Sunday, 31 July 2016

Poetry in a Tweet : Poem for The Dispossessed

Poetry in a Tweet : Poem for The Dispossessed

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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30 July





© Belston Night Works 2016


End-notes

* A companion-piece to 'You *tease* !' ~ 60-word story...




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 28 July 2016

Cambridge Summer Music Festival (#CSMF16) : concerts with a first-time visitor to Cambridge

Cambridge Summer Music Festival : concerts with a first-time visitor to Cambridge

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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28 July
Some Tweets about four concerts, in three days, at Cambridge Summer Music Festival (#CSMF16), with - and chosen by - a first-time visitor to Cambridge


A follow-up to A quick overview, by Tweet, of I Fagiolini’s programme 'Amuse-bouche' at Cambridge Summer Music Festival...



 1. Benjamin Appl (baritone) (@BenjaminAppl), standing in for Louise Alder (soprano) (@louisealdersop), with Gary Matthewman (piano) (@songpianist) at The Fitzwilliam Museum (@FitzMuseum_UK) ~ Monday 25 July at 7.30 p.m.










Interlude (general grumping) :






Resuming with Appl (@BenjaminAppl) and Matthewman (piano) :







2. The Piatti String Quartet at ‘Little St Mary’s’ (The Church of St Mary the Less [Wikipedia®]) ~ Tuesday 26 July at 1.15 p.m. :




3. The Academy of Ancient Music (@AAMOrchestra), directed by Pavlo Beznosiuk, in The College of St John the Evangelist, St John's College (@stjohnscam) ~ Tuesday 26 July at 7.30 p.m.










4. #Gallicantus at The Round Church ~ Wednesday 27 July at 9.30 p.m.












Also from #CSMF16 : A quick overview, by Tweet, of I Fagiolini’s programme 'Amuse-bouche' at Cambridge Summer Music Festival...




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Saturday, 23 July 2016

A quick overview, by Tweet, of I Fagiolini’s programme Amuse-bouche at Cambridge Summer Music Festival

An overview of I Fagiolini with Amuse-bouche at Cambridge Summer Music Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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23 July

A quick overview, by Tweet (and free text), of I Fagiolini’s performance of their programme Amuse-bouche, under the directorship of Robert Hollingworth, for Cambridge Summer Music Festival at Emmanuel United Reformed Church, Cambridge, on Saturday 23 July at 7.30 p.m.


A still from I Fagiolini - Ode à la gastronomie

Directed by John La Bouchardière and made by Polyphonic Films




In both halves, we also heard from Anna Markland (as well as her voice in the ensemble) on piano, with two of Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes (Nos 4* and 6, respectively), and, to close the first half, with Roderick Williams’ arrangement for piano and choir of the central movement (marked Adagio assai) of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major









All in all, whether one wants to relate to the majority of the texts that we heard before the Françaix as surréaliste, or in some other stylistic or genre terms, these composers brought out qualities in them, and likewise the members of I Fagiolini under Robert Hollingworth’s direction, that made them compelling, and highly inviting of our interest :

In his Lieder, Franz Schubert sometimes transformed poems to which one might otherwise not have devoted much attention : here, it was not that the poems of Éluard or Apollinaire were unattractive, but that interpreters such as Poulenc could, in and through their sound-world, cause their visions to open up – in a way that, beforehand, their words on the page, even in the French, did not easily allow one to experience…





To conclude by way of an encore, after the well-received strangeness of Jean Françaix’s text and its treatment, something more familiar still than the Satie pieces : ‘Baïlèro’ from Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne.



Very much a Post-script - Schumann, Surrealism, and Satie [in Satie’s Parade] :









One can read more about András Schiff here [from Kirshbaum Associates Inc., his representatives in North America], and Wikipedia® on Parade, Satie's Opus ??, here...



 End-notes

 * Regarding which the audience, wrongly, seemed almost more enthusiastic than the preceding Sept chansons (by Francis Poulenc)… ?


Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 21 July 2016

In a few sentences, casting out NWR¹'s The Neon Demon (2016)

In a few choice sentences, casting out NWR¹'s The Neon Demon (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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21 July


In a few choice sentences, casting out NWR¹'s The Neon Demon (2016)



Martin Creed ~ Work No. 232 (2000) at Tate Modern (@tate)



With a film, some will want to go into it, already knowing everything about it...




Or having (in its proper sense of reading every word) perused what Little White Lies (@LWLies) – or even Picturehouse Recommends – had to say (or did say, without ‘having to’ say it), and which will have determined them to watch - or to shun².





'when you were young, you dressed yourself and walked where you wanted'
John 21 : 18


Nicolas Winding Refn's (NWR¹'s) The Neon Demon (2016) is very deliberately mannered, and to the extent that his dialogue desires - in massive swathes of overly-delayed reaction - to be portentous. However, alongside its mise-en-scène³, instead it ends up just feeling very ponderous : nigh tediously so, with an affect that aims at insightful awkwardness, but largely conveys leadenness.

 Music choices, as ever, are strong, but, having made a graphic point of doing so in Drive (2011), NWR seems unable to do other than try to shock his audience, as if crediting that it will have a lack of interest in the first-blush, well-worn premise of the traps of (the topos of) a beautiful young girl, come to California to trade on attributes that she knows herself to possess.





 Prey on her what may - which, of course (and in order to provide the shocks), it duly does...



 This is what [some] others said, at more length… :






[...]










End-notes :

 ¹ Winding Refn is now monogrammed, with the claimed status of the royal or the regal, at the head of his films. (Although, according to Wikipedia®, A series of uncombined initials is properly referred to as a cypher (e.g. a royal cypher) and is not a monogram.)


² Maybe it is the bane of many a film-maker (or distributor) that a book is judged by what is not even its cover, though those in the latter category do not entirely help their cause when a trailer makes an excellent film seem weak, or a poor film worth the watch, because of how scenes, snippets and elements of dialogue have been unrepresentatively mixed up and divorced from their filmic setting, in favour of creating an impression that the work itself does not substantiate (let alone footage that is in a trailer, but did not make the cut to appear in the film itself…).

 ³ Which obviously heavily evokes Tony Scott's Tarantino-scripted True Romance (1993) (whose being shot by Scott left Tarantino himself free to direct Reservoir Dogs (1992)).




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Wednesday, 20 July 2016

Starting with @PeterBradshaw1's @guardian 'review', some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)

Some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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20 July

Starting with @PeterBradshaw1's @guardian 'review', some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)














Next, engagement with the Every Film in 2016 review from Neil White (@everyfilmneil ~ http://everyfilmblog.blogspot.co.uk) :




More to come...




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Sunday, 10 July 2016

From the archive : Ma Apsley deputizes at inaugural Cary Grant Comes Home for the Weekend Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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10 July

From Horfield to Hollywood - Guest Review ~ Diana Davis

I was thrown in at the deep end to review the event From Horfield to Hollywood, including a discussion with Laura Rawlings (BBC Radio Bristol) and an expert panel. The reason being that The Agent Apsley [@THEAGENTAPSLEY] was unable to cover the event, owing to another commitment in Cambridge, so he suggested I attend, and Charlotte Crofts, the event and festival organizer, agreed - as I have always been such a fan of Cary Grant...

 It will come as no surprise to most Bristolians that the Watershed was packed with fans at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning – even George Ferguson, wearing his trademark red trousers, was there, to herald the start of the Cary Grant Comes Home for the Weekend Festival : to celebrate the transformation of Bristol schoolboy Archie Leach into Hollywood icon Cary Grant, and his endearing relationship with the City.

The film Cary Comes Home was directed by Stuart Napier ten years ago for ITV, and Laura Rawlings kicked off the proceedings by telling us that, on the anniversary of Cary Grant’s birth (18 January) this year, BBC Bristol decided to produce a radio programme about his life, and so invited listeners to contribute tales about him. She received many different stories, because people had met him walking around the City, or remembered him from school. She felt sure that it would be possible to make another film about their encounters in the future.


Dr Kathrina Glitre, Film and Screen Writing Lecturer at UWE, said how she just fell in love with him when she was eight, after watching Arsenic and Old Lace [(1944)], and saw a lot of his films. She was a teenager when he died, and spent the whole day in bed in misery. I feel sure that most women in the audience felt exactly the same, as his charm, elegance and sheer acting skills were mesmeric when he was on screen.


To think, too, that the-then Archie, as a poor child of eight, returned home from Bishop Road school to find his mother just not there must have been heart breaking. To be given no explanation by his callous father, Elias, who had packed his wife off to the psychiatric 'asylum' at 100 Fishponds Road - on what grounds we do not know* - beggars belief.

In a film-clip, a psychiatrist said that, as Archie's mother was quite strict about his appearance, she could have been suffering from OCD [Obsessive Compulsive Disorder]. Archie therefore felt for years it was something he had done that had caused her to go away.


 It is commonly known that he helped back stage at the Empire Theatre and the Hippodrome, and, in so doing, met Bob Pender, who gave him the chance to join his acrobatic troupe, since he was impressed with Archie’s skills. So Archie ran away from home in order to do so.

His father tracked him down up north and insisted he returned home to continue his education at Fairfield School - and, when he did so, Archie discovered that his father had remarried. However, Archie’s desire to join the troupe (so the story goes...) made him peep into the girls’ toilets, and thus he was expelled : he then rejoined the troupe, and went to New York City with them, as he was now 13.

In 1935, Cary learned his mother was alive when one of the Kingdon family, his mother’s relatives, saw a film of his and thought that he bore a strong resemblance to the Archie Leach whom he had known as a boy. It was 1939 before Cary was able to make contact with his mother, and another six years before he was able to visit her. He ensured that she was released from the psychiatric hospital, and was the perfect son to her right until her death.



After the interval, Professor Andrew Spicer, a lecturer at UWE [University of the West of England], gave an interesting talk about James Bond (Agent 007) and why Cary turned down the role. Cubby Broccoli, a friend of Cary’s, had wanted him to play the part of Bond in Thunderball [(1965)], but Cary did not want to be tied down for a total of seven films. In any case, he would have been too expensive, as the film had a budget of only one million dollars, and Cary’s fee would have eaten up most of that. It was felt that an unknown actor would best suit the part, and Sean Connery [that unknown then] landed the job !

 Stuart Napier’s film on Cary Grant’s life, with Cary occasionally speaking in his everyday voice, was highly interesting. He had been a very astutute man, and had realized, when cast opposite Audrey Hepburn in Charade [(1963)], that - on film - the age-gap between them was too great. He therefore insisted that the scene in the lift be re-written, which meant that he was then able to tell her that she was a child who needed a good spanking, and to behave herself, when she was coming on to him.


In her summing-up, Laura Rawlings referred to the story that Cary [when still Archie] had been playing football in the Bishop Road school-playground, and, when one of his front teeth had been knocked out, there was no money available to have a false tooth. However, mercifully the gap grew over and, as evidenced in a photographic still, he did indeed have only three front teeth. If one had not been told, one would not have realized at all !

There are not many cities whose inhabitants who can boast both about Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge, the s.s. Great Britain, and a Hollywood star whose origins began in their home town of Bristol :

Hurrah for Cary Grant !



To come, in the Festival itself, on 16 and 17 July :




 End-notes

 But watch carycomeshome.co.uk or @carycomeshome, and this space... ?




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 9 July 2016

Report from Cary Grant Comes Home for the Weekend Festival 2016 : Notorious (1946) at Averys Wine Cellars

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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8 July




This posting will accrete into some sort of collage account of 'A Grand Day Out' in Averys Wine Cellars, Bristol, for the launch event of Cary Grant Comes Home for the Weekend Festival 2016, with a special screening - with wine interludes, and cheese and bubbly preludes - of Notorious (1946)



Attending this event had only been proposed and then booked, on the day, on a train to Bristol Parkway, as a much-delayed birth treat for The Agent's maternal...







When Cary checks his e-mail / voicemail - or gets that text-message ? - we already know the bad news for Ingrid and him...





Andrea Riseborough as Colette McVeigh in Shadow Dancer (2012)







 To come, in the Festival itself, on 16 and 17 July :






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Wednesday, 29 June 2016

Forget #EURO2016 ! : It was never the biggest European game of skill (or chance)...

Forget #EURO2016 ! : It was never the biggest European game of skill (or chance)...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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28 June

STOP PRESS ! (BUT WHY NOW ?) :




Forget #EURO2016 ! : It was never the biggest European game of skill (or chance)...












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Sunday, 19 June 2016

From Sheffield to Southwold* : Planning one's time... (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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19 June onwards




[...]





Tippett & Britten II ~ Saturday 18 June at 3.00 p.m. ~ St Bartholomew's, Orford










[...]





[...]











[...]















[...]








[...]






[...]





[...]







[...]







End-notes

 * For, respectively, Sheffield Doc/Fest and Aldeburgh Festival** : in 2016, their respective 23rd and 69th incarnations (they bear a relation : for example, one is one-third the age of the other, one may note).

 ** No doubt (?), Peter Bradshaw (@PeterBradshaw1) would wish to insist that Aldeburgh is, properly, Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts ?




Judging, at any rate, by his word-wasting pedantry (please see below) in ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass review – large as life and twice as phoney’, his a skatingly thin review of Alice Through The Looking Glass (2016)...


Bradshaw takes, that is, many a word (a sentence of thirty-four, in fact) to make yet another highly catty observation about this work (even if the film may not bear examination, as, for some, its Burton-directed predecessor did not...) : Using only the title and some characters from Lewis Carroll’s own 1871 sequel – in fact called Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There [The Agent’s emphasis] – this new movie is just machine-tooled CGI fantasy fare’.


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Friday, 17 June 2016

A new formulation of the moral superiority inherent in what 'a good reason' is to be depressed

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17 June




The above strand of Tweets relates to what is set out in Cold Comfort Terms




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Wednesday, 8 June 2016

Was director Ciro Guerra just being coy ? : A report on the @CamPicturehouse Q&A for Embrace of the Serpent (2015)

The @CamPicturehouse Q&A, with director Ciro Guerra, for Embrace of the Serpent

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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8 June
An accreting report on the Q&A at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, with director Ciro Guerra, for Embrace of the Serpent (2015) on Tuesday 7 June 2016, following its preview screening at 6.00 p.m.





Fitzcarraldo (1982) no more is, or purports to be, a biography of some aspects of the real-life Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (whose name has been corrupted to ‘Fitzcarraldo’ in Peru) than Embrace of the Serpent (2015) can said to be one of the last days of Theodor Koch-Grünberg :

 Director Ciro Guerra does not make a claim for that type of historical or anthropological depiction in Serpent - since the plants and Amazonian peoples have been fictionalized - but, when the question of film-references, and of Fitzcarraldo in particular, was raised, he ignored that Werner Herzog had his own directorial or writerly fantasies, and started criticizing Fitzgerald the man (and put Koch-Grünberg in relief against him - or vice versa, to make the analogy more accurate).



The question, in the title of this posting, about the possibility of Guerra’s coyness fits together with these observations in this way :


 (1) One could quite clearly hear the strength of Guerra’s antipathy to Fitzgerald, when he started talking about the latter’s activity as a rubber baron¹ (such activity, and its effects on the indigenous peoples, is, of course, one strand in Guerra’s film).


(2) However, when brought back to the question whether one would fail to think that he is referencing Fitzcarraldo, in Serpent, by having a gramophone as an item of the luggage that Theo (Jan Bijvoet) has with him (amongst all this baggage, which Karamakate (Nilbio Torres) scorns), Guerra was quick to cite the fact that - as shown in the film² - the historical Koch-Grünberg actually played Haydn's Die Schöpfung (The Creation, Hob. XXI : 2) in the jungle in this way, and liked to do so.



(3) Probably so (but so what ?). For, all of this begged the following question, which Guerra saying that he here relied on fact seeks to dislodge one from posing :

 For other reasons as well (there are other parallels³), both Apocalypse Now (1979) and Fitzcarraldo are the obvious film references that an audience is likely to import (with all that doing so means).

 Since that is so, why include (and want to justify including ?) this eccentricity of Theo’s, just because it actually happened – because does that then imply that no detail is imagined, none there to flesh out [a version of] a story ?
(4) The starting question had been about making film references in Embrace of the Serpent : could there have been more such (apparent) references, if they had not been excised ?

 The coyness is there in that the film eventually erupts in striking visuals – as, say, Enter the Void (2009) does – and which are partly dependent on a contrast with (near-)monochrome. Implying that the gramophone is in the film not because of Fitzcarraldo or Apocalypse Now, but almost despite them, feels tenuously contrived.

 Yet it did manage to disarm the impulse to look at this film, with Guerra’s help, in a worldwide cinematic context, and instead expected us to consider it in solely its own terms…


* * * *




A few film-references :

 * Burden of Dreams (1982) [about the making of Fitzcarraldo (1982)]

* Cave of Forgotten Dreams ~ Werner Herzog

 * Enter the Void (2009)

 * Fitzcarraldo (1982) ~ Herzog

 * Ivan’s Childhood

* On the Road (2012)

 * Post Tenebras Lux (2012)

* The Hunter (2011)

* The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

 * The White Diamond (2004) ~ Herzog

 * While We're Young (2014)

* Zelig (1983)


In important respects, Apocalypse Now does not much resemble Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, and we would feel, if at all, that Embrace of the Serpent is referencing the film treatment.

 More pressing written parallels (or origins ?) are Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception (1954), and Borges, in the collection Doctor Brodie's Report (1970) (especially 'The Gospel According to Mark').





On the level of film and film-stock, we heard [from Jack Toye (@Jackabuss), hosting the Q&A as the marketing manager of The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse)] that Ciro Guerra had shot on film : a remarkable piece of information, because one had formed the view, during the film, that it was unlikely that Guerra had done other than shoot in colour (and not a monochrome digital filming-mode), and then stripped out the colour – except only to leave a quality, at times, of the spectral, but mostly one that gave a grey-green tinge to the largely river-located foliage.

Various reasons suggested themselves as to why Guerra might have rendered his footage into near-monochrome, some to do with suspecting that not every moving image had been shot by his team, and that some of them, rather, were taken from stock-footage (thus disguised). The likely reason being that – as with a very different film such as Zelig (1983) – one’s matching of images from possibly very differing origins then has the potential of being done much more easily (not least if one may have had to process further), by virtue of not having the additional aspect of (very many) dimensions of colour.


Other reasons more obviously relate to the sort of distancing - although, at the same time, perhaps oddly sharpening ? - the effect of what Guerra chose to show to us (if only at the emotional level of pure, non-technical viewing) : for, the Amazon river³, in full swell, is going to look so much more dramatic, if one gives it the more-refined contours and gradients of monochrome.

To process in the image of the canoe and its three passengers is also likely to be more straightforward – for we must assuredly be gulled by the works of post-production, if we are to believe that the actors were ever trusted to the spate in and on which, for some twenty seconds (maybe thirty ?), we see them tracked. (Do we even detect how they appear to have been separately located, in their vessel, in a quiet stream that lies behind the foregrounded, wilder waters ?)



Yet maybe this is all guesswork, based on little actual knowledge of how the film went into production, and what happened afterwards...

 To some extent, so is the film itself, in elaborating the rather basic message, if no more satisfying for that, given by Willem Dafoe, as the title-character Martin, in - and at the close of - The Hunter (2011) ?




End-notes :

¹ Likewise, Guerra is reported - by the BFI (@BFI / British Film Institute) - as saying this to Ben Nicholson (@BRNicholson) :

'For example, Fitzcarraldo (1982), when you find out what that real story was, you find out that he was a genocidal maniac and a bloodthirsty rubber baron and you realise that the story has only been told from one point of view.' As such, the cinematic influences that had served Guerra as his compass previously were no longer going to be useful. 'I thought this was okay because recently I feel that films tend to be too much about cinema; it’s like a dog chasing its tale in many instances. I think cinema also needs to take its inspiration more and more from life. Even though film history is invaluable, it is sometimes also necessary to depart from it.'


² The recording that we see is not playing at 78rpm, though, as it would have had to do for its time ?

³ Apart from the clear question of indigenous people of a land and those desiring to occupy and exploit that land, we also have, though not with a huge ship, the canoe being transported, across land, from one stretch of water to another. (In Scotland, such isthmuses, and the like practice of conveying a boat overland, give rise to a fair few spots called Tarbe[r]t.)

⁴ Even so, we mainly spend time on tributaries, and have the temporal illusion - which cinema can create in terms of screen-time by both what is not shown and what is shown – that we are much on this mighty stretch of water, broad and long.




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