Some thoughts on being reacquainted with Suspicion (1941)

Some thoughts on being reacquainted with Suspicion (1941)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

1 January (Tweets added to the third end-note, 25 August)

Some thoughts on being reacquainted with Suspicion (1941)

However, as hinted at in @FaberBooks' Hitchock on Hitchcock [part of their series on film directors : https://t.co/AsBeKcvD6N], and - to whom thanks - explicated by hitchcockmaster, this was *not* the original conception : https://t.co/tJKyMF0fRV pic.twitter.com/AybVsHBNqX

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 9, 2018

Ingrid Bergman (Dr. Constance Petersen) and Gregory Peck (John Ballantyne), then joined by Michael Chekhov (Dr. Michael Brülov) for more dream-work, in Spellbound (1945)¹

Although it results that, in Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll - briefly in Suspicion, too), 'the inmates have taken over the asylum', Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) almost unwaveringly believes in John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck), despite Dr. Michael Brulow (Michael Chekhov). https://t.co/Di1EmfGjBV

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 1, 2018

Leo G. Carroll (Dr. Murchison) - joined by Ingrid Bergman (Dr. Constance Petersen) here in a link to the near-dénouement

The surges in Franz Waxman's score² for Suspicion (1941) go from emotional peaks, as when Lina overhears herself effectively described (by her mother, within) as dull and so impulsively kisses Johnnie, to ones - reverting to form ? - of terror, at what he might have done, or be³.

We scarcely see the exterior design of Lina and Johnnie's matrimonial property, when they return from honeymoon⁴, but we soon become acquainted with the fact that what we must assume is some sort of large cupola, at all sorts of times of day, has the shadow of its struts cast onto the living area and stairs.

Just as those surges, as part of Hitchcock's vision, help overwhelm with terror what is reasonable in us, too, likewise, more and more – without our doing much more than taking it for granted – does it turn from a benign compass to an imperious clock to an alarming web... ? :

Maybe, in this famous scene, we credit it - if we think of its plausible origins at all - as cast by the full moon, but, then, with all that it traditionally implies about sanity (Johnnie's ? Lina's ?)...

End-notes :

¹ Seemingly titled, in Italy, io ti salverò ('I will save you') :

² Waxman, under the category 'Music (Music score for a dramatic picture)', was nominated for an Academy Award (in 1942).

³ In 'Murder - With English on it' [originally published in The New York Times Magazine (3 March 1957 ; 17, 42)], Hitchcock chooses to say In Suspicion, the story of a wife who suspects her husband of being a homicidal maniac, I had to make [my emphasis] the suspicion ultimately [my emphasis] a figment of her imagination. The consensus was [my emphasis] that audiences would not want to be told in the last few frames of film that as popular a personality as Cary Grant was a murderer, doomed to exposure. (The article is collected as part of Faber & Faber's film series on directors, in Hitchcock on Hitchcock (London, 1995), pp. 133-137.)

However, although the article does not cite this reference, hitchcockmaster finds ample evidence that, after principal shooting, Hitchcock found that the film had been cut down to 55 minutes, out of the fear mentioned (which arose from preview screenings at RKO, and after changes of personnel made by the studio, that lost Hitchcock the support of the two men most closely involved with the film). The article also shows that few people liked the ending of the film, as duly completed in post-production and released.

Yet naming no source for making this assertion about the film, versus the material in such web-sites as :https://t.co/tJKyMF0fRVhttps://t.co/C5CkMlrDQh

* By Jenny Curtis. Michael Friedman Publishing Group, Inc. (MetroBooks), New York, 1998. pic.twitter.com/Vb6CSRZaYs

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 25, 2018

As faces aren't symmetrical*, it brings out a Craigian quality to Cary Grant (even in the already not very likeable guise of Johnnie Aysgarth).

* We may also forget that we most often see ourselves in reflected form ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 23, 2021

In full, the caption in Cary Grant : A Life in Pictures reads :

Grant accepted the role of John Aynsgar on the condition that the part be softened from that of a murderer to one who only appears to be a murderer. The ambiguous nature of Aynsgar presented a unique challenge to Grant. He was required to appear both guilty and innocent at all times. The air of mystery he'd brought to earlier roles served him well in Suspicion. He was both playful and menacing, often within the same scene, and made these mood shifts so smoothly that no one really noticed he was doing some of his best work. Based on the novel Before the Fact, the film's name was changed to Suspicion so that the audience wouldn't know whether or not Grant's character was a killer until the last scene. Hitchcock wrote and filmed two separate endings to the film, hoping to do it his way with Aynsgar as his killer and his wife the willing victim. But early preview audiences preferred the soft ending, in which Joan Fontaine's character is so paranoid that she only imagines her husband is trying to kill her.


⁴ Our best chance to see this hallway, and how especially it is lit from above, comes from at 28 : 43 (in the colour version), whereas, when Lina comes in from riding and meets ‘Beaky’ (Nigel Bruce) for the first time (at 38 : 30), the property appears to have a perfectly flat façade (which gives little away what is supposed to be behind it).

One reviewer (quoted by hitchcockmaster³) somewhat disapproved of the use of the image cast by the putative cupola, calling it, in The Times, an effective, if a little crude, use of shadow (4 December 1941).

Post-script : Since the above was written, this still has been found, which appears to show the exterior (from an angle) :

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Two Tweets about Oklahoma ! (1955)

This started with two Tweets about Oklahoma ! (1955)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

29 December

This started with two Tweets about Oklahoma ! (1955)

After the Cinemascope version of Oklahoma ! (1955) [from the two-disc collector's edition, but without using the sing-along sub-titles], finding that James Dean (and Paul Newman) tried out for the part of Curly (Gordon MacRae), and that - in 1906 - Oklahoma was but a Territory. pic.twitter.com/Kv9jElDkpt

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 29, 2017

I thought I may pass out from boredom while watching this @BFI for the first time last weekend... apart from Gloria Grahame’s appearances. No interval.

— michelle (@best2vilmabanky) December 30, 2017

Very wise - these films were not made with the intention of seeing them through without a break !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 30, 2017

https://t.co/TKD0TFcMeE

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 30, 2017

A crude stereotype of opera-goers by custom is if not being jolted awake by an act's final cadence, then living for the well-known arias :

Can we any more imagine now how an audience reacted to a film released in 1955 (with a seemingly obligatory scene of ladies in lingerie ) ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 30, 2017

To an extent, I also made my own entertainment with the film, spotting what had been shot on a sound-stage, and also following the movement of the camera and how the shots were put together...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 30, 2017

The dream-sequence in Oklahoma ! (1955) - sure some inspiration to Woody Allen with Deconstructing Harry (1997), and Larry (Billy Crystal), presiding over the infernal regions... pic.twitter.com/ae2HCg0okq

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 2, 2018

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Don't forget you have a board meeting at the museum at three¹

A reaction to Nocturnal Animals (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

St Stephen's Day

A reaction to Nocturnal Animals (2016)

From Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst downwards (including Aaron Curry (courtesy of LA’s David Kordansky gallery), Beatrice Caracciolo (courtesy of Paula Cooper gallery, NY), and Robert Polidori (courtesy of Edwynn Houk gallery in NYC)), the closing titles of course give credit for the original artwork that Tom Ford chooses to show us, but not for the provocative images with which the film starts² (which, maybe, should not provoke ?). However, they might embody a sentiment to which Ford seems to have attached his name :

Unless the obtuse ontological point that Susan Morrow exists because Amy Adams plays her (and Jake Gyllenhaal, as her ex-husband (Edward Sheffield) and his novel's main character (Tony Hastings)) - the art in her show has to be less real than that of Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 10, 2018

Since they are clearly pastiche, but Ford clearly also wanted them in Nocturnal Animals, the thing that asking us to credit them as works of art does is to deny Susan Morrow (pictured above) plausibility from the start even in the capacity of gallerist¹, and to undermine whatever is meaningful in including views of actual artworks in the film : after the opening, it might as well all be invented, for all that it matters.

Likewise, this canvas was made for the film by Ford and his art department

When, around three-fifths of the way through Mulholland, David Lynch gives us the sub-text to the glossy surface that preceded it, he is not 'playing with our expectations' (as Belle toujours (2006) and this film both desire to do), but exercising the proper craft of film-making.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2017

Here, the film within a film would possibly be of no real interest³, were it not for being contained in this film - which makes it of marginally more interest for being, through her imaginings of a novel in proof form, some insight into [the character of] Susan Morrow (Amy Adams).

Except that she has no real character⁴, except as a repository for Proustian recollection that leads to much-delayed guilt (and regret ?) : she is a void whom we see Edward Sheffield, her former husband, filling up (with text that we do not, however, directly experience), and from whom reactions are elicited.

(Abel Korzeniowski's principal theme for the film is of quality, and has all the fineness of one of Bernard Herrmann's most lusciously orchestrated themes, but - as if to emphasize the conceptual sterility of Morrow's interior world ? - two important moments, at the conclusion of the film within a film, are accompanied, respectively, by the unsubtlety of an absurdly-held tremolo, and the mimicry of a pulse.)

To be sure of the true mark of Symbolism, though, director Tom Ford gives us this curious detail on the night when the typescript is delivered : On seeing Morrow driving up, first, to the automatic gate that lets her car into her property - and as if it has never happened before - the head-lights reflect on the gate, blinding her, and she has to shield her eyes !

It is therefore not surprising that it appears, from ‘Communicating through Fiction : Tom Ford on Nocturnal Animals’⁵, that what appealed to the writer / director in Tony and Susan, Austin Wright’s original novel, was the idea of this device of communicating to someone through a work of fiction. Through a written work of fiction. And thereby communicating something that they had not been able to really communicate clearly.

That novel is, in case we miss it, Tony and Susan, i.e. the character in the book, Nocturnal Animals, and the person who compellingly reads that book (by the man from whom she divorced nineteen years ago).

Anne Brontë might have written in a way that endangered the structure of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, with around one hundred and fifty pages that we are to conceive of as read overnight. Even so, though Brontë risks breaking not so much the flow of the book as our attention by such a prolonged leap back in time, the fine impulse on her part here is to have us read – just at the same time when Gilbert Markham reads it – what informs his (and so our) understanding of where Helen Graham has come from, and so of who she is.

Whereas, with Susan Morrow and what her rememberings and her intense engagement with her ex-husband's fiction tell us, one is more reminded of James Joyce, dismissed by Virginia Woolf for Ulysses as a bell-boy at Claridge’s, scratching his pimples⁶. [Woolf also wrote, of Ulysses, Never did any book so bore me.] As with Belle toujours (2006), the entire conceit here is to have the film consume itself, as if a dragon ate its own tail : it begins, after an opening at a gallery, with the delivery of the typescript, and ends - with precious little in between - just after Morrow has finished a weekend of reading it.

Certainly, whatever proponents Nocturnal Animals has, one could not rightly claim of it (as Time Out did of something no less unworthy⁷) that the film offers a deceptive, philosophical and cautionary meditation, not only on age, appetite, pleasure, betrayal, mendacity, revenge and disillusionment but also in idle curiosity. (Largely, that seems more fitting to describe the films evoked by its empty establishing shots at a distance, Mulholland Drive (2001) and Sunset Blvd. (1950).)


Even if some reviewers / explicators have not imputed this motive [for example, Vulture and The Cinemaholic], is Nocturnal Animals essentially - as Belle toujours and Sleeping Beauty (2011) before it - no more than a wind-up, of the form that (purportedly) engages us with it, and then does something different ?

In the former (the alleged sequel to Belle de jour (1967), although it is hardly like Buñuel), Henri and Severine at the dinner-table is bad enough, but there are a thousand reasons why what is shown at the end of this film (even with a suggestion of a tear ?) could, in its own terms, just signify something other than what it seems to imply. (The writers quoted, who only consider the film in isolation, adopt the familiar tactic of making a virtue of an offence.)

For, as Vivian Mercier says⁸ about the conclusion of Samuel Beckettt's novel Malone Dies (Malone meurt), even the apparent ending is 'not conclusive' because, as happened before, Malone may have dropped his pencil.

And, perhaps, Beckettt seems ever so slightly more relevant to Morrow, because of that tear, and his succeeding novel The Unnamable (L'Innommable), as well as 'Rough for Radio I' (collected by Faber & Faber in Ends and Odds : Plays and Sketches) ?

Animator : Particularly with that tear so hard behind. It is not the first, agreed. But in such a context !

End-notes :

¹ Though the line neatly enough avoids establishing later where we are and why, devices such as it afford Susan the status of being a person of import, but who is just seen wandering around, looking at things, and barely in the film, in real time, except to put herself into the film within a film that she creates.

Maybe, in this professional life, Adams is precisely not meant to possess any conviction, but, whether as Jeanne, a gallerist married to Germain (Fabrice Luchini) in François Ozon’s In the House (Dans la maison) (2012), or the madly art-collecting Iona Aylesbury of Martha Fiennes’ Chromophobia (2005), KST has it in spades.

² We might have suspected that the video projection and sculptures on plinths were designed and created by the film’s art department and Tom Ford - as is confirmed to us Emerson Rosenthal in conversation with Shane Valentino, the film’s production designer, for VICE.

³ There seem to be undigested elements that are familiar from Funny Games (1997) or Wind River (2017).

⁴ Trivially, of course, she is no more real than the characters of Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon), whom we believe that we see her embodying.

⁵ Zacharias, Ramona (10 January 2017). CreativeScreenwriting.com.

⁶ Also quoted in the form The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

⁷ Written of Belle toujours [20–26 November 2008].

⁸ Beckettt / Beckettt (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979). Mercier writes that it is frequently assumed that death comes to Malone when his hand ceases to write on the last page (p. 175) - quoted in Anthony Davis' No Symbols Where None Intended (Belston Night Works, Bristol, 2nd edn, 1998).


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Cinema-going in 2017, an illustrated round-up

#UCFF's most-esteemed films, as seen during 2017

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

Christmas Eve

#UCFF's most-esteemed films, as seen during 2017 :
or, available here in a plain-text version

Dedicated to Neil White of everyfilm.co.uk (as pictured)

Just flicked through the 520 films on https://t.co/xFknMehWT9 that @everyfilmneil has watched and posted reviews for so far this year :

A way of reminding of the dozen or so that #UCFF valued (from a much smaller sample), to compile in a Christmas posting.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 24, 2017

In alphabetical order (with date of viewing), and - unless stated otherwise - seen at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse) :


* A Quiet Passion (2016) ~ 12 March

Bright Star (2009) and @aquietpassion link : Jane Campion and Terence Davies, respectively, want us to hear verse unheeded in the poets' day pic.twitter.com/PbPBKDwkGd

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 13, 2017

* Baby Driver (2017) ~ 3 July

No doubt that Wright's poking fun of - outright mocking ? - Drive (2011) and Gosling / Mulligan with the pseudo-psychology and 'Wanting out'

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 5, 2017

* Becoming Cary Grant (2017) ~ 29 July [seen at The Watershed* / @wshed]

Loved listening to Mark Kidel intro +Q&A his affectionate Becoming Cary Grant: "He took acid 100 times, which is 99 times more than I did."

— Rose (@rozebaker) July 30, 2017

* Cameraperson (2016) ~ 8 March

Thanks, @CamPicturehouse @PicDOCS, for Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson (2016) :

Well worth waiting, since not getting in at @sheffdocfest !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 8, 2017

* Citizen Jane : Battle for the City (2016) ~ 8 May

The @janejacobsdoc : Battle for the City (2016) is an encouragement to us, when we do not think that we can make a difference to our lives ! pic.twitter.com/YEG64wrfsw

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 8, 2017

* Elle (2016) ~ 10 March

'Where Eastern Boys (2013) evokes merging the power-play of the everyday world with that of gaming and gamers, Elle (2016) actually does it' pic.twitter.com/fWEATuFRZf

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 12, 2017

* Happy End (2017) ~ 1 December

Sally Potter's The Party (2017) and Haneke's @HappyEndFilm (2017) are arguably both ensemble films, but there the similarity stops : #HappyEnd's Anne (Isabelle Huppert), for example, has the space of not being in every scene, unlike Tom (Cillian Murphy), in the loo, or at the bin pic.twitter.com/Btxu7UoFu4

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 2, 2017

* Jackie (2016) ~ 22 February

Expectations of Grace of Monaco (2014) put right by @everyfilmneil's encouraging review, this was screen-filling intensity and immersion.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 22, 2017

* Missing (Sarajin Yeoja) (2016) ~ 24 April

Hyo-jin Kong and Ji-won Uhm [Missing (2016)] do much more than give Tae-ri Kim and Min-hee Kim a run for their money [The Handmaiden (2016)] pic.twitter.com/xT3ge6KCVr

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 25, 2017

* Prevenge (2016) ~ 31 March [seen at Saffron Screen / @Saffronscreen]

As told by @prevengemovie's @MissJoHartley [@Saffronscreen's guest], @alicelowe scripted @prevengemovie in a fortnight, shot it in 11 days.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 1, 2017

* Silence (2016)

We can be proud to have film-makers with the vision and honesty of Martin Scorsese with Silence (2016), initially in first half C17 Japan.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 20, 2017

Very easily done with Scorsese, but thinking that #silencemovie has a colonial theme or needs an interest in missionaries misses the point ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 24, 2017

* Souvenir (2016) ~ 28 August [seen at Saffron Screen]

Very pleased, once more, for the assurance of trusting @SaffronScreen 'blind' for Isabelle Huppert in Souvenir (2016) - rivalling KST now !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 28, 2017

* The Villainess (Ak-Nyeo) (2017) ~ 11 September

Here's a first response, to a film that asks 'Who are we ?', and asserts (twice ?) that 'Nothing we say here will change anything'... pic.twitter.com/H6hXgw3RPr

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 11, 2017

So, March turns out to have been a good time to be at the cinema (not just because it is the time of year for bait for BAFTA, or The Academy Awards)...



Honourable mentions :


* Aquarius (2016) ~ 23 November

NB Should be 'makes / wants to *keep* an underclass' !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 24, 2017

* Chi-Raq (2015) ~ 5 February [seen at Saffron Screen]

At @Saffronscreen, Chi-Raq (2015) from Spike Lee was sometimes a little patchy, but had a stonking speech from John Cusack in St. Sabina's !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 5, 2017

* Dispossession : The Great Social Housing Swindle (2017)

50,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished to make way for about 130 illegal Israeli settlements #50yearstoomany https://t.co/1ZZ0kQ2pIY

— Amnesty UK (@AmnestyUK) September 27, 2017

And we must spot parallels ? :

In films such as @halfwaydocu and @velvetjoyltd's Dispossession), we see people in the UK losing their homes https://t.co/bcoMfCK9OX

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 27, 2017

* Freesia (2017) ~ 26 September

By chance at @CamPicturehouse, ended up (through @ourscreenuk) doing a double-bill : @WindRiverMovie, then Conor Ibrahiem's Freesia (2017). pic.twitter.com/QWQFxr9mYp

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 26, 2017

* Half Way (2015)

Some impressive coverage of @halfwaydocu in, respectively, @TimeOutLondon and @guardian :https://t.co/UxjIRhBJIXhttps://t.co/AFB7pVt3oi

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 12, 2017

* Loving Vincent (2017) ~ 10 November [seen at The Watershed]

Thanks, @wshed, for Following, and for @LovingVincent (2017) this afternoon !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 10, 2017

* On the Road (2016) ~ 9 October

Arguably, On the Road (2016) is closer to Roger Graef and James Rogan's Monty Python : The Meaning of Live (2014), but at a whole-gig level.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 9, 2017

* The Seasons in Quincy : Four Portraits of John Berger (2016) ~ 18 July

Tilda Swinton shares her friendship with Berger / he his with her : they know they're filmed, but no pretension :https://t.co/1db2h5FC9W

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 19, 2017

* The Journey (2016) ~ 16 July [seen at Saffron Screen]

John Hurt RIP and Timothy Spall being in The Journey (2016), and a Good-Friday-agreement setting, was enough to get #UCFF to @Saffronscreen

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 18, 2017

End-notes :

* In conjunction with Cary Grant comes Home for the Weekend Festival (@carycomeshome).


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Cinema-going in 2017, a round-up

#UCFF's most-esteemed films, as seen during 2017

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

Christmas Eve

#UCFF's most-esteemed films, as seen during 2017 :
or, available here in a jazzed-up version

Just on merit, https://t.co/oyIJF62aS2, #UCFF's list of much-esteemed films seen in 2017 includes @aquietpassion @Cameraperson16 @janejacobsdoc @ElleMovieUK @jackiefilm Missing 미씽:사라진 여자 (Sarajin Yeoja) (2016) @prevengemovie @YvesVerbraeken's Souvenir (2016) The Villainess pic.twitter.com/exHaSQtiQ2

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 26, 2017

Dedicated to Neil White of everyfilm.co.uk (as pictured)

Just flicked through the 520 films on https://t.co/xFknMehWT9 that @everyfilmneil has watched and posted reviews for so far this year :

A way of reminding of the dozen or so that #UCFF valued (from a much smaller sample), to compile in a Christmas posting.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 24, 2017

In alphabetical order (with date of viewing), and - unless stated otherwise - seen at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse) :

* A Quiet Passion (2016) ~ 12 March

* Baby Driver (2017) ~ 3 July

* Becoming Cary Grant (2017) ~ 29 July [seen at The Watershed* / @wshed]

* Cameraperson (2016) ~ 8 March

* Citizen Jane : Battle for the City (2016) ~ 8 May

* Elle (2016) ~ 10 March

* Happy End (2017) ~ 1 December

* Jackie (2016) ~ 22 February

* Missing (Sarajin Yeoja) (2016) ~ 24 April

* Prevenge (2016) ~ 31 March [seen at Saffron Screen / @Saffronscreen]

* Silence (2016)

* Souvenir (2016) ~ 28 August [seen at Saffron Screen]

* The Villainess (Ak-Nyeo) (2017) ~ 11 September


So, March turns out to have been a good time to be at the cinema...



Honourable mentions :

* Aquarius (2016) ~ 23 November

* Chi-Raq (2015) ~ 5 February [seen at Saffron Screen]

* Dispossession : The Great Social Housing Swindle (2017)

* Freesia (2017) ~ 26 September

* Half Way (2015)

* Loving Vincent (2017) ~ 10 November [seen at The Watershed]

* On the Road (2016) ~ 9 October

* The Seasons in Quincy : Four Portraits of John Berger (2016) ~ 18 July

* The Journey (2016) ~ 16 July [seen at Saffron Screen]


End-notes :

* In conjunction with Cary Grant comes Home for the Weekend Festival (@carycomeshome).


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

When Bergman rejoices in opera's absurdities...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

18 December

The creatures in Bergman’s Magic Flute were the most delightful things I’ve seen in a long time. What a treat. #bfi 🐻 🐇 🦇 #needwalrusemoji

— Snowman Barraclough 🎄☃️ (@EssBarraclough) December 21, 2017

As one would expect from Bergman, no suggestiveness, allure, desire or sex in this moment, where a length of wood (or flute) floats freely from the open hands of two men as three eager young women with black cloaks and pronounced décolletage look on in pleasure.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 19, 2017

"Ingmar Bergman does Mozart with gusto."

As The Magic Flute serenades BFI Southbank, read @SightSoundmag's archival review https://t.co/nAHHND7oPg pic.twitter.com/NRGMFgBszk

— BFI (@BFI) March 17, 2018

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)