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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: January 2016

Resurrection folk tales

28 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in resurrection, Rohmer, Uncategorized

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A Winter's Tale, Alcestis, Anagnorisis, Dreyer, Euripides, Ordet, Piero della Francesca, Reygadas, Rohmer, Shakespeare, Silent Light, Titian

Conte d'Hiver 3

Éric Rohmer’s Conte d’Hiver / A Winter’s Tale consciously re-works William Shakespeare’s ‘A Winter’s Tale’. As others have remarked it echoes too Dreyer’s Ordet, and, Rohmer, being so well-read, I am sure had Euripides’ ‘Alcestis’ in mind as well.

All four works form milestones through the passage of time, giving this story something approaching a folktale quality, or folk myth: Classical Greece (Euripides), Jacobean England (Shakespeare), a backward-looking 20th-century Denmark (Dreyer), contemporary Paris (Rohmer).

Which of the four is the most moving? This is an empty competition, not to be pursued, but it is striking how all four play the moment of Resurrection for all its dramatic power. When the dead women (Alcestis, Hermione, Inger) move from lifelessness to life, they unleash the power of the Recognition moment (anagnorisis in the Greek word). In these three cases the male gaze is transformed from stupefaction to desire by the woman’s re-appearance (Alcestis unveiled to Admetus, ditto Hermione to Leontes, Inger awaking in her coffin). Rohmer is more modern: when Charles and Félicie look at each other in the bus, they awaken mutual desire, and their love feels instantly resurrected.

Rohmer is different in another way. The other three stories show a deus/dea ex machina figure orchestrating the ending: Heracles (Euripides), Pauline (Shakespeare), Johannes (Dreyer). No such figure appears in Rohmer’s Conte d’Hiver, but instead one of Rohmer’s teasing philosophical ideas. Is it chance that Félicie and Charles meet on the bus, or is it an answer to Félicie sitting quietly in Nevers Cathedral, not praying (on her own admission) but thinking hard of the possibility of finding Charles again? Something supernatural is surely at work, something more than chance, but Rohmer eschews using a character orchestrating the meeting on the bus, out of delicacy: he is making this magic story plausible enough to feel contemporary, which a deus/dea ex machina would disrupt. However it brilliantly achieves the quality of the miraculous, ‘beyond custom and experience’, in a secular setting.

The film revels in its New Wave aesthetic: real interiors, many exterior sequences, sequences on buses and trains. This contemporary patina is in strong contrast to Dreyer’s Ordet, with its calculated interiors (Dreyer would fully dress a set, and then reduce the furniture and fittings by more than a half). The Recognition moment in Rohmer takes place in public view: Charles looks and recognises, Félicie looks and recognises – the camera observes almost casually.

Conte d'Hiver 1.png       Conte d'Hiver 2

In Ordet, on the other hand, the camera is a firm and far from casual presence, and makes the viewer a participant both in the high drama of Johannes’ command to the dead to arise, and in Inger’s moment of awakening.

Ordet 7 - Inger wakes

There is a fifth version of this story, told slightly differently: in the Gospel versions of Jesus’ resurrection, all four evangelists are conscious of the dramatic power of the idea. Later, Piero della Francesca captured its terrifying quality in his ‘Resurrection’ in the Museo Civico in Sansepolcro, Italy:

Piero - Resurrection, Sansepolcro

Titian underlines the delicacy of the moment in his ‘Noli Me Tangere’, in the National Gallery in London, when Mary Magdalene encounters the resurrected Jesus in the garden:

Titian - Noli Me Tangere

In his ‘Alcestis’, Euripides understands this delicacy too: Alcestis come back to life is not to speak for three days because she has already been dedicated to Death for that period. Shakespeare similarly keeps his last scene short, unburdened by practical explanation of what is happening, so that the curtain falls on Leontes’ and our astonishment.

Rohmer ends in untrammelled delight: Félicie and Charles reunited, Élise provided with a father, Charles invited to a New Year’s Eve dinner party, and the children playing by themselves. Félicie and Charles are not just the union of Leontes and Hermione resurrected, but Florazel and Perdita as well, innocence made flesh. What happens to them in maturity is for another story, or since Félicie believes in reincarnation, for another life. To mention this idea is inappropriate and risks violating Rohmer’s cinematic touch as a Master of Delicacy.

*

There is yet another version of this story in Carlos Reygadas’ very fine film, Silent Light (2009) – see image below right, a reworking of Ordet (left) set in a Mennonite community in Mexico.

ordet 2    Silent Light (640x288)

I write about both films in ‘The New Filmgoers Guide to God’, and link Ordet to Babette’s Feast and Breaking the Waves, further versions of the Resurrection story. See http://bit.ly/TroubadorPress.

An 18th-century photographer

08 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in painting and photography, Uncategorized

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Curchod, Francis Bacon, Liotard, selfie

He painted portraits in the 18th century, but not as we know them. For a start, they are usually in pastels not oils. Secondly, they establish an unusual relationship of equality between painter and sitter. They respect the sitter’s social position, but the sitter looks at the painter or out of the frame without superciliousness. Thirdly they can sometimes be tinged with informality.

Since pastels produce an exceptional, brushstroke-free smoothness to the flesh, like make-up in their way, the faces attain the luminosity of formal photographic portraiture.  In some of them an informality in gaze, in gesture or in costume suggests the camera’s naked truth rather than the varnished version of classical oil painting.

When he painted, there were 200 to 300 years of tradition in artists’ self-portraits, but the image for which he is perhaps best known – the artist’s face turned towards the viewer, hair a bit unkempt, his index finger pointing off-frame right, and laughing – is not just a self-portrait but a selfie. Let us then call it the first selfie, an accolade which we have only learnt to bestow in the 21st century, the selfie era. He made at least a dozen versions of himself spread throughout his life.

Liotard self-portrait

The painter is Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702 to 1789), whose scattered artistic remains are to be found in all sorts of collections, but which are now all too briefly gathered at the Royal Academy in London until the end of January (having been at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh in summer 2015). Catch them if you can. On the other hand, because the paintings have this photographic feel, and because I have long felt photographs are best appreciated in a book on the lap rather than framed on the wall, the catalogue is very rewarding.

It wasn’t all good. Fingers are definitely not his forte, the lips can sometimes look fuzzy, and his noses look too soft: where is the bone beneath the skin? But the draughtsmanship is often superb, the eyes of his sitters are lit with a vital spark, the skin tones are delicious, the fabrics gorgeous. The peaches on the table in his terrific portrait of Suzanne Curchod look so ripe and perfect that you long to eat one.

Liotard - portrait of S Curchod

Francis Bacon I suspect would not have approved. He felt painting should be something other than an illustrational process. “A non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.” Liotard’s portraits on the other hand start by illustrating a society and an age, its facts as it were, but to my mind they ‘leak back’ if not into sensation then into enquiry. I would like to know more about these people, to have made their acquaintance at the least, and possibly more than that, for their appearance, while often plain, just as often suggests to us that there is more to the world than being ‘skin deep’.

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Sarah Cawkwell on FILM PORTRAITS 2: TACITA …
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