More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
12 May
As one who came to Cambridge’s ADC Theatre (Amateur Dramatic Club (@adctheatre)) that night clutching book 6 of Harry Potter (HP and the Half-Blood Prince), it was a distinct surprise – not to say ‘spooky’ – to find that the performance opened with Potter, and, within moments, Max Barton, as his own Harry, crying out Expelliarmus !.
In the flyer’s write-up, the play’s origins in Barton’s reading of Jekyll and Hyde are made explicit. However, for anyone with a background in the world of mental-health, they make one wonder whether, in his premise for the work, he has mistaken the symptomatology of multiple personality disorder (as it tends to be called, rather than split personality) for that of paranoid schizophrenia*.
In fact, the suspicion turned out to be justified, because, although it was suggested that Harry might have been hearing voices (as those with the diagnosis of schizophrenia commonly, but not invariably do (auditory hallucination)), there was great weight placed on the notion that he was acting under the name of Edward Catcher (we do not learn Harry’s surname) as a distinct personality, who has distinctly violent, even murderous, inclinations. [Touches of Hitchock’s Psycho (1960), not to mention Powell’s Peeping Tom from the same year ?]
As the drama unfolded, any belief dissipated (although it did occasionally revive) that Barton might have seen a more subtle parallel between Hyde and the apparent subject of his own work : it had been initally fostered by the fact that the programme notes, despite the flyer’s suggestion, did not mention Stevenson after all). There was also an increasing feeling that the seeming similarities with Sebastian Faulks’ novel Engleby**, itself clearly set in Cambridge, might be more than coincidental, and that maybe, when it came to the involvement of a lawyer in Harry’s unfolding case, implausibly so. Yet, Faulks’ novel, too, appears to have, as its proper subject personality disorder, its possible origins, and its public understanding.
Interestingly, in the scenes with the lawyer, and in Harry’s prior experiences at some unnamed Cambridge college, there was an allusion to the finding attested by an apparent body of research – the link, because skunk is a highly concentrated form of hash (specially cultivated for being stronger than the ‘traditional’ forms of hash), between its use and the onset of schizophrenia. Or, perhaps more properly, the sorts of psychotic experiences to which this label is frequently applied. What made this allusion relevant was the way in which Barton’s text appeared to suggest is that there might be a cynical manipulation of such research findings, by the legal profession, to exculpate the guilty from full responsibility for their crimes – a topic more fully and knowingly dealt with by Faulks’ eponymous Corpus graduate (Harry does not get to graduate).
The way in which No Magic and Engleby both fight shy of specificity are also, one can only believe, more than chance: Faulks renames a well-known pub in Bene’t Street, but, at the same time, makes it so clear, from the choice of alternative name, which one he is referring to, as one of Engleby’s largely solitary drinking haunts, that one wonders why he has bothered. Likewise, although Barton himself is at Cambridge, we are only told in a wry way that Harry is there, in a running joke, carried off to great effect by the cast. There is, though, no way of knowing at which college the 'real' Edward Catcher was an undergraduate (although, for no good reason, one suspects Fitzwilliam).
Postscript
If completed, this review would have dealt with the subjects whose headings follow, but the fact that it did not is why it is incomplete… [However, recollected comments, in square brackets such as these, have been added - there was some contemporaneous correspondence with Barton, which, when located, may provide more detail / confirmation] :
1. Blocking / staging
[The most vivid moment was one that reminded of the infernal scenes in What Dreams May Come (1998) (not to say Doré's illustrations of Dante), and the terror of Event Horizon (1997), in an effective combination of latex and lighting***]
2. Acting
[The principals were probably fine, with Barton as Harry****]
3. Ensemble
[Almost certainly generally tight enough, even if some scenes could have been dwelt on less in the playing]
4. Text
[As mentioned, there was a certain teasing coyness about where this place (Cambridge) might be, which suited the likely audience congratulating itself that it was 'in the know' - hard to remember now whether Barton's evocation succeeded, probably in the midst of in-jokes, in portraying a more recognizable Cambridge than Larkin did Oxford in his undergraduate novel Jill]
5. Further comments about pathology
[Only that the attempt to cover similar ground to Faulks also gave rise to somewhat cynical attempt to take down the whole justice system by association - a matter much in people's minds with Yewtree just now]
End-notes
* A useful confirmation can be found in the published diary of Phoebe Pluckrose-Oliver, who was the show's producer :
Last night I was up until 1am in the Homerton auditorium making 3.5m by 2m frames out of Lycra and scaffolding for the set we’ve devised for the play. [...]
The frames are an important part of the set for the play, which is called ‘No Magic’. Written by a second year student on my course, Max Barton, it’s about an undergraduate who develops paranoid schizophrenia.
** Hutchinson, London, 2007.
*** This aspect seemed to have attracted favourable comment from Nathan Brooker, the (more-timely) reviewer for Varsity (though issue 731 seemed to be having a dig and /or private joke with the last of its (festive) Predictions : Max Barton will resurrect his verse-comedy No Magic).
**** The resource of camdram.net is interesting...
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Monday, 12 May 2014
Saturday, 10 May 2014
From the archive : The Language of Insults
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 May
The Language of Insults
Let’s abuse each other !
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, making You are selfish and evil ! (or vice versa).
But how cowed by this will #Shameron feel, because he can just brush off the adjectives, knowing that he is a pure and noble breed* ?
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.**, sod, bastard, twat, prick, and so on***.
At this point, it is worth noticing that many adjectives that, according to this pattern, occupy the place of our own ‘stupid’ are bisyllabic, such as ruddy, bleeding, bloody, sodding, fucking, useless, hopeless, etc., and can therefore be rattled through and over : they have their weight, but mainly as a qualification to our chosen engine of conveying our message, 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, again, 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 say, 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. (For 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 of threatening – or even administering – violence to a person who is known (or believed****) to have a mental-health condition. That reinforces a message that, if 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 suggest :
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 feelings of alienation from one’s life, which usually fall far 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...
End-notes
* In Paul Weller’s words ('David Watts').
** Or, as my father was wont to say, ‘individual’.
*** 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 .
**** A sort of guilt by association or mistake, as in Max Frisch’s Andorra.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 May
The Language of Insults
Let’s abuse each other !
Waiting for Godot, Act I
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, making You are selfish and evil ! (or vice versa).
But how cowed by this will #Shameron feel, because he can just brush off the adjectives, knowing that he is a pure and noble breed* ?
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.**, sod, bastard, twat, prick, and so on***.
At this point, it is worth noticing that many adjectives that, according to this pattern, occupy the place of our own ‘stupid’ are bisyllabic, such as ruddy, bleeding, bloody, sodding, fucking, useless, hopeless, etc., and can therefore be rattled through and over : they have their weight, but mainly as a qualification to our chosen engine of conveying our message, 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, again, 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 say, 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. (For 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 of threatening – or even administering – violence to a person who is known (or believed****) to have a mental-health condition. That reinforces a message that, if 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 suggest :
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 feelings of alienation from one’s life, which usually fall far 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...
End-notes
* In Paul Weller’s words ('David Watts').
** Or, as my father was wont to say, ‘individual’.
*** 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 .
**** A sort of guilt by association or mistake, as in Max Frisch’s Andorra.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
From the #UCFF archive : The Lottery Ticket (submitted to @BBCRadio3 as a competition entry)
The Lottery Ticket :
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 May
The Lottery Ticket :
Six Numbers
[In homage to Stravinky’s Jeu de Cartes
(and, necessarily, Walter Mitty)]
(and, necessarily, Walter Mitty)]
To Svetlana
Alex frowned.
He had become captivated (again) by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, and now he just didn’t know how to go on… In particular, he found the story ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ perplexing, and his equilibrium upset. (This was, of course, before technology would render his musings virtually redundant, but at the impossibly high cost of re-creating another Borgesian fantasy, that of a library without end or catalogue, or even meaning.)
Despite the clear reference to another of this century’s great writers in the name of ‘the sacred latrine’, which – maybe? – threatened to undermine the whole edifice as artifice, was there ironic plausibility in the claim that ‘A slave stole a crimson ticket; the drawing determined that that ticket entitled the bearer to have his tongue burned out’? After all, hadn’t he heard that the same writer, in his A Universal History of Infamy, had plundered – or rather dismembered – the Encyclopaedia Britannica in search of tales of ‘Widow Ching, Lady Pirate’ and of ‘The Tichborne Claimant’?
That being so, why shouldn’t there be a grain of truth in a lottery in an ancient land decreeing ‘that a sapphire from Taprobana be thrown into the waters of the Euphrates’, or giving rise to a world where it could be said that ‘Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave’?
He cursed Borges under his breath at the notion that, in the simple frustration that he just couldn’t know the answer, there lay the beauty of the text, and, in search of sleep, turned over once more.
13
* * * * *
Christy woke him – too early! – the following morning, with a shake. ‘Wassamatter?’, he raged incoherently. ‘Your mother is here’, came the stark answer that brought him unerringly into the wakefulness that he sought to avoid. Christy had a knack for doing that, and for being to hand as the (logically necessary) messenger-boy in the first place.
Alex threw on some clothes, and descended into the farmhouse kitchen. There, indeed, she was, brandishing a pale pink oblong of paper. ‘Now I’ll be rid of the lot of you!’, she shrieked; ‘And you all told me, over and over till I nearly was, that I was out of my mind!’. He had no idea what she was talking about, but there was no chance to find out, because she had metamorphosed into Science Officer Spock, complete with tricorder, blue top, and those ever so slightly kinky boots, and started flying around the room.
He jerked himself awake, regretting that the act of emergence meant that, the revels being, though thankfully, ended, he would have to face the day.
And who the hell was Christy?, he railed to himself. (Or was that, as he surmised as soon as he’d said it, an unbidden consequence of listening to Beckettt’s All That Fall…?)
8
* * * * *
Across the heath, he spotted a shape on the horizon. Not having the patience for it to materialize in a long shot, like Peter O’Toole on horseback, he busied himself with some papers: if, whether or not bearing scythe, it was for him, it would be there soon enough. But where were his notes from the other evening?!
When the knock came at the door, he descended. He half-expected Maria Andreevna – although she was no horsewoman – and accordingly started puzzling at why that term conjured up a satyr-type hybrid for him, whereas the word ‘horseman’ didn’t.
In fact, it was Dr Wassimiter, ever darkly cloaked against the wind. As usual, in the six or more hours that he was with Alex, he drank tea, kvaas and vodka to excess, and consumed copious pickled beetroot and herring, but, most importantly, he had brought the love-note that was so long awaited.
Alex waved him on his way, and fell to opening it.
19
* * * * *
Her carriage came crisply for him at ten, glistening with frost. At first, he was disappointed at the thought that it had been sent to him empty after all, but the pallor of her unveiled face gave her away, when she tried to sneak a further look.
Ably helped, amidst a cloud of powder, he climbed the steps that the footmen let down for him, but, losing his balance at the summit, almost fell into the furs on top of her! Scarcely a fit way to greet your queen when she condescends to call you to have your future read – a horoscope likely cast whilst the Englishman improvised a fantasia or two, and that other saucy fellow embellished further the record of his sexual conquests!
7
* * * * *
All at once, she was Leni to his Josef K., betraying the advocate with her passion, toppling and crushing the piles of paperwork over and over under her willing back.
Or Frieda, bringing the odour of the slops and swill into Klamm’s private rooms at the Herrenhof, into which K. and she had penetrated to avoid the tiresome attention of the assistants – and now found themselves alone, as never before since his arrival in the village, with the luxury to enjoy (rather than snatch at) sex.
He came close behind her, nuzzling the side of her neck and covering it with kisses, as he crossed his hands under and embraced her breasts.
Yes, to-night was the night!
29
* * * * *
As he drove her home the next morning, she caught him unawares, just after he had taken the gentle S-bend by the church.
‘What are you looking like that for, like you’ve won the lottery?’, she said, slyly.
46
31 January
Copyright ® Belston Night Works 2010
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Friday, 9 May 2014
From 11F2 to you : But the delivery service never makes a mistake
This is a review of The Lunchbox (Dabba) (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 May
This is a review of The Lunchbox (Dabba) (2013)
A beautiful film about the things that we say, and transport of all kinds (e.g. by train, emotionally, and to convey), The Lunchbox > (Dabba) (2013) is prudently packed with metaphors, none of which are leant on, but which give great richness.
It is rightly said that Irrfan Khan (Saajan Fernandes) excels in this film, which he does by pacing, by small facial gestures, and by his sheer humanity, but so does Nimrat Kaur as Ila, with the central group of characters completed by Nawazuddin Siddiqui (Shaikh) and Yashvi Puneet Nagar (Yashvi). Other characters, we either never see (Auntie, played by Bharati Achrekar), or might as well not have (Nakul Vaid’s Rajeev) : Auntie, though invisible, proves more kindred than some.
Contrary to @THEAGENTAPSLEY's expectations, a beautiful film, not a schmaltzy one, in The Lunchbox (Dabba) (2013) - many elements / facets !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 9, 2014
The film, set in Mumbai, revolves around trains, but without ever being about them, except as passing social commentary on the Westernizing influence of, amongst various matters, commuting. It starts and ends with a train, pleasantly leaving us in the dark, right in the beginning, as to what we see, but later letting us sometimes be one step ahead of the game. The central medium of the lunchbox, carried far and wide, bears many an import : as blind Cupid, the happenstance that other modern styles of media (such as Twitter®) can give rise to*, as a barometer of the feelings and of interest and appreciation (Twitter® again, with fire-fights, or e-mail (also mentioned, but unseen)), and of what sharing is, whether of food with another (we see some highly contrasting contrasting meals) or via the delivery service.
Sending something of oneself to another place, and what life is and concerns itself best with, these are the matters that The Lunchbox devotes itself to**. Unafraid to look matters such as stagnation, ageing, death, suicide and the content of a lifespan in the face, the film sets them in relief against the revolutionizing potential for good in (being open to) change. Hopes and fears, encouraged or allayed by Auntie at first, transmute into the aspiration for a place elsewhere, which could be Bhutan, which is not shown (but maybe familiar from Michael Palin’s excellent series Himalaya).
En route, the façades that, if we are honest with ourselves, we all should know that we put up of withdrawing into our nutshell and becoming ‘the king of infinite space’ (Hamlet), or, equally, of embracing some new way without heed to its impact on ourselves and / or on others – taking a lover, ‘exploiting’ an opportunity, closing our heart. Clinging on to what we find that we have really been resenting or needlessly protecting is exemplified by the realization made by Ila’s mother, or by the little girl who shuts Fernandes out from what he can see (symbolically, too), whereas his sense of something good, right and different is palpable when we see him open the lunchbox, almost as if the aroma came to us alongside how fine the food looks.
Yes, it is partly what some like to call magical realism, with the delivery system that has been endorsed by Harvard Business School as the engine for change with a life of its own (despite the customer-service response from the local representative’s denials), but this is not the hackneyed topos of the mystique and draw of India that The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) depicts.
Instead, writer / director Ritesh Batra has fully absorbed the examples given by works such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, and there is a seamless integration of medium and polymath message. Neither a rough ride, nor striving just to feel good, this film even gives us little flavours of themes such as those of The Double (2013) (in the government offices, devoid of technology, and of people seeking to get / hang on), and maybe even The Matrix (1999), in looking beyond the life that we take for life…
With camera-angles to wallow in and a controlled use of light, not to mention an insightful triptych mirror-scene, the film is as wonderfully put together as it is acted. Max Richter, in at the start with his score, is on very good form, and the result of this endeavour is a film that is moving and intelligent : it does not just entertain, but with the pretence of a big message of Small is beautiful (You’ve Got Mail (1998)), or needlessly and provocatively revel in the epistolary power to corrupt (in Christopher Hampton’s adaptation for Dangerous Liaisons (1988)), but engages with the questions that we may avoid even acknowledging as twentieth-century citizens.
End-notes
* Though the Comedy of Errors and Romeo and Juliet, more than 400 years ago and to name but two, both manage very well in rely on the potential for, respectively, fortuitous and calamitous (mis)communication…
** And it may not just be coincidence, for what it is worth, that Khan is part of Slumdog Millionaire (2008).
*** Almost racist in its suggestion of the primitivism of different ways, just as the very flawed Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) feels to be in its transplanted setting of the Catalonian capital for the original one of Los Angeles.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Thursday, 8 May 2014
Stranded (Excuse the pun) ?
This is a review of The Sea (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 May
This is a review of The Sea (2013)
With no knowledge of the prize-winning novel from which John Banville is credited with adapting the screenplay, one can only comment on other literary features that are apparent, the whiff of L. P. Hartley’s child- and class-centred novel The Go-Between* (also the film of that name from 1970), the feel of Harold Pinter’s troubling Old Times, and of Cocteau’s also troubling text Les Enfants Terribles (and his influence on Jean-Pierre Melville's directorship of Cocteau's screen adaptation). (Not to mention the ring and aura of many Irish actors who have played in Beckettt’s work, or read it aloud.)
The Pinter has a direct link here, for Rufus Sewell, this film’s register-twisting adult male (Carlo Grace), played opposite Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams as Deeley when they magnificently alternated the roles of his wife Kate (reviewed here when KST played her) and Kate’s friend Anna (likewise reviewed – and that on the last night of the run at The Harold Pinter Theatre**).
Where, o where, to start writing about The Sea (2013), as screened at @CamPicturehouse ?
Not derivatively, but a debt to Pinter, Hartley...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 8, 2014
Sewell brings to the part the mix of lightness and indefinable menace that he found in Deeley, and serves perfectly for Connie Grace’s (Natascha McElhone’s) mate, she seeming to be carefree – and open to misinterpretation (not only tones of Hartley, but also of the mystery of childhood for Stephen Wheatley, the narrator of Michael Frayn’s novel Spies (from 2002), who is similarly drawn back to his past). Connie, more welcoming than Carlo gustily feigns to be, does not reckon with the backlash from Carlo’s and her playful high spirits, in invasive yet immersive scenes that we cannot, deep down, utterly credit being remembered aright (any more than the Pinter trio’s competitive claims for their time in London), because (through colour-balancing in shooting or post production) they are tinged with colour, golden light – as if of a Golden Age.
The mixture of fascinated flirting, stark inadequacy / naivety, and simply being in love with this unworldly family of Graces that Matthew Dillon brings to the role of Max Morden has us hooked into what he feels and then tries to think through – without that immediate involvement with his world, his viewpoint, nothing that Ciarán Hinds brings to his stark, rather gruff universe, whose colour (in a Night and Day contrast, especially at the key moment in the drama) seems to have been sucked from it, would move and affect us.
If we are tempted to think that it is a mystery falsely postponed that Hinds’ character keeps from Charlotte Rampling’s, and hers from him, that each knows who the other is, then it is best thought of as an unfolding : as in Old Times, the power is not in knowing (or guessing) the story, but, as always with Pinter (or in mature Beckettt), in the telling itself, the words, actions, nuances.
As also with Pinter, the resolution – if there is one – is on the level of some sort of acceptance. Max Morden (Hinds), suspicious of whether fellow guest Karl Johnson (Blunden) has a real or invented military past, suspicious and frightened, in fact, of so much, and feeling such pain, hurt and guilt, senses that he has misjudged this man. Perhaps, in his heart, he senses that, even if the forces background is a convenient fabrication, then not only have been his own references to ‘my parole officer’ (or maybe needing to write about Pierre Bonnard), but also the stories and confusions with which he has dogged himself / allowed himself to be dogged by through some misplaced respect, reverence even…
The Sea impresses strongly with how it has been shot and put together, no least as a worthy companion for the stunning Calvary (2014) and its own Irish grounding. Not, in that trite way, that the location is another character – just to the extent that Morden, shunning the present, seeks to inhabit this place in County Wexford, and finds that he has the weight of its cruel reminders to bear, borne in Hinds’ terrified expression of being in thrall.
In its way, more alarming for Morden than the demons of Event Horizon (1997), though not, for us, with its lingering mood (or that of Under the Skin (2013)), but rather with a final promise of peace, which could be as redemptive as that of Eric Lomax in The Railway Man (2013).
End-notes
* For no very good reason, a dear friend thinks of it as The Gobi Twin (though a title of some resonance after all).
** That review has, at the time of writing, a staggering 1,302 page-views on the blog, the other just 88… !
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Wednesday, 7 May 2014
Stockholm’s under-belly of punk
This is a review of We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 May
This is a review of We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013)
Maybe skip this section if you are less interested in punk attitude, more just in the film…
Perhaps Swedish punk, rather than imports from the States and the UK, were factually what a thirteen-year-old girl, whose elder brother had been into punk, would be listening to in 1982*. However, in the light of visiting three of the four Scandinavian countries (Finland excepted) around this time, it does seem unlikely – and knowing what, for example, German and Norwegian speakers have said about songs in their language not working, and so singers / listeners choosing English for their lyrics, more so.
Language and lyrics are a part of We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013), so it is a shame that the sub-titles do not always seem plausible – is the heckling, in Swedish, really as frank and harsh as the words Communist cunts render it ? (Likewise, unless there were a family tradition of the usage, would a girl her age saying ‘Screw dessert !’ to her mother, in a tussle over going out, seem unnoticed ? (Instead, the mother just replies to the effect that the estranged father, the girl and she will not ‘screw dessert’, but the girl will help her make it, and it will be nice.))
Maybe upping the stakes in translation was intended to make the teenagers’ rebellious nature seem stronger (since they are punks), but the apparent mismatch with context and with people’s reactions seems to suggest that it was an ill-judged strategy. The mother laying down the law, for example, takes no visible offence at the word ‘screw’, when she surely would, since she is dictating what her daughter will do, if it is inappropriate : one is left wishing that one knew in what register the exchange really took place, rather than in the version overlaid by ‘the translation’.
Do join here, if you skipped the section above
All this is by the by[e] for some, but the Swedishness of everything makes it impossible to tell how much, if anything, of the punk scene is real, rather than invented – a matter of intrigue to some**, but one which may not bother others at all… (Though, when a group of girls try to do a stage routine, in the school concert, to Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’, we are spot on in time for 1982.)
We Are the Best ! (Vi är bäst !) (2013) reminds a little of another recent film, The Rocket (2013), but also – inevitably – of The Commitments (1991) (let alone, in its wake, The Sapphires (2012))***. Yet, as commented, it distinguishes itself from these others by having a different heart, a different pull, from that, say, of Sitthiphon Disamoe in The Rocket, as Ahlo, a ‘fixer’ – although the overwhelming feeling is likewise that of people being brought together (where this film ends****).
The school concert, mentioned in passing above, is where Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) realize that they have overlooked, and underestimated, Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) – we have already seen the pair (under the catty pressure from fellow students at the lunch table to conform and look like them) refuse to normalize. At this stage, we may not realize that Bobo is female (jazzer Bobo Stenson is definitely a man), because the other two appear to be addressing Klara and Bobo as if one of them is male*****.
In a beautifully casual way, they have formed a band – essentially Let’s play, because this band [Iron Fist : possibly a reference to Sweden’s Soviet past ?] is crap, which is a fairly earthy punk attitude, if ever there were one… Hedvig, initially, fits in because maybe, Klara and Bobo conclude, they could use her – not knowing, as we do not, where her engagement will take them. That emergence of Hedvig, responding to them as they respond to her, and with God thrown in for good measure, is the joy of the film.
As to the dynamic, with Bobo sometimes more serious than her often frivolous mother’s friends (happily playing Spin the Bottle at a party), she can sound quite alarmingly sage when she makes a reasoned assertion. Yet one can easily believe that this tempering of and firing off each other is why Klara and she have been friends for so long, as complementing each other, rather than as opposites. (It is not for nothing that a larger girl is not unusual in being a companion to a slender one.)
Having said this, although the film is a good and thoughtful one, it does take a while to bed down, just at the time when one wants to start feeling part of it and perhaps has started to despair of being able to do so. Call that a tease, if you like, but it cannot be the full intention, since the film relies not on alienating us, but on engendering an interest in and affection for the efforts that Klara, Bobo and Hedvig are making.
So an audience needs to be patient with the film, allow it the odd uneven moment (even when it has established itself), and be taken along by Klara’s energy as a driving force for much of what happens, but also Hedvig’s quiet rebelliousness mixed with good sense, and Bobo’s envious uncertainty.
End-notes
* Maybe, though, with the Swedo-centric nature of the featured music, we have a reflection of cultural bias in Sweden to the home grown (one that certainly helped Fredrik Gertten with legal obstacles to releasing Bananas !*, whose story is told effectively in Big Boys Gone Bananas !* (2011)).
At any rate, the libertarian picture painted in this film, mainly of Stockholm, but also of outlying areas (with a debate about whether one is a mere suburb or a city, and whether the inhabitants of another are (sic) ‘retards’), extends to adult sexual promiscuity and drug usage, but firmly not to minors consuming alcohol – and, contrary to the translation’s hutzpah, the three girls do not seem brazenly defiant to their parent(s).
** Not least viewers of films such as those of Shaun Jefford and Don Letts – respectively, Beijing Punk (2010), and Punk : Attitude (2005).
*** However, it is only really the sense of striving that feels similar in the former, and the latter, strong though the music is, lacked any cohesion beyond the loose notion that the group of performers should (be encouraged to) play soul because they were ‘black’ – there is precious little, beside (and between) the set-pieces, to constitute a story, just a few links.
**** That said, the credits are artfully integrated into the closing moment, and you will not want / be able to miss them…
***** Yes, those subtitles (again) seem to interpose a little difficulty, because the person responsible for bringing them to the screen has not only paired them, but brought them up contrary to our expectations, so that they make us confuse who said what to whom…
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Tuesday, 6 May 2014
Charity begins - in Ireland ?
This is a mini-review of A Thousand Times Goodnight* (Tusen ganger god natt) (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 May
This is a mini-review of A Thousand Times Goodnight*(Tusen ganger god natt) (2013)
* Contains spoilers *
A division was called on the motion 'This Film is Not a Good Film'
Nos
* Lovely shots of the beach in Ireland
* Arty tricks with light at the beginning (which remind of K-PAX (2001)'s tag-line beam of light)
* The whole mystery of the opening scene, with the near-masonic pre-burial - though a mystery sought for in vain elsewhere...
* The girls are convincing sisters
* A cute kitten (a device as favoured by The Movie Evangelist (@MovieEvangelist))
* Some of the photos from the Kabul trip
* A role for Maria Doyle Kennedy (one of the people who rescued The Commitments (1991)), but blink and you miss it - sure some scenes cut there along the way !
Ayes
* Too many lights crystallized as out-of-focus dots
* Much wooden dialogue / delivery
* Flagging up that it is Afghanistan by the descending words on a building KABUL BUSINESS CENTRE (or some such)
* Accents from Binoche and Coster-Waldau that nearly wander as much as her character travels the globe
* Editing that cuts off several scenes rather abruptly, and not as if to move 'the action' along with a pace
* The closing resemblance to Jennifer Saunders, let alone the wild, bearded stereotype of marine biology
* She is patently not taking photographs with those Canon EOS 5Ds - at best, she shows how to snap a lens onto a body
* As if she would (but she is thoughtless...) only realize on the plane that her daughter might want to photograph Kenya whilst there, not giving her the chance to try out the camera
* As plausible as The Bride's rising from a coma (in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)) that she should recover both so quickly and with so little damage from that blast
* How a family could possibly have survived in tatters this long, given how old the daughters are
* The clunky Skype-type scenes with Jessica (whoever Jessica really is)
* We also need to believe that Jessica just commissions photographs of someone about to become a suicide-bomber, no questions asked - let alone the ridiculous belief that it matters very much that those particular people were killed or maimed, whatever the real target was
* That the said 5D and its lens are so robust that photographs can be taken after the blast - even more robust than Binoche, really
* Any notion that the camp in Kenya, declared safe, was going to be safe
* That the hut used as a shelter really afforded the photo-opportunities whose results we see
* The clear similarity to te main theme of In a Better World (Hævnen) (2010), which may not have the billing, but... could be a better film
QED The Ayes have it !
End-notes
* What Romeo and Juliet has to do with it is anyone's guess - director / co-writer Erik Poppe likes the sound of the words ?
It could easily have been A Thousand Times Goodnight (2013) to the film...
Sooner Friar Lawrence any time !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 6, 2014
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Friday, 2 May 2014
Dennis Russell Davies conducts Pärt, Glass and Adams - Cambridge, Sunday 27 April 2014
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 May
Whatever the three composers whose works were on the bill on the evening of Sunday 27 April at The Corn Exchange in Cambridge (@CambridgeCornEx) may have in common (Arvo Pärt, at least, rejects the description of ‘minimalism’ (let alone ‘holy minimalism’, which he considers nonsense)), there is probably more about the music that each one writes that makes him distinctive :
Below, is a review, which follows on from the introductory posting Minimalists - or Rhythmicists ?, and there is also an edited-down version of the first half of the review here...
When large orchestras, such as from Russia, have visited The Corn Exchange in the past, the stage has seemed crammed, and this time was no different, with what seemed a massive orchestra (at full strength, there are fifty string-players alone). A little of a pity that more had not turned out to witness this spectacle and hear their impressive ensemble, but still a creditable attendance of around six hundred heard two major works by Philip Glass and John Adams, and something more modest from Pärt – as maybe the man himself may be, although works such as Passio are on a larger scale.
Arvo Pärt – These Words…
According to Universal Edition, this piece for string orchestra and percussion was composed between 2007 and 2008, and it was a commission by the Léonie Sonnings Musikfond in Denmark. (The same source says that Pärt has been awarded the Léonie Sonning Prize, the most important musical distinction in that country.)
About the piece itself, the person who wrote that entry (Eric Marinitsch) goes on to say :
As its textual basis Pärt uses the human foibles mentioned in the old Church Slavonic prayer from the Canon to the Guardian Angel, while the title derives from associations between this material and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Whatever that may mean, it is to be noted that, just before the scene with the play performed by the theatrical troupe, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius says to him I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine. (Act 3, Scene 2). With the connivance of the leader of the players, Hamlet had interpolated the text with material designed to bring out guilty behaviour in Claudius, and then afterwards, when Hamlet confronts his mother Gertrude, she says O, speak to me no more! These words like daggers enter in my ears. No more, sweet Hamlet. (Act 3, Scene 4).
As for the work, it began with a chord full of suspense, and, after the sound of a triangle and a bass-note, the strings sometimes played piano, as a sequence was given first by what sounded like a xylophone* and then a different one by a bass-drum, before the opening material returned. Still with a feeling of suspense, a swaying sweep of the xylophone and another note from the triangle led to a statement of the same sequences, seemingly both hesitantly and thoughtfully, after the string writing had moved up and down in chords.
Yet although a triangle had been seen struck earlier, the bell-sound that next entered could have been a tubular-bell (it had more of the lasting, resonant note that characterizes a desk-bell), and preceded a progression that had an oriental feel to it, if not how it grew in intensity. Then a moment’s pause, cymbals and the bell and then a bell sounding a tone lower marked a new section, in which the interval given by the two bells recurred before a pizzicato motif with a rumbling drum-noise – a moment of haunting eeriness, which gave way to a bowed sound, and then the two bells again, the noise of the second of which held in the air.
After another pause, beats on the bass-drum led to further powerful writing for the strings, which again drifted away to a pianissimo. In what followed, heralded by triangle and xylophone, the latter did not so much interject, as juxtapose the feeling of its presence (in the spirit of Pierre Boulez) : the writing was moving as if we were tracing a very slow, but clear, life-sign, and the music conformed to its own measure. The string-sound swelled again to something fuller, and then diminished. Momentarily, for no more than a bar or two, the material took on a different rhythmic stress, and then ended, with the sound of the bell.
What is so important with a piece such as this is that a gesture of a bell or something like it should feel germane and organically have its own poise, otherwise one is just going through the motions of playing it. Davies fully knows that, and has worked with orchestras, this one included, in such a way that the atmosphere that Pärt appears to be seeking is wholly present, such that a large group of strings can bow together, and yet play piano, so that one has the density of the string-texture, but not the immediacy of the string-sound.
Those new to these composers may not have experienced this kind of sound-world before, but it was a good choice to open the concert, rather than, say, Pärt’s better-known Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, which would have been too intense to fill this role.
Philip Glass – Cello Concerto No. 2 (‘Naqoyqatsi’)
The fourth film on which Philip Glass worked with director Godfrey Reggio, Visitors (2013) has just been released in the UK.
Glass has also turned the score for the previous film, Naqoyqatsi (2002), in which cellist Yo-Yo Ma played prominently, into his seven-movement Cello Concerto No. 2, subtitled Naqoyqatsi. Dennis Russell Davies (the conductor in this concert) has recorded the work, conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and with the same soloist, Matt Haimovitz.
As with the Adams work in the second half, the movements have titles, but one wonders whether they may be more for the convenience of players, conductors, concert arrangers and the like to refer to the piece’s constituent parts, rather than just by bar-numbers, because, in both cases, there seems to be relatively little emphasis on elucidating the word(s) chosen. (In the case of Glass, of course, the cues for the film would have given rise to a need for titles, which may have (partly) survived : contrast this with how one refers to the works of artist Mira Schendel, when almost everything is sím titulo).)
1. Naqoyqatsi
The work opened with strings and ‘parping’ horns, before going down a level for the solo entry, which was marked by the intensity of drums and cymbals, and the weight of the cellos and double-basses. It was clear straightaway that the combination of instrument and cellist brought about a lovely sound, and the solo part developed to encompass a variety of moods, including, most obviously, yearning. The opening motif recurred, but now against material of shifting tonality, and, in a tutti section with contributions from tubular-bell, the modulations were thrilling. A short section for the cellos alone, before joined by the basses, led in what is almost a trademark of Glass’ music, where he does not literally inscribe a circle with complementary pairs of descending triplets, but feels as though he does (for want of a better term, circle-sounds). The movement came to an end as the cellos played at the bottom of their register, joined by basses and brass, and percussion.
2. Massman
In the opening of this movement, Glass used an alternating pattern, which modulated, before the cello gave us a short motif, and then a shorter motif, parallel to it, and the strings then played this material under the writing for cello, where Haimovitz had sharpened notes in his part, and with a tremolo effect. With the combination of interjective tutti and a climax in the percussion, the feeling that was conveyed was a little like a trudge, and, when Glass had quarter-tone writing high in the cello’s solo register, the percussion was given an oom-pah effect : we momentarily felt as if it were a further parody of one of Shokstakovich’s ‘ironic’ parodies. Another high-energy tutti section, rich in brass, brought in those ‘circle-sounds’ again, but with a slightly sickening feel to the sound of the soloist. Together with brass and strings, and a fleeting evocation of Viennese style, the movement ended, the cello at the bottom of its register.
3. New World
With some beats from the tam-tam, the soloist had a suggestive phrase that had the quality of a gypsy fiddler. For the first time seeming like a solo cello with an orchestra behind him, Haimowitz’s part ran the gamut of evoking tuning the instrument and the tradition of solo cello music of Bach, but also harmonics, slide-notes, and ghostly tremolos by the bridge of the instrument.
4. Intensive Times
Tutti passages, with a prominent place for wood-blocks and snare-drum, led to a haunting theme in the ‘peachy’ register of the brass being taken up, and to the accompaniment of struck cymbals. As the movement developed, there was a feeling of varying between driving inevitability and harmonic uncertainty, but which gave the impression of bedding down before the end.
5. Old World
Another movement that opened with solo cello in a high, aetherial stratum, a phrase then emerged with which the harp chimed with a descending interval, and the movement had a similar feeling to it to that marked New World, but exploiting a rising interval.
6. Point Blank
The opening theme had a bouncy, but sinister, aspect, with a slightly coarse rasp from the brass. Yet, as it developed, Glass seemed to pitch a descending minor third against the cello’s rising major third (?), and with a lurking snare-drum rhythm. Tutti sections followed, and, in turn, gave way to writing for Haimowitz that seemed to demand intense slurring and sawing. More ‘circle-sounds’ followed, but which appeared undercut by sneering descending writing for brass and strings. At a moment when the cello seemed to be reaching out, it felt constrained, as if required to limit itself to Semaphore against the brass and the percussion. The movement then ended, meditating on one note. [Around when, unfortunately, Haimowitz’s C-string (?) broke]
7. The Vivid Unknown (described by Davies as ‘the epilogue’ when the broken string was being replaced)
The movement, in its opening, had a very expansive theme for solo cello, which, whilst it generally strived upwards, had downwards motions. As cellos and basses contributed ‘circle-sounds’, the cello had a vivid outpouring, only brought back to earth by a pure sound from the violins. The bassoon, always there in the general texture, was given the special feature of a weighty contribution, which gave way to more solo material. The bassoons then contributed, with a rising interval (a third ?), and, on beats from the tam-tam – in conjunction, with the other percussion ¬– the concerto came to an end.
The filmic origins and nature of the concerto may have meant that the movements were necessarily of a more delineated kind than, say, in the work by John Adams (which followed after the interval), because several began with the soloist introducing thematic material, or in a different character from what preceded. In any case, it was clearly a score that Davies knew very well and was involved with, if possible, even more fully than with that of These words….
Haimowitch, whose hesitations about the idea of the work, when being invited to premiere it, could be read about in the programme, gave a highly engaged performance, and, as he says Glass had licensed, played the repeated matter in a manner as he saw fit, varying it according to context and his artistic judgement. (Haimowitch has recorded it under Davies, about which one can read here, and also listen to samples of tracks.)
All in all, with Pärt and Glass, a good first half, and one that introduced a post-modern approach to compositions that explore the dimensions of a small chosen realm in depth, but without much of the vividly atonal or even twelve-tone approaches that many composers of the last forty or fifty years have embraced :
This, if anything, sets these composers apart, but in a different way from that of other practitioners such as, from the world of choral music, Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen or John Rutter, whose works are characterized by being much more highly tonal, and less rhythmically emphatic, than those of Adams, Glass, and Pärt.
Harmonielehre original version ?
John Adams – Harmonielehre
Not uniquely so, but the title of the work is that of a text by composer Arnold Schoenberg (from 1911), which roughly means Lessons in Harmonc Writing, whom Adams describes as representing ‘something twisted and contorted’ (this from the composer of Gnarly Buttons). Contrary to Adams’ claim that, as a pupil of a pupil of Schoenberg’s, he had respect for and even felt intimidated by Schoenberg, what he writes – at length – in the programme suggests something different :
That he built an image of Schoenberg of his own, as a god or ‘high priest’, and that then Rejecting Schoenberg was like siding with the Philistines. Adams has built a Schoneberg-shaped altar, according to his notion of Schoenberg, and then refused to bow down before it, citing the aural ugliness of so much of the new work being written. Yet the real Schoenberg wrote, for example, the incredibly beautiful and moving Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31…
Anyway, Harmonielehre is in three movements, but the first has no title (as to titles, please see the section on Glass’ concerto, above). It seems that the second movement has some connection with what Russell Hoban, making a Spoonerism, called Blighter’s Rock, because the programme reports that a dramatic dream broke a fallow period and gave rise to the piece – the link with The Fisher King (made famous, if not by T. S. Eliot’s notes to ‘The Waste Land’, then at least by Terry Gilliam’s film of that name in 1991) being that of woundedness, impotence even in some versions of the Arthurian story, and sometimes with a second wounded figure, the father.
As the programme tells us, Quackie is just what Adams and his wife were calling their daughter Emily at the time of composition (in the mid-1980s), and Adams had another dream, this time with her floating through space with Meister Eckhardt, a German mystic and philosopher, born in 1260. (As discussed, whether such titles and anecdotes add anything to a performance may be a matter of personal experience.)
1.
The work has an energetic, rhythmic opening statement, with tubular-bells. As in These Words…, one could hear xylophone, and brass and woodwind instrument playing high up, with plucked second violins, and also glockenspiel. The movement was one of contrasts, with bowed and plucked strings, and then with some string-players playing very long, slow notes against others with jabbed notes of much smaller duration – an exciting, bright mix of sound, which reminded of Adams’ A Short Ride in a Fast Machine, before it gave way to a moment of quiescence, against which we had the bubbling sounds of the xylophone and the luminous ones of the glockenspiel, before struck cymbals brought about a pause.
A full string-sound from cellos, double-basses and brass, with the material then passed to violas and violins : a questioning tone and a high string-sound gave a resemblance to a heavenly choir, before the direction moved down to a pulsing, with arpeggios from the strings, and solid bass-notes. In both texture and depth of sound, there was still an other-worldly sense, an almost Brucknerian sound-mood (with hints of Mahler) in the string-writing, and with the harp evident. Momentarily, Adams gave us raindrops, in the form of high notes, falling on this Alpine mood-meadow, and then the brass of tuba, trombone and horn came through. This rich and luscious feeling, changed, as the pitch descended, to sustained string-notes – the initial impression was given by some ‘snarky’ bass-notes, but overall it was one of rhythmic plasticity, with contributions from triangle and tubular-bells.
Then the tense opening motif returned, and gained in intensity, with huge rhythms from tam-tam, and the bass-drum a-booming. The moment dissolved, and re-formed, heralding anxious string and brass sounds, with high notes in the latter. Finally, fast-paced snare-drumming and tubular-bells (coupled with harp) broke through the sonority, followed by hammer-blows on the bells that brought about a close.
2. The Anfortas Wound
With grave notes on the basses and cellos, before the woodwind joined in, with the cellos playing in unison, we found ourselves in an andante in an uncertain place, where one of the five busy percussionists could be heard bowing a crotale and then seen wafting it, so that it resonated in the air.
Tonality was now quite unclear, and harmonies were straying, with brass-notes adrift amongst the bell-sounds, as a crescendo slowly built and then, as in Bartók’s mirrored ascent in the Music for Percussion, Strings and Celesta, fell away again from its zenith. The harps were given prominent rhythmic patterns as the harmonic centre, in the strings, began rising, tension being added by pizzicato playing, and by the percussion, whose bass-drum led another crescendo. With a momentary slap of the strings and a screech, the tuba-players fitted their huge mutes, and the bowed crotale was sounded again.
The tubas were just as quickly unmuted, and with anticipatory sounds from the strings, let off blasts, which signalled bell-sounds, and low notes from cellos and basses. Several times before the end, the orchestra seemed to die away, but revived – a sort of inversion of classical works that seem to have ended with a loud full close, but for a few more chords to declare insistently the approach of the real ending.
3. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie
Once again, we were in that alpine meadow for a while, with high notes from the harps, and with ambient percussion. Through it, though, came a soaring feel amongst the twittering of piccolos, and there was again a remembrance of Fast Machine, but this time inversely, a sensation of (harmonically) slowly dropping.
Mounting tension, fed by a tap-tap beat on a block, and high violin notes performed in a slicing motion (as if for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)), was intensified by agitated writing in very short note-values, evoking Fast Machine further with chords from the brass as if receding on a railway, and then that sinister type of horn-tone that The Matrix (1999) uses for the sentinels. With pulsing drum and glockenspiel, the energetic impulse in the ensemble rose, fell away again, and climbed back up – to end on a brief open sonority.
End-notes
* One says ‘xylophone’, because the sound did not appear to resonate, but it may have been a marimba…
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 May
Dennis Russell Davis was brought back to the rostrum at @CambridgeCornEx at least three times after his programme of Pärt, Glass and Adams.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 27, 2014
Whatever the three composers whose works were on the bill on the evening of Sunday 27 April at The Corn Exchange in Cambridge (@CambridgeCornEx) may have in common (Arvo Pärt, at least, rejects the description of ‘minimalism’ (let alone ‘holy minimalism’, which he considers nonsense)), there is probably more about the music that each one writes that makes him distinctive :
Below, is a review, which follows on from the introductory posting Minimalists - or Rhythmicists ?, and there is also an edited-down version of the first half of the review here...
When large orchestras, such as from Russia, have visited The Corn Exchange in the past, the stage has seemed crammed, and this time was no different, with what seemed a massive orchestra (at full strength, there are fifty string-players alone). A little of a pity that more had not turned out to witness this spectacle and hear their impressive ensemble, but still a creditable attendance of around six hundred heard two major works by Philip Glass and John Adams, and something more modest from Pärt – as maybe the man himself may be, although works such as Passio are on a larger scale.
Arvo Pärt – These Words…
According to Universal Edition, this piece for string orchestra and percussion was composed between 2007 and 2008, and it was a commission by the Léonie Sonnings Musikfond in Denmark. (The same source says that Pärt has been awarded the Léonie Sonning Prize, the most important musical distinction in that country.)
About the piece itself, the person who wrote that entry (Eric Marinitsch) goes on to say :
As its textual basis Pärt uses the human foibles mentioned in the old Church Slavonic prayer from the Canon to the Guardian Angel, while the title derives from associations between this material and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Whatever that may mean, it is to be noted that, just before the scene with the play performed by the theatrical troupe, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius says to him I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine. (Act 3, Scene 2). With the connivance of the leader of the players, Hamlet had interpolated the text with material designed to bring out guilty behaviour in Claudius, and then afterwards, when Hamlet confronts his mother Gertrude, she says O, speak to me no more! These words like daggers enter in my ears. No more, sweet Hamlet. (Act 3, Scene 4).
As for the work, it began with a chord full of suspense, and, after the sound of a triangle and a bass-note, the strings sometimes played piano, as a sequence was given first by what sounded like a xylophone* and then a different one by a bass-drum, before the opening material returned. Still with a feeling of suspense, a swaying sweep of the xylophone and another note from the triangle led to a statement of the same sequences, seemingly both hesitantly and thoughtfully, after the string writing had moved up and down in chords.
Yet although a triangle had been seen struck earlier, the bell-sound that next entered could have been a tubular-bell (it had more of the lasting, resonant note that characterizes a desk-bell), and preceded a progression that had an oriental feel to it, if not how it grew in intensity. Then a moment’s pause, cymbals and the bell and then a bell sounding a tone lower marked a new section, in which the interval given by the two bells recurred before a pizzicato motif with a rumbling drum-noise – a moment of haunting eeriness, which gave way to a bowed sound, and then the two bells again, the noise of the second of which held in the air.
After another pause, beats on the bass-drum led to further powerful writing for the strings, which again drifted away to a pianissimo. In what followed, heralded by triangle and xylophone, the latter did not so much interject, as juxtapose the feeling of its presence (in the spirit of Pierre Boulez) : the writing was moving as if we were tracing a very slow, but clear, life-sign, and the music conformed to its own measure. The string-sound swelled again to something fuller, and then diminished. Momentarily, for no more than a bar or two, the material took on a different rhythmic stress, and then ended, with the sound of the bell.
What is so important with a piece such as this is that a gesture of a bell or something like it should feel germane and organically have its own poise, otherwise one is just going through the motions of playing it. Davies fully knows that, and has worked with orchestras, this one included, in such a way that the atmosphere that Pärt appears to be seeking is wholly present, such that a large group of strings can bow together, and yet play piano, so that one has the density of the string-texture, but not the immediacy of the string-sound.
Those new to these composers may not have experienced this kind of sound-world before, but it was a good choice to open the concert, rather than, say, Pärt’s better-known Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, which would have been too intense to fill this role.
Philip Glass – Cello Concerto No. 2 (‘Naqoyqatsi’)
The fourth film on which Philip Glass worked with director Godfrey Reggio, Visitors (2013) has just been released in the UK.
Glass has also turned the score for the previous film, Naqoyqatsi (2002), in which cellist Yo-Yo Ma played prominently, into his seven-movement Cello Concerto No. 2, subtitled Naqoyqatsi. Dennis Russell Davies (the conductor in this concert) has recorded the work, conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and with the same soloist, Matt Haimovitz.
As with the Adams work in the second half, the movements have titles, but one wonders whether they may be more for the convenience of players, conductors, concert arrangers and the like to refer to the piece’s constituent parts, rather than just by bar-numbers, because, in both cases, there seems to be relatively little emphasis on elucidating the word(s) chosen. (In the case of Glass, of course, the cues for the film would have given rise to a need for titles, which may have (partly) survived : contrast this with how one refers to the works of artist Mira Schendel, when almost everything is sím titulo).)
1. Naqoyqatsi
The work opened with strings and ‘parping’ horns, before going down a level for the solo entry, which was marked by the intensity of drums and cymbals, and the weight of the cellos and double-basses. It was clear straightaway that the combination of instrument and cellist brought about a lovely sound, and the solo part developed to encompass a variety of moods, including, most obviously, yearning. The opening motif recurred, but now against material of shifting tonality, and, in a tutti section with contributions from tubular-bell, the modulations were thrilling. A short section for the cellos alone, before joined by the basses, led in what is almost a trademark of Glass’ music, where he does not literally inscribe a circle with complementary pairs of descending triplets, but feels as though he does (for want of a better term, circle-sounds). The movement came to an end as the cellos played at the bottom of their register, joined by basses and brass, and percussion.
2. Massman
In the opening of this movement, Glass used an alternating pattern, which modulated, before the cello gave us a short motif, and then a shorter motif, parallel to it, and the strings then played this material under the writing for cello, where Haimovitz had sharpened notes in his part, and with a tremolo effect. With the combination of interjective tutti and a climax in the percussion, the feeling that was conveyed was a little like a trudge, and, when Glass had quarter-tone writing high in the cello’s solo register, the percussion was given an oom-pah effect : we momentarily felt as if it were a further parody of one of Shokstakovich’s ‘ironic’ parodies. Another high-energy tutti section, rich in brass, brought in those ‘circle-sounds’ again, but with a slightly sickening feel to the sound of the soloist. Together with brass and strings, and a fleeting evocation of Viennese style, the movement ended, the cello at the bottom of its register.
3. New World
With some beats from the tam-tam, the soloist had a suggestive phrase that had the quality of a gypsy fiddler. For the first time seeming like a solo cello with an orchestra behind him, Haimowitz’s part ran the gamut of evoking tuning the instrument and the tradition of solo cello music of Bach, but also harmonics, slide-notes, and ghostly tremolos by the bridge of the instrument.
4. Intensive Times
Tutti passages, with a prominent place for wood-blocks and snare-drum, led to a haunting theme in the ‘peachy’ register of the brass being taken up, and to the accompaniment of struck cymbals. As the movement developed, there was a feeling of varying between driving inevitability and harmonic uncertainty, but which gave the impression of bedding down before the end.
5. Old World
Another movement that opened with solo cello in a high, aetherial stratum, a phrase then emerged with which the harp chimed with a descending interval, and the movement had a similar feeling to it to that marked New World, but exploiting a rising interval.
6. Point Blank
The opening theme had a bouncy, but sinister, aspect, with a slightly coarse rasp from the brass. Yet, as it developed, Glass seemed to pitch a descending minor third against the cello’s rising major third (?), and with a lurking snare-drum rhythm. Tutti sections followed, and, in turn, gave way to writing for Haimowitz that seemed to demand intense slurring and sawing. More ‘circle-sounds’ followed, but which appeared undercut by sneering descending writing for brass and strings. At a moment when the cello seemed to be reaching out, it felt constrained, as if required to limit itself to Semaphore against the brass and the percussion. The movement then ended, meditating on one note. [Around when, unfortunately, Haimowitz’s C-string (?) broke]
7. The Vivid Unknown (described by Davies as ‘the epilogue’ when the broken string was being replaced)
The movement, in its opening, had a very expansive theme for solo cello, which, whilst it generally strived upwards, had downwards motions. As cellos and basses contributed ‘circle-sounds’, the cello had a vivid outpouring, only brought back to earth by a pure sound from the violins. The bassoon, always there in the general texture, was given the special feature of a weighty contribution, which gave way to more solo material. The bassoons then contributed, with a rising interval (a third ?), and, on beats from the tam-tam – in conjunction, with the other percussion ¬– the concerto came to an end.
The filmic origins and nature of the concerto may have meant that the movements were necessarily of a more delineated kind than, say, in the work by John Adams (which followed after the interval), because several began with the soloist introducing thematic material, or in a different character from what preceded. In any case, it was clearly a score that Davies knew very well and was involved with, if possible, even more fully than with that of These words….
Haimowitch, whose hesitations about the idea of the work, when being invited to premiere it, could be read about in the programme, gave a highly engaged performance, and, as he says Glass had licensed, played the repeated matter in a manner as he saw fit, varying it according to context and his artistic judgement. (Haimowitch has recorded it under Davies, about which one can read here, and also listen to samples of tracks.)
All in all, with Pärt and Glass, a good first half, and one that introduced a post-modern approach to compositions that explore the dimensions of a small chosen realm in depth, but without much of the vividly atonal or even twelve-tone approaches that many composers of the last forty or fifty years have embraced :
This, if anything, sets these composers apart, but in a different way from that of other practitioners such as, from the world of choral music, Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen or John Rutter, whose works are characterized by being much more highly tonal, and less rhythmically emphatic, than those of Adams, Glass, and Pärt.
Harmonielehre original version ?
John Adams – Harmonielehre
Not uniquely so, but the title of the work is that of a text by composer Arnold Schoenberg (from 1911), which roughly means Lessons in Harmonc Writing, whom Adams describes as representing ‘something twisted and contorted’ (this from the composer of Gnarly Buttons). Contrary to Adams’ claim that, as a pupil of a pupil of Schoenberg’s, he had respect for and even felt intimidated by Schoenberg, what he writes – at length – in the programme suggests something different :
That he built an image of Schoenberg of his own, as a god or ‘high priest’, and that then Rejecting Schoenberg was like siding with the Philistines. Adams has built a Schoneberg-shaped altar, according to his notion of Schoenberg, and then refused to bow down before it, citing the aural ugliness of so much of the new work being written. Yet the real Schoenberg wrote, for example, the incredibly beautiful and moving Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31…
Anyway, Harmonielehre is in three movements, but the first has no title (as to titles, please see the section on Glass’ concerto, above). It seems that the second movement has some connection with what Russell Hoban, making a Spoonerism, called Blighter’s Rock, because the programme reports that a dramatic dream broke a fallow period and gave rise to the piece – the link with The Fisher King (made famous, if not by T. S. Eliot’s notes to ‘The Waste Land’, then at least by Terry Gilliam’s film of that name in 1991) being that of woundedness, impotence even in some versions of the Arthurian story, and sometimes with a second wounded figure, the father.
As the programme tells us, Quackie is just what Adams and his wife were calling their daughter Emily at the time of composition (in the mid-1980s), and Adams had another dream, this time with her floating through space with Meister Eckhardt, a German mystic and philosopher, born in 1260. (As discussed, whether such titles and anecdotes add anything to a performance may be a matter of personal experience.)
1.
The work has an energetic, rhythmic opening statement, with tubular-bells. As in These Words…, one could hear xylophone, and brass and woodwind instrument playing high up, with plucked second violins, and also glockenspiel. The movement was one of contrasts, with bowed and plucked strings, and then with some string-players playing very long, slow notes against others with jabbed notes of much smaller duration – an exciting, bright mix of sound, which reminded of Adams’ A Short Ride in a Fast Machine, before it gave way to a moment of quiescence, against which we had the bubbling sounds of the xylophone and the luminous ones of the glockenspiel, before struck cymbals brought about a pause.
A full string-sound from cellos, double-basses and brass, with the material then passed to violas and violins : a questioning tone and a high string-sound gave a resemblance to a heavenly choir, before the direction moved down to a pulsing, with arpeggios from the strings, and solid bass-notes. In both texture and depth of sound, there was still an other-worldly sense, an almost Brucknerian sound-mood (with hints of Mahler) in the string-writing, and with the harp evident. Momentarily, Adams gave us raindrops, in the form of high notes, falling on this Alpine mood-meadow, and then the brass of tuba, trombone and horn came through. This rich and luscious feeling, changed, as the pitch descended, to sustained string-notes – the initial impression was given by some ‘snarky’ bass-notes, but overall it was one of rhythmic plasticity, with contributions from triangle and tubular-bells.
Then the tense opening motif returned, and gained in intensity, with huge rhythms from tam-tam, and the bass-drum a-booming. The moment dissolved, and re-formed, heralding anxious string and brass sounds, with high notes in the latter. Finally, fast-paced snare-drumming and tubular-bells (coupled with harp) broke through the sonority, followed by hammer-blows on the bells that brought about a close.
2. The Anfortas Wound
With grave notes on the basses and cellos, before the woodwind joined in, with the cellos playing in unison, we found ourselves in an andante in an uncertain place, where one of the five busy percussionists could be heard bowing a crotale and then seen wafting it, so that it resonated in the air.
Tonality was now quite unclear, and harmonies were straying, with brass-notes adrift amongst the bell-sounds, as a crescendo slowly built and then, as in Bartók’s mirrored ascent in the Music for Percussion, Strings and Celesta, fell away again from its zenith. The harps were given prominent rhythmic patterns as the harmonic centre, in the strings, began rising, tension being added by pizzicato playing, and by the percussion, whose bass-drum led another crescendo. With a momentary slap of the strings and a screech, the tuba-players fitted their huge mutes, and the bowed crotale was sounded again.
The tubas were just as quickly unmuted, and with anticipatory sounds from the strings, let off blasts, which signalled bell-sounds, and low notes from cellos and basses. Several times before the end, the orchestra seemed to die away, but revived – a sort of inversion of classical works that seem to have ended with a loud full close, but for a few more chords to declare insistently the approach of the real ending.
3. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie
Once again, we were in that alpine meadow for a while, with high notes from the harps, and with ambient percussion. Through it, though, came a soaring feel amongst the twittering of piccolos, and there was again a remembrance of Fast Machine, but this time inversely, a sensation of (harmonically) slowly dropping.
Mounting tension, fed by a tap-tap beat on a block, and high violin notes performed in a slicing motion (as if for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)), was intensified by agitated writing in very short note-values, evoking Fast Machine further with chords from the brass as if receding on a railway, and then that sinister type of horn-tone that The Matrix (1999) uses for the sentinels. With pulsing drum and glockenspiel, the energetic impulse in the ensemble rose, fell away again, and climbed back up – to end on a brief open sonority.
End-notes
* One says ‘xylophone’, because the sound did not appear to resonate, but it may have been a marimba…
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Wednesday, 30 April 2014
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More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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30 April
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30 April
Much of a crowd, @tobytram @CamPicturehouse ? @THEAGENTAPSLEY was put off by the sound of it being Max Ernst rehashed (plus Glen Baxter)...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 30, 2014
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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