pain, on the part of the patient towards the detaining authorities - my analogy, but a bit like trying to carry out dentistry on someone who is not willingly opening his or her mouth.
3. Compassion - much more than those basic things at 1, above, - partly involved in doing what Ronnie did in rocking with that patient, and which feeling for and honouring the respect and dignity of patients would not, in itself, lead to. Compassion wholeheartedly and without reservation puts your lot in with the other person's*, often thought of as unconditional love, and is almost at an opposite pole to psychiatric practice of Ronnie's time - you wouldn't have found many endorsing the rocking anecdote as concordant with their views of patients.
4. Criminality - if I lock you up, whether you're drunk and have smashed some things, or in psychosis and have done the same, and you don't appreciate the situation (in the latter case, thought of as lack of insight), you will nonetheless - at some level - know that you are being treated as if you have done something wrong. As I look at what Thomas might have meant at 2, above, and think of mental health in England and Wales, the police can (forcibly) take you to a place of safety, they may be involved in any sectioning process or in taking you to hospital (if you do get sectoned), and they are the people who take you back, if you escape (or try to). In our own system, then, the coercion and the criminal taint are linked, even though, under the Minstry of Justice's control, there is quite separate legal provisions for the foricble detention of people on remand for or convicted of criminal offences: the in-patient not only feels imprisoned, mistreated, misunderstood, misrepresented, but has a perception that some criminal wrong is the reason for all this punishment. And, amidst all this, he or she is supposed to recover, respond to treatment, and - which is itself ambiguous as to health and character - get better.
For what it is worth, those are my thoughts on what Thomas and Ronnie still have to say to us, decades on...
End-notes
* In Ronnie's case, I suggest that he probably took compassion too far, rather than the approach of being empathic, which, for anyone with mental-health issues, is a less costly and, literally, less soul-destroying way of relating to patients. Whatever happened to him in later life, with booze - but he was a Glaswegian - and the effect of efame or whatever, I guess that he may have given too much of himself, and in a way that Adrian, one of his sons, likes to report (he has written a biography) that Ronnie did not do at home, by usually describing home life as a crock of shit.
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Friday, 12 October 2012
Ronnie, gae hame!
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13 October
There's a rather strange review / account of The Turner Prize entries in The Telegraph (at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/turner-prize/9578907/Turner-Prize-2012-Tate-Britain-review.html).
Strange in that, when Luke Fowler has a film 'about' R. D. Laing, the writer (Richard Dorment) takes issue with Laing himself, what he represented and advocated, and how he was discredited for his theories, and one 'wrong-headed belief' (about schizophrenia)in particular.
Dorment says not only that Laing could be 'self-aggrandising' and 'pretentious', but also 'compassionate' and 'articulate', once he has finished talking, perhaps with less knowledge than he believes, about medications such as lithium and Prozac, neither of which would have done much, if anything, for Laing's core patients.
Far be it from me to say whether one should watch Fowler's film, but Dorment leaves himself precious little space in which to make comments that might inform such a view. Such description as there is leaves one not knowing whether this is a film with an arty feel (as another Telegraph critic felt), or a work of art, nor even, whichever it is, whether it is any good. Just as well Ronnie left the stage earlier...
On which more here.
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13 October
There's a rather strange review / account of The Turner Prize entries in The Telegraph (at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/turner-prize/9578907/Turner-Prize-2012-Tate-Britain-review.html).
Strange in that, when Luke Fowler has a film 'about' R. D. Laing, the writer (Richard Dorment) takes issue with Laing himself, what he represented and advocated, and how he was discredited for his theories, and one 'wrong-headed belief' (about schizophrenia)in particular.
Dorment says not only that Laing could be 'self-aggrandising' and 'pretentious', but also 'compassionate' and 'articulate', once he has finished talking, perhaps with less knowledge than he believes, about medications such as lithium and Prozac, neither of which would have done much, if anything, for Laing's core patients.
Far be it from me to say whether one should watch Fowler's film, but Dorment leaves himself precious little space in which to make comments that might inform such a view. Such description as there is leaves one not knowing whether this is a film with an arty feel (as another Telegraph critic felt), or a work of art, nor even, whichever it is, whether it is any good. Just as well Ronnie left the stage earlier...
On which more here.
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Catalan strand
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13 October (updated 25 October)
By way of an an announcement, I want to write next about four more Catalan films that were kindly brought (along with V.O.S. (2009), already reviewed) to the festival this year, which I am sure was a very good and also well-received initiative, The Body in the Woods (1996), Warsaw Bridge (1989), and The Night Elvis Died (2010). And I nearly forgot to say Black Bread (2010).
What I can say now is that, to write effectively about the middle of these three, I would really need to see it again, whereas the other three are clear in my mind. That said, I have less to say about the first, and would prefer to concentrate on the other two.
Regarding Warsaw Bridge (1989), it came as a surprise to me (although subliminally I recognized the connection, in the festival programme, when making this one of my selections), that the prize-winning book (of the same name) within was one of the landmarks from a stay booked at a hotel in the former East when I visited Berlin seven years ago, meaning that I was so many stops before, probably, the omnipresent Friedrichstraße.
However, rather than self-psychoanalyse why I can retrieve only the ending (which solved a mystery), and, vaguely, a slightly evasive acceptance speech or press questions from the award-holder at a busy reception around a pool at night, it is better to seek out a copy to fill in the gaps, and to talk about Body. We were told that it was a sort of Catalan Twin Peaks, which was something that, for not having followed it, only helped me vaguely.
It turned out to be not quite what it presented itself to be, an investigation into a crime, but rather the manipulation of evidence, gender and even human remains in a self-interested and alarmingly corrupt way. That said, that revelation came after an immensely slow-burn, and after a string of people, who at first denied that they knew anything (or more than what they said), collapsed under the real or imagined threat of violence (or other penalty) made by the woman lieutenant: it felt like too much of a deferral, not to mention a massive misdirection, to merit the hoped-for pay-off.
Not just that, but that the depiction of events, whether in recall or in real time, made no especial use of the resource of film as a medium (as against t.v.), and so seemed rather prosaic, as if not made for cinema. A good piece of work, but not, for my money, in the same inventive league as, say, V.O.S., in being for and of film per se.
As for the films that remain, Elvis now has a review, as does Bread.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
13 October (updated 25 October)
By way of an an announcement, I want to write next about four more Catalan films that were kindly brought (along with V.O.S. (2009), already reviewed) to the festival this year, which I am sure was a very good and also well-received initiative, The Body in the Woods (1996), Warsaw Bridge (1989), and The Night Elvis Died (2010). And I nearly forgot to say Black Bread (2010).
What I can say now is that, to write effectively about the middle of these three, I would really need to see it again, whereas the other three are clear in my mind. That said, I have less to say about the first, and would prefer to concentrate on the other two.
Regarding Warsaw Bridge (1989), it came as a surprise to me (although subliminally I recognized the connection, in the festival programme, when making this one of my selections), that the prize-winning book (of the same name) within was one of the landmarks from a stay booked at a hotel in the former East when I visited Berlin seven years ago, meaning that I was so many stops before, probably, the omnipresent Friedrichstraße.
However, rather than self-psychoanalyse why I can retrieve only the ending (which solved a mystery), and, vaguely, a slightly evasive acceptance speech or press questions from the award-holder at a busy reception around a pool at night, it is better to seek out a copy to fill in the gaps, and to talk about Body. We were told that it was a sort of Catalan Twin Peaks, which was something that, for not having followed it, only helped me vaguely.
It turned out to be not quite what it presented itself to be, an investigation into a crime, but rather the manipulation of evidence, gender and even human remains in a self-interested and alarmingly corrupt way. That said, that revelation came after an immensely slow-burn, and after a string of people, who at first denied that they knew anything (or more than what they said), collapsed under the real or imagined threat of violence (or other penalty) made by the woman lieutenant: it felt like too much of a deferral, not to mention a massive misdirection, to merit the hoped-for pay-off.
Not just that, but that the depiction of events, whether in recall or in real time, made no especial use of the resource of film as a medium (as against t.v.), and so seemed rather prosaic, as if not made for cinema. A good piece of work, but not, for my money, in the same inventive league as, say, V.O.S., in being for and of film per se.
As for the films that remain, Elvis now has a review, as does Bread.
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Batsqueak
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12 October
Right now, I would edit a Wikipedia® page to say this:
Contrary to popular reckoning, a batsqueak is not a term for a noise emitted by one of our webbed, flying foes, but a sheer yoking together of words heard often enough together in the pretence that it is a noun.
Essentially, such things used to be done, at wearisome length (Finnegans Wake !), by Jimmy Joyce, but even he gave up on it, and the whole practice has only been resurrected by the secret Brethren of Bradshawites, who invoke it in the hope that you'll be so dazed that you do not twig that they have not, behind all this mucking around, got anything of any sense to contribute.
This entry is a stub - you can help make it a complete Bradshaw's by donating $10
Pipsqueak, anyone?
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12 October
Right now, I would edit a Wikipedia® page to say this:
Contrary to popular reckoning, a batsqueak is not a term for a noise emitted by one of our webbed, flying foes, but a sheer yoking together of words heard often enough together in the pretence that it is a noun.
Essentially, such things used to be done, at wearisome length (Finnegans Wake !), by Jimmy Joyce, but even he gave up on it, and the whole practice has only been resurrected by the secret Brethren of Bradshawites, who invoke it in the hope that you'll be so dazed that you do not twig that they have not, behind all this mucking around, got anything of any sense to contribute.
This entry is a stub - you can help make it a complete Bradshaw's by donating $10
Pipsqueak, anyone?
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Thursday, 11 October 2012
From my week's post
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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12 October
I share the following, largely self-contained, item of correspondence from one of my parishioners :
Dear Apsley
I am a little uncertain what to make of the Rector's letter in the latest edition of the magazine for the group of parishes, and wanted to seek your advice.
In the past, the Rector has made references to other cultural matters, such as the coronation (and the words said during part of the service) or a piece of music, but always as a way of bringing 'the conversation around' to Biblical principles and the Christian life. (Mention of things in nature and the like may have been made with the same intention.)
However, in a recent magazine, he talked a lot about poetry and only, almost as an afterthrought, put in any sort of message that you might expect, in the circumstances, from an ordained minister. This time, he seems to have forgotten about why he is writing entirely.
Having begun by talking about the history of the pastoral tradition, halfway through he quotes two quatrains from the six-stanza poem 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Love' by Marlowe (and, knowing other work of that writer, it would be a stretch to imagine that he had any other shepherd of the flock in mind here). The language of the rest of the poem is described, and the whole thing ends up like an exercise - perhaps not even a very good one - in literary appreciation, not a letter from a Rector, but someone using a sixteenth-century text to make loose, general observations about village life.
I have always read these letters in the past, but, if this is to be the type of generalized observation that I can expect from now on, which does not even attempt to consider a spiritual dimension or another moral viewpoint, I feel reluctant to continue.
Do you have any thoughts?
Yours, &c.
Herbaceous P. Crubb
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
12 October
I share the following, largely self-contained, item of correspondence from one of my parishioners :
Dear Apsley
I am a little uncertain what to make of the Rector's letter in the latest edition of the magazine for the group of parishes, and wanted to seek your advice.
In the past, the Rector has made references to other cultural matters, such as the coronation (and the words said during part of the service) or a piece of music, but always as a way of bringing 'the conversation around' to Biblical principles and the Christian life. (Mention of things in nature and the like may have been made with the same intention.)
However, in a recent magazine, he talked a lot about poetry and only, almost as an afterthrought, put in any sort of message that you might expect, in the circumstances, from an ordained minister. This time, he seems to have forgotten about why he is writing entirely.
Having begun by talking about the history of the pastoral tradition, halfway through he quotes two quatrains from the six-stanza poem 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Love' by Marlowe (and, knowing other work of that writer, it would be a stretch to imagine that he had any other shepherd of the flock in mind here). The language of the rest of the poem is described, and the whole thing ends up like an exercise - perhaps not even a very good one - in literary appreciation, not a letter from a Rector, but someone using a sixteenth-century text to make loose, general observations about village life.
I have always read these letters in the past, but, if this is to be the type of generalized observation that I can expect from now on, which does not even attempt to consider a spiritual dimension or another moral viewpoint, I feel reluctant to continue.
Do you have any thoughts?
Yours, &c.
Herbaceous P. Crubb
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A Tweet review I
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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That was a Tweet that I couldn't trawl through Splatter to find (I found), so got it on Google® instead...
I need to say a little more about this, in another posting.
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The Idiot (2011) pares Dostoyevsky's story down to essentials, but, by fully realizing key scenes in a stylized universe, hints at the whole
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 12, 2012
That was a Tweet that I couldn't trawl through Splatter to find (I found), so got it on Google® instead...
I need to say a little more about this, in another posting.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Kraken crake
This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)
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12 October
This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)
* Contains spoilers *
Two admissions, which ruin my credibility forever:
(1) I declined the opportunity to see The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) because I had no wish to follow the journeys of an early Che - he could have been an early Woody Allen and it would have made no difference to the fact that, if I want a travel documentary (in the case of somewhere where I am not going to go), I will watch Michael Palin's antics, and I see the concept of a film rather differently. (As I did not see the film, obviously I do not know for sure what I missed. Accepted.)
(2) I have never read On the Road (let alone any of Kerouac's other writings), though, when I decided to get around reviewing the film, which a friend and I saw, largely through his desire to do so, at Cambridge Film Festival, I looked out my copy of it. Therefore, anything that I find to quote from it will be just that - a phrase or passage that I find when flicking through it.
I also have some insights about Jack K. from my friend, who has read it and more, namely the close identity between the narrators of these works and JK himself.
As the credits for On the Road (2012) tell you, scenery through which we are supposed to be following various travellers on various journeys is nowhere near where it was shot, but in another part of the States (or of Canada). Yes, unconvincingly London passes for Paris in the dire Bel Ami (2012) (quite apart from what we see in The Third Man (1949) or Amadeus (1984)), but that almost makes sense - we can have a sense of the monumentality or grandeur of parts of Paris, even if we are not seeing them.
Certainly, they must have had reason, in this film, not to show the territories surrounding, say, Louisiana (to and from which we journey), but isn't the entreprise a bit hollow if whatever they do show has nothing to do with those places? I start with this point because, if one cannot say Great panoramas - I must go and see them myself some day, we are 'forced back' on the characters, and I honestly do not think that their desires and changes of heart run to a whole two hours 17 minutes worth of interest, but maybe 90 (with less need to show shots that were really somewhere quite different - I do not think that the list bore any relation to what we thought that we were shown).
OK, my thesis is this - it's a nice safe bet to film some version of a well-known, successful book, because people have been satisfied enough with how it is put together working to have read it approvingly. Nothing new there, but, if one's choice lands on something that, to be done justice to, has to sprawl so much and maybe be pretty lacking in any story, is that the ideal project, unless one has a big shake-up with the text and portrays it radically differently? Yes, that might upset an author's estate, or even fans at grass roots, but would it be a better film, maybe even be a film?
Given the acknowledged limitations, but in the light of talking to my friend and others as to whether the way that the text lies lends itself to taking it point for point as the basis for a film, what I have to ask (as I did) is what credibility Sal Paradise has, when we meet him, as a writer, or even simply what there is about him that would make someone, on pretty slight acquaintance, ask him to travel from New York to Denver to see him.
Now we know, after the event, that On the Road the book resulted from this and all the other travels, and, when Sam Riley (as Sal) starts hitching, we see him scribbling is his small but somehow infinite note-book (as if the guys on the back of the truck with him would not have been more than a little interested and been likely to have parted their company).
It may be little more than sexual when he is cotton picking, but there is even a sense that this Sal abandons his exteriority to his own experiences and actually feels them : frustrated though I was that I was being asked to believe in him as a writer when there had not even been so much as something being read aloud with his New York chums, I think that, by now, there might have been voiceover, maybe, of some of his writerly snippets (unless that only occurs later, when he actually starts writing, and he is reliving these moments).
Set against now, where, unless I wanted to be scenic about it, I would take a flight to make this first journey of Sal's, I would still be less than impressed with Dean Moriarity to have had impressed on me that I needed to make a trip whose basis and necessity turn out, in the ever-casual way of intoxication beyond the means of alcohol passing for the common currency of life, to have dissolved, so that, no sooner there and with no thought of where Sal might stay, Dean has to go to Los Angeles (or some such).
Just the first of a series of long, long journeys that seem to have the same capacity for their purpose to disappear more quickly than the destination can be reached. For me, none of it amounts to more than a few very blunt character traits and repressed feelings, which is where I arrive at a run-time around 90 minutes, because they do not merit more :
Sal is flattered by Dean's interest in him, and Dean, for his part, talks up this man who, if he did not resemble (a little) Scottish saxophonist Tommy Smith (whose talent I know and value), actually seems to possess no qualities to justify it. It is all sublimated through Dean arranging girls (including his own partner, at a key point) for Sal to sleep with, and then noisily doing so himself.
That holds true until (for money, and as he says to Sal he has done before) Dean has sex with the man who has been sedately driving them, and Sal witnesses it : not much guessing where his disgust with Dean and walking out on him at breakfast comes from. With a few twists and turns of sub-plots, and of Dean's various and far-flung women, that is pretty much the emotional core of all these lengthy wanderings, except that they always serve as a distraction from him ever knowing what on earth he wants, and all the signs, from how he chatted up Sal on first meeting, are that his own deeper desires from their 'relationship' (I only call it that because they virtually travel across the continent to say hello for ten minutes) are the same.
However, the film decides to swallow its own tail by having Sal write the book that we are viewing, with a roll of paper that he makes and feeds into the typewriter. Apparently such a roll does exist amongst JK's effects, though its status as being how he wrote the book might be suspect, but we get back to the bogus demonstration of creativity, as if there has to be this infinite roll of paper to receive the limitless notes that we saw scribbled before, and the white-hot power of the process is such that nothing, not even puttting in a new sheet of paper and keeping the finished ones in order, must be allowed to interrupt it. Believe that idea of writing if you like!
Clearly, things were taken from this film, but - from my position of majestic ignorance - I believe that a better film could have been made by taking the book as raw material, and not setting out depiction as if sacrosanct. And, blow me, I've still not opened the wretched text!
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Brad Pitt wants to play a scouser (according to AOL®)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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11 October
If it's a classic Mark Twain (although such things as the Feast of Fools and the framing device of The Taming of the Shrew foreshadow him), then the scouser chosen should have the chance to be Pitt in return.
Whatever happens, I think that Pitt should be under Terene Davies' direction as to how he can play what he apparently wants to be - either that, or thator Alexei Sayle.
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11 October
If it's a classic Mark Twain (although such things as the Feast of Fools and the framing device of The Taming of the Shrew foreshadow him), then the scouser chosen should have the chance to be Pitt in return.
Whatever happens, I think that Pitt should be under Terene Davies' direction as to how he can play what he apparently wants to be - either that, or thator Alexei Sayle.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
The Turnip Prize II
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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11 October
There has already been such an enormous amount of interest in the previous questions posed on these pages that I have agreed to post some further ones from readers and to see if I can find out some answers when I make it down to the show...
1. Is it true that everyone working on this part of the show wears a Ronnie Laing mask?
2. The prohibited actions didn't mention laughing - was that an oversight?
3. Is it general admission or allocated seating?
4. The prohibited actions didn't mention farting - was that an oversight?
5. Can other sorts of vegetable be taken into the screening, then?
6. I've heard that, too, about the masks, but aren't they from images from all different times in Laing's life?
7. If you watch the film twice, do you get Air Miles?
8. The prohibited actions didn't mention scratching (oneself, others or the seat) - was that an oversight?
9. I've heard that it's allocated seating, but the seat is allocated to you, depending on whether you screen for schizoid tendencies, schizophrenia, etc. Is that right?
10. Can people obtain verification, if it is needed, that, although they were at the Turner Prize show, they didn't attend a screening of All Divided Selves?
11. Can they still obtain such verification, even if they did actually attend one?
12. The prohibited actions didn't mention yawning - was that an oversight?
13. Does the death penalty still apply to anyone who mentions the word 'documentary' in connection with the film?
PS Hey! This sounds like an almost interesting approach to a film about a hisorical subject (taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/5307532/Luke-Fowler-stories-upside-down-and-inside-out.html) :
Your eyes have barely focused on the tousled head of the composer Cornelius Cardew, when the image on the screen dissolves into footage of winter foliage that skitters in and out of focus. Newspaper cuttings concerning Cardew's early death (in a hit-and-run accident) are presented floating in space like elements in some miniature sculptural installation.
This is documentary film-making according to Luke Fowler, one of the hottest names in contemporary British art, winner of the inaugural Derek Jarman Award for artist film-makers, whose first major retrospective has opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In Fowler's best-known film, Pilgrimage between Scattered Points, which tells the story of English composer Cornelius Cardew, interviews are presented deliberately out of synch, subjects appear suddenly upside down, interspersed with apparently random imagery.
Apart from the random imagery, why has the canon of invention dwindled?
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
There has already been such an enormous amount of interest in the previous questions posed on these pages that I have agreed to post some further ones from readers and to see if I can find out some answers when I make it down to the show...
1. Is it true that everyone working on this part of the show wears a Ronnie Laing mask?
2. The prohibited actions didn't mention laughing - was that an oversight?
3. Is it general admission or allocated seating?
4. The prohibited actions didn't mention farting - was that an oversight?
5. Can other sorts of vegetable be taken into the screening, then?
6. I've heard that, too, about the masks, but aren't they from images from all different times in Laing's life?
7. If you watch the film twice, do you get Air Miles?
8. The prohibited actions didn't mention scratching (oneself, others or the seat) - was that an oversight?
9. I've heard that it's allocated seating, but the seat is allocated to you, depending on whether you screen for schizoid tendencies, schizophrenia, etc. Is that right?
10. Can people obtain verification, if it is needed, that, although they were at the Turner Prize show, they didn't attend a screening of All Divided Selves?
11. Can they still obtain such verification, even if they did actually attend one?
12. The prohibited actions didn't mention yawning - was that an oversight?
13. Does the death penalty still apply to anyone who mentions the word 'documentary' in connection with the film?
PS Hey! This sounds like an almost interesting approach to a film about a hisorical subject (taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/5307532/Luke-Fowler-stories-upside-down-and-inside-out.html) :
Your eyes have barely focused on the tousled head of the composer Cornelius Cardew, when the image on the screen dissolves into footage of winter foliage that skitters in and out of focus. Newspaper cuttings concerning Cardew's early death (in a hit-and-run accident) are presented floating in space like elements in some miniature sculptural installation.
This is documentary film-making according to Luke Fowler, one of the hottest names in contemporary British art, winner of the inaugural Derek Jarman Award for artist film-makers, whose first major retrospective has opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In Fowler's best-known film, Pilgrimage between Scattered Points, which tells the story of English composer Cornelius Cardew, interviews are presented deliberately out of synch, subjects appear suddenly upside down, interspersed with apparently random imagery.
Apart from the random imagery, why has the canon of invention dwindled?
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Wednesday, 10 October 2012
The Turnip Prize I
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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11 October
I have already seen on Tate Britain's web-site that Luke Fowler's film, All Divided Selves (2012), has published screening-times for his entry for The Turner Prize (on which the Evening Standard has given an overview).
I'm assuming that they have built a cinema-room in the show in which it will be projected, but do all (or any) of these rules apply? :
1. No latecomers admitted
2. No popcorn, fizzy drinks or noisy sweet-papers
3. Only bona fide appreciators of the genre of artists' films allowed in
4. Any screening not containing a full quota will be cancelled
5. No petting
6. Anyone found with a root-vegetable about their person will be ejected
7. No whispering to your companion when you cannot follow what is happening (or what the title means)
8. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, except in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
9. Anyone found with closed eyes during a screening will be given The Alex Treatment
10. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, even in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
11. Anyone who betrays any knowledge of the subject of R. D. Laing, the man, his thought and his psychiatric practice will be encouraged to believe that they really have a very busy day and cannot spend ninety-odd minutes in a screening
12. No heavy petting
13. Friends of the film-maker will not be allowed entry (on the grounds of protecting them from getting the impression that they, too, are famous artists)
NB Now that I have found out, I should acknowledge that The Turnip Prize has existed for some years - www.turnipprize.com is its web-site.
STOP PRESS - now more at http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-turnip-prize-ii.html
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
I have already seen on Tate Britain's web-site that Luke Fowler's film, All Divided Selves (2012), has published screening-times for his entry for The Turner Prize (on which the Evening Standard has given an overview).
I'm assuming that they have built a cinema-room in the show in which it will be projected, but do all (or any) of these rules apply? :
1. No latecomers admitted
2. No popcorn, fizzy drinks or noisy sweet-papers
3. Only bona fide appreciators of the genre of artists' films allowed in
4. Any screening not containing a full quota will be cancelled
5. No petting
6. Anyone found with a root-vegetable about their person will be ejected
7. No whispering to your companion when you cannot follow what is happening (or what the title means)
8. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, except in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
9. Anyone found with closed eyes during a screening will be given The Alex Treatment
10. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, even in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
11. Anyone who betrays any knowledge of the subject of R. D. Laing, the man, his thought and his psychiatric practice will be encouraged to believe that they really have a very busy day and cannot spend ninety-odd minutes in a screening
12. No heavy petting
13. Friends of the film-maker will not be allowed entry (on the grounds of protecting them from getting the impression that they, too, are famous artists)
NB Now that I have found out, I should acknowledge that The Turnip Prize has existed for some years - www.turnipprize.com is its web-site.
STOP PRESS - now more at http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-turnip-prize-ii.html
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Allen Italian
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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11 October
Allen's right, you know! Just look at how great these titles look translated :
* Misterioso Omicidio A Manhattan
* Crimini E Misfatti
* Una Commedia Sexy In Una Notte Di Mezza Estate
* Harry A Pezzi
* Il Dormiglione
* Prendi I Soldi E Scappa
* La Maledizione Dello Scorpione Di Giada
* Basta Che Funzioni
* Incontrerai L'Uomo Dei Tuoi Sogni
* Provaci Ancora Sam
But I don't know where they were going with this one (unless conjured up after a cult viewing of the desperation that is Withnail and I) :
Io E Annie
Turning Sweet and Lowdown into Accordi E Disaccordi is, to me, a little mystifying, too.
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11 October
Allen's right, you know! Just look at how great these titles look translated :
* Misterioso Omicidio A Manhattan
* Crimini E Misfatti
* Una Commedia Sexy In Una Notte Di Mezza Estate
* Harry A Pezzi
* Il Dormiglione
* Prendi I Soldi E Scappa
* La Maledizione Dello Scorpione Di Giada
* Basta Che Funzioni
* Incontrerai L'Uomo Dei Tuoi Sogni
* Provaci Ancora Sam
But I don't know where they were going with this one (unless conjured up after a cult viewing of the desperation that is Withnail and I) :
Io E Annie
Turning Sweet and Lowdown into Accordi E Disaccordi is, to me, a little mystifying, too.
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Damaging or harming?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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10 October
The other day, when I heard that someone was reported to have harmed a painting by Mark Rothko, it did sound quite right - maybe one can harm the natural world, so there is no need for a living creature, capable of being harmed, but would one's first choice for damage to an artwork be that it had been harmed?
The person accused of the act, which he denies was criminal damage, was mentioned on the news again, his name one of many with which Ian Skelly had difficulties to-night. This time the man was said to have damaged the Rothko, which gives rise to this stupid thought :
Could a piece of art be damaged, but not harmed, if the damage were done in the right way? For, what if the damage actually, objectively (in art-critical terms), improved the piece, and, maybe, the living artist approved of it : no point, then, in restoring the work to how it had been before.
Actually, although I do not think that history claims that the fracturing to Duchamp's so-called Large Glass was deliberate, it was a ready-made that he adopted (i.e. rather than making the thing over again from new). But, of course, what Richard Hamilton did in the 60s was to make a re-creation of the work, and, not least as he could not have got the glass to fracture in the same way, it resembles its pre-facture appearance.
Hamilton's piece is on display at Tate Modern, and I take issue with the fact that the label does not draw attention to the fact that the original, some 40 years younger, is in Philadelphia or some such. That said, Duchamp approved what Hamilton had done (and, probably, Hamilton had his agreement before setting out), and I think that he went further, which was to say that, by signing it, it stood for the original for all purposes. My issue? You would only know that, if you knew it, and, if a friend, who had seen the original, asked you what you thought of the cracked glass, you would shake your head, not remembering any.
Finally, on this and as to Francis Bacon, the same Tate advised that he was such a keen reviser of his work that it had had to refuse permission for him to borrow key canvases from its holding : it knew very well that what Bacon would have returned would have been different works from what had been borrowed! If the works were in Gerhart Richter's private collection, no one would deny his right to the practice of overpainting earlier works, but might question his judgement, if not artistic integrity (which is abundant from the film Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)).
If Bacon had broken into the Tate, with the assistance of one of his lovers, and worked on some canvases, would be have harmed them, by causing them to appear differently from the image in the catalogue and what people would expect to see if they wished to view what Turnage called Three Screaming Popes? Or would he have damaged them, but without harming them - and who knows what glories the Tate presented us from seeing to surpass what we have?
In the extreme case of Van Gogh, we might wish to say that his artistic legacy was not safe with him - but do we have a right, as an inheritance gives us, to remember someone for works that he would have destroyed. And so into, sadly, the moral debate about Max Brod and Franz Kafka, which I generally find rather sterile.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 October
The other day, when I heard that someone was reported to have harmed a painting by Mark Rothko, it did sound quite right - maybe one can harm the natural world, so there is no need for a living creature, capable of being harmed, but would one's first choice for damage to an artwork be that it had been harmed?
The person accused of the act, which he denies was criminal damage, was mentioned on the news again, his name one of many with which Ian Skelly had difficulties to-night. This time the man was said to have damaged the Rothko, which gives rise to this stupid thought :
Could a piece of art be damaged, but not harmed, if the damage were done in the right way? For, what if the damage actually, objectively (in art-critical terms), improved the piece, and, maybe, the living artist approved of it : no point, then, in restoring the work to how it had been before.
Actually, although I do not think that history claims that the fracturing to Duchamp's so-called Large Glass was deliberate, it was a ready-made that he adopted (i.e. rather than making the thing over again from new). But, of course, what Richard Hamilton did in the 60s was to make a re-creation of the work, and, not least as he could not have got the glass to fracture in the same way, it resembles its pre-facture appearance.
Hamilton's piece is on display at Tate Modern, and I take issue with the fact that the label does not draw attention to the fact that the original, some 40 years younger, is in Philadelphia or some such. That said, Duchamp approved what Hamilton had done (and, probably, Hamilton had his agreement before setting out), and I think that he went further, which was to say that, by signing it, it stood for the original for all purposes. My issue? You would only know that, if you knew it, and, if a friend, who had seen the original, asked you what you thought of the cracked glass, you would shake your head, not remembering any.
Finally, on this and as to Francis Bacon, the same Tate advised that he was such a keen reviser of his work that it had had to refuse permission for him to borrow key canvases from its holding : it knew very well that what Bacon would have returned would have been different works from what had been borrowed! If the works were in Gerhart Richter's private collection, no one would deny his right to the practice of overpainting earlier works, but might question his judgement, if not artistic integrity (which is abundant from the film Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)).
If Bacon had broken into the Tate, with the assistance of one of his lovers, and worked on some canvases, would be have harmed them, by causing them to appear differently from the image in the catalogue and what people would expect to see if they wished to view what Turnage called Three Screaming Popes? Or would he have damaged them, but without harming them - and who knows what glories the Tate presented us from seeing to surpass what we have?
In the extreme case of Van Gogh, we might wish to say that his artistic legacy was not safe with him - but do we have a right, as an inheritance gives us, to remember someone for works that he would have destroyed. And so into, sadly, the moral debate about Max Brod and Franz Kafka, which I generally find rather sterile.
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