Tirza in the afternoon?

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21 September

I'm thinking that it would be good to revisit this film, before saying anything much about it, which means being around for 1.00 - we shall just have to see whether that works...

The reason for doing so is that, now that I know where it goes, I'd like to feel the psychological realities afresh: at the moment, I still think of Engelby, the novel by Sebastian Faulks, and cannot tell whether I am convinced by the unfolding, or feel that it is a misunderstood peg on which the narration hangs. (It's also based on a novel, so I'm necessarily judging what has been done with that text.)


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Poems and films

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21 September

No real time to respond now to Neil Brand on Bernard Herrmann (Knowing the Score), Drive, and Red State, but a very enjoyable day with my friend Chris, who made it for a day at the Festival.

In honour of the last of these items, and referring to a passing comment that I made to Jane Monson (the Festival's writer in residence) that the Picturehouse's weekly programme could give rise to a poetic comment or appreciation (with, of course, the offer of a lovely prize):


There was a director called Smith
Whose Dogma became quite a myth
When they said 'Where's Red State?'
He become so irate
That gunfire erupted forthwith

Frustration with the Festival

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20 September

Anyone who read about the omelette will urge caution and restraint, but I no longer know whom to ask to solve the problem of reviews that are often being given the time to get written very shortly after the screening still not being on the Festival web-site (last night's of Philipp even gets a tweak, because, for all that 'fuck' is said on the screen, it's apparently necessary to write it as 'f-ck', though I don't remember Faber & Faber, Larkin's publisher, trying that one!).

There are three from as far back as Friday, Tabloid from last night, and two others between those points, and not even Tony Jones can tell me any more than that the Festival is frustrated with the IT system (or, should I say, 'system', as I prefer in such situations).

Or is it that I dared not to be impressed by the cinema of Jos Stelling, and said so in two reviews on Friday night? Another review, submitted after mine, is there for everyone to see, and praises The Illusionist (I think that it was praise, but, when one uses words such as 'oneiric' casually, others can not be quite sure - probably a reason for doing it... - what your take is). OK, it's like Fellini (or even 'Fellinian'), but so what?

Embarrassingly, Jos and I exchanged a few words, my probably feeling guilty that I'd ditched one of his the day before and promptly rebooked not to see the question-and-answer session that he had just done. I knew that it was Jos, because the photo in the brochure was accurate and recent, and for some reason - out of the blue - he asked if I was German: I had done nothing German, unless working on a review at a neighbouring table in the bar is German.

I said that I wasn't, but that I speak German: Ich spreche Deutsch. He remarked, as is true because of the similarities, that I would therefore know some Dutch. It really puzzled him that I could speak German (though not so much as me why we were talking about being or speaking German at all), so I said that I had learnt it: Habe Deutsch studiert. That, too, puzzled him, and he kept asking why I had done so and whether I had done so 'freely', but with a Dutch pronunciation, and the word may not actually mean what 'freilich' does in German.

Oh, I did try to explain, but I don't think that he got it, and it remained some sort of mystery, as if studying German 'A' Level were unheard of. Somehow - and I can't remember what he said or asked - I ended up saying that I knew who he was. Slight puzzlement at that, but dispelled by saying that I had recognized him from his photograph. That settled things, and he went back to talking to people on his table. Pretty oneiric, pretty Fellinian!

A visitor

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20 September

What is likely to be a more leisurely day at the Festival, as a friend who joined in for a day last year is coming again, and we do not meet until 2.00 - still, sadly, not leaving enough time just now to write anything about Tirza or to try to catch up with comments on White White World.

We have tickets for Neil Brand (if he is quite recovered from playing so energetically at Trinity last night, but I'm sure that he does this sort of thing all the time) and his talk / presentation at 3.30 about the film-music of Bernard Herrmann, then a break for some food before Drive at 8.15, and Red State at 11.00...

Bob Dylan is 70 (1)

This is a Festival review of Dont Look Back [sic] (1967)

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20 September

This is a Festival review of Dont Look Back [sic] (1967)

So, as my interlocutor suggested earlier, he was 27 at the time of the film, and I have been reminded that he is really a Zimmerman (or room-man).

One thing that he was asked was whether he was religious - he took issue with the word, and, on another occasion, didn't seem abundantly audible when he was asked if he read the Bible.

However, when the same questioner asked if those who bought his records knew what his songs were about, he stated that he knew that they did (and wanted no truck with the suggestion that he could not know, because he hadn't asked them), so no communication problems there, with words meaning different things to different people.

Remarkably also, when we are given these bogus statistics about how little (as a precise percentage) is communicated by the words that we use, shout 'Fire!' (admittedly in the right tone of voice), and then try substituting 'Conflagration!' (or vice versa)! (Equally, at the bar, no other formulation quite has the same effect as 'My round!')

Why we need books, not just the Internet : A Festival response to Dont Look Back (1967)

This is a Festival response to Dont Look Back (1967)

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20 September

This is a Festival response to Dont Look Back (1967)

Yesterday's double-bill included Dont [sic] Look Back (1967), following Bob Dylan’s pivotal UK tour in 1968 with the still relatively new handheld camera: I am left wanting to check two things, one of which any web-site will tell me (how old Dylan was then, because I’m hopeless with ages and couldn’t be sure), the other being how the film was received by those who had started following his career, which is best done by consulting a biography: there is the reassurance not only that someone has taken the trouble to research the subject, but that a publisher will have checked it for accuracy.

I shall come back to why, but first to say how beautiful Joan Baez’ voice was at that time (she is seen arriving with Dylan, and was around for the earlier part of the tour), and what a pleasure it was to see footage of the famous concerts in the Royal Albert Hall (it was not identified which songs (or parts of them) were from which). His career has lasted so long that it is refreshing to see him at this time, although it is what true fans (and I know about a few) would know all about (and have multiple takes of the audio and visuals), and to hear him trying out audiences in Manchester, Nottingham and Liverpool.

The interest in Dylan’s age and the film’s reception are linked, and I got into conversation afterwards, because I had found it quite a revelation to see three encounters : one at a hotel, when it seems that one of Dylan’s party (or his or their guests) had thrown a glass into the street, and two when he meets a science student (as he calls himself) who had wanted to meet him before a gig (and, maybe, to write about the meeting), and then with someone from Time magazine before going on at the Albert Hall.

Regarding the glass incident, it could be construed that Dylan shows concern that someone might have been hurt, but (I think twice) he ends up (when no one says who did it) declaring that he does not want it to be his responsibility, which, in all honesty, sounds more like not wanting to be sued.

I missed the opening remarks of what we see with the student, but I think that he was asking Dylan why he doesn’t like him. As things develop, and after Dylan has said that he doesn’t know him so why should he like him and asked for reasons why he should get to know him, it felt more like he has a chip on his shoulder, picking on someone with a few argumentative ploys, and moving between them, rather in the way that someone might play with hurting or threatening a victim.

I know that I am sensitive to seeing such behaviour, because I am quite capable of intellectual showing-off and trying to take someone down a peg or two, but the display of seemingly unprovoked hostility was even more clear with the person from Time. Dylan announced straightaway that he wouldn’t see anyone after the gig for an interview, and that he would be called a folk-singer: he could explain to him what a folk-singer is and why he isn’t one, but the man would just nod and not get it, and, no, he wasn’t going to bother to do so.

He said exactly what he thought of the publication, what it was, who read it, and why he didn’t need it, because he had sold out the Albert Hall twice without it. Move over, Mr Ego! Has Dylan recanted and been on the cover of Time since, one wonders, and does he still engage in verbal fisticuffs?

Early on in the tour, he employed the technique of saying that all the words in a question could mean different things to different people, so how could he answer it? That just seemed evasive, and the treatment dealt out to the two other men seemed like a good deal more of the same – but from whom was he really seeking to escape?


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Miss Wyoming comes to Britain

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20 September

I was not really of an age to have known about Joy(ce) McKinney at the time that she rose to prominence, but, as the former Mormon who was used in the documentary Tabloid to explain various things remarked, what she said was one thing, what the Mormons said was another, and maybe what actually happened fell in the middle somewhere. Still, by escaping from the country and home, via Canada, she and her friend and accomplice Keith made fools of the British authorities (which perhaps explains why no application was made for their extradition).

Be that as it may, it is a curiosity of this subject that The Daily Mirror says that (as a result of what happened to Mirror Group Newspapers) it no longer has much of the evidence showing that she performed sexual services (although not intercourse) for money before meeting her ideal man, and that Joy herself says that a large amount of original material that proved the contrary was stolen from a vehicle of hers. She states that the material that the Mirror used at the time was faked, whereas its photographer says that he saw the negatives and prints, and the magazines in which the images appeared.

Altogether intriguing (and entertainingly, sometimes quite irreverently, presented), though nothing was as significant, for me, as the account of the cloning in South Korea of five puppies, all with sub-names from their beloved ‘parent’ Booger, and courtesy of some tissue from his stomach when he died. The practitioner who had performed the procedure said that he wasn’t playing God, because he wasn’t creating life – well, you could have fooled me, if that’s not what those Booger replicas were…!


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Philipp and Philip

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20 September

I can only guess that the end of Philipp was meant to shock, but, as we had been in that location before, and I had thought then of what happens, it didn’t. I also didn’t feel that it necessarily fitted (although it could have done), and that what was a very well-played portrayal by Max Hegewald of acute embarrassment and pain at the pretences and stupidities of life (largely because of being at home with his parents) could have had some other resolution.

The scenes between Christa (Vanessa Krüger) and Philipp, when allowed to be themselves (and not involved in silly family rubbish at the ice-cream parlour, almost inevitably the place to go to with a new person in polite German society), are very telling, and went well, as a pairing, with snatches of intimacy in what followed, Above us Only Sky (Über uns das All).

I found the heart of Philipp there, and, by contrast, recalled only all too well how a significant birthday in my own life had to be spent with not only my family, but my parents’ friends, and their jokes, attitudes, etc. – I felt unsure whose birthday it was (whose needs are met by this coming-of-age stuff?), and, at a later stage in life (when leaving a job), really didn’t want it marked by a present that I didn’t want just because that was the protocol of moving on.

For some of us, such feelings of awkwardness stay part of life, and many other films in this festival feed into each other’s themes in this regard: Black Butterflies, Tomboy, and Tirza seem to do this, too. Philip Larkin, not with any great insight, enlivened a pretty unremarkable poem with his well-known opening line ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’.


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Monday at the festival

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20 September

Four sessions (five films) to-day – should have been five, but I couldn’t count, and somehow hadn’t spotted, when booking, that one of them would be going in whilst another was still being shown, but which gives me £3.85 credit on my Blue Pass for another day.

Plus a hurry from the extravagance of seeing Douglas Fairbanks (from 1922) in and as Robin Hood in the Great Hall at Trinity (thanks to the indulgence of the college's Master and Fellows), to get back to Festival central for Tirza, of both of which more later. (Suffice to say that those who thought that they were dining in the hall, which was set up like a cinema when I arrived, must have been fed elsewhere.)

,
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A Festival review of Abgebrannt (Burnout) (2011)

This is a Festival review of Abgebrannt (Burnout) (2011)

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19 September

This is a Festival review of Abgebrannt (Burnout) (2011)

To-night's screening was attended by director Verena S. Freytag*, and she spoke to the Festival's own Verena afterwards, and answered questions from the audience (which, it must be said, is a true privilege for a viewer).

Mine elicited that she had not intended to have a music soundtrack, but, having met a violinist (amongst other instruments that he plays) three times by chance in Berlin, and then learnt about him and his work, he composed for the finished edit. (I had felt that the score worked very well with the emotion of the changing scenes, and also adopted at least twice the simple motif of a quiet sustained note that abruptly heralded silence: the song whose lyrics I had thought might have been central from the start had not been.) I also gathered that the film had been edited from around 180 minutes to 102, with the result, Verena said, that the complexion of what happened after the initial location in Berlin had changed much.

As the other Verena commented, Maryam Zaree's performance as a hard-pressed mother (Pelin) was very strong, and I found that Tilla Kratochwil's Christa, for all that she seemed dominating and hidebound, gave her real scope for being near someone with different experiences and for them to learn from each other.

However, I am not quite sure that the trajectory of Pelin's story is really as set out in the Festival brochure (and I do not know where in life she may be heading at the close), but she certainly desires to change her position, if she can be allowed to do so - that is one of the very heartening things about this film, that we are shown her being given a chance, and also that healing and forgiveness can take place. Alongside those things, we also witness self-interest being a motivating force, and the fact that trying to shake off past ties brings new problems.

Thinking about the issues that lead to the family's seaside placement made me wonder whether the story could have fitted in the UK. The concerns portrayed would certainly have brought the same attention to bear on Pelin's behaviour as a mother, and she might, if very lucky, have had a social worker who was prepared to work with her to make things better for her children on the basis of a profession - and evidence - of a willingness to change. Even some sort of respite is sometimes possible (but maybe not so easily on the coast, because of funding), so this is not a scenario unique to Germany and not, say, Cambridge, but perhaps what it would miss is the especially German tendency of propriety about how life should be conducted.


That, however, is not what I shall take from this film: Maryam's expressiveness (and the fatigue with which she battles), her care, however wayward, for her children, her interactions with Christa, and her sheer exuberance when she breaks the rules and goes out dancing - oh, and her utter convincingness as someone who tattoes ('inks') others and believes in herself and in that sort of statement.


End-notes :

* Somewhat irrelevantly to remark, but someone who moved to Berlin has the same middle initial : he adopted it, as a sort of silent 'S', just so that he would have one...


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Sonnet 116

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19 September

A rather faltering reading of Shakespeare in class (which did not, as I recall, include the closing couplet) starts Above us Only Sky (Über uns das All). The poem was still unmistakeable, and highly relevant: 'Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds'. We end with shots, the last with the credits rolling, of the place where Sandra Hüller, as Martha, had expected to be, but on a different basis.

In-between, she finds plenty of alteration, together with confusion, mistrust and loss, and a mystery for which she seems (doomed) to find no answer (and we no answer as to how it could financially have been maintained so that she did not know). Her courage in all this is immense, her denial is evidence of great hope, and she carries and conducts herself with a real knowledge of her worth, and of not wanting inconsequential formalities and pleasantries that do no more than irritate her by their emptiness.

Yet, as we would, we do doubt her mental state, whether, if not actually dissociating and trying to project one person's identity onto another, then perhaps seeking solace where time should heal (as the sonnet again says, 'Love alters not with [time's] brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom'): such concern is at its closest in one scene, where she barks out orders, and forces what she insists should be done in a humiliating and damaging way. But not a way that reckons with love, not a way that remembers being told that it is actually easier to make an apology weeks afterwards, although it seems awkward, because it has already been accepted in that time.

The warmth of the joking, the bantering, links this to the most positive parts in the short film Philipp that was shown before: there is a shared life that cuts through trite sentiments such as 'it feels as though we've always known each other', and appears, even with seeming 'impediments', to be 'the marriage of true minds'. (Lovely, also, to see all this against the background of Köln (Cologne), which has a special resonance for me since a long time ago.)


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Omelette rescue

Omelette rescue

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18 September

Omelette rescue

If ever I should get disillusioned (pretty likely, unfortunately), I should remember Kath.

Her extreme kindness in taking pity on the fact that, having been left with just 30 minutes between film 1 and film 2, I was only going to have another 30 minutes before film 3 would begin - with the offer to order me a cheese-and-tuna omelette, which, complete with lettuce and lovely balsamic dressing, was waiting for me when I exited from White White World (2010). A very welcome thing to come out to from that individual experience !

Plus my change in a wonderful origami wallet. As I told Kath, 10 out of 5 !


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Don't be Afraid of This Film

This is a Festival review of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)

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18 September

This is a Festival review of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)

* Contains spoilers *

I gather that Guillermo del Toro liked the t.v. story from which Don’t be Afraid of the Dark was adapted. It was perfectly understandable, in view of what appears to interest him, that it attracted him, but he may not have stopped to ask himself whether it would please anyone else.

For, given that he co-wrote the script, and that Pan’s Labyrinth holds together in a way that, for me, this simply did not, I have to ask why there were so many flaws, and why, with such a poorly conceived script, the film was made at all. (There may have been flaws in the original, but that was no reason to recreate them.) It is probably enough just to list some, in no particular order:

· Unless invoking magic, a Polaroid® camera that very obviously has five singe-use flash-bulbs cannot keep taking flash photographs indefinitely (for no reason, we had a shot of a collection of cameras earlier on);

· The extensive injuries inflicted on Mr Harris could not have been construed as resulting from any accident – no one, for example, could get a puncture wound (from the screw-driver) in the back of his leg at the same time as multiple lacerations to face and hands, and it is utterly implausible that the extent of the injuries and their causes would have been missed, at the scene or in hospital (end of residence, end of film);

· Accepted that it is a given of this sort of film (whatever it may be) that people just act stupidly (and despite the attempt at a sinister twist at the end), it made no sense for Kim (Katie Holmes) to go to the library after seeing Harris, rather than rescuing Sally (Bailee Madison) first;

· Creatures that can move objects without touching them (Mr Harris again, e.g. the Stanley® knife) do not need the agency of those objects to turn off light-switches, etc.;

· Sally may have been shocked (but what by? by people bursting into the library, who, as ever, seem to take a quiet eternity to do so?), but why did she show her father a photograph, not the creature that she had not been too shocked to manage to squash?;

· And what suddenly persuades him to believe her, when nothing else has happened? I did not recall the trade name, but (at her tender age – the States and child medication again!) she is probably taking an anti-depressant, and so has to be disbelieved!


Trying to set aside questions of genre, making sudden loud noises does not constitute horror (or suspense), e.g. the gratuitous thump in the soundtrack when Mr Harris apprehends Sally when she first discovers the basement window. Later, when the pace of the attack has stepped up (as, of course, it could have done at any point), there is just overloading of the senses, achieved by pounding music, other chaotic loud sounds, and confused visual displays that are typical of any so-called action film, but which, if it is one's intention, do not make one afraid, but raise anxiety.

We suspect that no one will make it out alive - anyone doing so is a bonus (but the adults have behaved so foolishly when they had the chance before). As to what the ending moments suggest about Kim, who actually cares?

True, it did seem, at one point (when she has been tripped on the stairs: these clever rhesus-monkey-like creatures, knowing how to tension wire - not there later, when Sally comes down - and which way down the stairs she'd come), that Kim was suggesting Sally as their kill instead of her (and, yawn, there may be earlier ambiguities).

Yet she does rescue Sally, she may or may not be dead (or transformed), and, if she isn't dead, who was the creatures' required victim?

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Poem for another festival

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18 September 2011

Awake earlier than I should like, but not ready to finish my comments on Guillermo del Toro's latest 'work', I shall post another of my poems, written for a competition at The Proms run by Radio 3's 'cabaret of the word', The Verb.

I think that it will be clear enough what it's about, but, if not, I can provide explanation later:



Hedwig in the air


Hedwig’s dead, killed outright in her cage –
Not fleeing from the deathly curse,
Or up, o’erseeing the under-age
Potter boy, whose mind she’d sought to nurse.


Birds – maybe she, too – brought first tidings
Of magic, of spells, of the castle
Reached by express from secret sidings:
A place to talk for real in Parsel-


Tongue, to know a first happy Christmas.
She flew with greetings then, and maybe
Saw her death as sure as Icarus,
Or the kings in that heav’n-sent baby –


An epiphany on wings, soft, still
As angels’ singing, this owl they kill.



Copyright © Belston Night Works 2011

Golden sands of time

This is a Festival review of Bombay Beach (2011)

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18 September (Tweets / tags added, 3 January 2015)

This is a Festival review of Bombay Beach (2011)

Bombay Beach (2011) (we had no explanation of the name, sadly) took a little time to get used to, because it seemed (perhaps unnecessarily?) raw in the early shots, and, of course, one has (gained) expectations that what is near the centre of the frame will be - or be put into - focus. (I'm assuming that editing the film with some footage that meets this description at the start was a deliberate ploy.)

In any case, what I quickly came to experience as a real joy, since it is a principle that I try to employ in my photography, was the use of available light (which must have caused some difficulties in places). The whole emphasis on lighting, and on the flatness that gives a distinct horizon at sunrise and -set, was a hallmark of this film, as was the naturalness with which people seemed to get about their business, and come to mean something to us in the (relatively) short time (compared with Alma Har'el) that we (felt that we) spent with them.

Before I went in, Tony Jones, director of the Festival, said that I would want to see the film again when it is on release generally, and he is right - from the sounds of it, as he hopes to have Alma in Cambridge, plenty of time to think up questions before then. Until that point, what I will think about, other than listening to some of my Dylan tracks, is the hope that there was in all that I was allowed to witness, and try to remind myself that it is a privilege to see others' lives.

That said, and nothing to do with how the film was made, but I couldn't help being shocked at how much behaviour is controlled (for) by medication in the States. A young boy, clearly given ritalin because of ADHD (now quite well known in the UK), but also being given an anti-psychotic, then put onto 600mg lithium (instead of the ritalin, unless I misrember), which is one-half of the typical sort of dose for a six-foot man (the exact dose depends on metabolism). As to an explanation to Benny's parents of possible side-effects, particularly for lithium toxicity in the bloodstream, that appeared lacking.

Well, and I'm sorry that I forget his name, but as the elderly guy says who recovers from a mini-stroke, and whose appetite for life and what it is worth were wholly infectious, Life is a habit. For Benny, I hope that he may be able to form a habit where he is not overmedicated to meet others' ideas of who he should be, and the film, in its crazy phantasy ending, offered us that vision.


PS Very much an after-thought, and not intended to detract from the above, but I could not understand the point of the intermittently present and vividly yellow-orange subtitles: at first, they seemed to stigmatize the would-be college student, as if just his diction were not clear enough (although it was), but then they appeared at other times.

Sometimes, during the interactions in the Parish household, they were a help to know what was being said. However, most of the time I did not see the need for them, but, because of how much brighter they were than usual, I could not avoid three effects: they spoilt the appearance of the film, they drew me to read them when I could perfectly well hear what was being spoken, and, because of that, I could not block them out, and so missed important detail on the screen. If I could have pressed a button on a remote-control to turn them off, I would have done, and been happier.

The documentary Bombay Beach (2011), released by @Dogwoof, has this page on @IMDb... : http://t.co/gFe3jzomi5
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 3, 2015

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Not waving, but drowning

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17 September

As expected, Liam Cunningham (as Jack Cope) was excellent in Black Butterflies, but Carice van Houten, playing poet Ingrid Jonker, was a revelation. To those in the know, she perfectly carried out a role that betrayed the traits of impetuosity, feeling abandoned, blaming others, promiscuity, drinking too much in order to feel safe and able to cope, and becoming overwhelmed by conflicting emotions, which characterize some common personality disorders (they would probably have called them neuroses then).

Yet, as is by no means inconsistent, her character was delightful, and she filled the screen with feeling, from seducing Jack, and showing the characters’ hunger for each other in the very beautiful sex-scenes, to hurling objects at him with extreme force. There are claims that she was had other lovers, but Eugene and Jack, the ones who are definite, both find her draining, as well they would. A force for life is hard to live with, after all.

Rutger Hauer as Ingrid’s father (eerily resembling my former university tutor facially) has a harsh love (eventually, on account of her alleged sleeping around, he dismisses her as a slut), likely to have been one of the things that contributed to how she reacts to life and, through doing so in later life, the three psychiatric admissions that we see (or hear of), the last of them leading to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Although it is not always true that people are never the same after it, she is damaged.

She is also damaged by the child whom she wished she had kept, and by the one fathered by Eugene, and which led her to desperate steps in Paris and that last admission. Whereas the film does not pretend to portray Ingrid’s life or that of others who were close to her faithfully, hearing Carice (and, against his judgement, her character’s father) read her verse will encourage a journey to look out her writing, not least given that is was allowed such a prominent place in the new South Africa.

Maybe the real Ingrid wrote on the walls, maybe she didn’t, but it set up a world in which desperate words written in the condensation in Paris were hurtingly real, and also tragically echoed her having made love to Jack in her old room at her father’s house (the old servants’ quarters), their bodies touching and mingling with her script.

Not exactly a love-story, through she clearly does love Jack (but cannot be ‘faithful’), but one about what it is to feel, love and live, and to write faithfully what one believes in, whatever the cost.

Another tribute to the past

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17 September

By popular request, another number from the back catalogues of The Spoonbill Generator:


Discredited in Birmingham


Your bland mosaics, weak and pale [Roland]
More like Bud than honest ale [fester]
More like chalk than wholesome cheese [Roland]
Not like health, more like disease [fester]
Just the ticket for the Tate [The Agent Apsley]

Your buckling sculptures, tired and stale [Roland]
More like water than like ale [fester]
More like flesh than good red fowl [Roland]
Not like a laugh, more like a growl [fester]
Just the thing to tickle Fate. [Roland]

Your tawdry frescoes, wan and quaint [fester]
More like puke than any paint [P]
More like frying-pan than fire [Roland]
Not good at all, but really dire [fester]
Just the kind of stuff I Hate! [Roland]

Your sordid etchings, smudged and faint [fester]
More like splurging than restraint [Roland]
Less than wholesome, quite absurd [The Agent Apsley]
Not quite first rate, more like third [P]
Just what I Regurgitate [Roland]

Yet your enamel's of the best [The Agent Apsley]
Not Faberge, but I'm impressed [fester]
Not quite thrilled, but more than glad [Roland]
It's more than good, it's not half bad [fester]
Really rather Second-rate! [Roland]

Painting makes you healthy

This is a Festival review of Calvet (2011)

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 September

This is a Festival review of Calvet (2011)

* Contains spoilers *

It cannot have been a coincidence that Rembrandt Fecit 1669 (1977) was timed in such a way that it could be watched back to back with Dominic Allan's film Calvet (2011), about the French artist of the same name, who lives in and discovered his calling in Nicaragua.

(However, I do have to take issue with the account, in the brochure, of Calvet as 'hardly inspir[ing] sympathy' on account of being '[t]attoed, pierced and heavily-built' - he had no more than two earrings on each side, his tattoes were not unusual for a man with a military background (apart, perhaps, on the back of his neck), and, as someone who would have known about exercise regimes from it, he was not out of shape.)

Given that I nearly walked out thirty minutes into the film directed by Jos Stelling (as I did, later in the evening, with The Illusionist (1983), having decided to try one of his later films), I know which I have more to say about. I have just looked at the IMDB web-site, and cannot disagree with any of these comments: 'obviously the director is fascinated by his subject but little of this passion manages to reach the audience', and 'the actors bear a awesome resemblance with the painter, but up to a point who cares?'.

Likewise, with me, Stelling had my attention, but lost my interest, and the other positive comments (about the visuals and the use of an old mirror) were about things insufficient to retain it. I'd really just have happily spent a few minutes reading some paragraphs that set out the facts and events that were presented in the film, e.g. Rembrandt was drawn to artefacts of all kinds in auction-houses, and not being able to afford them - or the effect that acquiring them would have on his family and household - appeared not to concern him, when, in themselves, he could see value, beauty and quality in them.


Calvet was a different proposition. I do not profess to have heard of him, and although, of course, I wish him well showing in New York galleries, one should not get the value of his art out of proportion, for he is not the Rembrandt of his age. It is almost the opposite to that artist's story, because there were periods of his life when Rembrandt seemed to squander the opportunities both that were offered to him in his career and that his family and those who cared for him sought to give him for close and intimate relationships. Calvet acknowledges having thrown away similar chances, but, through painting, fought back against the highly nihilistic and self-indulgent and self-destructive view of life that he had grown into.


The documentary was sensitive, gave a strong sense of all the locations to which Calvet's story took it, and employed a sparing, and so effective, use of time-lapse scenes to evoke differing moods. There is no doubt that Calvet's figure dominated it, either by the scale and coloration of his works, or by the way that he gave an account of himself. For some, though not for me, his repeated focus on the son, Kevin, whom he had deserted seemed a little too much as though it were public self-flagellation, and did not seem to acknowledge that Kevin's mother, Nathalie, had just as much been abandoned by him. (She only got a mention in the closing third of the film, when he goes to France in search of Kevin.)

In this, the film-maker was doing his job, letting his subject talk for us to make our own mind up. Afterwards, in the session that David Perilli led, I asked Dominic Allan whether there had been anything that Calvet told him that he had been unable to check. I was thinking not so much of the work that had brought him to the States on false pretences or those externally verifiable issues, but his extended time in the house in the cul-de-sac, where he had found that he could quell his rage against life and the hallucinatory voices that beset him by attacking the main wall, and then all the surfaces, with paint and any other material (he described burning wood to make charcoal) that he could muster.

Afterwards, Dominic clarified that the images that had been used in the part of the film where Calvet revisits the property were made before work was done on the property (and it was put in the state of repair in which we see it). They, therefore, were the surviving testimony to that time, and, for all the anger and self-disgust that were directed to a suicide of a highly torturing complexion (rather than mere death), they struck a chord, when I saw them, that spoke too much of an ordered rationale arising out of the chaos. Perhaps Calvet had painted before - and he says that he needs that discipline to keep him well - as I otherwise found it hard to understand such an eloquent redemption in art coming to him, when the sort of frenzy and panic that he describes would not have been the time for getting acquainted with painterly method and technique.

The contrast, finally, is with Rembrandt, played in his later years by a second actor, and seeming to paint on not to find or be with his family, but despite them. Not a paradigm of the artist (whether painter, musician or writer), but one that seems to intoxicate some, and to give a different form of contented life from that sought by Calvet.

Enough Stelling

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 September

* Contains spoilers *

I wasn't sure as early as the introduction that Bill gave to The Illusionist that it had been such a good idea, and, less than halfway through, I decided that I would let no more of the evening disappear with morbid images, as I am quite capable of generating my own without any help - this is the primary advantage of the aisle seat (which, I hope, meant that I could vanish with the minimum of inconvenience to anyone else).

And, no, I don't now want to see the Q&A with the director on Saturday night (17 September), or the other of his films for which I have a ticket (on Monday, I think - Trains, Aeroplanes, or some such), so there will be some reordering of my priorities, and, I trust, some things will prove possible that clashed with this event and screening.

Now I will grant you - but what else could the audience do, settled down for two hours' viewing a little after 8.30, and, after all, we all have our own ideas? - that there was laughter at the slapstick, at the incongruous, at the utter weird awfulness of how these people (a family?) in a mill of some sort on the edge of a polder lived, but little of that amused me very much, because it was only superficial to the feelings of dread that lay hardly below the surface.

After all, I witnessed (the depiction of) someone being beaten up (for no very good reason), then taken away to a psychiatric unit (for no very good reason), plus various stomach-churning sequences in an indeterminate reality, the last of which determined me to depart as soon as a fresh scene started. So, as I realized later (by looking at the Festival brochure) I missed the additional delights of (amongst other things): the threat of brain surgery, and a suicidal father (who, I suppose, must be the one whom I took for a hanger-on or another brother).

Well, I was well spared those things, after all that I had seen. And it wasn't that there was 'no dialogue', but there were no subtitles - not quite interchangeable descriptions. All of which, with two mentions of the Breughels (in introducing this and the earlier film), made me wonder whether there was actually here another codified display of Netherlandish mottoes or proverbs such as Breughel the Elder was found to have shown with cake-tins on the roof, etc. All very Dutch, perhaps, but, if so, with limited scope for travel, I feel.

And the listing talks about the film having 'much sound and fury', to which the qualifying end of the quotation from Macbeth reads 'signifying nothing'...

Tomboy - no more, no less

This is a Festival review of Tomboy (2011)

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

16 September

This is a Festival review of Tomboy (2011)

* Contains spoilers *

A note on paedophilia: according to the approach to school or church nativity plays that says that anyone wanting to film them cannot, because they could be directly editing their own pornography, we should not have been shown this film in which Laure / Mikael (Zoé Héran) and her / his sister Jeanne (enchantingly played by Malonn Lévana, with a real 'knowing innocence') are shown writhing around, as children do, and even having a bath. What nonsense !


This film encapsulates so much about childhood that, one imagines, is unlikely to change (or to have changed from when Céline Sciamma was a child): pretending / pretence (that one is stronger / cleverer than one is or that one's parents have fascinating jobs or large amounts of money); knowing that something will not work out, but not caring to think it through; a sense of foreboding when something that has to happen is being put off; being surprised; humiliation; secrets (and secret hiding-places); threatening to tell one's mother or making a deal not to tell; being confronted with what one has done, etc.

Incidentally, the film has as its centre a girl who can convincingly pass herself off as a boy (sometimes with prosthetic help!), who does so, attracted to the group of boys seen near the outset of living in a new house, and proving to be as good a footballer and to match their physical strength in other respects. It really does not matter why she does this, what she thinks will happen when she has to join the fourth grade, or even that it may - or may not - be read as a desire to be a boy (and later a man), rather than accepted as one.

I think the latter, that Laure hasn't thought it through, but doesn't want to face what Lisa was told when she wanted to play football, that she thinks. She doesn't think through what deceiving Lisa will do to her feelings, she just - without much heed to the consequences, except when she might have been caught out squatting to urinate and wets her shorts - sets out to be a boy. She does it, and the way that she draws Jeanne into the whole affair is utterly engaging, as are the scenes in which they have fun together outside Laure's plans. As I said, so many scenes that capture the essence of childhood and the childlike, with the issue of the particular path that Laure is following as Mikael very much secondary for me.