Despatching Thatcher - who always had cost in her arsenal to justify cuts

This is a review of Ken Loach's documentary The Spirit of '45 (2013)

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17 April

This is a review of Ken Loach's documentary The Spirit of '45 (2013)

In reassuring me that there was no expectation of a delay in my journey using The Tube, Transport for London's notices called 'Baroness' one whom some recently have been referring to as 'Lady' - who knows what the protocol is, but it seems more than a little odd that no one knows what to call Thatcher.

Certainly not, to my mind and the title of a recent waste of the medium of film, The Iron Lady. More like, if a noisy band hadn't got there first, an iron maiden, choking and skewering to death those whom she despised : just look at the footage from the time of the miners' strike in Ken Loach's excellent The Spirit of '45 (2013).

In London, this seems a day like any other, apart from those notices - just imagine a horrible world where everyone around you wore a black arm-band !

Which takes me, by an inevitable association, to the tomb of The Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral - about him, as about the snuffed-out promise of Prince Henry (i.e. the elder son of James I (of England)), there was no doubt what was felt. Yes, even in the seventeenth century, people were not as free as we now think ourselves, but there was a lively press, and a spirit that would lead to a monarch on trial for crimes against his own country...

Not that the chummy trio of Cameron, Clegg and Osborne need face any more than tha ballot-box, but they are fools if they think that their self-minded and motivated support of their cronies builds this country, rather than their wealth and interests, and that it will all go unforgiven, let alone unnoticed !


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In the clouds

This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)

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14 April 2013

This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)

* Spoiler warning : assumes a knowledge of the film, so best not read without one *

Follows on from A cloudy prospect

Cloud Atlas is loved up and fucked up, sublime and ridiculous. a Hollywood Inland Empire, a life's work, a lifetime's work...
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) March 21, 2013

As a re-viewing reminded me, there are even clouds in Warner Bros' corporate title, and there are probably many more than the other ones that I did spot, which include the striking ones reflected in water (impossibly and Dalíesquely) on the beach when Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess) fatefully first meets Dr Henry Goose (Tom Hanks)

Clouds are transient things, a fact that Hamlet exploits (and even artist Alexander Cozens in his illustrated treatise, A New Method of Landscape), but I do not yet know what role they play in David Mitchell's novel, on which this film is based.

Yet there are, just as clouds pass overhead, communications between :

1849 and 1936 - Adam Ewing's journal (read by Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw)), plus the effects on history of Tilda's (Doona Bae's) and his joining the abolitionists

1936 and 1973 - Robert Frobisher's compositions (heard by Luisa Rey (Halle Berry)), and letters to Rufus Sixsmith (James D'Arcy) (read by Luisa Ray, and passed to the mother of Megan), and it is through Sixsmith that Rey becomes aware of the report on the Hydra reactor at Swannekke, plus the effect of her exposing the attempt to discredit that form of power by allowing a nuclear catastrophe

1973 and 2012 - What Isaac Sachs (Tom Hanks) was writing on the plane could not physically have survived its being blown-up, but his words seem to resonate; in 1973, Luisa Rey was friends with Javier Gomez (Brody Nicholas Lee), and, in 2012, Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent) is reading Gomez' script, heading north on the train; later, Cavendish writes of his experiences at Acacia House, and a film is made at some point (Tom Hanks)

2012 and 2144 - Yoona-939 (Xun Zhou) shows Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) a device on which a short segment of the film based on Cavendish's writing is looping; a recording of Sonmi's broadcast, and the account that she gives in captivity (taken by James D'Arcy), form part of the archive on her

2144 and 2321 - A venerated form of some of Sonmi's words is kept sacred by the Abbess (Susan Sarandon), and read to Zachry (Tom Hanks) when he consults her, and Sonmi's image is represented both in the valleys, and on Mount Seoul

In short, a series of nested what ifs

Cloud Atlas is, for me, as trippy as Hollywood gets (except for 2001: A Space Odyssey), as queer as 300 or Fellini.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) March 21, 2013

I touched previously on what significance 'the doubling' of parts might have : in fact, if IMDb is to be trusted*, six actors play a part in all six time-strands, although those of Hugh Grant, though instrumental, are minor ones (and some of those played by, say, Doona Bae, are far less significant than that of Sonmi-451), which is surely no accident.

Georges Melies would have loved Cloud Atlas.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) March 21, 2013

To be continued



End-notes

* Since, as seems accurate, Jim Broadbent is not credited in that from 1973.


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Soft targets for scorn : Who gives a stuff about homoeopathy* ?

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13 April

Honestly, I'd really far rather that people such as Simon Singh, who campaign about homoeopathy, would consider the rights and wrongs of electro-convulsive therapy* (ECT), or even psychosurgery : that's keeping it within the so-called sphere of medicine (borderline butchery ?), but one could migrate to hammering many an alternative therapy, whereas homoeopathy seems to have an abiding fascination, which is what this posting concerns itself with.

To keep with ECT : it's odd that human-rights campaigners, journalists and the like want to stress the inhumanity of measures used against, say, Iraqi detainees to break them (whether or not to get information from them), but those - equally detained - under the Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended) seem to be have some different sort of emotional or moral status as victim, compared with military prisoners or officials of deposed regimes. Maybe I'm just weird in finding that curious...

Actually, I don't think so, because it actually seems easier (possibly as a result of documentary : but, then, who makes the documentaries, and why about that ?) for people to contemplate the ethics of the waterboarding or mock execution of a captive in (or brought from) a foreign country than what might happen, say, to an Afghani in a UK psychiatric unit, deemed to be in an unshakeable depression and (irrespective of consent) to need ECT to save his life or for some other reason under the 1983 Act.

RT @mrxeis From an adviser who says #Homeopathy is Mad to one who says it is Nonsense. Just about covers the spectrum of scientific opinion.
— Simon Singh (@SLSingh) April 18, 2013

And where are we with our headline issue, homoeopathy ? Well, isn't much criticism - dressing-up of the criticism aside - just saying either You're gullible pricks to believe in this crap (various royals included, I believe***), or You are exploiting gullible pricks who believe in this crap - and it matters because it is done 'on the NHS' ?

So what irritates me is the arbitrarily focused smugness of those who say that this is all crap and we're not such mugs as to believe in it, or to want it to continue :

Nothing better to get angry about (such as the mental-health or other humanitarian issues already mentioned) ?

Or just making a fuss because it's an easy battle to win, when most people grasp that the practice is one of repeated dilution, and don't need much stoking to concur that it should not happen at public expense.

Frankly, with the waste that is everywhere in this world, from unnecessarily upgrading phones or laptops (or PCs) just because people can, or have to****, is stopping homoeopathic treatment going to save anything sigificant in terms of money or lives ? Is is really such a huge topic that Pratter needs to be full of condemnation of it, whether in ridicule or rhetoric ?

Who cares, @slsingh ? All these Tweets about homoeopathy are plain boring !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 18, 2013

Unless homoeopathy is banned by law (and might go underground ?), it will continue privately, so the people who were involved in the NHS have an incentive - called losing their job - to work for a private institution, or set up on their own. Net result what ? What savings, and what change ?

Maybe worthwhile in itself, but why not highlight the horrible and cruel isolation and poverty in which many with mental-health conditions have to live ? The lack of befriending or other support schemes, the lack of concern that poor diet, lifestyle and even the long-term effects of medication have on, and reciprocally so, physical health, the battles to be awarded and survive on wlefare benefits, etc., etc., ?

Honestly, Splatter, I really can't think that it matters any great amount, when such degraded lives are all around us, that a few people are being prescribed overdiluted extracts - don't mock or barrack this practice of low significance when people are living and dying in obscurity. If you choose to, you prove that your own mental and personal satisfaction in what you do outweighs the demands of your humanity, your integrity, and your intellect.

@theagentapsley i think you want the unfollow button
— Simon Singh (@SLSingh) April 18, 2013

End-notes

* How can something as damaging, as brutal and little understood as to its mechanism of effectiveness (when effective), be called 'a therapy' ?

** Most people who Tweet so much about it can't even spell it - they write homeopathy, when they'd probably pounce on someone not putting homoeothermy...

*** And some might know, far better than I, how there came to be a Bristol Homoeopathic Hospital.

**** Because applications and web-coding becomes ever more (gratuitously ?) complicated, and not (or no longer) supported by the only operating that will run on a computer because of its specification, whose functionality is otherwise perfectly good.


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Kristin at the Harold Pinter Theatre II

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8 April

In the last performance of Old Times at The Harold Pinter Theatre (formerly The Comedy, and home to nine or so previous Pinter productions), I saw Lia Williams as Kate (Deeley’s wife), and therefore Kristin Scott Thomas as Anna (Kate’s friend) (Rufus Sewell was Deeley).

I was partly encouraged to do so by what Lia had said to me at the stage door before Easter, when she had come off stage from being Anna : that Kristin and she looked very different, and that, with her dark wig, I wouldn’t recognize her. It sounded fascinating for these very clear portrayals one way around to swap over, and for Kristin to be not ‘dark’ as Anna, as the opening word of the play would have her, but blonde, and to imbue the other woman with character, form, shape…

This way around, the play was different from the start : KST was standing, as Lia had done (according to the stage directions), looking out of the window at the back, but she was audience right, not left, and Lia, on the sofa, was on the one audience left, not the other. As the interaction between Deeley and Kate proceeds, the gestures, the blocking of the two on and around the stage, were quite different, not mere mirror-images*, and, as I made comparisons, I contemplated that memorizing the roles, even for Rufus, would be made more distinct by such partitioning, lest (a word that Deeley thinks not often heard) he should suddenly mistake Kate for Anna, or vice versa.

At the moment when the text directs Anna to turn ‘from the window, speaking’, the full presence of Kristin burst onto the stage. Knowing the play anyway, it had been a striking moment with Lia, but it was if suddenly she had always been in the room. Her movement, her energy, her grace were fantastic, and the relief in which Lia’s Anna was cast enlivened one’s appreciation of what they each had done – this suited KST down to the ground, the enthusiasm tempered by, but seeking to cover, the uncertainty that Deeley seeks to exploit by his interjections.

Sewell seemed a different Deeley, hard to characterize, but maybe a bit more bluff at the outset, a little more active on his feet, but no less drawing attention to himself when (as he did in both versions) he leant forward, put his mouth to the brandy-glass, and, in one swift bending move backwards, downed a very good measure, before trotting over, naughtily, to the brandy bottle.

As the sort of man that he is, wanting to stress how travelled he is, how much he enjoys his job and how important it is, this larger-than-life Salmon Fishing in the Yemen sort of woman (KST’s role in it, that is) is a threat to him – that is, at any rate, how he responds to her, trying to knock holes in her recollections, what she says her life in Sicily is like, etc. KST’s Anna stood up very well to this treatment, not by ignoring it, but by posture, movement, expression, and she got, by it, the lion’s share of the laughs that were not already on the face of the script.

It is clear enough to me, more so as I think back on Saturday night, that the tailoring of how Lia and Kristin played each part, and how their Rufus responded to them, must have been worked out in wonderful detail all along. What a marvellous piece of theatre to have gone to such trouble to create the play twice over to fit with this fascinating experiment of switching over !

Lia’s Kate was, I guess, much more how I tried to imagine her when I first devoured Pinter plays in several afternoons at the time of studying The Caretaker for ‘A’ level, that acquisitive sort of juvenile desire to know as much as possible about something (thankfully, not from the Internet, then, but from Pinter’s own words, though largely not words enacted on stage or screen) : she lived that sort of distance, that inwardness of Kate that makes her awkward, makes them, much as the bare situation invites it, end up talking about her in the third person.

That feature of the play, both when Deeley is first seeking information about Kate (following Anna’s exuberance about the lives / life that she says that they lived in London), and in the time when, after Kate has gone for her bath, they have moved together for Deeley to show Anna the bedroom, is more than just a feature : it is the bedrock that both are drawn to use Kate as the only thing that they have in common, whether as offensive gesture or defence, and to propound the Kate that they assert that they know, however much at odds with that of the other.

Lia’s Kate seems to invite being fought over in a quite other way from that of Kristin – Kristin was quiet, as Kate has to be in words when they are allocated to the other two, but not in a way that did not let us into her movements, expressions, smiles, be they only the adjustment of a limb, a calmness of the face, or the radiance of her pleasure. Lia, by contrast, had a more stark take on Kate, one that burnt oh so slowly right up to the final sets of blocks of words that she delivers to close the dialogue.

That approach seemed to work better as what Woody Allen would always have described as a ‘passive aggressive’ interpretation, but, at the same time, Kristin came to those utterances from a different place, and so, perhaps, we were more shocked by these words*, and the sense of enigma had a contrasting origin :

But I remember you. I remember you dead.


It is quite apparent to me that the play can unfold in very unlike ways, and yet still be close to the conception of the text, and not, I suspect, exhaust it.

More here on what seeing this production twice now makes me believe…


End-notes

* In the first viewing of the play, before the tableau, Anna (Lia) is at the foot of the bed that is audience left, after being pushed off the end by Kate, whereas Lia’s Kate stood over Anna.

** Just after Anna has said to Deeley :

Oh, it was my skirt. It was me. I remember your look… very well. I remember you well.


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Lessons from Merz

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8 April

On my fourth visit to the Kurt Schwitters exhibition at Tate Britain (Schwitters in Britain), I shall probably conclude having looked at everything, and might even manage some time with the ‘Kurt-inspired’ installations by Laure Prouvost and Adam Chodzko.

Four visits ? Yes, because, unlike those of the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at (Tate) Modern (Lichtenstein : A Retrospective) these works, in my experience, need time to be appreciated, and also space. As a Member of Tate, I have my admission free and at will, without the need for a ticket, and I can accordingly pace my viewing. (With the Arshile Gorky exhibition at Modern, I misjudged a little, and needed to travel down for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday of its closing weekend.)

What I have learnt (so far) is :

(1) One can have no appreciation of the pieces in Room 5 (Hand-held sculptures) from photographic images (I have seen such)

(2) In fact, without having them endlessly rotate on a turntable (not least because some are fragile, or, maybe, unstable), I believe that filming some of the works revolving would have benefited the typical visitor’s appreciation of, for example, Chicken and Egg, Egg and Chicken, Untitled (The All-Embracing Sculpture) and Speed (all dates to come)

(3) There are various reasons, some to do with the effect of shadow on Schwitters’ constructions (both on canvas and paper, and these free-standing ones), and others to the fact that he has, for example, vividly painted planes of Chicken and Egg, Egg and Chicken that are not – almost necessarily with a three-dimensional object (although there is more to it than that) – visible at all times

(4) In fact, the moving image as an interpretive element is under-represented in the show (whereas the installations both use film) – we do not, I assume, have footage of Schwitters reciting the Ursonate or any other of his poems, stories, etc., which is why we have the well-known three-by-three grid of photographs of him performing the former (plus audio)

(5) I have not yet done more than pass through Prouvost and Chodzko’s parts of the exhibition, but it does beg the question why their work, even if it is a response to his, is part of the show about Schwitters – how interesting are commissions from 2011, as against, say, some reactions in artwork that are contemporaneous to his time in Britain (seven years, after all), or even reporting Hirst’s inspiration to go to art college because of Schwitters’ collages ?

(6) What we do have, which I suggest is more of archive interest, are the photographs of the Merz Barn that were taken in situ by the team led by Richard Hamilton, and we have an almost excessively full chronology* of the failure to save the remains of the Merzbau, and of the near-failure to preserve the Merz Barn, both before and after the Hamiltonian survey

(7) I criticize the inclusion of a film-loop of those photos for several reasons : (a) they include rulers whose scale is never made explicit, (b) it is also not clear what the – often enough – poor-quality images (usually too dark) depict, because there is no over-arching shot of that wall of the Merz Barn, except in the course of the loop (which, of course, one cannot consult), and (c) a large-scale quality image of the wall as it can now be seen in Newcastle-upon-Tyne would show far more (or one could even have had a touch-sensitive one that would project a choice of images, being various levels of close-up or one of the ones from the survey)

(8) There are two large plaster pieces (a little like columns, as displayed, but resembling shapely newel-posts, or legs), which, I understand, were found in the Merz Barn, and which are ‘displayed’ in oblong Perspex boxes, placed against the wall, so that one side is invisible – unlike the four Perspex cubes that contain the hand-held sculptures, one cannot even walk all around them, and so film of them being either rotated or circled would give more sense of their curves, their construction, and their continuity with the smaller pieces

(9) But enough of all these observations for how the Schwitters show could have been better or different, because so many visitors (typically for a gallery) are doing themselves no favours by appreciating the works on canvas, wood, cardboard or paper without standing back from them

For I believe that Schwitters used the bus-tickets, say, or newspaper clippings, pieces of packaging, corrugated card or paper, gauze or net purely for their visual effect – if, after we have seen a shape mutedly through a piece of net, we will not see it close to, and we will not see the composition by knowing that that part of it is paper, that part oil-paint on the paper, that part a piece of stone adhered to the surface

(10) The exhibition contains some examples of his use of pointillist marks in landscape and abstract work, but, again, we do not get the best from Seurat by being so close that we see what the painting is made of, but not how the technique is meant to work and be viewed – same with painters such as Sisley or Pissarro

(11) As to the materials that Schwitters used that derive from reproductions of works in national collections, there are some cases (Room 3 contains some) where one is quite clearly meant to see that he is transforming or subverting a representation of an identifiable original, which is entirely consistent with the assertion that he made in 1919 :

The word Merz denotes essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes, and technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials


(12) Schwitters goes on to make his meaning quite plain – and I like it that he talks, along with paint, about things as if there is a harmonious democratization :

A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint


(13) For this reason, I reject the curatorial interpretation put on his use of a copy of G. F. Watt’s Hope in c. 63 old picture 1946 :

The inclusion of an advertisement for Dr Scholl’s Foot Comfort Service brings the lofty symbolism of the original painting, positioned upside-down and overlaid with scraps of paper so that it is barely recognizable, down to earth


Well, if Watt’s painting is inverted and so overlaid maybe it is not meant to be recognizable, and could there, therefore, not be any ‘bringing down’ except in the recognition of a student of art history ? As to the advert, I see no greater significance in the wording than in that of many a scrap used in other collages (‘Merz’ itself is an appropriated fragment, after all) :

The person who looks at a bus-ticket in one and ponders its provenance might as well be in London Transport Museum as the Tate, because I believe that Schwitters’ eye is good, a self-reinforcing belief, because I stand back from his paintings, find a harmony in them, and that, if I put my thumb up to remove a detail, the painting is no longer balanced – it is interesting to get close and see how he achieved it, but just doing so is mistaking means and end


All in all, although some things could have been done differently, I am glad to have had this exhibition to visit, and, when I am not hearing inane comments on Schwitters or his art from other visitors (which makes me run a mile), or avoiding their proceeding to a painting that had looked ‘free’, or even their deciding to stand in my way, I can fondly hope that people have the chance to get to know his work better.

Not everything works as effectively as the select few that really do sing, but almost all have something to say, and it is a joy to become aware of his works of portraiture, landscape, and – in the flesh – sculpture.

Viva Kurt !


End-notes

* I refuse to say ‘time-line’.


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‘Let’s abuse each other !’ (Waiting for Godot, Act I)

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6 April

If – God forbid ! – I were to wish to express the notion that the Prime Minister is a bad man, motivated by self-interest, how might I say it to Cameron’s face ?

I can’t emphatically say the natural You’re evil !, because the first syllable, with its diphthong, is hard to control at any volume when making sure that the message is abrupt and clear, so I might resort to three sharp, distinct jabs, You are evil !, and then add to it, You are selfish and evil ! (or vice versa).

But how cowed by this will he feel, because he can just brush off the adjectives, knowing that he is a pure and noble breed¹ ?

Think of when you are in the car, or cycling, or on the pavement, and someone else using the road does something stupid. You might serenely and calmly turn your countenance to the fact that you have had – as the case might be – to brake suddenly, softly murmur How stupid…, and resume your assumed walk through life with the Buddha.

More likely, I suggest, is that you will react differently, and not resort to our earlier formulation, You are stupid !, at all, but to the You stupid x !, where – probably depending on the level of your non-Buddha-restrained frustration, indignation or even anger – x might be man, woman, etc.², sod, bastard, twat, prick, and so on³.

At this point, it is worth noticing that many adjectives that, according to this pattern, occupy the place of our own ‘stupid’ are bi-syllabic, such as ruddy, bleeding, bloody, sodding, fucking, useless, hopeless, etc., and can therefore be rattled through and over : they have their weight, but as a qualification to our chosen engine of conveying, e.g. You priceless fucker / shite / wanker. (One can, of course, say (probably if relevant) You bald git !, and there is, in great, fat, dumb, proud, crass, etc., a whole battery of monosyllables, but the stronger qualifying words seem to be polysyllabic.)


OK, so what is this exercise – even if some may find it fascinating – of considering condemning Cameron all about ? Well, I want to look at the words of insult that some of the bloggers on mental-health regard as taboo because they stigmatize those with mental-health issues. For example the terms lunatic, psycho, mad, crazy, loopy, demented, and psychotic.

If someone gets called a fucking psycho, that is one extreme, and it may constitute any number of things from a drunken mate approving a reckless act of violence to, say, the critical characterization of a risky piece of driving. (We use words in context, and, in the first example, this may be part of the mythology of the mates’ behaviour, and so not be understood anything other than positively.)

There is a stage further, though, such as in the arena of taunting or threatening – or even administering – violence to a person who is known (or believed⁴) to have a mental-health condition. That reinforces a message that (beautified) goes along the lines We don’t like you or want you around because of who you are, what you do, and what it means for you to be here where you are not welcome.

However, I believe that some words have been denuded of any real malice, unless they are deliberately used offensively : I would suggest that, with enough energy, being called a pretty table-leg could, if anyone wanted to say it, be invested with and convey disregard, disdain, and disgust.

Or take this, from Soda Pictures’ booklet for New British Cinema Quarterly (where Eryl Phillips talks about making – planning to make – Gospel of Us, a three-day theatrical event to tell Christ’s Passion in and around Port Talbot) :

The ambition of the piece was bordering on madness – to attempt a film of it all was either a mid-life crisis or just lunatic


At least two of the words or phrases ‘mid-life crisis’, ‘madness’ and ‘lunatic’ explicitly suggest poor judgement through mental ill-health, but does that, in itself, make it insulting as such to those with that experience ? I’d draw the line in favour of those things being OK, whereas to have written this would be different, I think:

The ambition of the piece was bordering on demented – to attempt a film of it all was either a psychotic episode or sectionable

The insult, there, is to belittle psychosis (by likening it to the feelings of alienation from one’s life that usually fall short of needing even medication), to draw the vague word ‘demented’ (usually meant to signify dangerous violence, and attributed in the popular imagination and vocabulary to mental-health conditions) into the mêlée of meaning, and to cheapen the real and highly threatening and frightening matter of being sectioned by mentioning it in the context of a film that would be hard to make.


What I am hoping is not so much to have demonstrated that when Jon Snow, in writing about the Philpott case, called Philpott 'a lunatic', it was not stigmatizing the whole mental-health community, but to have started a debate about whether that word (and others, some of which I have mentioned, or even given in examples) can ever be used, or must always be pounced upon...


End-notes

¹ In what turn out not to be Paul Weller’s words, but those of Ray Davies (David Watts).

² Or, as my father was wont to say, ‘individual’.

³ Enterprising individuals** might learn a whole string of them, or play a sort of melody, on a scale of them, in increasing and receding severity, such as :

man shit jerk sod cunt drip bum twat .


⁴ A sort of guilt by association or mistake, as in Max Frisch’s Andorra.


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What would you do with an extra £600 (which you won't get) ?

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6 April

Not quite sure how democratic the Diberal Lemocrats are, so here is my comment on Lynne Featherstone's disingenuous question :


Well, if people in a job all got their salary up front on 6 April (rather than every week, fortnight or month throughout the year), or equally those on welfare benefits, they would be in a completely different position to make prudent capital outlays, such as not having to pay interest on paying insurance by instalment.

No one, though, will get £600 in a lump sum, so it's a rather stupid question to ask what anyone would do - let alone whether, overall, other changes leave them worse off !


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Epiphany : Questions in a comment

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3 April

I am taking this space to start respond to various questions posed in a comment on Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain II

I have now watched Turner Prize Video artist Elizabeth Price wins and BALTIC Bites - Elizabeth Price, and they should inform my answers



(1) I am unfamiliar with Beckett. If I were to listen to Words and Music, or watch Quad, what influences would be mirrored by Price?


(2) Did it not feel odd to spend so much time on the recreation with the burning furniture?

I can't say that it did.

After all, how do you convey the notion, the terror, of a fire without showing it, and the whole work is only around 20 minutes.

I don't even think that it could be mistaken for a re-creation. At that time, I believe less had been appreciated about how different substances in furniture burn, and how a source of fire might ignite other items.

I took the footage used by Price to be from filmed combustion tests, where the nature and spread of fire was being analysed. I have already commented on the use of two panes : for me, Price located, in this material, the bewitching, hypnotic quality of fire, as against, elsewhere, the destructive one.


(3) With Choir and with the information on the church architecture interspersed, did the fire seem like a sacrament?


(4) The description of the parcloses reinforced an absent focus on the parishioners. How did the film make you feel?


I take it that these belong together.

I watched the film twice through in succession, and therefore knew how CHOIR related to the other two parts of the film the second time.

In my vocabulary, a parclose is merely what I would call a rood-screen or, in other church traditions, an iconostasis (although, in that case, not serving to separate the choir from the rest of the church, but designating, by opaque panelling decorated by holy images, a place limited to the priest).

I am not sure how describing any of the church architecture stressed an absence of parishioners, since there was no one in this part of the film (unlike the distorted moving dancers / singers of the second part, into which the clicks, beats and handclaps drew us).

As I realized that the second section was moving towards giving detail of a fire in which people had been trapped and died, I felt uneasy. We did not see them. We saw the aftermath, and heard from those who had been outside. They were traceless, numberless dead.

They could have been trapped in the choir of a church, and, with no way out (except, perhaps, smashing the windows and climbing out), burnt to death.


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DJ Kristin is spinning discs

This is a review of In the House (Dans la maison) (2012)

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3 April

* Contains spoilers *

This is a review of In the House (Dans la maison) (2012)

Another posting is a detailed attempt to understand what is happening in this film, but it is not a review – this is.

The story presents itself as an unfolding, a relationship between a teacher and a sixteen-year-old ‘learner’ (as the staff now have to call the pupils), in his class Sophomore C* at the Lycée Gustave Flaubert** : Germain (Fabrice Luchini), the teacher, first learns that he has this class (we know nothing about what else he does – whether, even, he teaches any other class) from Anouk, the school secretary (with whom, if not now, he has almost certainly had an affair).

Less interested in his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) than in marking homework (does the affair with Anouk subsist, a diversion of Germain’s care and attention ?), he is excited by an account (marked à suivre, to be continued) of his weekend by a Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer) fully as much as if Claude had spied upon Germain’s thought, actions and life and written it up, gives it a B+, and shares it with Jeanne – she has to suspend her uncertainty about what will happen in the wake (pun intended !) of the death of Bruno, the owner of the gallery that she runs, whose funeral service Germain, kindly, declined to accompany her to.

Everything stems from these facts, Claude’s attitude(s), Germain’s obsessive fascination, and his continued sharing with Jeanne : it is almost as if, on one level, Claude is writing to Jeanne by the epistolary mediation of Germain, because, when Jeanne says that she is reminded of the fondness for gossip of her cousin in Yorkshire (which, I believe, explains why her accent in French is less tight than usual, because we are not meant to see her as native to this country), Germain opens his critique of the latest instalment from Claude by saying that he writes like ‘a provincial cousin’.

It is patent that Germain is forgetting who he is, what he is doing, and almost fictionalizing his own work as a teacher by devoting himself to a creative effort and a creator who, although good, do not objectively merit it, a risky projection, most likely, of the ambitions that he could not fulfil for himself as a writer.

Who is teacher, who is being taught lessons, and what of this family with which Claude involves Germain (and Jeanne, through him : at least twice, Claude asks Germain if he is showing the episodes to anyone else, who straightaway denies it, although he keeps trying to moderate by invoking the spectre What if someone else read this ?) ?

These are the essential questions that this film poses in three very good performances by the named characters, and also by the family whose house, lives and thoughts Claude effortlessly seems to infiltrate (reminiscent of the manipulation in Funny Games (1997) and, more recently, The Imposter (2012)) – they will not directly lead to the answers that I have found in this film, and, without them, the ending will only partly work.

Yet it is as striking as Ali Smith’s close to her stunning novel The Accidental, and, if a viewer is anything like me, he or she will want to watch a second time*** to track how its course as affected by knowing where it is going.


End-notes

* The French education system may have taken this from that of the States, or vice versa.

** There seems to be such an establishment in Rouen (where Flaubert was born, and died).

*** This film is, with its cinematic credentials in place, all about the watching that audiences do.


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What does the bread line mean ?

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3 April

Living on the bread line.

What exactly is that, when one stops to ask ?

It means, as in Soviet Russia*, queuing for your bread, for hand-outs (and this administration sees no need for food banks : everyone, we are told, actually has more than he or she needs).

Somehow, however bad Rickshaw-Ditch wants to make it out to have been (why did his wife have no income, we wonder... ?), I don't think that he was waiting for hours, as people passing watched, for a loaf of bread !

And this charitable giving to the poor : just go, for example, to the Collegiate Church of St Mary in Warwick and see how the boards preserved there record provision in people's wills for giving to the poor and how people were considered then, centuries ago, not as lazy, scrounging scum, but worthy of care and consideration.

Think, too, of the long tradition of the Poor Laws, on which Wikipedia is far more knowledgeable than I can be, and look at what is happening in the name of Fairness in twenty-first century post-industrial Britain...



End-notes

* Which this Coalition is copying, by making accommodation fit the number of occupants and screw what happens to those already there, in what they fondly think of - whatever it may be - as 'home'.


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KST with a Yorkshire cousin

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3 April

* NB Spoiler City : What follows is not a review as such, and takes as read that the film has been watched and its plot is no surprise *

The closing shot of the film, before a screen comes across from left and right to meet at the point where a double shooting has taken place, shows a two-storey building with eight (or ten ?) sets of French doors onto balconies. Dusk has somehow fallen, and the lit-up windows are mini-screens or stages on which we witness dancing, sex, etc., and, in one case, first a man and then a woman being shot (top, second from left). Other stories for Scheherazade to tell...

The opening shots were of a boy of around sixteen dressing, first his muscular torso with no head, and he will turn out to be Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer), but, by the time of the closing shot, we may even have forgotten how the film started, such has been our journey, circumscribed and maybe claustrophobic as its locations have been :

* In and around the Lycée Gustave Flaubert

* The flat of Germain (Fabrice Luchini) and his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas)

* In and around the house of what comes to be called that of 'the Raphas' (Denis Ménocet (Rapha Artole père), Emmanuelle Seigner (Esther), and Bastien Ughetto (fils))

* In and around the gallery that Jeanne runs (and thinks of as hers), Labyrinthe du Minotaur (with all its echoes of Theseus and Ariadne, Minos, Pasiphaë, and Dædalus)

* Approaching and inside the complex that contains the basketball court

* Queuing outside and in the cinema

* Finally, just outside the Germains' flat (after we have been shown Garcia's house and him on a bus to the former)


That is the entire compass, I believe, of In the House (Dans la Maison) (2012), but one may not have realized as much in watching. Our cast, too, is quite narrow beyond those mentioned, being Anouk (the school's secretary), the headmaster, the twins Rosalie et Eugénie (both played by Yolande Moreau), and Bernard, the maths teacher whose test Germain 'steals'.


I hypothesize that :

* French forms of greeting apart, Germain and Anouk are (or have been) more intimate than just colleagues

* Even before the events unfold, nobody atthe school much liked Germain, who may have been reactionary (or otherwise caused conflict with authority)

* Jeanne has probably thrown herself into the gallery both because childless, and because of Germain's relative lack of interest in her and what she does (and maybe she, in her turn, was intimate with the former gallery owner Bruno, whose funeral Germain early does not attend, calling it 'a mass')

* Maybe some (or all) of this does not exist outside Germain's head in the present of the film, for the following reasons :


(1) As with Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Germain is fascinated by Garcia because of the latter's writing, and is a Germain Germain, seeking, as Humbert does, to be untruthful to himself about what the fascination is

(2) If Garcia = Germain, Germain projecting his desire and drive for good writing onto another part of himself that concocts an enticing supply (after all, although what he takes to be the inventiveness (if it is not autobiographical) of Garcia's writing keeps him interested, the writing itself (at best) shows promise, not great genius), he can distance himself psychologically, by entering a psychotic experience, from any or all guilt for attacking his wife, humiliating 'a learner', and stealing the maths test

(3) For all that we know, the return to school (and the announcement of the reintroduction of school uniform, complete with the prurience of seeing Garcia dressing) onwards is imagined, because Germain has already been suspended (and maybe is already at the Institut de la Verrière, the psychiatric provision where his other, younger, more promising self (Garcia) visits him) - the scene, shown to us and which Garcia tells him that he watched, with learners in everyday clothes strikes a strange note, which might suggest the unreality of the uniformed scenes

(4) If so, then he tells himself a story of his own being drawn in (perhaps as to the centre of a labyrinth, Ariadne's (Garcia's) string taking him to face the Minotaur monster at the heart of him / his life) to excuse the three culpable acts listed in (2), above, and to provide his internal rationale for being led on and on, as if like Macbeth or Othello, to his destruction

(5) Esther Artole tells Claude Germain that his thinking that he loves her is 'in his head' and irréelle, and he is only in proximity to her by having, in part, helped her son Rapha with unreal numbers (such as the square-root of -2) : if Germain is - as Beckettt says about his prime character in Company - devising it all for company, then his neglect of Jeanne becomes Claude's interest in getting close to and seeking to seduce Esther (with all her Old Testament echoes in a book of her own)


On quite another level, the film seems to present itself to us much like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, trying to piece together the puzzle of what is happening in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), and there is often its playful feeling to the unfolding of each instalment from Garcia and its reception by the Germains. On another, Garcia is not unlike the son in Benny's Video (1992), or another schemer in the rather dire Bel Ami (2012) (not to mention The Imposter (2012)).

If, though, Germain had his admission, prior to (on a 'straight' reading) or during which (on a reading where, as Germain showed on the blackboard, the conflict is within) Garcia is the internal enemy (= the younger writer who Germain once was, back to haunt him, but at the same time intrigue him), the film has a different character that fits the ending.

Perhaps consumed by his failure as a writer and being but a teacher (just as Jeanne's biological 'failure' may have caused her to seek a career), we may see Germain spurred to fond imaginings that turn toxic and bring / have brought his downfall, a little in the same way that a noise that we hear in sleep incorporates itself into a dream and then, at what seems a remove of time, appears to wake us.


Interestingly, I have now seen a variant of the landscape poster that is in @CamPicturehouse on Neil White's (@everyfilmteled's) web-site, which shows Garcia next to Germain on a bench, with the Rapha house foregrounded (and even with a Narnia-style lamp-post, which, rather, reminds me of Magritte and his anarchic Empire of Light paintings)...

We cannot see Garcia's face, but just look at the expression on Germain's, regarding him !


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A cloudy prospect

This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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31 March

This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)

dear Cloud Atlas the movie, I'm going 2 c u today. please boggle my mind. it's a sunny day and 3 hrs is a long time. nae pressure.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) March 21, 2013

In his review of Cloud Atlas (2012), Philip French – not at all showing off – seems to give every example that he can think of in films where actors play more than one role. (Thankfully, he did not trouble us with Alec Guinness’ eightfold cameos as members of the d’Ascoyne family.) To French, that historical view may be important, but I agree with the person (was it he ?) who said that one might be too bothered working out which actor / actress is on screen to pay attention to other things.

For me, trying to think of Hugo Weaving’s name (by reminding myself of The Matrix (1999) and its Agent Smith) was not too much for my poor little brain (not, that is, in the way that some of the intense stretches of action were, acting as some sort of overload). Having thought of some counter-examples, I cannot think that the following Tweet is correct in alleging a significance, other than damn’ good fun on the part of cast and crew (Weaving as a nurse to put Ratched in the shade ! ), in these multiple roles (which is properly the stuff of The Hours (2002)) :

As far as I am concerned, the territory that the futuristic parts of the film occupies is that before the time of the trilogy that began with The Matrix, and whose antecedents were ‘filled’ in by the collection of short works that make up The Animatrix (2003). It may be that, with his novel Cloud Atlas (published in 2004), David Mitchell was aware of this material, and has an interest in the ethics, possibilities and implications of AI (Artificial Intelligence) – I almost cannot believe otherwise, rather than that it is a layering on the book from the Wachowskis, who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Tom Tykwer (who was also one of its three composers).

We are shown an agent from Union (Hae-Joo Chang, played by Jim Sturgess) who is seeking to recruit Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), very much in the same way that Trinity recruits Neo in The Matrix and introduces him to Morpheus : the aim in both cases is to tell the truth about the situation that fellow ‘fabricants’ and humans, respectively, are in, when they are deluded as to the reality of their existence and purpose.

Neo, before he is ‘awoken’, is in one small pod of a huge human power-source for the machine world, but, believing otherwise because of the stimuli provided to his inert, supine body (which generate the matrix in which he seems to be alive), has to be shown the truth, which shocks him. Even more shocking, in a way, is for him to be told that he is the chosen one, just as Sonmi-451 is. In her case, the lies that fabricants such as she have been told, when unmasked, cause her to engage with Union’s cause and to seek to broadcast the truth. (One is almost reminded of the closing scene of The Matrix, where Neo is making the sort of ‘wake-up call’ that was made to him by Trinity at the other end of the film.)

In another era, that of the continuing slave trade in the States, Doona Bae is Adam Ewing’s (Sturgess’) wife Tilda, to whom he returns from the colonies a changed man because of having his life saved by Autua (David Gyasi), a black slave who had stowed away : we do not learn more of it, but Adam and Tilda intend to head eastwards to campaign for the abolition of slavery. Is the multiple-character aspect significant here ? Well, yes, Bae plays both Tilda and Sonmi-451, but, in the former role and in those times, she would probably have been no more visible as a force for change than as Adam’s supporter.

There is thus a link between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twenty-first century in terms of seeking freedom and helping others in that search. Dr Henry Goose (Tom Hanks) would have prevented the latter, but, as Zachry, he helps, rather than hinders, escaping a stricken place, so it would appear that any pattern is not one of direct correspondence, and, if not dictated by logistics, may be little more than fortuitous.

i saw Cloud Atlas...Now I shout it from the highest hills, even told the golden daffodils- it's a glorious multiverse of jodorovsky+Griffith
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) March 21, 2013

Continued as In the clouds


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A working document : Silver Linings Playbook and its pros and cons with mental-health issues

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25 March

First thoughts after just seeing the film, to be added to, revised, etc., as time and reading other comments permit

* NB Contains spoilers *


Preamble : I do not know about US mental-health or criminal law, but I do know about sections 37 and 41 of the Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended), where it used to be that, before the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office would receive psychiatric reports and decide whether someone could fully or conditionally be discharged from section. Such people had been found to have committed a criminal offence, but, because of their mental-health condition, were being held in hospital, not in prison.

What we are shown seems similar, though it is implausible that Pat’s mother could just turn up, sign a document, and take him home there and then (or, equally, that it would not be known beforehand that police officer Keogh had been allocated to supervise Pat (Bradley Cooper) in the community) : in the UK, the 1983 Act would only allow Pat’s mother to take him off even a non-criminal section by giving 72 hours in which the consultant could object to it on the basis that he would be a danger to himself or others.

As I suggest, a far cry - even if perhaps necessary to a plot where Pat's father does not even know that it is happening - from seemingly just 'bowling up' and getting Pat signed over...


Pros :

1. Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal (as Tiffany Maxwell) of someone with mental-health issues as straightforward and open, genuine, and not excusing what, in Pat, did not have to be that way.

2. That Pat (Bradley Cooper) responds to her, albeit just initially just by talking about medication at her sister's dinner table, because they share something.

3. That Tiffany is shown throwing back in Pat's face his hierarchy of craziness, where she is ‘worse than’ he, because she ended up being highly promiscuous for a while (after her husband has been killed when helping another driver), and where, as she tells him, he throws back in her face what she has trusted him with in friendship.


Cons :

1. Bradley Cooper’s portrayal (as Pat) of someone with mental-health issues who cannot control himself, and lacks compassion, tact and understanding, because he is the one with the history of undiagnosed bi-polar disorder, and the implication might be that those traits or behaviours are part and parcel of the diagnosis.

2. The notion that regular therapy would not only be available, but provided, in a medical culture so rooted to medication. (The therapy gets conveniently forgotten, once Pat encounters Dr Patel at a football game, as do the charges and consequences of what happens there, because the film presents him as doing nothing other than rehearsing with Tiffany and collapsing.)

3. The suggestion from Pat that he can recognize OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder*) in his father Patrizio just because he likes the remote-controllers in a certain arrangement, which is a regression even on Jack Nicholson's character in As Good as it Gets. Pat has been in a psychiatric unit for eight months, and so should know better, because (as suggested at point 5) he has got close enough to people to understand how they tick and feel.

4. The whole film, of course, has a bit of a feel that, just as Jack Nicholson in that other film 'just needed the love of a good woman to take him out of himself' (i.e. Helen Hunt), so Pat just needs to accept that he loves Tiffany and wants to care for her.

5. Danny (Chris Tucker) is shown as engaging, but with recurrent fixed thought-patterns that prevent his engagement with others. Nonetheless, Pat and he have a friendship, which must mean that Pat is capable of getting beyond his self-centredness(contrary to what point 1 in this list suggests. Danny has a pretty understandable desire to escape from the unit at Baltimore, but, when he is legitimately out (prior to which Pat, somehow, has been finding time to write to him), he is suddenly transformed into a with-it guy, making Pat jealous by demonstrating dance-moves with Tiffany - the transformation would have been interesting to know more of.

6. Putting points 4 and 5 in this list together, the message appears to be that mental ill-health arises from self-obsession, and that learning to focus one's attention on the needs and feelings of another is all that is needed as a cure. Which is about as true to the world of such conditions as bi-polar disorder as films like Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) are to psychiatric practice or Marnie (1964) is to breaking through a neurosis by finding 'the key'.


Watch this space !


End-notes

* Some people seriously believe, as someone with the condition once told me, that it stood for Obsessive Cleaning Disorder.

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