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7 November
A piece that I read about My Week With Marilyn recently – it might have been a review, but I don’t recall that it said anything other than about Michelle Williams – reported that its writer had to keep reminding him- or herself that Williams was Marilyn Monroe.
Well, having had the reservation that the person playing MM only superficially resembled her, I thought that I would have the same problem, but what the piece went on to say, was that Williams nonetheless captured her essence (for me, in this performance, a mix of vulnerability, insecurity, playfulness, unawkward sexiness, and a kind of naturalness, when not undercut by self-doubt): not succeeding in putting the piece out of my mind, I only momentarily doubted, because I could see that she wasn’t, that Williams was Monroe.
The film would not have been a whit better if she had been made to resemble Marilyn more (or, for that matter, Kenneth Branagh more like Sir Laurence Olivier) – the passing resemblance was quite sufficient, for those who can enter into a story, and has left me wanting to know more about Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), his book The Prince, The Showgirl and Me, and the diaries on which the credits say that the film was based. (The ex-lawyer in me ended up thinking how meaningful a disclaimer it was at the end to say that there was a true basis, but that some events and characters had been fictionalized, since one would have no way or knowing what was what.)
The special MM temporary exhibition at the American Museum at The University of Bath, Claverton, had made me aware of the frustrations had by those working on set with her, and Branagh caught that attempt at charm, thinly disguising tetchiness and even anger very well: I shall revisit the programme from that exhibition, and also attempt to see The Prince and The Showgirl, on whose filming this work was based.
Williams, Branagh and Judi Dench (as Sybil Thorndike), for whom I personally don’t usually have a lot of time, were all very strong, and those three characters in themselves caught the tensions, when Thorndike sticks up for Monroe against Olivier, one of just a series of tensions between those trying, Clark included, to understand Monroe best. Those triangles and other shapes worked very well to provide a background against which the central tension of the early days of Arthur Miller’s marriage to Monroe could operate, and which could in turn lead to the charming relationship with Clark, who twice rejects advice from others (maybe suspecting their envy, maybe just out of Old Etonian pride).
If there were any doubt, it is not that Clark, with his background, would have ‘run away to the circus’ of trying to get into the film world, but that he is such a decent specimen of humanity in spite of that education (of which we get two tasters): yet, as with Cyril Connolly, I need to be reminded that there the few who do not grow up cherishing the establishment, and they have become the Louis Malles of our world.
The snippets at the end didn’t say where Clark went next with his career, although it did with Some Like It Hot for Monroe and The Entertainer for Olivier, but only where he ended up, and how his book, in 1995, achieved international recognition. Yet I am under no illusions: I am interested in him (and also in what may survive of Olivier’s views) to know the roots of what I have seen in this film, and to witness that charm of which Williams has given such a full account in this well-scripted film, a fitting tribute to MM this year.
Just two quibbles, which in one case, if I am right, may be little more than a continuity error: when Clark is picked up at the studio by Roger Smith, Monroe's bodyguard (who has a hidden Marilyn), he necessarily leaves his car there, but I felt sure that it was shown driving from behind (unless it was the back of Roger's car) during their jaunt; the moment when Olivier is off with Clark for being invited to Monroe's house and wonders whether he could possibly make him a cup of tea before he goes makes a good contrast with an earlier scene, but, unless he is trying to make sure that Clark is on side, he is being far more friendly with him than seems likely in the wider scpe of things.
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Thursday, 8 December 2011
Tuesday, 6 December 2011
He wolfed it all down (some would add ‘hungrily’)
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6 December
Why this word associated with a creature that was eliminated in England, and why have some dogs not been eliminated, even though they are just as dangerous (remember that pointless piece of knee-jerk political legislation, the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, which achieved almost nothing other than appearing to do something)?
(Mind you, it is probably just as much a myth that the wolf was hunted out of existence as that England was covered by forests, cut down to create the landscape that we have to-day…)
I found, to-night, that there is reference in the lyric to Riu, riu, chiu:
The river bank protects it, as God kept the wolf from our lamb.
The furious wolf tried to bite her, but God protected her well
Some suggestion that the wolf equates to the devouring Satan…
In any case, if someone, by accident, said He dogged it all down, it would probably carry some prurient meaning now, but that was not true ten years ago, so that’s no explanation, but maybe this Red Riding Hood anti-wolf / devil in disguise sentiment runs deep, and the disparagement of the phrase has simply fitted better to denigrating our lupine friend rather than man’s best.
How the cat is not man’s best friend is beyond me! I know that these things are deeply personal, but cats don’t slobber, jump up (even with the limited altitude of that leap, a pair of trousers ruined as soon as I arrived where I was staying on one visit to Germany), suddenly bark for no apparent or useful reason, or require to be taken to places that cats can get to all on their own, let alone the places that are exclusive to them.
OK, cats think that they are invisible when they are not (but Snowball wasn’t hiding from me under the rhubarb, and her tally of prey was impressive, if tiresome), and, without barking, they can miaow in so many different ways that don’t just mean Feed me! and it can be a deuce of a job (the devil again!) to work out what it means so that the cat will be satisfied and the miaowing will stop, but they do eat in a polite way, more as we do, except when (more animal prejudice…) We are making pigs of ourselves!.
Plus cats can purr (which deserves devotion in itself, as the Egyptians knew), and, usually without bearing much of a grudge, they are far more capable of stating their point of view with an arched back and a hiss, when the preceding warning-sign of a twitching tail has been ignored.
None of which has anything to do with The Song of Songs, or the German word Badezimmer, but I think that you knew that...
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6 December
Why this word associated with a creature that was eliminated in England, and why have some dogs not been eliminated, even though they are just as dangerous (remember that pointless piece of knee-jerk political legislation, the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, which achieved almost nothing other than appearing to do something)?
(Mind you, it is probably just as much a myth that the wolf was hunted out of existence as that England was covered by forests, cut down to create the landscape that we have to-day…)
I found, to-night, that there is reference in the lyric to Riu, riu, chiu:
The river bank protects it, as God kept the wolf from our lamb.
The furious wolf tried to bite her, but God protected her well
Some suggestion that the wolf equates to the devouring Satan…
In any case, if someone, by accident, said He dogged it all down, it would probably carry some prurient meaning now, but that was not true ten years ago, so that’s no explanation, but maybe this Red Riding Hood anti-wolf / devil in disguise sentiment runs deep, and the disparagement of the phrase has simply fitted better to denigrating our lupine friend rather than man’s best.
How the cat is not man’s best friend is beyond me! I know that these things are deeply personal, but cats don’t slobber, jump up (even with the limited altitude of that leap, a pair of trousers ruined as soon as I arrived where I was staying on one visit to Germany), suddenly bark for no apparent or useful reason, or require to be taken to places that cats can get to all on their own, let alone the places that are exclusive to them.
OK, cats think that they are invisible when they are not (but Snowball wasn’t hiding from me under the rhubarb, and her tally of prey was impressive, if tiresome), and, without barking, they can miaow in so many different ways that don’t just mean Feed me! and it can be a deuce of a job (the devil again!) to work out what it means so that the cat will be satisfied and the miaowing will stop, but they do eat in a polite way, more as we do, except when (more animal prejudice…) We are making pigs of ourselves!.
Plus cats can purr (which deserves devotion in itself, as the Egyptians knew), and, usually without bearing much of a grudge, they are far more capable of stating their point of view with an arched back and a hiss, when the preceding warning-sign of a twitching tail has been ignored.
None of which has anything to do with The Song of Songs, or the German word Badezimmer, but I think that you knew that...
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Sunday, 4 December 2011
Schlafzimmer
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4 November
The German word for bedroom doesn't focus on the bed, but on the sleeping.
With living-room, we do what Wohnzimmer does, and consider the act of living our waking life. Same with dining-room and Esszimmer.
So why this difference with sleeping-room? Likewise, if French qualifies its word 'chambre', it adds à coucher, 'for sleeping'?
Bed or sleep - I believe that Italian goes for the bed part...
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4 November
The German word for bedroom doesn't focus on the bed, but on the sleeping.
With living-room, we do what Wohnzimmer does, and consider the act of living our waking life. Same with dining-room and Esszimmer.
So why this difference with sleeping-room? Likewise, if French qualifies its word 'chambre', it adds à coucher, 'for sleeping'?
Bed or sleep - I believe that Italian goes for the bed part...
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Saturday, 3 December 2011
An appreciation of Sarah's Key - and not for what it isn't
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4 November
There are times when I curse myself for having used the time when Kristin Scott Thomas signed my programme for me after her informed performance of Pinter's magnificent play Betrayal that I bothered her with how uniformly useless the UK papers' reviews had been - she didn't need to know (as (a) the run in the cinemas trounced their shallow views and (b) even if it hadn't, the DVD market was sure to pick up on it), and I could have said something other than thanking her for this film that they were too inadequate to appreciate.
So forget what they wrote, and their comparisons (which shouldn't have been made, even given the proximity in time) with this other film The Roundup, with which it clearly shares so little.
This is not the Kristin Scott Thomas French film that this time disappoints, it is better than Leaving (although I think that that film is very fine) and at least as good as I've Loved You so Long. Yes, one can always quibble about the plot, but Sarah's Key pulls no punches in doing justice to the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, from which it sprang.
And here some of these so-called UK film writers / critics got lost, by ascribing to the film what it is in the book (although, of course, it could have been changed), and by not understanding how Julia Jarmond is engaged in what happened to young Sarah Staryznksi, not least because she has a life within her that her husband views as a nuisance, and in her wanting to follow her story, wherever it goes.
The film ends with a truth: that what is shared as a story, goes on, and Julia's character, played with an enormous amount of integrity and with great respect to the times through which Sarah lived, wants to bring that truth, both husband Bertrand's family and to the family with which she feels such a human bond in the person of Sarah herself. Yes, she sometimes thinks that she has hurt and has done wrong, but she has actually healed, and has helped others to view their lives differently.
So forget all this rubbish about what happens 'in the third act' - films are not plays, and do not fall into acts, whether three or five. This is a vibrant and living piece of cinema, which transcends all this nonsense about acts.
I will watch this film on DVD, but I am glad that I had the chance to see it on the big screen, where it could touch audiences - I could here the silence of engagement in the screens in which I saw it. It is also a tremendous novel, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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4 November
There are times when I curse myself for having used the time when Kristin Scott Thomas signed my programme for me after her informed performance of Pinter's magnificent play Betrayal that I bothered her with how uniformly useless the UK papers' reviews had been - she didn't need to know (as (a) the run in the cinemas trounced their shallow views and (b) even if it hadn't, the DVD market was sure to pick up on it), and I could have said something other than thanking her for this film that they were too inadequate to appreciate.
So forget what they wrote, and their comparisons (which shouldn't have been made, even given the proximity in time) with this other film The Roundup, with which it clearly shares so little.
This is not the Kristin Scott Thomas French film that this time disappoints, it is better than Leaving (although I think that that film is very fine) and at least as good as I've Loved You so Long. Yes, one can always quibble about the plot, but Sarah's Key pulls no punches in doing justice to the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, from which it sprang.
And here some of these so-called UK film writers / critics got lost, by ascribing to the film what it is in the book (although, of course, it could have been changed), and by not understanding how Julia Jarmond is engaged in what happened to young Sarah Staryznksi, not least because she has a life within her that her husband views as a nuisance, and in her wanting to follow her story, wherever it goes.
The film ends with a truth: that what is shared as a story, goes on, and Julia's character, played with an enormous amount of integrity and with great respect to the times through which Sarah lived, wants to bring that truth, both husband Bertrand's family and to the family with which she feels such a human bond in the person of Sarah herself. Yes, she sometimes thinks that she has hurt and has done wrong, but she has actually healed, and has helped others to view their lives differently.
So forget all this rubbish about what happens 'in the third act' - films are not plays, and do not fall into acts, whether three or five. This is a vibrant and living piece of cinema, which transcends all this nonsense about acts.
I will watch this film on DVD, but I am glad that I had the chance to see it on the big screen, where it could touch audiences - I could here the silence of engagement in the screens in which I saw it. It is also a tremendous novel, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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The weather's been quite reasonable recently, hasn't it?
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4 November
Yes, a quite usual British piece of padding for - or for avoiding - God knows what, but the weather can only be reasonable (just like a run of luck), and it makes no sense to call it 'unreasonable' weather in this idiom of British English.
Oh, fair enough, we have the verb 'to bury' now, but the pair, 'to disbury', has been lost, and we have to resort to 'to dig up' (or 'to disinter', for specific purposes), but this is not one of those: it never was possible to say the opposite of 'he has reasonable skill as a tennis player'.
This bloody word 'reasonable', being so reasonable that it has no pair, no man on the Clapham omnibus (why Clapham? why should he ever have been going to - or coming from - Clapham) who isn't reasonable. No, we have to go to unpronounceable Wednesbury for unreasonableness, for decisions so unreasonable that no reasonable panel could have made them.
And there's nothing in-between - it's either the officious (a much misused word, outside the courts) man on the omnibus, saying to two people about to make a contract 'I say, what if Z happens?', or this hopeless lot in Wednesbury, making their artless unreasonableness itself a form of art by being so damn'd unreasonable.
Well, I'm not convinced that we should say 'It has been unseasonably / unseasonally warm of late' - I'm going to go right out and accuse the weather of being like that lot in Wednesbury, so unreasonable in attaching terms to the licensing of something like a cinema that they made a name for themselves.
Damn'd unreasonable the weather we've been having, you'll hear me say (avoiding God knows what)!
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4 November
Yes, a quite usual British piece of padding for - or for avoiding - God knows what, but the weather can only be reasonable (just like a run of luck), and it makes no sense to call it 'unreasonable' weather in this idiom of British English.
Oh, fair enough, we have the verb 'to bury' now, but the pair, 'to disbury', has been lost, and we have to resort to 'to dig up' (or 'to disinter', for specific purposes), but this is not one of those: it never was possible to say the opposite of 'he has reasonable skill as a tennis player'.
This bloody word 'reasonable', being so reasonable that it has no pair, no man on the Clapham omnibus (why Clapham? why should he ever have been going to - or coming from - Clapham) who isn't reasonable. No, we have to go to unpronounceable Wednesbury for unreasonableness, for decisions so unreasonable that no reasonable panel could have made them.
And there's nothing in-between - it's either the officious (a much misused word, outside the courts) man on the omnibus, saying to two people about to make a contract 'I say, what if Z happens?', or this hopeless lot in Wednesbury, making their artless unreasonableness itself a form of art by being so damn'd unreasonable.
Well, I'm not convinced that we should say 'It has been unseasonably / unseasonally warm of late' - I'm going to go right out and accuse the weather of being like that lot in Wednesbury, so unreasonable in attaching terms to the licensing of something like a cinema that they made a name for themselves.
Damn'd unreasonable the weather we've been having, you'll hear me say (avoiding God knows what)!
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Die Blechtrommel
This piece is about the BFI's work on The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) (1979)
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3 December (25 August 2015, Twitter-names added, etc.)
This piece is about the BFI's work on The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) (1979)
Those who read BFI's (@BFI's) Sight & Sound magazine (@SightSoundmag) will know that some work has been done, but not when it will come to fruition, on The Tin Drum.
Not a director's cut as such, because what was released (at around 140 mins) in 1979 was edited to that length by Volker Schlöndorff to suit the needs of distributors at the time (otherwise he might as well not have made it), but this new release (at 163 mins) will give the piece a chance to talk a little more freely.
As well as 'snippets archive footage', there are new scenes: one where Oskar is being read a story, and an orgy ensues, complete with 'scantily dressed nuns and grand duchesses; another has Oskar rebelling against the Nazis; a third, a Holocaust survivor, arriving in bombed-out Danzig, and trying to introduce, although they are dead his wife and six children.
When it is in cinemas, or just on DVD, I do not know... - the article only mentions Blu-ray and a release in January, with the original version.
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Forty-five years in film (1)
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3 November
Cinema-devoted New Empress Magazine has a Yearbook, which is just going to press, and it contains a piece about Woody Allen as a film director and writer of screenplays, which is a source of pleasure to me, not least for how it has been ilustrated...
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3 November
Cinema-devoted New Empress Magazine has a Yearbook, which is just going to press, and it contains a piece about Woody Allen as a film director and writer of screenplays, which is a source of pleasure to me, not least for how it has been ilustrated...
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Sunday, 27 November 2011
I was once (nearly) a steward at Cambridge Wordfest... (2)
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27 November
Interestingly, the web-site wants to boast this:
Every year the festival needs a crew of friendly, reliable and unflappable people to act as stewards at the venues for day and evening events. Stewards collect and sell tickets, show patrons to their seats, assist wheelchair users where necessary, are trained in each venue's safety procedures, answer questions and provide the friendly face of the festival. In return, stewards receive free entry to all events where seats are available.
Well, I've already made mention of safety procedures. As for wheelchair users, it was apparently sufficient that the programme would have told them that there was no access to one of the venues (or not all of the way, but maybe as far as the foot of a flight of stone steps), so I am sure that there will have been no disappointments on the day, and, of course, it's pointless to consider why a place without such access would be chosen for a public event.
Even suggesting that, once off duty from the four-hour shift, other stewards might want to change out of the required uniform of the Wordfest T-shirt was misconstrued as 'not being in the right spirit':
Well, I was actually thinking, believe it or not, of the paying public!
It is scarcely a help for people to be picked out by their clothing as helpers, when they have actually finished working. If they appear to be stewarding, but don't actually know the behind-the-scenes details of the event (because they are seeking to attend it - one of the perks of stewarding), one of two things happens.
They either have to get involved (possibly leading to confusion), or else cannot safely direct the person in need of help to someone else in a T-shirt, because he or she may be in the same position.
(Allegedly, then, no marks for being 'friendly'.)
I also think that I must have proved myself not unflappable, if I bothered to wonder about realities such as where people should assemble in the event of a fire. At any rate, I believe that I have seen behind the friendly face of the festival...
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27 November
Interestingly, the web-site wants to boast this:
Every year the festival needs a crew of friendly, reliable and unflappable people to act as stewards at the venues for day and evening events. Stewards collect and sell tickets, show patrons to their seats, assist wheelchair users where necessary, are trained in each venue's safety procedures, answer questions and provide the friendly face of the festival. In return, stewards receive free entry to all events where seats are available.
Well, I've already made mention of safety procedures. As for wheelchair users, it was apparently sufficient that the programme would have told them that there was no access to one of the venues (or not all of the way, but maybe as far as the foot of a flight of stone steps), so I am sure that there will have been no disappointments on the day, and, of course, it's pointless to consider why a place without such access would be chosen for a public event.
Even suggesting that, once off duty from the four-hour shift, other stewards might want to change out of the required uniform of the Wordfest T-shirt was misconstrued as 'not being in the right spirit':
Well, I was actually thinking, believe it or not, of the paying public!
It is scarcely a help for people to be picked out by their clothing as helpers, when they have actually finished working. If they appear to be stewarding, but don't actually know the behind-the-scenes details of the event (because they are seeking to attend it - one of the perks of stewarding), one of two things happens.
They either have to get involved (possibly leading to confusion), or else cannot safely direct the person in need of help to someone else in a T-shirt, because he or she may be in the same position.
(Allegedly, then, no marks for being 'friendly'.)
I also think that I must have proved myself not unflappable, if I bothered to wonder about realities such as where people should assemble in the event of a fire. At any rate, I believe that I have seen behind the friendly face of the festival...
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Saturday, 26 November 2011
I was once (nearly) a steward for Cambridge Wordfest... (1)
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26 November
I even got given the T-shirt, when, on Monday evening, I attended what was billed as a training session that was vital, necessary, apparently, because of their complying with health-and-safety regulations.
Vital because, when we were shown that there were two fire-exits at the back of one of the venues, no one actually knew, when I asked, where they led to, let alone where the fire assembly point was! - and we'd been told that we couldn't steward, unless we attended one of these vital sessions.
So was it sour grapes that led to the e-mail on Thursday morning, telling me that they had reviewed their needs, and I wasn't required to steward?
Dunno, though I'm suspicious...
As to the vital training, if you're going to any of Sunday's events, I wouldn't plan to be ill, as nothing was said about what to do in a medical emergency, and I'd pray that there is no fire, as, in addition, none of us was told where the fire extinguishers were, how to raise the alarm, or what the alarm sounded like!
They also thought, when muggins again asked on your behalf, that written instructions, with no diagrammatic representation, were all that was needed, so I hope that everyone is well up on the more obscure reaches of Trinity College...
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26 November
I even got given the T-shirt, when, on Monday evening, I attended what was billed as a training session that was vital, necessary, apparently, because of their complying with health-and-safety regulations.
Vital because, when we were shown that there were two fire-exits at the back of one of the venues, no one actually knew, when I asked, where they led to, let alone where the fire assembly point was! - and we'd been told that we couldn't steward, unless we attended one of these vital sessions.
So was it sour grapes that led to the e-mail on Thursday morning, telling me that they had reviewed their needs, and I wasn't required to steward?
Dunno, though I'm suspicious...
As to the vital training, if you're going to any of Sunday's events, I wouldn't plan to be ill, as nothing was said about what to do in a medical emergency, and I'd pray that there is no fire, as, in addition, none of us was told where the fire extinguishers were, how to raise the alarm, or what the alarm sounded like!
They also thought, when muggins again asked on your behalf, that written instructions, with no diagrammatic representation, were all that was needed, so I hope that everyone is well up on the more obscure reaches of Trinity College...
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The Physics of Poetry
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26 November
Well, you've heard of The Tao of Physics (or even The Tao of Pooh), so why not?
What I mean is a poetry reading, rather than reading (or writing) poetry, and looked at from the point of hearing of a member of the audience (screw the poets – for they choose to do this, and they, or their contacts (or their contacts’ contacts), then involve the listeners in being there, perhaps as witnesses, perhaps as priests, offering or withholding the sacrament).
It is both a very physical (sometimes exhausting) experience – closet close in quiet, concentrate on confessions, confused by colour, word-choice, syntax – and one that, unlike interactions that have a chemistry, is a creature of physics. Why physics, not biology?
OK, the larynx, the vocal-chords, they are necessary participants, just as are ears and auditory processing (What did he just say? Oh, he did slip in ‘fuck’ after all – have I caught what he said next?), but they are in what we call chemistry, what, when there are more people present, we like to call ‘the group dynamic[s]’.
No, this is physics, because bodies are in rotation or opposition about or on the fulcrum of the reading, and they could be as massive as planets, or as tiny as motes (probably not at the same time). Into that void, from who knows where, the reader-poet advances a proposition, a poem (or the so-called prose-poem, as if there could be a cigarette-cigar, for a cigarillo certainly isn’t it), which might be met by a laugh or two, shocked inhalations or a snort, but largely by silence.
Is it even over? Is usually not registering, even by the crude measure of applause, a proper response until what follows I’ll finish with this one is clearly finished just borne out of fear of jumping in too soon? Or is there some more delicate formality in play, some respectful reverence into which sounds other than those that escape us despite ourselves (no, I didn’t mean those) are not meant to intrude?
Perhaps, with some reader-poets, each poem is a letter, spelling – or threatening to spell – the name of God, but one succeeds another, and some of them almost seem to found their sense of success (and succession) on how much distortion and noise they have added.
I do not believe that it can always have been like this with public performances, but I must research it to see if I can find how, for example, a reading of his works by Robert Browning or, better still, Lord Byron was received. (At the opposite extreme is the recital where, despite a clear indication that songs accompanied by piano are to be treated as a group, those present insist on clapping after every one, utterly with the potential to put off the soprano or counter-tenor for (or by) whom a sequence of three or four songs had been conceived as part of the whole.)
And, if I had ten or a dozen poems that might even be worth being heard, I’d allow those present to see the text of what they were hearing (or not, if they preferred the mental crossword-puzzle of fathoming form and content from sound), and I’d memorize those poems (so never do it, as my memory doesn’t favour input in a prescribed form), and I’d learn to look around at those around me, to engage them and engage with them.
I know that I should, because a guy called Mark Waldron did it the other night. Moreover, he didn’t use language to show off his knowledge (or what passes for it), he didn’t just entertain with his rich conceits, and he recited in such a way that I was quite clear of his literal meaning, without abnormal accentuation or the obscurity of the prized referent that has to be explained first.
Poor man’s contumely? There’s always that danger, but I hope the recognition that there is more of stand-up in reading poetry than is given credit for – the comedian needs to know whether the audience is being reached (imagine the straitjacket of no spontaneous applause during a set), and the audience needs to feel that the comedian is reaching out to them with his or her words, not just delivering a joke or story with flatness and expecting their approval as if his or her due.
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26 November
Well, you've heard of The Tao of Physics (or even The Tao of Pooh), so why not?
What I mean is a poetry reading, rather than reading (or writing) poetry, and looked at from the point of hearing of a member of the audience (screw the poets – for they choose to do this, and they, or their contacts (or their contacts’ contacts), then involve the listeners in being there, perhaps as witnesses, perhaps as priests, offering or withholding the sacrament).
It is both a very physical (sometimes exhausting) experience – closet close in quiet, concentrate on confessions, confused by colour, word-choice, syntax – and one that, unlike interactions that have a chemistry, is a creature of physics. Why physics, not biology?
OK, the larynx, the vocal-chords, they are necessary participants, just as are ears and auditory processing (What did he just say? Oh, he did slip in ‘fuck’ after all – have I caught what he said next?), but they are in what we call chemistry, what, when there are more people present, we like to call ‘the group dynamic[s]’.
No, this is physics, because bodies are in rotation or opposition about or on the fulcrum of the reading, and they could be as massive as planets, or as tiny as motes (probably not at the same time). Into that void, from who knows where, the reader-poet advances a proposition, a poem (or the so-called prose-poem, as if there could be a cigarette-cigar, for a cigarillo certainly isn’t it), which might be met by a laugh or two, shocked inhalations or a snort, but largely by silence.
Is it even over? Is usually not registering, even by the crude measure of applause, a proper response until what follows I’ll finish with this one is clearly finished just borne out of fear of jumping in too soon? Or is there some more delicate formality in play, some respectful reverence into which sounds other than those that escape us despite ourselves (no, I didn’t mean those) are not meant to intrude?
Perhaps, with some reader-poets, each poem is a letter, spelling – or threatening to spell – the name of God, but one succeeds another, and some of them almost seem to found their sense of success (and succession) on how much distortion and noise they have added.
I do not believe that it can always have been like this with public performances, but I must research it to see if I can find how, for example, a reading of his works by Robert Browning or, better still, Lord Byron was received. (At the opposite extreme is the recital where, despite a clear indication that songs accompanied by piano are to be treated as a group, those present insist on clapping after every one, utterly with the potential to put off the soprano or counter-tenor for (or by) whom a sequence of three or four songs had been conceived as part of the whole.)
And, if I had ten or a dozen poems that might even be worth being heard, I’d allow those present to see the text of what they were hearing (or not, if they preferred the mental crossword-puzzle of fathoming form and content from sound), and I’d memorize those poems (so never do it, as my memory doesn’t favour input in a prescribed form), and I’d learn to look around at those around me, to engage them and engage with them.
I know that I should, because a guy called Mark Waldron did it the other night. Moreover, he didn’t use language to show off his knowledge (or what passes for it), he didn’t just entertain with his rich conceits, and he recited in such a way that I was quite clear of his literal meaning, without abnormal accentuation or the obscurity of the prized referent that has to be explained first.
Poor man’s contumely? There’s always that danger, but I hope the recognition that there is more of stand-up in reading poetry than is given credit for – the comedian needs to know whether the audience is being reached (imagine the straitjacket of no spontaneous applause during a set), and the audience needs to feel that the comedian is reaching out to them with his or her words, not just delivering a joke or story with flatness and expecting their approval as if his or her due.
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Tuesday, 22 November 2011
Blogging at the Tate (from 4 September)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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23 November
To give this another home, I have lifted the content of my - long! - posting (but the Tate Blog is also worth seeing for the views of some the exhibits):
I do not know whether those who purchase a ticket on the day are allowed re-entry (and I have heard people in the past talking about ‘doing a show’ in 90 minutes because they have an art-history background), but I tend to find these Tate Modern exhibitions quite demanding, because they are so extensive and there is often almost too much to look at.
(I have seen some comments about the ticket-price: maybe the exhibitions will seem expensive if, apart from the availability of toilets (and they are not very obvious), one understands that the only time to look around is the two or three hours before needing lunch or dinner.)
If not, this is where Tate membership is a real benefit, because I am free to go off to have a coffee or something to eat, if I am getting fatigued and realize that I am no longer taking in what I am trying to look at. I can then go back into the exhibition once or twice more, or even leave the rest of it until another day.
However, in this case, apart from the Barcelona series – which I left to the end and only had time to spend a few seconds in front of each print – there was no one group of exhibits that represented a very significant amount of time needed to look at it properly. (I would say that the display-cases in the Gauguin show represent the other extreme.) Room 1 had been seen on another day, but I managed to look around yesterday in the five hours until 10.00 p.m. that I had available.
That, too, is a benefit of Friday and Saturday evenings, with the gallery thinning out towards closing time. Others have commented on the two rooms with two triptychs each (Rooms 10 and 12, although the fireworks triptych was displayed differently, and well), but it was only later that one could get a clear view of all three canvases, and I deliberately waited until past 9.30 p.m. to view them.
They were stunning, both pairs, and I will hope to see them again when the gallery is quiet, but I wondered whether they really needed a little more space to themselves, and the fact that they were back to back meant that a viewer standing away to take in one triptych as a whole, as I did, would inevitably (if there had been anyone there then) have been in the way of anyone wanting to see the other.
With an artist as prolific as Miró (and I had not been aware that he was working at his death until I saw the video, which was not in its normal place at the exit), the exhibition was inevitably selective, but it was a very good selection, not least for the Constellations series, and, again, the triptychs.
That said, including the burnt pictures but not having footage from the video that I saw displayed on a screen in Room 11, which could have showed the artist burning a canvas (and even stepping on it and leaving red footprints) was, I believe, a mistake: with the video where it is, not everyone would see it, and I consider it as of much more interpretative value to have something relevant to the creation of a series of works in the place where they are being shown.
Above all, I now appreciate that Miró related to series (and, although he is quoted as saying that two and two do not make four, he had some sort of personal mathematics that related one item in a series to the next), and also to sequence, so it was also unfortunate that the captioning in Room 7 did not more clearly draw attention to his request for the Constellations to be displayed in order. They were displayed in order, but the casual viewer would not obviously have known where to start, or (except from the date on the caption to each painting) that they were in any definite order.
Which takes me to my final few observations about the exhibition and how it was curated:
1. Unless I am much mistaken and misunderstood the footage, the curators of the exhibition themselves (shown, on the video, visiting Miró’s studios, both of which he had used since 1959) confused the studios, and seemed to be saying that works created in one were the product of the other.
In any event, it would again have been helpful to understand the artist’s working life to have had the history and views of the studios, and his way of working, set out in the gallery (not just references to them in the captions).
2. Inevitably, the captions to the paintings (as well as those for each room) tease out meanings, and make suggestions as to how work and life relate: the ones in this exhibition were generally suitably tentative, but, after a while, the proposition introduced by ‘maybe’ kept eliciting my quiet retort ‘who says so?’. (What evidence is there for what the ladder imagery mean, I want to ask.)
On this level, not least when the video footage of Miró gave a very different impression of the genesis of the burnt canvases, and set his producing them in a different context, I sometimes felt misled by what was being suggested as to his motivation or meaning (Room 11, for example).
3. Finally, the fact that the chronology of his life was (as it usually is) outside the exhibition, but was essential reading to flesh out one’s understanding of Spain and its history did not help. (I do not even recall a map of Spain for that matter, showing where Mont-roig and other significant places are, and not everyone has yet visited Barcelona.)
This was a particular problem where such help was most needed: I was being asked to understand the paintings from 1931 onwards against the background of what was happening, but I could not tell from what was presented to me when Franco actually gained power, or when the Spanish Civil War began and (how it) ended.
Details of that war as a whole, including German involvement and the anti-fascist movement, seemed to have been assumed to be common knowledge, which I doubt is true: information and images would have informed viewing the paintings greatly. The Phoney War was also referred to, but we were not even told (it was the anniversary on my visit) that Britain (and France) declared war on 3 September, or when Germany invaded France and The Low Countries.
Unfortunately, I end up thinking that I will have to look out texts on the civil war myself to understand better the times in which Miró was painting.
Anthony Davis
Copyright Belston Night Works 2011
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23 November
To give this another home, I have lifted the content of my - long! - posting (but the Tate Blog is also worth seeing for the views of some the exhibits):
I do not know whether those who purchase a ticket on the day are allowed re-entry (and I have heard people in the past talking about ‘doing a show’ in 90 minutes because they have an art-history background), but I tend to find these Tate Modern exhibitions quite demanding, because they are so extensive and there is often almost too much to look at.
(I have seen some comments about the ticket-price: maybe the exhibitions will seem expensive if, apart from the availability of toilets (and they are not very obvious), one understands that the only time to look around is the two or three hours before needing lunch or dinner.)
If not, this is where Tate membership is a real benefit, because I am free to go off to have a coffee or something to eat, if I am getting fatigued and realize that I am no longer taking in what I am trying to look at. I can then go back into the exhibition once or twice more, or even leave the rest of it until another day.
However, in this case, apart from the Barcelona series – which I left to the end and only had time to spend a few seconds in front of each print – there was no one group of exhibits that represented a very significant amount of time needed to look at it properly. (I would say that the display-cases in the Gauguin show represent the other extreme.) Room 1 had been seen on another day, but I managed to look around yesterday in the five hours until 10.00 p.m. that I had available.
That, too, is a benefit of Friday and Saturday evenings, with the gallery thinning out towards closing time. Others have commented on the two rooms with two triptychs each (Rooms 10 and 12, although the fireworks triptych was displayed differently, and well), but it was only later that one could get a clear view of all three canvases, and I deliberately waited until past 9.30 p.m. to view them.
They were stunning, both pairs, and I will hope to see them again when the gallery is quiet, but I wondered whether they really needed a little more space to themselves, and the fact that they were back to back meant that a viewer standing away to take in one triptych as a whole, as I did, would inevitably (if there had been anyone there then) have been in the way of anyone wanting to see the other.
With an artist as prolific as Miró (and I had not been aware that he was working at his death until I saw the video, which was not in its normal place at the exit), the exhibition was inevitably selective, but it was a very good selection, not least for the Constellations series, and, again, the triptychs.
That said, including the burnt pictures but not having footage from the video that I saw displayed on a screen in Room 11, which could have showed the artist burning a canvas (and even stepping on it and leaving red footprints) was, I believe, a mistake: with the video where it is, not everyone would see it, and I consider it as of much more interpretative value to have something relevant to the creation of a series of works in the place where they are being shown.
Above all, I now appreciate that Miró related to series (and, although he is quoted as saying that two and two do not make four, he had some sort of personal mathematics that related one item in a series to the next), and also to sequence, so it was also unfortunate that the captioning in Room 7 did not more clearly draw attention to his request for the Constellations to be displayed in order. They were displayed in order, but the casual viewer would not obviously have known where to start, or (except from the date on the caption to each painting) that they were in any definite order.
Which takes me to my final few observations about the exhibition and how it was curated:
1. Unless I am much mistaken and misunderstood the footage, the curators of the exhibition themselves (shown, on the video, visiting Miró’s studios, both of which he had used since 1959) confused the studios, and seemed to be saying that works created in one were the product of the other.
In any event, it would again have been helpful to understand the artist’s working life to have had the history and views of the studios, and his way of working, set out in the gallery (not just references to them in the captions).
2. Inevitably, the captions to the paintings (as well as those for each room) tease out meanings, and make suggestions as to how work and life relate: the ones in this exhibition were generally suitably tentative, but, after a while, the proposition introduced by ‘maybe’ kept eliciting my quiet retort ‘who says so?’. (What evidence is there for what the ladder imagery mean, I want to ask.)
On this level, not least when the video footage of Miró gave a very different impression of the genesis of the burnt canvases, and set his producing them in a different context, I sometimes felt misled by what was being suggested as to his motivation or meaning (Room 11, for example).
3. Finally, the fact that the chronology of his life was (as it usually is) outside the exhibition, but was essential reading to flesh out one’s understanding of Spain and its history did not help. (I do not even recall a map of Spain for that matter, showing where Mont-roig and other significant places are, and not everyone has yet visited Barcelona.)
This was a particular problem where such help was most needed: I was being asked to understand the paintings from 1931 onwards against the background of what was happening, but I could not tell from what was presented to me when Franco actually gained power, or when the Spanish Civil War began and (how it) ended.
Details of that war as a whole, including German involvement and the anti-fascist movement, seemed to have been assumed to be common knowledge, which I doubt is true: information and images would have informed viewing the paintings greatly. The Phoney War was also referred to, but we were not even told (it was the anniversary on my visit) that Britain (and France) declared war on 3 September, or when Germany invaded France and The Low Countries.
Unfortunately, I end up thinking that I will have to look out texts on the civil war myself to understand better the times in which Miró was painting.
Anthony Davis
Copyright Belston Night Works 2011
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Dimensions - a love that outlasts the years?
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23 November
Oh, don't get me wrong - the love and the longing do, and, on this third opportunity for me to see the film, at a special educational event about, broadly, getting into and developing film-making (held at the Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge), I could really sense what Stephen finds so special in Victoria, and the days with her, that he wants to recapture it all, and I realize that I had not properly valued this young actress's (Hannah Carson's) performance, as it is radiant: before, I was standing back and not quite going with Stephen's trying to regain her.
I watched the film from the back of Screen 1, sitting with Ant and Sloane. When asked, I hadn't noticed what they had trimmed to take off 3 or 4 minutes, but I did feel the mood set by Ant's scoring for the opening titles, and I did find some scenes even more evocative than before, particularly various scenes at the well-head, starting with that of grief - the well-head is, in fact, literally that, a well-spring of all that happens, a source.
I've been trying to come up with a catchy tag since being in the bar afterwards with Trish Sheil (who was stage-managing the event, and interviewed come contributors), Ant and Sloane, the impetus being that I do not think that the emphasis is right in calling this a sci-fi love story (as it is a love story with sci-fi elements), and this is probably the best so far (a love that outlasts the years), better than:
* conquering time for love
* a love that outstrips the years - in either version, 'the years' could be 'time', e.g. A Love that Outlasts Time (or have I stolen that from somewhere? - nothing very specific in the two pages of results from Google, anyway)
* love beyond hope
* longing beyond all reason
* longing conquers all
* a search to regain special summer days
* longing for youth's tranquillity, etc., etc. - point probably made
There is a special evening on Thursday for possible distribution, and I hope that it generates the interest that is deserved amongst those who see this lovely and nicely put together piece of work...
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23 November
Oh, don't get me wrong - the love and the longing do, and, on this third opportunity for me to see the film, at a special educational event about, broadly, getting into and developing film-making (held at the Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge), I could really sense what Stephen finds so special in Victoria, and the days with her, that he wants to recapture it all, and I realize that I had not properly valued this young actress's (Hannah Carson's) performance, as it is radiant: before, I was standing back and not quite going with Stephen's trying to regain her.
I watched the film from the back of Screen 1, sitting with Ant and Sloane. When asked, I hadn't noticed what they had trimmed to take off 3 or 4 minutes, but I did feel the mood set by Ant's scoring for the opening titles, and I did find some scenes even more evocative than before, particularly various scenes at the well-head, starting with that of grief - the well-head is, in fact, literally that, a well-spring of all that happens, a source.
I've been trying to come up with a catchy tag since being in the bar afterwards with Trish Sheil (who was stage-managing the event, and interviewed come contributors), Ant and Sloane, the impetus being that I do not think that the emphasis is right in calling this a sci-fi love story (as it is a love story with sci-fi elements), and this is probably the best so far (a love that outlasts the years), better than:
* conquering time for love
* a love that outstrips the years - in either version, 'the years' could be 'time', e.g. A Love that Outlasts Time (or have I stolen that from somewhere? - nothing very specific in the two pages of results from Google, anyway)
* love beyond hope
* longing beyond all reason
* longing conquers all
* a search to regain special summer days
* longing for youth's tranquillity, etc., etc. - point probably made
There is a special evening on Thursday for possible distribution, and I hope that it generates the interest that is deserved amongst those who see this lovely and nicely put together piece of work...
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An empty future
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22 November
A great director, an Allen, can write for him- or herself perfectly and bring it off.
Miranda July has created, in Sophie, something that she could not inhabit - yes, the character is meant to have an awkwardness about and with herself, but the July behind it is not comfortable with that*.
By contrast, I can imagine a younger Diane Keaton playing this role brilliantly, with all of the nervous energy, but actually being a credible - not just rather irritating and inadequate - Sophie. Is Keaton one of July's heroines? I'd be very surprised, if not...
End-notes
* Actually, it's a bit like Rapunzel - children might accept the story, and not think of the physics behind golden tresses being let down and the handsome suitor climbing up (which, by the way, is not the least of Marshall's charms, even if he is a bit Kirk Douglas - more Frog Prince than Prince Charming), whereas wiser heads can appreciate that she remains attached by her own to the tresses, and the whole of her, or it, will end up being pulled swiftly out of the tower window.
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22 November
A great director, an Allen, can write for him- or herself perfectly and bring it off.
Miranda July has created, in Sophie, something that she could not inhabit - yes, the character is meant to have an awkwardness about and with herself, but the July behind it is not comfortable with that*.
By contrast, I can imagine a younger Diane Keaton playing this role brilliantly, with all of the nervous energy, but actually being a credible - not just rather irritating and inadequate - Sophie. Is Keaton one of July's heroines? I'd be very surprised, if not...
End-notes
* Actually, it's a bit like Rapunzel - children might accept the story, and not think of the physics behind golden tresses being let down and the handsome suitor climbing up (which, by the way, is not the least of Marshall's charms, even if he is a bit Kirk Douglas - more Frog Prince than Prince Charming), whereas wiser heads can appreciate that she remains attached by her own to the tresses, and the whole of her, or it, will end up being pulled swiftly out of the tower window.
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Monday, 21 November 2011
The cat in The Future
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22 November
The cat in The Future
No, not what we will breed friends like my Molly to be, as I understood our Egyptian colleagues did some millennia back to give rise to her (with her red streak of tortoiseshell), but rather who gives Paw-Paw spoken words in this rather dismal no.
I am sure that someone claimed that it was Ms July - if only that didn't have connotations - but, at the same time, I recollect someone else having a credit :
Now that's, maybe, where I have been misled by the credits, as, now that I think of it, some animal actors have names that are indistinguishable in form from those of a human actor... I was, perhaps, looking at the form of Paw-Paw as shown in the only shot that I saw where he is not just animatronic, and not very convincing (in fact, it seemed like a pretty poor attempt to gloss over the failure to have engaged a co-operative animal actor, now that I think of it).
Can one rely on what IMDb tells us, in the absence of any desire to see this again? - or opportunity, as it lasted just two weeks at my cinema, from which I infer the lack of an audience (maybe 20 people watched it when I did, on its last day).
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Saturday, 19 November 2011
Thoughts arising from a programme note for the Dante Quartet
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20 November
I have not found a source, which means that I cannot put these words in context, but Dvorak (the accent on the ‘r’ will not reproduce, so I have also left that on the ‘a’) is often quoted as having written (and seemingly in English, as the form of the words does not differ):
To have a fine idea is nothing special. The idea comes of itself, and if it is fine and great, then that is not because of the person who has it. But to develop the idea well and make something great of it, that is the hardest part – that is art!
Well, obviously, for all the apparent modesty of saying that there is no merit in having ‘a fine idea’, there is an immense amount of self-congratulation in being able to employ ‘art’ in order ‘to develop the idea well’. (Besides which, Dvorak envisages the idea being ‘fine and great’ without that conferring any merit on the recipient, but then envisages, of the already great idea, ‘mak[ing] something great of it’, by ‘develop[ing it] well’: so is the idea great already, or is something great made of it?)
Dvorak seems also to miss out some other points in his enthusiasm for this argument that stresses art, i.e. his art as a composer:
1. Ideas may – indeed, I would say, are more likely to – come more often, or more easily, to someone who is or has become receptive to them. And if, which he must, as he is talking as a composer, he means musical material, then the notion of everyone being an equal participant in ‘hav[ing] a fine idea’ just does not stand up to inspection. I wager that it is not that members of the public in general are regularly having musical themes come to them, but simply then do not have the art to develop them and make them great – no, they do not think compositionally at all, and do not have such ideas.
2. If I am right, then having an idea is, after all, something to do with the person who has it. Whatever that receptivity may be, or consist in, it is not that people as a whole are having fine ideas all the time, but that they will probably come more often to those who make use of them – and whether they have made use of them well or ill may fall to be judged by someone else, even in Dvorak’s case.
3. In the case of the Diabelli Variations (or, properly, 33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op. 120), I cannot believe that anyone will seriously contend that what Beethoven did with what Diabelli composed did not transcend the original so as to make it inconceivable that its origins could have been so slight. Likewise, there are (not that the only great works are in variation form!) parts of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988, published as ‘an aria with diverse variations’) in which Bach transforms the source material, as if alchemically (Arnold Schering’s thesis that the aria is not the composer’s own theme appears discredited). Certainly support for the notion that ideas might come to those not best placed to develop them, but lesser musicians than Beethoven and Bach might still record them in cases where, if fine ideas came to all and sundry, they might be more likely, if we conceive of ideas in general, to die stillborn.
Dvorak is also recorded writing the following, in which I see scope for, if not necessarily antithesis, then synthesis:
As for my new Symphony, the F major String Quartet and the Quintet (composed here in Spillville – I should never have written these works ‘just so’ if I hadn’t seen America.
If there is something antithetical, it is in acknowledging that experience – here, having visited America, and, in particular, this enclave of immigrants from Czechoslovakia – has shaped the reception of ideas (unless Dvorak just means that his art of developing them was what was influenced), which appears at odds with saying that ‘To have a fine idea is nothing special’, and, I would say, supports arguing that receptivity may vary immensely, and also may well be capable of being cultivated.
There may be a capacity to have a fine idea, there may be a capacity to do something great with it – whether those capacities, on all occasions, are the same person’s may depend, but, almost certainly, it will be the judgement of others that may determine whether something great has been achieved, and will be a significant (but not the only) influence on its survival for other generations to value in their turn. (I am thinking, as I do so often, of Mendelssohn’s important championing, in his time, of works of Bach’s such as the Mass in B Minor (BWV 232), which, along with others that were rediscovered, we would now take for granted as being great, if not necessarily to our taste.)
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20 November
I have not found a source, which means that I cannot put these words in context, but Dvorak (the accent on the ‘r’ will not reproduce, so I have also left that on the ‘a’) is often quoted as having written (and seemingly in English, as the form of the words does not differ):
To have a fine idea is nothing special. The idea comes of itself, and if it is fine and great, then that is not because of the person who has it. But to develop the idea well and make something great of it, that is the hardest part – that is art!
Well, obviously, for all the apparent modesty of saying that there is no merit in having ‘a fine idea’, there is an immense amount of self-congratulation in being able to employ ‘art’ in order ‘to develop the idea well’. (Besides which, Dvorak envisages the idea being ‘fine and great’ without that conferring any merit on the recipient, but then envisages, of the already great idea, ‘mak[ing] something great of it’, by ‘develop[ing it] well’: so is the idea great already, or is something great made of it?)
Dvorak seems also to miss out some other points in his enthusiasm for this argument that stresses art, i.e. his art as a composer:
1. Ideas may – indeed, I would say, are more likely to – come more often, or more easily, to someone who is or has become receptive to them. And if, which he must, as he is talking as a composer, he means musical material, then the notion of everyone being an equal participant in ‘hav[ing] a fine idea’ just does not stand up to inspection. I wager that it is not that members of the public in general are regularly having musical themes come to them, but simply then do not have the art to develop them and make them great – no, they do not think compositionally at all, and do not have such ideas.
2. If I am right, then having an idea is, after all, something to do with the person who has it. Whatever that receptivity may be, or consist in, it is not that people as a whole are having fine ideas all the time, but that they will probably come more often to those who make use of them – and whether they have made use of them well or ill may fall to be judged by someone else, even in Dvorak’s case.
3. In the case of the Diabelli Variations (or, properly, 33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op. 120), I cannot believe that anyone will seriously contend that what Beethoven did with what Diabelli composed did not transcend the original so as to make it inconceivable that its origins could have been so slight. Likewise, there are (not that the only great works are in variation form!) parts of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988, published as ‘an aria with diverse variations’) in which Bach transforms the source material, as if alchemically (Arnold Schering’s thesis that the aria is not the composer’s own theme appears discredited). Certainly support for the notion that ideas might come to those not best placed to develop them, but lesser musicians than Beethoven and Bach might still record them in cases where, if fine ideas came to all and sundry, they might be more likely, if we conceive of ideas in general, to die stillborn.
Dvorak is also recorded writing the following, in which I see scope for, if not necessarily antithesis, then synthesis:
As for my new Symphony, the F major String Quartet and the Quintet (composed here in Spillville – I should never have written these works ‘just so’ if I hadn’t seen America.
If there is something antithetical, it is in acknowledging that experience – here, having visited America, and, in particular, this enclave of immigrants from Czechoslovakia – has shaped the reception of ideas (unless Dvorak just means that his art of developing them was what was influenced), which appears at odds with saying that ‘To have a fine idea is nothing special’, and, I would say, supports arguing that receptivity may vary immensely, and also may well be capable of being cultivated.
There may be a capacity to have a fine idea, there may be a capacity to do something great with it – whether those capacities, on all occasions, are the same person’s may depend, but, almost certainly, it will be the judgement of others that may determine whether something great has been achieved, and will be a significant (but not the only) influence on its survival for other generations to value in their turn. (I am thinking, as I do so often, of Mendelssohn’s important championing, in his time, of works of Bach’s such as the Mass in B Minor (BWV 232), which, along with others that were rediscovered, we would now take for granted as being great, if not necessarily to our taste.)
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Maybe more on Nicola Malet...
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 November 2011
My very impromptu little piece about Nicola Malet, written on the night that I visited her recent exhibition, seemed to attract such interest that I am inclined to see whether she would like me to feature an interview with her, or a longer look at her work.
(As I told Nicola, I had hoped to create something along the lines of the latter whilst the show was still on, but proved to need to devote myself to an extended piece about Woody Allen's 45 years in film, which is due to come out soon in a special publication from New Empress Magazine.)
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 November 2011
My very impromptu little piece about Nicola Malet, written on the night that I visited her recent exhibition, seemed to attract such interest that I am inclined to see whether she would like me to feature an interview with her, or a longer look at her work.
(As I told Nicola, I had hoped to create something along the lines of the latter whilst the show was still on, but proved to need to devote myself to an extended piece about Woody Allen's 45 years in film, which is due to come out soon in a special publication from New Empress Magazine.)
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How does a film work?
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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20 November
Well, when it works, you don't need to ask: not that there's any real magic involved, just movie magic, where something has been put together with care.
When it doesn't work, the holes leap out at you, because the thing doesn't bear thinking about coherently - if the music and fast action have just dazzled you, there is still time for reflection - if the plot has taken you somewhere where you weren't convinced to go, you will know why later.
OK, so getting back to The Future, who has time for a couple of 35-year-olds who glibly reckon that, if the next five-year period is taken up with caring for a cat, they will then be 40, which is effectively just 50, which is effectively just decline, decay and death? For this analysis, dismissive of the rest of their lives (except, of course, the month remaining before they collect the cat), is so assinine that:
(a) It can't be the supporting premise for everything else that happens (let alone our believing that they treat it as one)*;
(b) What happens, in Jason's part of it at least, proves him (factually) wrong; and
(c) If anyone should have been given this denial to deliver that they have any future, Miranda July should have given it to her own character, Sophie, as Jason is a little more knowing and less likely to utter such nonsense.
Unfortunately for these two, only Sophie appears to have any friends (or family), she only appears to have two, and they seem as poor at contacting her as she them (although Jason does mention their names at least twice, which is helpful when they do make a brief appearance - too late). July may not have deliberately plotted this, but their 'experiment with living' can then happen in a vacuum: starved the oxygen of publicity, it deserved to die.
Oh, and two things about the cat / veterinary centre:
(1) In these days of concern for humane treatment, so many such places carry out at least home visits, if not other assessments, prior to 'adoption';
(2) But maybe this one, which cares so little for a cat that has been waiting with it for a month for an injury to heal (and yet the cat still has the bandage on its paw), is therefore quite content, as it advertised*, to exterminate the animal that it has housed (at whose cost?) for all that time when those due to collect it do not turn up until a day later? - or can they not afford the cost of a telephone call or e-mail (but can that of the necessary euthanasia injection)?
*For me, these starred items are just the scars of lazy film-making, of July wanting Sophie to have an affair with Marshall without being troubled to come up with any - or any convincing - scenario.
Let alone her taking the step of calling a number that she expertly reads upside-down, which may be a charming non sequitur, but then why bother with making the cat out to be the impetus for all of this?
In fact, I almost wish I had bothered to watch Revolutionary Road...
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20 November
Well, when it works, you don't need to ask: not that there's any real magic involved, just movie magic, where something has been put together with care.
When it doesn't work, the holes leap out at you, because the thing doesn't bear thinking about coherently - if the music and fast action have just dazzled you, there is still time for reflection - if the plot has taken you somewhere where you weren't convinced to go, you will know why later.
OK, so getting back to The Future, who has time for a couple of 35-year-olds who glibly reckon that, if the next five-year period is taken up with caring for a cat, they will then be 40, which is effectively just 50, which is effectively just decline, decay and death? For this analysis, dismissive of the rest of their lives (except, of course, the month remaining before they collect the cat), is so assinine that:
(a) It can't be the supporting premise for everything else that happens (let alone our believing that they treat it as one)*;
(b) What happens, in Jason's part of it at least, proves him (factually) wrong; and
(c) If anyone should have been given this denial to deliver that they have any future, Miranda July should have given it to her own character, Sophie, as Jason is a little more knowing and less likely to utter such nonsense.
Unfortunately for these two, only Sophie appears to have any friends (or family), she only appears to have two, and they seem as poor at contacting her as she them (although Jason does mention their names at least twice, which is helpful when they do make a brief appearance - too late). July may not have deliberately plotted this, but their 'experiment with living' can then happen in a vacuum: starved the oxygen of publicity, it deserved to die.
Oh, and two things about the cat / veterinary centre:
(1) In these days of concern for humane treatment, so many such places carry out at least home visits, if not other assessments, prior to 'adoption';
(2) But maybe this one, which cares so little for a cat that has been waiting with it for a month for an injury to heal (and yet the cat still has the bandage on its paw), is therefore quite content, as it advertised*, to exterminate the animal that it has housed (at whose cost?) for all that time when those due to collect it do not turn up until a day later? - or can they not afford the cost of a telephone call or e-mail (but can that of the necessary euthanasia injection)?
*For me, these starred items are just the scars of lazy film-making, of July wanting Sophie to have an affair with Marshall without being troubled to come up with any - or any convincing - scenario.
Let alone her taking the step of calling a number that she expertly reads upside-down, which may be a charming non sequitur, but then why bother with making the cat out to be the impetus for all of this?
In fact, I almost wish I had bothered to watch Revolutionary Road...
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Beckettt, the alleged adherent to Buddhist thought
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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19 November 2011
Brought to you from where I posted the review on Amazon*:
One academic writer, supposed to be an authority on Beckettt's work (see my review of one of his books, Beckettt and Eros), finds - or claims to find - deep Buddhist thought, philosophy, and probably even practice in it.
I wonder if he has considered Waiting for Godot in the following way...
The play has five characters, six if you include the named, waited for and talked-about Godot, who, we are told, has sent the last of them to appear (the Boy) to Vladimir (also known as Didi) and Estragon (also known as Gogo - the full name is the French one for tarragon), who have been (one, then the other) on stage from the start, and almost without break throughout the two Acts (although the end of both is, crucially, different - please see below).
The remaining two characters, Pozzo and Lucky (the atter is also known as 'pig', 'hog', 'scum', and a number of other offensive names, by Pozzo) arrive together, halfway through each Act, but seem mightily changed between them: in fact, we actually have no direct way of knowing how time passes, in this timeless and largely featureless space that keeps the characters in it or draws them to it (or through it), such as these two.
Pozzo is grand, pretentious even, and certainly cruel. However, he may not actually have the power either in the place where we see him, or in the relationship beyond his transit of these lands with the other man, Lucky. (At one point, Pozzo asserts or implies (but he alleges many things that we cannot verify) that this is his part of his land). Even so, he openly abuses Lucky before us, whilst - in the phrase used by another Beckettt writer to describe a scene of reported dialogue in the earlier novel Watt - often employing a 'language of bizarre civility', as well as some of the accompanying manners / mannerisms. His cruelty draws out that, alluded to earlier in speech largely, of Vladimir and Estragon, too.
Beckettt calls Waiting for Godot 'a tragicomedy (in two acts)', but it is often played for pure comedy, which jars with the obvious brutality and unpleasantness of what human beings (Didi (or Gogo) pronounces that 'People are bloody ignorant apes!') do to pass the time when bored, but have to be somewhere.
Are we, perhaps, reminded of the random torture that SS officers and the concentration camps gave rise to (this play was first performed in around 1953 in what had been Nazi-occupied Paris, and Beckettt, who had served in the French resistance - is this where the references (shared by the contemporary novel Molloly) to beatings during the night by an unspecified 'they' come from?), would have had some bitter experiences / memories of the recent war.
After Pozzo and Lucky leave the stage (for the first Act), there is an exchange between the Didi and Gogo that their appearance had passed the time. The retort is that it would have passed anyway, replied to by agreement, but that it would not have passed as quickly.
Another exchange is:
What keeps us here?
The dialogue.
Ah.
This is a play of quick wits, and comments and counter-comments batted back and forth, and one character (probably Estragon) is asked whether he cannot 'return the ball once in a while'.
As has been said, Pozzo and Lucky return, much changed, in Act II - Lucky, who was loquacious on demand, is, if not mute, then does not 'think' for us again on stage as he did before, and Pozzo - we are told, anyway - is blind (so now led by his Lucky, whom he could previously lead before, and jerk quite cruelly to the ground by his rope). Yet Vivien Mercier, another Beckettt 'crrritic' (from when Gogo and Didi decide to play the game of orally abusing each other) trying to be clever, described the play as nothing happening - twice.
When had Act I been? Whenever it was, the title-page to Act II tells us: 'Next Day. Same Time. Same Place.' And this is where the Buddhism trail comes in more clearly: only Vladimir remembers - and does not (really) doubt remembering - Pozzo and Lucky from Act I, but there is scant or no recognition or recollection on the part of the other three (four, when we include the Boy - please see below). He knows that they passed this way the day before, and is appalled at the change (the Buddhist doctrine of and teaching on the transience of all things?), but all the rest muddle through.
Of them all, if he could see this for what it is, he could break through the unreality of life, of striving, of searching after the wrong things, whereas they are locked in it, so busy, seemingly, living these frantic and tortured lives that they have both little self-awareness (a step on the Buddhist path to acquire it). Since they cannot capture the keys and clues to reality, they struggle, battle and scrape on, as if that struggle, battle and scraping, rather than rejecting it as meaningless, is the essence of life, of what life is.
As things stand, Vladimir is doomed to be trying to remind others of their own (past) lives. (This play can, it is argued, be seen as a presentation of a (potential) voyage towards enlightenment - whereas people seeing the play may think that it is for their entertainment (distracting them from life), which is a further distraction, this time from what the narrative thrust (yes, Professor Mercier - there is one!) of the play is trying to focus on.) For he does not twig (yet?) what it means. So this includes interacting with the Boy, who comes (alone, and to him alone) at the end to apologize that Godot will not come that day (after all).
The Boy, as has been seen with the others, has no knowledge that he came at the end of Act I in the same way. In consequence of that, and because Vladimir only knows how to respond by just being frustrated that even this young being is blighted and trapped by not even remembering his own life, he lashes out, orally and physically, against a weaker force, with the brutal streak that we have witnessed - with a shudder? (although Lucky seemed weak, subservient, and capable of being picked on, in Act I, he proved not to be wholly so) - most clearly when Pozzo and he are on the stage.
The play does not end, though, with the frightened Boy running off the stage at what the stage-directions call Vladimir's 'sudden violence' (a contrast both to the placidity of this scene, and to the previous encounter in Act I (although Estragon did then briefly participate, laying hands on the Boy, and accusing him of lying before Vladimir intervenes). It is Didi and Gogo, again, hoping and fearing for another day, for hanging themselves, if they bring some rope, and that maybe Godot will come then, after all, and (they do not specify how) 'We'll be saved'.
Yet the words with which he has, two pages back in the text, heralded trying to grab for the Boy (as Estragon had done in Act I), and sent him running off instead, should ring in our ears:
You're sure you saw me, you won't come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!
He wants, at this stage to be witnessed, to be credited with existing and having existed in relation to another, but needs to let go. His search is for something else. Lewis Carroll had another faith, but wrote (for Isa Bowman, a child friend like the more famous Alice):
Is all our life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?
Bowed to the ground with bitter woe
Or laughing at some raree-show
We flutter idly, to and fro
Man's little day in haste we spend
And, from its merry noontide, send
To glance to meet the bitter end
End-notes
* A kind person called M. McCartney was moved to add the following comment (on 9 March (2012)):
Fascinating review, well worth following up. But who is the academic you mention, and what is the Buddhist Beckett book? I looked in your reviews, but it isn't there.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
19 November 2011
Brought to you from where I posted the review on Amazon*:
One academic writer, supposed to be an authority on Beckettt's work (see my review of one of his books, Beckettt and Eros), finds - or claims to find - deep Buddhist thought, philosophy, and probably even practice in it.
I wonder if he has considered Waiting for Godot in the following way...
The play has five characters, six if you include the named, waited for and talked-about Godot, who, we are told, has sent the last of them to appear (the Boy) to Vladimir (also known as Didi) and Estragon (also known as Gogo - the full name is the French one for tarragon), who have been (one, then the other) on stage from the start, and almost without break throughout the two Acts (although the end of both is, crucially, different - please see below).
The remaining two characters, Pozzo and Lucky (the atter is also known as 'pig', 'hog', 'scum', and a number of other offensive names, by Pozzo) arrive together, halfway through each Act, but seem mightily changed between them: in fact, we actually have no direct way of knowing how time passes, in this timeless and largely featureless space that keeps the characters in it or draws them to it (or through it), such as these two.
Pozzo is grand, pretentious even, and certainly cruel. However, he may not actually have the power either in the place where we see him, or in the relationship beyond his transit of these lands with the other man, Lucky. (At one point, Pozzo asserts or implies (but he alleges many things that we cannot verify) that this is his part of his land). Even so, he openly abuses Lucky before us, whilst - in the phrase used by another Beckettt writer to describe a scene of reported dialogue in the earlier novel Watt - often employing a 'language of bizarre civility', as well as some of the accompanying manners / mannerisms. His cruelty draws out that, alluded to earlier in speech largely, of Vladimir and Estragon, too.
Beckettt calls Waiting for Godot 'a tragicomedy (in two acts)', but it is often played for pure comedy, which jars with the obvious brutality and unpleasantness of what human beings (Didi (or Gogo) pronounces that 'People are bloody ignorant apes!') do to pass the time when bored, but have to be somewhere.
Are we, perhaps, reminded of the random torture that SS officers and the concentration camps gave rise to (this play was first performed in around 1953 in what had been Nazi-occupied Paris, and Beckettt, who had served in the French resistance - is this where the references (shared by the contemporary novel Molloly) to beatings during the night by an unspecified 'they' come from?), would have had some bitter experiences / memories of the recent war.
After Pozzo and Lucky leave the stage (for the first Act), there is an exchange between the Didi and Gogo that their appearance had passed the time. The retort is that it would have passed anyway, replied to by agreement, but that it would not have passed as quickly.
Another exchange is:
What keeps us here?
The dialogue.
Ah.
This is a play of quick wits, and comments and counter-comments batted back and forth, and one character (probably Estragon) is asked whether he cannot 'return the ball once in a while'.
As has been said, Pozzo and Lucky return, much changed, in Act II - Lucky, who was loquacious on demand, is, if not mute, then does not 'think' for us again on stage as he did before, and Pozzo - we are told, anyway - is blind (so now led by his Lucky, whom he could previously lead before, and jerk quite cruelly to the ground by his rope). Yet Vivien Mercier, another Beckettt 'crrritic' (from when Gogo and Didi decide to play the game of orally abusing each other) trying to be clever, described the play as nothing happening - twice.
When had Act I been? Whenever it was, the title-page to Act II tells us: 'Next Day. Same Time. Same Place.' And this is where the Buddhism trail comes in more clearly: only Vladimir remembers - and does not (really) doubt remembering - Pozzo and Lucky from Act I, but there is scant or no recognition or recollection on the part of the other three (four, when we include the Boy - please see below). He knows that they passed this way the day before, and is appalled at the change (the Buddhist doctrine of and teaching on the transience of all things?), but all the rest muddle through.
Of them all, if he could see this for what it is, he could break through the unreality of life, of striving, of searching after the wrong things, whereas they are locked in it, so busy, seemingly, living these frantic and tortured lives that they have both little self-awareness (a step on the Buddhist path to acquire it). Since they cannot capture the keys and clues to reality, they struggle, battle and scrape on, as if that struggle, battle and scraping, rather than rejecting it as meaningless, is the essence of life, of what life is.
As things stand, Vladimir is doomed to be trying to remind others of their own (past) lives. (This play can, it is argued, be seen as a presentation of a (potential) voyage towards enlightenment - whereas people seeing the play may think that it is for their entertainment (distracting them from life), which is a further distraction, this time from what the narrative thrust (yes, Professor Mercier - there is one!) of the play is trying to focus on.) For he does not twig (yet?) what it means. So this includes interacting with the Boy, who comes (alone, and to him alone) at the end to apologize that Godot will not come that day (after all).
The Boy, as has been seen with the others, has no knowledge that he came at the end of Act I in the same way. In consequence of that, and because Vladimir only knows how to respond by just being frustrated that even this young being is blighted and trapped by not even remembering his own life, he lashes out, orally and physically, against a weaker force, with the brutal streak that we have witnessed - with a shudder? (although Lucky seemed weak, subservient, and capable of being picked on, in Act I, he proved not to be wholly so) - most clearly when Pozzo and he are on the stage.
The play does not end, though, with the frightened Boy running off the stage at what the stage-directions call Vladimir's 'sudden violence' (a contrast both to the placidity of this scene, and to the previous encounter in Act I (although Estragon did then briefly participate, laying hands on the Boy, and accusing him of lying before Vladimir intervenes). It is Didi and Gogo, again, hoping and fearing for another day, for hanging themselves, if they bring some rope, and that maybe Godot will come then, after all, and (they do not specify how) 'We'll be saved'.
Yet the words with which he has, two pages back in the text, heralded trying to grab for the Boy (as Estragon had done in Act I), and sent him running off instead, should ring in our ears:
You're sure you saw me, you won't come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!
He wants, at this stage to be witnessed, to be credited with existing and having existed in relation to another, but needs to let go. His search is for something else. Lewis Carroll had another faith, but wrote (for Isa Bowman, a child friend like the more famous Alice):
Is all our life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?
Bowed to the ground with bitter woe
Or laughing at some raree-show
We flutter idly, to and fro
Man's little day in haste we spend
And, from its merry noontide, send
To glance to meet the bitter end
End-notes
* A kind person called M. McCartney was moved to add the following comment (on 9 March (2012)):
Fascinating review, well worth following up. But who is the academic you mention, and what is the Buddhist Beckett book? I looked in your reviews, but it isn't there.
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Thursday, 17 November 2011
IS this The Future?
Writing about The Future (2011) is / as post-trauma therapy
More views of – or after – Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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18 November
* Contains spoilers *
Writing about The Future (2011) is / as post-trauma therapy
One should be wary of having expectations of any film, based on a write-up in the cinema, or even a trailer.
Amy told me that the cat narrated the film, but that it was all right, when I said that such a thing could be dreadful. Thankfully, it did not narrate any more than its own part, in a slightly soporific – or perhaps just lingeringly slow – way, a little reminiscent of Miranda July’s own speech-patterns. (It is supposed to have lived on the streets, and dreaded the nights, but it just seemed like a perfectly likeable and well-adjusted tabby to me.)
If July’s character Sophie or that of Jason, the man with whom she lives, were not regular partakers of illicit substances, which I guess would not be shown in a film rated 12A, it would be surprising. The way that it showed these people, both wedded to their Apple laptops as they shared the sofa from opposite ends, and with Jason saying that he was just getting comfortable, when invited by Sophie to bring a glass of water, was telling: it seemed that neither of them wanted to do anything for the other that did not have to be done.
Four initial elements, which are dwelt on, are where ‘the development’ starts: the cat, which cannot be picked up until 26 April, by when its injured paw should be healed, and, as they are told when they go to collect it, they euthanize at the clinic; the drawing of a child and her pet, which Jason buys for Sophie when he talk to the girl, and then her father (who drew it), at the rescue centre; Jason’s claimed ability to stop time; and Sophie’s secret friend in the form of a sweat-shirt, bearing the legend C’est la nuit, which would not endear her to the cat.
They had gathered that the cat would be with them for just six months, but I missed the very opening, unless this was just Paw-Paw narrating in the dark (which does not make for easily finding a seat). The short-term reward is seemingly part of what attracts the couple to adopting the cat, but when they learn that, with good carers, the cat could live for five or six years, their balance is thrown, nay their whole lives (and let’s suspend disbelief as to what they would have been told before). It’s as if, perhaps reasonably, they are too meek to say that they cannot make a commitment of that length to the cat, and too caring just to leave it until 27 (or 28) April to collect it.
So the premise is that they must not waste time and make the most of the intervening month (four weeks ?), which, Jason reckons is the only worthwhile part of their lives left. After they have both left their jobs, it paralyses Sophie, and leads Jason into searching for patterns (which he duly finds), but, with very little self-knowledge (neither character possesses it – the cat can tell us more about who it is, what it thinks, and why), she dismisses the sweat-shirt from her entourage for not helping her inability with a self-imposed project for which she does not seem the ideal candidate, and, finding numbers on the back of the drawing, contacts Marshall, who made it.
When Sophie has done more with her time sexually then Jason, who spends it at the house of a man from whom he bought a hair-dryer (seemingly, Sophie and Jason did not have one), Jason invokes his power of stopping time to prevent her telling him about Marshall. He talks to the moon (who sounded a lot like Sophie’s lover), who tells Jason what the changing date is: the moon is not female, as we might think, or changeable, but powerless, and fixed as a full moon).
With everything halted outside, Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor seems an obvious inspiration, but I wonder whether Superman stopping the earth turning and sending it backwards to save Lois Lane is a stronger one, though without the hero’s supreme effort and emotion. July gives us an image of a world that is frozen, until Jason goes to the ocean and assists the moon, by breaking the waves (it does not bear thinking what the moon should have to do with this).
This is not really Jason’s motivation, but to rescue the cat – the moon tells him that there are a few hours left of 26 April, but, after the trip to the beach, Paw-Paw is nonetheless not rescued in time on 27 April. Paw-Paw tells us how waiting became death in the cage (not quite my understanding of how pet animals are put down), and concepts such as ‘I’ ceased to exist as he came to bathe and rejoice in the light.
An ambiguous reunion occurs when Sophie looks out Jason, and he offers her nothing, which she accepts; he also offers for her to stay the night and then leave for good; she seems to have longer than that – Time itself has become rather ambivalent – and maybe they will drift on together. (Equally, she could go back to Marshall.) Perhaps they, too, will come to the comfort of which Paw-Paw talks.
The dilemma is whether this film was bound to be what it was, or could have offered me something else in ‘a last-ditch bid to taste freedom’, which depends on an artificial countdown (except for Paw-Paw’s continued existence). Obviously, people do end up having affairs on a rather slight basis, and perhaps Sophie’s is about what she can still do and is more of a revelation to her. (If, that is, one doesn’t suppose that something must have happened in the 31 years before she met Jason, though maybe his way of being with her has knocked her faith in herself.)
In any case, she is suspicious of him being happy when she is not; he wants to hold time where it is and see if he can prevent her revealing her infidelity – although he knows with whom and must know what. As I said, both of them seem only to be prepared to do for the other what has to be done. As, from memory, one of my favourite group’s Ezio’s, songs says (and maybe some of these songs say a whole lot more in five minutes than in ninety):
You only share the things you don’t own
Makes me fear that you’ll be forever alone
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Saturday, 12 November 2011
The shakes and Melancholia
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
13 November
I have already made a couple of postings about this film. However, there is something reassuring about seeing one's views echoed in print.
In my first response, http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.com/2011/10/gravity-levity-or-some-more-middling.html, I commented on the camerawork, so I was drawn to a letter about Melancholia called 'A pan too far', which appeared in December's issue of Sight & Sound.
It is from a correspondent in Tenterden, and I quote the relevant part (the edit is a comment about film-makers in general using this practice of hand-held cinematography):
But what is it with this handheld camera stuff? [...] I found the first half of the film quite dificult to watch as the extreme fast panning and wobbling of the frame made me feel quite dizzy. I can understand the representation of manic-depressive urgency that came over as a result, but I do feel rather glad that the film was not showing in IMAX!
It is unclear whether Mr Bruce's concern was for others who might have seen it projected in that way, or relief that he had not, but his point was well made:
I did not see the need to be made anxious to understand another's anxiety, not least since it is my experience that being anxious inhibits one's ability to empathize with someone else's feelings.
However, Mr Bruce also found:
The opening sequence with Wagner's music was quite thrilling, evoking memories of 2001.
I do not disagree about being reminded of Kubrik's film and how it used the tone-poem of Richard Strauss, but I also thought how monumental Kubrik's use had made a piece that had not previously been much known, and now Also Sprach Zarathustra automatically has connotations of the vastness of space and man in it.
The Wagner, by comparison, already has well-established connotations of grand Germanic and even Nordic mythology, and it still seems to me that they were being appropriated, rather than the pure music itself. To my mind, this part of Wagner's canon is too well known for a use such as Kubrik made in 2001 or even, much later, in Eyes Wide Shut.
The link that I see between the music and camerawork is as if the director is saying:
I want to make my images in the opening music seem grand, so I will use imposing music to import that quality. I want the scenes at the wedding to seem as awkward as possible, so I will use camerawork that impinges viscerally on the viewers' senses to unsettle them and so cause them to share the sense of unease in an extreme way.
So is that legitimate - as a critique, or as a director's prerogative to use what is available?
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13 November
I have already made a couple of postings about this film. However, there is something reassuring about seeing one's views echoed in print.
In my first response, http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.com/2011/10/gravity-levity-or-some-more-middling.html, I commented on the camerawork, so I was drawn to a letter about Melancholia called 'A pan too far', which appeared in December's issue of Sight & Sound.
It is from a correspondent in Tenterden, and I quote the relevant part (the edit is a comment about film-makers in general using this practice of hand-held cinematography):
But what is it with this handheld camera stuff? [...] I found the first half of the film quite dificult to watch as the extreme fast panning and wobbling of the frame made me feel quite dizzy. I can understand the representation of manic-depressive urgency that came over as a result, but I do feel rather glad that the film was not showing in IMAX!
It is unclear whether Mr Bruce's concern was for others who might have seen it projected in that way, or relief that he had not, but his point was well made:
I did not see the need to be made anxious to understand another's anxiety, not least since it is my experience that being anxious inhibits one's ability to empathize with someone else's feelings.
However, Mr Bruce also found:
The opening sequence with Wagner's music was quite thrilling, evoking memories of 2001.
I do not disagree about being reminded of Kubrik's film and how it used the tone-poem of Richard Strauss, but I also thought how monumental Kubrik's use had made a piece that had not previously been much known, and now Also Sprach Zarathustra automatically has connotations of the vastness of space and man in it.
The Wagner, by comparison, already has well-established connotations of grand Germanic and even Nordic mythology, and it still seems to me that they were being appropriated, rather than the pure music itself. To my mind, this part of Wagner's canon is too well known for a use such as Kubrik made in 2001 or even, much later, in Eyes Wide Shut.
The link that I see between the music and camerawork is as if the director is saying:
I want to make my images in the opening music seem grand, so I will use imposing music to import that quality. I want the scenes at the wedding to seem as awkward as possible, so I will use camerawork that impinges viscerally on the viewers' senses to unsettle them and so cause them to share the sense of unease in an extreme way.
So is that legitimate - as a critique, or as a director's prerogative to use what is available?
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