More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
13 October
There's a rather strange review / account of The Turner Prize entries in The Telegraph (at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/turner-prize/9578907/Turner-Prize-2012-Tate-Britain-review.html).
Strange in that, when Luke Fowler has a film 'about' R. D. Laing, the writer (Richard Dorment) takes issue with Laing himself, what he represented and advocated, and how he was discredited for his theories, and one 'wrong-headed belief' (about schizophrenia)in particular.
Dorment says not only that Laing could be 'self-aggrandising' and 'pretentious', but also 'compassionate' and 'articulate', once he has finished talking, perhaps with less knowledge than he believes, about medications such as lithium and Prozac, neither of which would have done much, if anything, for Laing's core patients.
Far be it from me to say whether one should watch Fowler's film, but Dorment leaves himself precious little space in which to make comments that might inform such a view. Such description as there is leaves one not knowing whether this is a film with an arty feel (as another Telegraph critic felt), or a work of art, nor even, whichever it is, whether it is any good. Just as well Ronnie left the stage earlier...
On which more here.
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Friday, 12 October 2012
Catalan strand
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13 October (updated 25 October)
By way of an an announcement, I want to write next about four more Catalan films that were kindly brought (along with V.O.S. (2009), already reviewed) to the festival this year, which I am sure was a very good and also well-received initiative, The Body in the Woods (1996), Warsaw Bridge (1989), and The Night Elvis Died (2010). And I nearly forgot to say Black Bread (2010).
What I can say now is that, to write effectively about the middle of these three, I would really need to see it again, whereas the other three are clear in my mind. That said, I have less to say about the first, and would prefer to concentrate on the other two.
Regarding Warsaw Bridge (1989), it came as a surprise to me (although subliminally I recognized the connection, in the festival programme, when making this one of my selections), that the prize-winning book (of the same name) within was one of the landmarks from a stay booked at a hotel in the former East when I visited Berlin seven years ago, meaning that I was so many stops before, probably, the omnipresent Friedrichstraße.
However, rather than self-psychoanalyse why I can retrieve only the ending (which solved a mystery), and, vaguely, a slightly evasive acceptance speech or press questions from the award-holder at a busy reception around a pool at night, it is better to seek out a copy to fill in the gaps, and to talk about Body. We were told that it was a sort of Catalan Twin Peaks, which was something that, for not having followed it, only helped me vaguely.
It turned out to be not quite what it presented itself to be, an investigation into a crime, but rather the manipulation of evidence, gender and even human remains in a self-interested and alarmingly corrupt way. That said, that revelation came after an immensely slow-burn, and after a string of people, who at first denied that they knew anything (or more than what they said), collapsed under the real or imagined threat of violence (or other penalty) made by the woman lieutenant: it felt like too much of a deferral, not to mention a massive misdirection, to merit the hoped-for pay-off.
Not just that, but that the depiction of events, whether in recall or in real time, made no especial use of the resource of film as a medium (as against t.v.), and so seemed rather prosaic, as if not made for cinema. A good piece of work, but not, for my money, in the same inventive league as, say, V.O.S., in being for and of film per se.
As for the films that remain, Elvis now has a review, as does Bread.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
13 October (updated 25 October)
By way of an an announcement, I want to write next about four more Catalan films that were kindly brought (along with V.O.S. (2009), already reviewed) to the festival this year, which I am sure was a very good and also well-received initiative, The Body in the Woods (1996), Warsaw Bridge (1989), and The Night Elvis Died (2010). And I nearly forgot to say Black Bread (2010).
What I can say now is that, to write effectively about the middle of these three, I would really need to see it again, whereas the other three are clear in my mind. That said, I have less to say about the first, and would prefer to concentrate on the other two.
Regarding Warsaw Bridge (1989), it came as a surprise to me (although subliminally I recognized the connection, in the festival programme, when making this one of my selections), that the prize-winning book (of the same name) within was one of the landmarks from a stay booked at a hotel in the former East when I visited Berlin seven years ago, meaning that I was so many stops before, probably, the omnipresent Friedrichstraße.
However, rather than self-psychoanalyse why I can retrieve only the ending (which solved a mystery), and, vaguely, a slightly evasive acceptance speech or press questions from the award-holder at a busy reception around a pool at night, it is better to seek out a copy to fill in the gaps, and to talk about Body. We were told that it was a sort of Catalan Twin Peaks, which was something that, for not having followed it, only helped me vaguely.
It turned out to be not quite what it presented itself to be, an investigation into a crime, but rather the manipulation of evidence, gender and even human remains in a self-interested and alarmingly corrupt way. That said, that revelation came after an immensely slow-burn, and after a string of people, who at first denied that they knew anything (or more than what they said), collapsed under the real or imagined threat of violence (or other penalty) made by the woman lieutenant: it felt like too much of a deferral, not to mention a massive misdirection, to merit the hoped-for pay-off.
Not just that, but that the depiction of events, whether in recall or in real time, made no especial use of the resource of film as a medium (as against t.v.), and so seemed rather prosaic, as if not made for cinema. A good piece of work, but not, for my money, in the same inventive league as, say, V.O.S., in being for and of film per se.
As for the films that remain, Elvis now has a review, as does Bread.
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Batsqueak
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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12 October
Right now, I would edit a Wikipedia® page to say this:
Contrary to popular reckoning, a batsqueak is not a term for a noise emitted by one of our webbed, flying foes, but a sheer yoking together of words heard often enough together in the pretence that it is a noun.
Essentially, such things used to be done, at wearisome length (Finnegans Wake !), by Jimmy Joyce, but even he gave up on it, and the whole practice has only been resurrected by the secret Brethren of Bradshawites, who invoke it in the hope that you'll be so dazed that you do not twig that they have not, behind all this mucking around, got anything of any sense to contribute.
This entry is a stub - you can help make it a complete Bradshaw's by donating $10
Pipsqueak, anyone?
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
12 October
Right now, I would edit a Wikipedia® page to say this:
Contrary to popular reckoning, a batsqueak is not a term for a noise emitted by one of our webbed, flying foes, but a sheer yoking together of words heard often enough together in the pretence that it is a noun.
Essentially, such things used to be done, at wearisome length (Finnegans Wake !), by Jimmy Joyce, but even he gave up on it, and the whole practice has only been resurrected by the secret Brethren of Bradshawites, who invoke it in the hope that you'll be so dazed that you do not twig that they have not, behind all this mucking around, got anything of any sense to contribute.
This entry is a stub - you can help make it a complete Bradshaw's by donating $10
Pipsqueak, anyone?
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Thursday, 11 October 2012
From my week's post
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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12 October
I share the following, largely self-contained, item of correspondence from one of my parishioners :
Dear Apsley
I am a little uncertain what to make of the Rector's letter in the latest edition of the magazine for the group of parishes, and wanted to seek your advice.
In the past, the Rector has made references to other cultural matters, such as the coronation (and the words said during part of the service) or a piece of music, but always as a way of bringing 'the conversation around' to Biblical principles and the Christian life. (Mention of things in nature and the like may have been made with the same intention.)
However, in a recent magazine, he talked a lot about poetry and only, almost as an afterthrought, put in any sort of message that you might expect, in the circumstances, from an ordained minister. This time, he seems to have forgotten about why he is writing entirely.
Having begun by talking about the history of the pastoral tradition, halfway through he quotes two quatrains from the six-stanza poem 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Love' by Marlowe (and, knowing other work of that writer, it would be a stretch to imagine that he had any other shepherd of the flock in mind here). The language of the rest of the poem is described, and the whole thing ends up like an exercise - perhaps not even a very good one - in literary appreciation, not a letter from a Rector, but someone using a sixteenth-century text to make loose, general observations about village life.
I have always read these letters in the past, but, if this is to be the type of generalized observation that I can expect from now on, which does not even attempt to consider a spiritual dimension or another moral viewpoint, I feel reluctant to continue.
Do you have any thoughts?
Yours, &c.
Herbaceous P. Crubb
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
12 October
I share the following, largely self-contained, item of correspondence from one of my parishioners :
Dear Apsley
I am a little uncertain what to make of the Rector's letter in the latest edition of the magazine for the group of parishes, and wanted to seek your advice.
In the past, the Rector has made references to other cultural matters, such as the coronation (and the words said during part of the service) or a piece of music, but always as a way of bringing 'the conversation around' to Biblical principles and the Christian life. (Mention of things in nature and the like may have been made with the same intention.)
However, in a recent magazine, he talked a lot about poetry and only, almost as an afterthrought, put in any sort of message that you might expect, in the circumstances, from an ordained minister. This time, he seems to have forgotten about why he is writing entirely.
Having begun by talking about the history of the pastoral tradition, halfway through he quotes two quatrains from the six-stanza poem 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Love' by Marlowe (and, knowing other work of that writer, it would be a stretch to imagine that he had any other shepherd of the flock in mind here). The language of the rest of the poem is described, and the whole thing ends up like an exercise - perhaps not even a very good one - in literary appreciation, not a letter from a Rector, but someone using a sixteenth-century text to make loose, general observations about village life.
I have always read these letters in the past, but, if this is to be the type of generalized observation that I can expect from now on, which does not even attempt to consider a spiritual dimension or another moral viewpoint, I feel reluctant to continue.
Do you have any thoughts?
Yours, &c.
Herbaceous P. Crubb
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A Tweet review I
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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That was a Tweet that I couldn't trawl through Splatter to find (I found), so got it on Google® instead...
I need to say a little more about this, in another posting.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
The Idiot (2011) pares Dostoyevsky's story down to essentials, but, by fully realizing key scenes in a stylized universe, hints at the whole
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 12, 2012
That was a Tweet that I couldn't trawl through Splatter to find (I found), so got it on Google® instead...
I need to say a little more about this, in another posting.
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Kraken crake
This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)
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12 October
This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)
* Contains spoilers *
Two admissions, which ruin my credibility forever:
(1) I declined the opportunity to see The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) because I had no wish to follow the journeys of an early Che - he could have been an early Woody Allen and it would have made no difference to the fact that, if I want a travel documentary (in the case of somewhere where I am not going to go), I will watch Michael Palin's antics, and I see the concept of a film rather differently. (As I did not see the film, obviously I do not know for sure what I missed. Accepted.)
(2) I have never read On the Road (let alone any of Kerouac's other writings), though, when I decided to get around reviewing the film, which a friend and I saw, largely through his desire to do so, at Cambridge Film Festival, I looked out my copy of it. Therefore, anything that I find to quote from it will be just that - a phrase or passage that I find when flicking through it.
I also have some insights about Jack K. from my friend, who has read it and more, namely the close identity between the narrators of these works and JK himself.
As the credits for On the Road (2012) tell you, scenery through which we are supposed to be following various travellers on various journeys is nowhere near where it was shot, but in another part of the States (or of Canada). Yes, unconvincingly London passes for Paris in the dire Bel Ami (2012) (quite apart from what we see in The Third Man (1949) or Amadeus (1984)), but that almost makes sense - we can have a sense of the monumentality or grandeur of parts of Paris, even if we are not seeing them.
Certainly, they must have had reason, in this film, not to show the territories surrounding, say, Louisiana (to and from which we journey), but isn't the entreprise a bit hollow if whatever they do show has nothing to do with those places? I start with this point because, if one cannot say Great panoramas - I must go and see them myself some day, we are 'forced back' on the characters, and I honestly do not think that their desires and changes of heart run to a whole two hours 17 minutes worth of interest, but maybe 90 (with less need to show shots that were really somewhere quite different - I do not think that the list bore any relation to what we thought that we were shown).
OK, my thesis is this - it's a nice safe bet to film some version of a well-known, successful book, because people have been satisfied enough with how it is put together working to have read it approvingly. Nothing new there, but, if one's choice lands on something that, to be done justice to, has to sprawl so much and maybe be pretty lacking in any story, is that the ideal project, unless one has a big shake-up with the text and portrays it radically differently? Yes, that might upset an author's estate, or even fans at grass roots, but would it be a better film, maybe even be a film?
Given the acknowledged limitations, but in the light of talking to my friend and others as to whether the way that the text lies lends itself to taking it point for point as the basis for a film, what I have to ask (as I did) is what credibility Sal Paradise has, when we meet him, as a writer, or even simply what there is about him that would make someone, on pretty slight acquaintance, ask him to travel from New York to Denver to see him.
Now we know, after the event, that On the Road the book resulted from this and all the other travels, and, when Sam Riley (as Sal) starts hitching, we see him scribbling is his small but somehow infinite note-book (as if the guys on the back of the truck with him would not have been more than a little interested and been likely to have parted their company).
It may be little more than sexual when he is cotton picking, but there is even a sense that this Sal abandons his exteriority to his own experiences and actually feels them : frustrated though I was that I was being asked to believe in him as a writer when there had not even been so much as something being read aloud with his New York chums, I think that, by now, there might have been voiceover, maybe, of some of his writerly snippets (unless that only occurs later, when he actually starts writing, and he is reliving these moments).
Set against now, where, unless I wanted to be scenic about it, I would take a flight to make this first journey of Sal's, I would still be less than impressed with Dean Moriarity to have had impressed on me that I needed to make a trip whose basis and necessity turn out, in the ever-casual way of intoxication beyond the means of alcohol passing for the common currency of life, to have dissolved, so that, no sooner there and with no thought of where Sal might stay, Dean has to go to Los Angeles (or some such).
Just the first of a series of long, long journeys that seem to have the same capacity for their purpose to disappear more quickly than the destination can be reached. For me, none of it amounts to more than a few very blunt character traits and repressed feelings, which is where I arrive at a run-time around 90 minutes, because they do not merit more :
Sal is flattered by Dean's interest in him, and Dean, for his part, talks up this man who, if he did not resemble (a little) Scottish saxophonist Tommy Smith (whose talent I know and value), actually seems to possess no qualities to justify it. It is all sublimated through Dean arranging girls (including his own partner, at a key point) for Sal to sleep with, and then noisily doing so himself.
That holds true until (for money, and as he says to Sal he has done before) Dean has sex with the man who has been sedately driving them, and Sal witnesses it : not much guessing where his disgust with Dean and walking out on him at breakfast comes from. With a few twists and turns of sub-plots, and of Dean's various and far-flung women, that is pretty much the emotional core of all these lengthy wanderings, except that they always serve as a distraction from him ever knowing what on earth he wants, and all the signs, from how he chatted up Sal on first meeting, are that his own deeper desires from their 'relationship' (I only call it that because they virtually travel across the continent to say hello for ten minutes) are the same.
However, the film decides to swallow its own tail by having Sal write the book that we are viewing, with a roll of paper that he makes and feeds into the typewriter. Apparently such a roll does exist amongst JK's effects, though its status as being how he wrote the book might be suspect, but we get back to the bogus demonstration of creativity, as if there has to be this infinite roll of paper to receive the limitless notes that we saw scribbled before, and the white-hot power of the process is such that nothing, not even puttting in a new sheet of paper and keeping the finished ones in order, must be allowed to interrupt it. Believe that idea of writing if you like!
Clearly, things were taken from this film, but - from my position of majestic ignorance - I believe that a better film could have been made by taking the book as raw material, and not setting out depiction as if sacrosanct. And, blow me, I've still not opened the wretched text!
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Brad Pitt wants to play a scouser (according to AOL®)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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11 October
If it's a classic Mark Twain (although such things as the Feast of Fools and the framing device of The Taming of the Shrew foreshadow him), then the scouser chosen should have the chance to be Pitt in return.
Whatever happens, I think that Pitt should be under Terene Davies' direction as to how he can play what he apparently wants to be - either that, or thator Alexei Sayle.
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11 October
If it's a classic Mark Twain (although such things as the Feast of Fools and the framing device of The Taming of the Shrew foreshadow him), then the scouser chosen should have the chance to be Pitt in return.
Whatever happens, I think that Pitt should be under Terene Davies' direction as to how he can play what he apparently wants to be - either that, or thator Alexei Sayle.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
The Turnip Prize II
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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11 October
There has already been such an enormous amount of interest in the previous questions posed on these pages that I have agreed to post some further ones from readers and to see if I can find out some answers when I make it down to the show...
1. Is it true that everyone working on this part of the show wears a Ronnie Laing mask?
2. The prohibited actions didn't mention laughing - was that an oversight?
3. Is it general admission or allocated seating?
4. The prohibited actions didn't mention farting - was that an oversight?
5. Can other sorts of vegetable be taken into the screening, then?
6. I've heard that, too, about the masks, but aren't they from images from all different times in Laing's life?
7. If you watch the film twice, do you get Air Miles?
8. The prohibited actions didn't mention scratching (oneself, others or the seat) - was that an oversight?
9. I've heard that it's allocated seating, but the seat is allocated to you, depending on whether you screen for schizoid tendencies, schizophrenia, etc. Is that right?
10. Can people obtain verification, if it is needed, that, although they were at the Turner Prize show, they didn't attend a screening of All Divided Selves?
11. Can they still obtain such verification, even if they did actually attend one?
12. The prohibited actions didn't mention yawning - was that an oversight?
13. Does the death penalty still apply to anyone who mentions the word 'documentary' in connection with the film?
PS Hey! This sounds like an almost interesting approach to a film about a hisorical subject (taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/5307532/Luke-Fowler-stories-upside-down-and-inside-out.html) :
Your eyes have barely focused on the tousled head of the composer Cornelius Cardew, when the image on the screen dissolves into footage of winter foliage that skitters in and out of focus. Newspaper cuttings concerning Cardew's early death (in a hit-and-run accident) are presented floating in space like elements in some miniature sculptural installation.
This is documentary film-making according to Luke Fowler, one of the hottest names in contemporary British art, winner of the inaugural Derek Jarman Award for artist film-makers, whose first major retrospective has opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In Fowler's best-known film, Pilgrimage between Scattered Points, which tells the story of English composer Cornelius Cardew, interviews are presented deliberately out of synch, subjects appear suddenly upside down, interspersed with apparently random imagery.
Apart from the random imagery, why has the canon of invention dwindled?
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
There has already been such an enormous amount of interest in the previous questions posed on these pages that I have agreed to post some further ones from readers and to see if I can find out some answers when I make it down to the show...
1. Is it true that everyone working on this part of the show wears a Ronnie Laing mask?
2. The prohibited actions didn't mention laughing - was that an oversight?
3. Is it general admission or allocated seating?
4. The prohibited actions didn't mention farting - was that an oversight?
5. Can other sorts of vegetable be taken into the screening, then?
6. I've heard that, too, about the masks, but aren't they from images from all different times in Laing's life?
7. If you watch the film twice, do you get Air Miles?
8. The prohibited actions didn't mention scratching (oneself, others or the seat) - was that an oversight?
9. I've heard that it's allocated seating, but the seat is allocated to you, depending on whether you screen for schizoid tendencies, schizophrenia, etc. Is that right?
10. Can people obtain verification, if it is needed, that, although they were at the Turner Prize show, they didn't attend a screening of All Divided Selves?
11. Can they still obtain such verification, even if they did actually attend one?
12. The prohibited actions didn't mention yawning - was that an oversight?
13. Does the death penalty still apply to anyone who mentions the word 'documentary' in connection with the film?
PS Hey! This sounds like an almost interesting approach to a film about a hisorical subject (taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/5307532/Luke-Fowler-stories-upside-down-and-inside-out.html) :
Your eyes have barely focused on the tousled head of the composer Cornelius Cardew, when the image on the screen dissolves into footage of winter foliage that skitters in and out of focus. Newspaper cuttings concerning Cardew's early death (in a hit-and-run accident) are presented floating in space like elements in some miniature sculptural installation.
This is documentary film-making according to Luke Fowler, one of the hottest names in contemporary British art, winner of the inaugural Derek Jarman Award for artist film-makers, whose first major retrospective has opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In Fowler's best-known film, Pilgrimage between Scattered Points, which tells the story of English composer Cornelius Cardew, interviews are presented deliberately out of synch, subjects appear suddenly upside down, interspersed with apparently random imagery.
Apart from the random imagery, why has the canon of invention dwindled?
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Wednesday, 10 October 2012
The Turnip Prize I
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11 October
I have already seen on Tate Britain's web-site that Luke Fowler's film, All Divided Selves (2012), has published screening-times for his entry for The Turner Prize (on which the Evening Standard has given an overview).
I'm assuming that they have built a cinema-room in the show in which it will be projected, but do all (or any) of these rules apply? :
1. No latecomers admitted
2. No popcorn, fizzy drinks or noisy sweet-papers
3. Only bona fide appreciators of the genre of artists' films allowed in
4. Any screening not containing a full quota will be cancelled
5. No petting
6. Anyone found with a root-vegetable about their person will be ejected
7. No whispering to your companion when you cannot follow what is happening (or what the title means)
8. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, except in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
9. Anyone found with closed eyes during a screening will be given The Alex Treatment
10. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, even in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
11. Anyone who betrays any knowledge of the subject of R. D. Laing, the man, his thought and his psychiatric practice will be encouraged to believe that they really have a very busy day and cannot spend ninety-odd minutes in a screening
12. No heavy petting
13. Friends of the film-maker will not be allowed entry (on the grounds of protecting them from getting the impression that they, too, are famous artists)
NB Now that I have found out, I should acknowledge that The Turnip Prize has existed for some years - www.turnipprize.com is its web-site.
STOP PRESS - now more at http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-turnip-prize-ii.html
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 October
I have already seen on Tate Britain's web-site that Luke Fowler's film, All Divided Selves (2012), has published screening-times for his entry for The Turner Prize (on which the Evening Standard has given an overview).
I'm assuming that they have built a cinema-room in the show in which it will be projected, but do all (or any) of these rules apply? :
1. No latecomers admitted
2. No popcorn, fizzy drinks or noisy sweet-papers
3. Only bona fide appreciators of the genre of artists' films allowed in
4. Any screening not containing a full quota will be cancelled
5. No petting
6. Anyone found with a root-vegetable about their person will be ejected
7. No whispering to your companion when you cannot follow what is happening (or what the title means)
8. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, except in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
9. Anyone found with closed eyes during a screening will be given The Alex Treatment
10. The audience is to be strapped in before the screening commences, and the central locking-release mechanism, even in the case of emergency, will only be operated at the end
11. Anyone who betrays any knowledge of the subject of R. D. Laing, the man, his thought and his psychiatric practice will be encouraged to believe that they really have a very busy day and cannot spend ninety-odd minutes in a screening
12. No heavy petting
13. Friends of the film-maker will not be allowed entry (on the grounds of protecting them from getting the impression that they, too, are famous artists)
NB Now that I have found out, I should acknowledge that The Turnip Prize has existed for some years - www.turnipprize.com is its web-site.
STOP PRESS - now more at http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-turnip-prize-ii.html
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Allen Italian
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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11 October
Allen's right, you know! Just look at how great these titles look translated :
* Misterioso Omicidio A Manhattan
* Crimini E Misfatti
* Una Commedia Sexy In Una Notte Di Mezza Estate
* Harry A Pezzi
* Il Dormiglione
* Prendi I Soldi E Scappa
* La Maledizione Dello Scorpione Di Giada
* Basta Che Funzioni
* Incontrerai L'Uomo Dei Tuoi Sogni
* Provaci Ancora Sam
But I don't know where they were going with this one (unless conjured up after a cult viewing of the desperation that is Withnail and I) :
Io E Annie
Turning Sweet and Lowdown into Accordi E Disaccordi is, to me, a little mystifying, too.
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11 October
Allen's right, you know! Just look at how great these titles look translated :
* Misterioso Omicidio A Manhattan
* Crimini E Misfatti
* Una Commedia Sexy In Una Notte Di Mezza Estate
* Harry A Pezzi
* Il Dormiglione
* Prendi I Soldi E Scappa
* La Maledizione Dello Scorpione Di Giada
* Basta Che Funzioni
* Incontrerai L'Uomo Dei Tuoi Sogni
* Provaci Ancora Sam
But I don't know where they were going with this one (unless conjured up after a cult viewing of the desperation that is Withnail and I) :
Io E Annie
Turning Sweet and Lowdown into Accordi E Disaccordi is, to me, a little mystifying, too.
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Damaging or harming?
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10 October
The other day, when I heard that someone was reported to have harmed a painting by Mark Rothko, it did sound quite right - maybe one can harm the natural world, so there is no need for a living creature, capable of being harmed, but would one's first choice for damage to an artwork be that it had been harmed?
The person accused of the act, which he denies was criminal damage, was mentioned on the news again, his name one of many with which Ian Skelly had difficulties to-night. This time the man was said to have damaged the Rothko, which gives rise to this stupid thought :
Could a piece of art be damaged, but not harmed, if the damage were done in the right way? For, what if the damage actually, objectively (in art-critical terms), improved the piece, and, maybe, the living artist approved of it : no point, then, in restoring the work to how it had been before.
Actually, although I do not think that history claims that the fracturing to Duchamp's so-called Large Glass was deliberate, it was a ready-made that he adopted (i.e. rather than making the thing over again from new). But, of course, what Richard Hamilton did in the 60s was to make a re-creation of the work, and, not least as he could not have got the glass to fracture in the same way, it resembles its pre-facture appearance.
Hamilton's piece is on display at Tate Modern, and I take issue with the fact that the label does not draw attention to the fact that the original, some 40 years younger, is in Philadelphia or some such. That said, Duchamp approved what Hamilton had done (and, probably, Hamilton had his agreement before setting out), and I think that he went further, which was to say that, by signing it, it stood for the original for all purposes. My issue? You would only know that, if you knew it, and, if a friend, who had seen the original, asked you what you thought of the cracked glass, you would shake your head, not remembering any.
Finally, on this and as to Francis Bacon, the same Tate advised that he was such a keen reviser of his work that it had had to refuse permission for him to borrow key canvases from its holding : it knew very well that what Bacon would have returned would have been different works from what had been borrowed! If the works were in Gerhart Richter's private collection, no one would deny his right to the practice of overpainting earlier works, but might question his judgement, if not artistic integrity (which is abundant from the film Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)).
If Bacon had broken into the Tate, with the assistance of one of his lovers, and worked on some canvases, would be have harmed them, by causing them to appear differently from the image in the catalogue and what people would expect to see if they wished to view what Turnage called Three Screaming Popes? Or would he have damaged them, but without harming them - and who knows what glories the Tate presented us from seeing to surpass what we have?
In the extreme case of Van Gogh, we might wish to say that his artistic legacy was not safe with him - but do we have a right, as an inheritance gives us, to remember someone for works that he would have destroyed. And so into, sadly, the moral debate about Max Brod and Franz Kafka, which I generally find rather sterile.
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10 October
The other day, when I heard that someone was reported to have harmed a painting by Mark Rothko, it did sound quite right - maybe one can harm the natural world, so there is no need for a living creature, capable of being harmed, but would one's first choice for damage to an artwork be that it had been harmed?
The person accused of the act, which he denies was criminal damage, was mentioned on the news again, his name one of many with which Ian Skelly had difficulties to-night. This time the man was said to have damaged the Rothko, which gives rise to this stupid thought :
Could a piece of art be damaged, but not harmed, if the damage were done in the right way? For, what if the damage actually, objectively (in art-critical terms), improved the piece, and, maybe, the living artist approved of it : no point, then, in restoring the work to how it had been before.
Actually, although I do not think that history claims that the fracturing to Duchamp's so-called Large Glass was deliberate, it was a ready-made that he adopted (i.e. rather than making the thing over again from new). But, of course, what Richard Hamilton did in the 60s was to make a re-creation of the work, and, not least as he could not have got the glass to fracture in the same way, it resembles its pre-facture appearance.
Hamilton's piece is on display at Tate Modern, and I take issue with the fact that the label does not draw attention to the fact that the original, some 40 years younger, is in Philadelphia or some such. That said, Duchamp approved what Hamilton had done (and, probably, Hamilton had his agreement before setting out), and I think that he went further, which was to say that, by signing it, it stood for the original for all purposes. My issue? You would only know that, if you knew it, and, if a friend, who had seen the original, asked you what you thought of the cracked glass, you would shake your head, not remembering any.
Finally, on this and as to Francis Bacon, the same Tate advised that he was such a keen reviser of his work that it had had to refuse permission for him to borrow key canvases from its holding : it knew very well that what Bacon would have returned would have been different works from what had been borrowed! If the works were in Gerhart Richter's private collection, no one would deny his right to the practice of overpainting earlier works, but might question his judgement, if not artistic integrity (which is abundant from the film Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)).
If Bacon had broken into the Tate, with the assistance of one of his lovers, and worked on some canvases, would be have harmed them, by causing them to appear differently from the image in the catalogue and what people would expect to see if they wished to view what Turnage called Three Screaming Popes? Or would he have damaged them, but without harming them - and who knows what glories the Tate presented us from seeing to surpass what we have?
In the extreme case of Van Gogh, we might wish to say that his artistic legacy was not safe with him - but do we have a right, as an inheritance gives us, to remember someone for works that he would have destroyed. And so into, sadly, the moral debate about Max Brod and Franz Kafka, which I generally find rather sterile.
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Monday, 8 October 2012
Guinness in different glasses
A short appreciation, from old review-notes, of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
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9 October
A short appreciation, from old review-notes, of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
Somehow, when a restoration by the Britifish Film Institute (would that they could be known as that, not as BFI!) was released last year, I failed to turn a few notes from seeing Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) into a review. Here ‘tis now…
One cannot argue with the description of this film, in Picturehouse Recommends, having 'the most articulate and literate of all Ealing screenplays'. It is not just dialogue, but Louis Mazzini's (Dennis Price's) sinister narration and how he delivers it as if what he planned and did is the most reasonable thing in the world, wherein, of course, lies the wonder of the piece. If the film gets you to laugh quite naturally at children dying of diphtheria (and their mother dying, too), then that is skilled writing, but even the best writing depends on delivery, and that of the principals is impeccable.
For me, the fact that Alec Guinness transforms himself into eight varyingly inbred members (including one woman) of Mazzini’s mother’s family is the lesser thing, and it is in this connection that I have alluded to it in my review of Holy Motors (2012) (for anyone who believes that even the resources of the limousine suffice, and not a great deal of assistance beside would be needed, is deluding him- or herself). The costume is not the least part not only of the impersonations, but of the whole film, most notably for the two leading ladies:
The character parts are cute, but it is Mazzini interacting with these crucial women that counts, Joan Greenwood as childhood chum Sibella Holland, and Valerie Hobson as Edith d’Ascoyne, the woman whom he has widowed and in favour of whom Sibella just becomes something on the side. The planning just gets a little too clever for its own good, and Mazzini ends up tried before his peers (who are peers), under the darting eyes of Hugh Griffith, and brings us crucially back to a document that he has written whilst telling his tale, and which could unwittingly end up as his confession.
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Sunday, 7 October 2012
A roaming view
This is a review of To Rome with Love (2012)
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6 October
This is a review of To Rome with Love (2012)
Few people might expect so much dialogue in Italian with English sub-titles from To Rome with Love (2012), even after seeing Midnight in Paris (2011) - I hope that the fact will not put off members of a typical Allen audience who are maybe less used to following text and action together in this way, either by their telling friends to avoid the experience, or by having it as a mental reservation for his next release.
(I could speculate as to how the Italian dialogue was arrived at, because it does not quite seem as if Allen wrote the sub-titled speech and it was translated into Italian, but something more complicated than that, and maybe Woody's Italian is much better than mine and he worked on writing the Italian parts of the screenplay.)
A traffic-policeman, balletically directing the thronging vehicles high on a tub in their centre, first introduces us to two of the couples in the stories that we will see, and then thankfully, unlike the narrator in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), leaves us to our own devices. He, himself, is a device, because he purports to be able to see what he shows us from his vantage-point, and he is competing to be important to us.
Moreover, he is a symbol for Allen in exactly bringing the four stories before us beautifully in one timescale, all of them humorous, but all of them, despite the humour, nonetheless serious in some way. One story takes place in a single day, another in a week, and the remaining two in probably two or three weeks, but they begin and end together, and we are never worried that time is running more quickly for someone than for someone else, which is the film’s real triumph, that we can accept what we see so easily because the different lines are woven together, but are separate, happening in their own universe.
We first meet Hayley, an American woman spending the summer in Rome and falling in love with the first Roman whom she asks directions, Michaelangelo. (And, yes, in another strand, Allen gives us Leonardo.) Later, her parents (Judy Davis, being waspish as Phyllis, and Woody Allen being one of his typical creative roles as Jerry) meet his parents, and so begins the most bizarre story of Michaelangelo’s father Giancarlo giving an operatic performance under Allen's bizarre direction. This should not be spoilt, so do not imagine what will come better as a surprise - and even did fine the second time around. Allen calls his film to Rome, and he shows us himself going there, both as an actor (and hating the turbulence), and to bring us there with him.
Pure Italian is used to tell the tale of Milly and Antonio, newlyweds from Pordenone who came to Rome for a honeymoon and a new life with Antnonio’s relatives' company, if only he had something in common with his aunts and uncles! Enter a wish to impress them with a new haircut for Milly, Penélope Cruz as the fortuitous Anna, and chance encounters with the cast of a film, allowed by the running joke of directions to anywhere being endlessly complicated and losing Milly further and further, but somehow bringing her having lunch in the same restaurant with actor Luca Salta as Cruz hilariously stands in as Milly (but - fear not - all ends well!).
Cruz being who she is not, and performing the role so delightfully that she steals virtually every scene, is part of what the story, equally deliciously portrayed by Roberto Beningi, of Leopoldo Pisanello (another painter’s name) is about : suddenly, everyone wants to know all about Pisanello, a little as he had wished, and is whisked off to answer questions about what he had for breakfast. He does not get used to all the attention, all the desire to know his opinions, and comes to see it as a curse. When it has gone, this take on modern celebrity mixed with Warhol’s notorious pronouncement leaves Pisanello a little bereft by the change, and he has to satisfy himself that he once had a chauffeur and people knew who he was.
The last story has an on-screen American narrator in older architect John (Alec Baldwin), who is not ever visible to more than one person (more or less), trying most of the time to share his wisdom with the younger architect Tim, and thereby giving us a great deal of amusement in his ironic comments and predictions, and ultimately proving right when Tim has decided to follow his romantic feelings. Baldwin finds an on-screen equal in the acting presence of Ellen Page as the bewitching Monica, who draws Tim despite what he or John can say to the contrary.
The film is thoroughly charming, but my hesitation is whether two strands in Italian is taking things too far for some potential viewers. It ends with a competing claim, from a man who emerges from behind some shutters near The Spanish Steps, to see everything from where he is, and, a bit like Beckettt ('Oh the stories I could tell if I were easy', from Moran's part of Molloy), the offer to tell some of these stories some other time.
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Thursday, 4 October 2012
Brad and Angelina consider changing names (according to AOL®)
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4 October
That's just a bit silly, isn't it?
So we have to contemplate calling him Angelina, Angelina Pitt, whereas she comes Brad, Brad Jolie...
About as crazy as Fairbanks and Pickford calling their place Pickfair!
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4 October
That's just a bit silly, isn't it?
So we have to contemplate calling him Angelina, Angelina Pitt, whereas she comes Brad, Brad Jolie...
About as crazy as Fairbanks and Pickford calling their place Pickfair!
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Monday, 24 September 2012
Fly Australian Airlines to nowhere
This is a Festival review of Holy Motors (2012)
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This is a Festival review of Holy Motors (2012)
* Contains spoilers *
If you want to see Kylie play a cameo as an airline hostess*, you’re clutching at straws, and would be better off queuing for one of her stage-shows than watching Holy Motors** (2012): if you watched the film first, you’d have no desire to hear her version of any other song. The other song was just mawkish dross about time, regret and the past – or was that Kylie’s song instead / as well, and trauma has bereft me of remembering ?
I have Tweeted that Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and Subway (1985) meet in a mortal embrace, and it is a fight that kills off the best of both, leaving a facile scene in a warehouse-sized garage at the end that was apt to make the ritual close of t.v.’s The Waltons seem profound. It did not even visually convince that so many similar vehicles had been assembled, not least since they insisted on drawing attention to their artificiality by flashing their brake-lights.
Could anything worthwhile have preceded such a banal ending, little better than imputing significance to the fact that the vital club in Enter the Void (2009) is called – wait for it! – The Void? A few moments did, but only a very few in the whole 115 minutes, comprising : an erotic dance; a building that I could swear owes something to the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright (but I could not spot it in the credits); the bizarre pastiche of a beauty, a beast and a photographer; the first of several humorous grave-stones; and a terrific interlude (called such), in which a gathering group of musicians, centred on an accordion ensemble, processed around a large church.
After then, and despite some intrigue concerning a crime and its ritualized repetition, it was a decline, not just musically, as a continuation of the episodic. Simply put, there was simply almost no interest in how (or even why) it all hung together, and it became, if possible, less and less significant. It was as if a premise of The Matrix (1999) that, when plugged in, Neo, Trinity and the others, can enter the machine-world had been stretched out to become some sort of secret, kept to the end.
I would happily have walked out of Holy Motors, at around the point that I describe, but, as my friend did not evince the desire to leave, I stayed so that we would have both seen all of it to discuss afterwards. He thought it a sort of purgatory for M. Oscar, I thought it a purgatory for me in this parade of the pointless, and that any notion that it meant more than the following quotation*** was vain speculation (though I was, also, reminded of Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd):
As the gom yawncher man passed me I recognized him as the man in the broken-rimmed hat who'd spoken to me in the underground when I was on my way home from Istvan Fallok's studio with electrodes all over my head.
'Hello,' I said.
'Nimser vo,' he said.
'You weren't talking like that the other day. How come?'
'I must've been somebody else then.'
'How's that?'
'Economy. You have a little chat with a stranger now and then, right? So do I, so does everyone. How many lines has the stranger got? Two or three maybe. There's really no need for a new actor each time, is there?'
'So you play them all.'
'The same as you.'
'What do you mean?'
'Yesterday you were the conductor on the 11 bus and you also did quite a nice little tobacconist in the Charing Cross Road. Actually London hasn't got that big a cast, there's only about fifty of us, all working flat out.'
'Are you writing a novel?'
'Novel-writing is for weaklings,' he said, and moved on.
After which, not only go to [to come], for an unfavourable comparison with The Night Elvis Died (2010), but here for a further conceit
End-notes
* I have never heard the male equivalent called ‘a host’.
** Surely a take-off of the Batman dialogue.
*** From The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban, Pan Books (Picador), London, 1988, p. 56.
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Saturday, 22 September 2012
Vertiginous Hitch
This is a Festival review of Vertigo (1958)
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22 September
This is a Festival review of Vertigo (1958)
* Contains spoilers *
When the Jimmy Stewart / Alfred Hitchcock collaborations that had been quickly taken out of circulation were released again in the mid-1980s, I went to see two or three, certainly Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). I remember not being much struck by either, the former because I found its device - as it assuredly is meant to be - so limiting, the latter because I just did not get it, and the suddenness with which some films from that era ended, with the words 'THE END' and the studio logo coming up, did not help.
Yesterday, watching Vertigo for the first time since then, I found myself coming at it with the eye of someone who loved Chinatown (1974), and found much that links the two, including a way of viewing that had me questioning who was the client and what had Stewart John 'Scottie' Ferguson been engaged to do and why. The key scene, for this way of thinking, was not at Gavin Elster's office, but the next one, at Ernie's, and questioning for whose benefit it was that Scottie was there, in terms of who was identifying whom.
Thereafter, having postulated that Scottie was the one to be seen by Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), it was easy enough to see him being led a dance, even to the extent of her, more than once, taking a parking-space that left him pulling in where no space existed. When she threw herself into San Francisco Bay, she then did so knowing that Scottie was there. (How all this connects with the foundation novel, D'Entre les Morts, I do not know, but research may tell me without having to look it out.)
In the meantime, it is the way of thinking that relates to Chinatown that interests me. Both films have secrets, a crime, someone pretending to be someone else and in whom a third someone should not fall in love, and all end with the death of that someone. In Vertigo, the private investigator (or PI) as a means to an end not known to him is hardly new*, but we are immersed in his pursuit such that we can be blinded to the fact that he has been blinded and bought a story.
To be continued
End-notes
* In a way it goes all the way at least back to Jonah, with texts such as Sir Gawain, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and G. K. Chesterton's The Man who was Thursday in between.
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Friday, 21 September 2012
More like Pirandello
This is a review of V.O.S. (2009), as screened at Cambridge Film Festival
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20 September
This is a review of V.O.S. (2009), as screened at Cambridge Film Festival (@Camfilmfest) 2012
V.O.S. (2009) (which denotes that it is the original version, but with sub-titles, i.e. not dubbed) was introduced as a film within a film, taken from a play within a play (which is by Carl Lopez), but it is more like Pirandello than anything else, with Brechtian Verfremdungseffekte thrown in for good measure, plus a hint of Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry.
For the four principal characters do not have - are not shown to have - any existence outside of the film, and though they are stepping in and out of the role as scenes are played out (and envisaged, in discussion, as having taken or to take a different course), it's as though their life is on the set or lot, which makes the experience of watching a lot like that of seeing Nine (2009) or Dogville (2003).
Woody Allen is even mentioned by Clara (Àgata Roca), the pregnant partner of Ander (Andres Herrera) who is seemingly writing the film as it goes, as if it were a linear process that leads up to the scene that we see at the beginning : one audience review that I have seen recently at Cambridge Film Festival critiques an accent as if were less convincing at the beginning of shooting and that that fact is necessarily reflected in where the scene appears within the film.
What does the suggestion that the actors have a life beyond the parts that they play add, when doors that we have been shown into a hospital theatre are later revealed as a mock-up, but then have figures dressed for a procedure emerge from them and appear to be received by the crew as if they are real surgeons or the like? As far as I could see, it merely put a layer of doubt as to whether any of the scenes played out have any status, which is something that Allen has explored, for example, with the use of a chorus (in Mighty Aphrodite (1995), with the alternative realities of Melinda and Melinda (2004), and in Harry or Stardust Memories (1980).
That said, the story of how Ander and Clara become a couple is still an engaging one, because it shows how they have interacted with Vicky and Manu, and it is not as if Allen has just done it all before. Those who are interested can read more in Variety.
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Jarman and jerking-off
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21 September
You might or might not like Jarman's style of working, and I couldn't make it all the way through Jubilee (1978), but he was patently a film-maker.
At Cambridge Film Festival last night, All Divided Selves (2011) and the demeanour of its director, Luke Fowler, gave a very different impression from that made by Jarman, and the film did not seem much like a film, and the artist - as all artists tend to do - tried, although his language kept tripping him up*, to distance himself from the idea that his work said something or had a message.
The message that All Divided Selves had consisted almost entirely of Laing talking, often enough with visuals, about psychiatric conditions and his personal and cultural background, plus some others talking with or about him, his theories and psychiatry in general. As it is not difficult to pull quotations out of Laing's works, let alone footage, that says something pertinent to us and to now, then there may be no great merit in having done so, even if you have embellished the enterprise with bits and pieces that you have shot.
Conclusion : Would I prefer to have the chance to see Tacita Dean's FILM 2011 from Tate Modern's Turbine Hall again and have it substitute for my memory of Fowler's film? Yes!
End-notes
* He seemed not to want to say 'illustrative', but nonetheless kept saying it, so drawing atention to a word that he purported to eschew.
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21 September
You might or might not like Jarman's style of working, and I couldn't make it all the way through Jubilee (1978), but he was patently a film-maker.
At Cambridge Film Festival last night, All Divided Selves (2011) and the demeanour of its director, Luke Fowler, gave a very different impression from that made by Jarman, and the film did not seem much like a film, and the artist - as all artists tend to do - tried, although his language kept tripping him up*, to distance himself from the idea that his work said something or had a message.
The message that All Divided Selves had consisted almost entirely of Laing talking, often enough with visuals, about psychiatric conditions and his personal and cultural background, plus some others talking with or about him, his theories and psychiatry in general. As it is not difficult to pull quotations out of Laing's works, let alone footage, that says something pertinent to us and to now, then there may be no great merit in having done so, even if you have embellished the enterprise with bits and pieces that you have shot.
Conclusion : Would I prefer to have the chance to see Tacita Dean's FILM 2011 from Tate Modern's Turbine Hall again and have it substitute for my memory of Fowler's film? Yes!
End-notes
* He seemed not to want to say 'illustrative', but nonetheless kept saying it, so drawing atention to a word that he purported to eschew.
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Thursday, 20 September 2012
Images arbitrarily made interesting
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21 September
Many people will have chosen to see the film All Divided Selves (2011) because it concerns Ronnie Laing, not because the director, Luke Fowler, is a candidate for The Turner Prize.
They will not have been disappointed to see some footage from when Laing became famous, and maybe from before, and they will have kept with his voice when it was heard alongside seeing material interposed between it and visuals of him speaking: sometimes we cut away from him to that material, sometimes we only heard his voice (perhaps because the recording was just audio, perhaps not). The interest, though, was not in that material, and it could even have been the test-card for all that it mattered.
Laing we saw at many ages, and with varying style of dress, but we always knew that it was he, and, once we heard him speaking and saw his lips move, we knew when we had his words being spoken. As to anyone else in the film and who they were, nothing told us, and only original captions - apart from what seemed a new inter-title regarding Esterson - told us two or three times what community we were being shown, so we might have had Thomas Szasz on the screen and not have known it.
So, yes, we hear Laing talking and being interviewed, but what the film offered as a polemic, as Fowler called it, might have been better achieved by a reading of select passages from Laing's publications, or by reading Adrian Laing's biography of his father. Plus there's Mike Moran's one-man play about Ronnie...
More on this topic here and a review, from the Berlinale, in The Hollywood Reporter here
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21 September
Many people will have chosen to see the film All Divided Selves (2011) because it concerns Ronnie Laing, not because the director, Luke Fowler, is a candidate for The Turner Prize.
They will not have been disappointed to see some footage from when Laing became famous, and maybe from before, and they will have kept with his voice when it was heard alongside seeing material interposed between it and visuals of him speaking: sometimes we cut away from him to that material, sometimes we only heard his voice (perhaps because the recording was just audio, perhaps not). The interest, though, was not in that material, and it could even have been the test-card for all that it mattered.
Laing we saw at many ages, and with varying style of dress, but we always knew that it was he, and, once we heard him speaking and saw his lips move, we knew when we had his words being spoken. As to anyone else in the film and who they were, nothing told us, and only original captions - apart from what seemed a new inter-title regarding Esterson - told us two or three times what community we were being shown, so we might have had Thomas Szasz on the screen and not have known it.
So, yes, we hear Laing talking and being interviewed, but what the film offered as a polemic, as Fowler called it, might have been better achieved by a reading of select passages from Laing's publications, or by reading Adrian Laing's biography of his father. Plus there's Mike Moran's one-man play about Ronnie...
More on this topic here and a review, from the Berlinale, in The Hollywood Reporter here
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A lifeless lack of feeling
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20 September
* Contains spoilers *
Totem (2011) is a film of relatively few words, but it arguably has relatively little to say. I wish that it were like Ali Smith's novel The Accidental, but it is not.
Fiona has advertised herself as a maid, apparently through the Internet, and, although she calls her mother as if from a sea-side resort (perhaps she has claimed to be on holiday), she has claimed that both her parents are dead, and that she is 23, which she does not often look. The family make fun of her at first, but that seems to dissolve as a motif when she does a passable pretence at being Keith Jarrett in solo-piano mode.
Otherwise, Claudia shows her how to clean, pushes her around (literally) a few times, and Fiona mutters to herself, when no one is around, about how they do not clean properly and are pigs. Later, when she had seemed to be going, but did not, she talks to herself in the same way, but it sounds more Biblical, maybe Isaiah.
Apparently based on a true story, the write-up in Cambridge Film Festival's programme makes it sound more doomy and laden with meaning than it is, and it is hard to see what, in what unfolds, needs or is made any more relevant by a factual basis. Nothing does happen, and we wonder why the resources of a film needed to be devoted to what is the territory, at best, of a short story.
PS As I left, not wanting the embarrassment of the Q&A (but also having something else to do), I heard one couple saying how they had been trying to work out who the characters were in relation to each other, another firmly decided that it was a dysfunctional family, that beloved phrase of yore that means not a whit, which jut shows that some viewers will blame themselves for not following, and others put a label on it.
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20 September
* Contains spoilers *
Totem (2011) is a film of relatively few words, but it arguably has relatively little to say. I wish that it were like Ali Smith's novel The Accidental, but it is not.
Fiona has advertised herself as a maid, apparently through the Internet, and, although she calls her mother as if from a sea-side resort (perhaps she has claimed to be on holiday), she has claimed that both her parents are dead, and that she is 23, which she does not often look. The family make fun of her at first, but that seems to dissolve as a motif when she does a passable pretence at being Keith Jarrett in solo-piano mode.
Otherwise, Claudia shows her how to clean, pushes her around (literally) a few times, and Fiona mutters to herself, when no one is around, about how they do not clean properly and are pigs. Later, when she had seemed to be going, but did not, she talks to herself in the same way, but it sounds more Biblical, maybe Isaiah.
Apparently based on a true story, the write-up in Cambridge Film Festival's programme makes it sound more doomy and laden with meaning than it is, and it is hard to see what, in what unfolds, needs or is made any more relevant by a factual basis. Nothing does happen, and we wonder why the resources of a film needed to be devoted to what is the territory, at best, of a short story.
PS As I left, not wanting the embarrassment of the Q&A (but also having something else to do), I heard one couple saying how they had been trying to work out who the characters were in relation to each other, another firmly decided that it was a dysfunctional family, that beloved phrase of yore that means not a whit, which jut shows that some viewers will blame themselves for not following, and others put a label on it.
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