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Tim Cawkwell

~ currently publishing my poetry and verse. Blog entries on film and painting going back to 2014. My main website is www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Tim Cawkwell

Monthly Archives: December 2014

Christmas

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Nativity

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Gospel according to St Matthew, Pasolini, Renaissance painting, the magi

Christmas approacheth. It feels an appropriate moment to refer to Pasolini’s version of Matthew’s gospel, made with a striking fidelity to the text. Like the Renaissance painters to be counted among his forebears, Pasolini knew the story intimately.

The Nativity in Matthew just involves the kings, or better magi, so no shepherds. The second image shows a touching moment, a scene imagined by the film-maker without contradicting the spirit of the words, in which Mary passes her baby to one of the magi for him to hold.

Pasolini gospel 005 (300x167) Pasolini gospel 002 (300x167)

Here is an extract from what I wrote about the film in THE NEW FILMGOER’S GUIDE TO GOD:

“What are the qualities of Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, in English The Gospel according to St Matthew (although Pasolini was strongly irritated by the addition of ‘saint’)? At first sight it has an astonishing closeness to the text, so that for the Christian believer the sacredness of the book is profoundly respected, but it also is the work of a literary man with a remarkable gift for visual images. In this ability to combine the worlds of words and of pictures Pasolini echoes his Renaissance fore-runners such as Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Alberti: besides writing novels and poems, he was an intellectual and semiologist, he wrote a book about Italian paintings, he drew (an exhibition of his drawings was held after his death), he had a passion for music. The Gospel brings these elements together more than any other of the many creations in the packed fifty-three years of his life.

“In order to visualize the Gospel, he first thought to film it in Palestine but after a visit rejected this as unsuitable, settling instead for the rugged landscapes of Apulia, Calabria, Basilicata and Catania in southern Italy. For Jerusalem he used the old part of Matera near Taranto. This unfamiliar, impoverished Italy is arresting in itself, and its buildings made an archaic and intangibly appropriate setting when compared to the papier mâché and plywood buildings of the Hollywood epic. But his creative imagination did not insist on some documentary adherence to the dress of the first century AD (assuming that such dress, whether military, royal or peasant, could be objectively determined). Instead he sought inspiration in painting, especially of the Renaissance: hence the Pharisees’ hats and the garb of the Roman soldiers are from the paintings of Piero della Francesca, the pregnant Mary is a Renaissance Madonna, and, so Pasolini claimed, ‘Giotto and Norman sculpture were in the background.’ He even adopts the visual trick of showing people with their bodies foreshortened by the camera (Herod on his deathbed, John in prison) as if the Renaissance fascination with perspective could become the film-maker’s as well.

“When the film appeared, its music aroused particular admiration, in its variety and its use: the opening of Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet for the healing of the leper, breaking into the Gloria from the Congolese Missa Luba as the miracle is achieved; the slide guitar of blues-singer Leadbelly whose stretched-out notes exaggerate the shuffling gait of the cripple as he approaches Jesus; for the massacre of the innocents Prokofiev’s stabbing music for the film Alexander Nevsky; a grave Negro spiritual to solemnize the Nativity. Bach is particularly favoured, including Webern’s arrangement for chamber orchestra of the Ricercare from ‘The Musical Offering’. Pasolini makes explicit use of Bach’s ‘St Matthew Passion’: an orchestral version of the chorus, ‘Wir setzen uns mit Träner nieder’, is used not just at the end as it is in Bach’s Passion, but at other points as well. The breadth of both the visual and musical references in the film embody Pasolini’s intention to tell the story and in doing so, encompass 2000 years of story-telling about the life of Christ.”

Next entry will be on Rossellini’s Messiah.

The stature of waiting

11 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in monastery films

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Bad Lieutenant, Into Great Silence, Michael Whyte, monastery, No Greater Love, nunnery, Philip Groning, Roland Barthes, The Presentation Sisters

It feels appropriate in the season of Advent to refer to the current vogue for monastery films – whose inmates’ principal goal in life is to wait upon God. Here is what I write in THE NEW FILMGOER’S GUIDE TO GOD:

“If the certainties of a rock-solid belief in the Almighty no longer seem appealing that is one reason why indirections are an attractive route to the heart of religious cinema, as if it was a maze whose centre was hidden, full of false turnings and dead ends, as if we were to keep running into emptiness. Yet there is no doubt that stories of faith and hope still inspire large audiences. What is missing is the sense of a guiding hand, of an imaginative divine universe; in effect we have become disconnected. This only makes it the more extraordinary that in the last few years, documentaries about monks and nuns have commanded a small but committed audience as if a glimpse into the monastic universe offered some key, if vicarious, insight into the proper form of human living.

“It must quickly be acknowledged that nunneries have attracted film-makers for the last sixty years, offering a wonderfully potent mix for melodrama: hothouse relationships, ridiculous costumes, suppressed desire, steamy ecstasy and fruitful hopes. The Devils (chapter 1) has already been mentioned, but other examples are Angels of Sin (Bresson 1943), Black Narcissus (Powell and Pressburger 1946), Mother Joan of the Angels (Jerzy Kawalerowicz 1961), La Religieuse (Jacques Rivette 1965), Dark Habits (Pedro Almodóvar 1983), Thérèse (Alain Cavalier, 1996, a fine film about Thérèse de Lisieux), The Calling (Jan Dunn 2009), and no doubt there are others. This is an illustrious roster of European directors and in breaking free of the censorship that overhung the film industries of the 1930s, they have behaved like someone in a sweet shop who has just come off a diet, or like a group of men on a stag night roused to hysteria by the arrival of a busload of nuns. Roland Barthes commented wryly on the risks involved in filming a convent full of nuns: ‘We know what they become in the director’s eye.’

“These films tell us a lot about human desire, but offer few or no insights into the attractions of the cloistered life. But digital technology which allows the camera to run and run at negligible cost has now produced three remarkable documentaries: No Greater Love (Michael Whyte 2009) about a nunnery in Notting Hill, London, The Presentation Sisters (Tacita Dean 2005) about a convent in Cork, and most remarkably Into Great Silence (Philip Gröning 2005) about the Grande Chartreuse monastery near Grenoble in the French Alps. The cloistered life is lived on a different plane of time, and long takes in the camera allow the material first to be captured and then shaped in the cutting room to honour the ‘stature of waiting’ (in Bill Vanstone’s phrase).”

I then go on to write about these films.

For details of the book see: http://bit.ly/TroubadorPress

and here’s an image of a monk mending a shoe in Into Great Silence:Into Gt Silence - mending shoe

The Sun is God

05 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Creation

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Brakhage, JMW Turner, Mike Leigh, Mr Turner

‘The sun is God’ – the last words of the painter JMW Turner, allegedly at any rate according to Mike Leigh’s magnificent new Mr Turner. Not a pagan sentiment but a spiritual one that links him to the great film-maker of light, Stan Brakhage. Brakhage admired Turner very greatly and saw him as a kindred spirit.

See my new (Dec. 2014) essay on Brakhage, Leigh and Turner:  http://bit.ly/brakhage_turner

004 (300x203) 

Brakhage painting film

Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth exhibited 1842 by Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851

Turner’s ‘Snow Storm’ (ca 1844)

013 (300x219) 

Brakhage’s painted strips

Late Turner poster (212x300) 

poster for ‘Late Turner’ at Tate Britain

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  • RICH MAN, POOR MAN, DEAD MAN – a Covid ode
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  • EMPIRE – WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS
  • yearning for the sixties
  • FILM PORTRAITURE 4: Bob Fleischner Dying

Recent Comments

Sarah Cawkwell on FILM PORTRAITS 2: TACITA …
Antonioni: more De C… on Antonioni’s Metaphysical…
Tim Cawkwell on Ferrara made me (1): Anto…
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Categories

  • Antonioni
  • artists' film
  • avant garde
  • Bible on film
  • biopics
  • Brakhage
  • Bresson
  • British cinema
  • cinema and culture
  • cinema of hyperbole
  • costume narratives
  • courtroom dramas
  • Creation
  • crucifixion films
  • crucifixion on film
  • diary films
  • disaster movies
  • documentaries
  • Doubt
  • film noir
  • film portraiture
  • gangster films
  • God
  • Hitchcock
  • humanism
  • Ireland
  • Italian gardens
  • Italy
  • John Ford
  • Kieslowski reflection
  • Kieslowski reflections
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  • predestination
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  • sewer films
  • silent cinema
  • spiritual cinema
  • surrealism
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