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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: March 2017

Goodfellas versus The Godfather

22 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema of hyperbole, gangster films

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Anthony Mann, Coppola, Mean Streets, Richard III, Scorsese

Goodfellas poster      versus     Godfather poster

I seem to be in a gangster-film fascination at the moment, a consequence of a Scorsese fascination in the UK at present. At the beginning of March, I saw the newly restored Goodfellas in the cinema in Norwich.

This is hyperbolic cinema: a lot of shouting and over-the-top psychopathic behaviour, with performance foregrounded before all else. There were a number of sustained tracking shots (I like these), but also music getting louder all the time (and somehow particularly annoying).

And what crudity, of dialogue and of characterisation, the first perhaps shaping the second. Compare the way Ford humanises his minor characters, or the way Hitchcock ‘highlights’ his marginal characters to make them more interesting.

Look at Tommy (Jo Pesci): his monstrousness needs some inner motivation like Shakespeare gives Richard III to make him compelling. Tommy by contrast is all repellent surface, with not one iota of charisma. And Henry should surely be more like Charlie in Mean Streets, so that some inner disturbance is seen to be working in him. This would help signpost the climax to the audience. Instead the betrayal Henry undertakes just happens, rather than the audience foreseeing it – and fearing it.

It all feels twenty minutes too long. I have been looking at the crime thrillers Anthony Mann made in the late 1940s – Railroaded, T-Men, Raw Deal and so on, which are no doubt admired by Scorsese – and they are tight as a fist, sometimes under eighty minutes, and since they have a kino-fist quality they leave you pummelled.

Compare Goodfellas too to The Godfather: a satyr to a Hyperion, surely. The popular music in Goodfellas is especially crude. It is used to mark the passage of time, ‘the soundtrack of our lives’, but it is Scorsese’s life not that of his characters or even of their milieu. The Godfather on the other hand has a memorable musical theme, the Sicilian essence of which speaks volumes on behalf of a whole culture. And The Godfather has a vivid cast of characters who generate their own drama: the Corleone family versus Salozzo, the non-italian consigliere Tom Hagen,  a grotesquerie like Luca Brasi, and so on. The narrative arc of Goodfellas has Henry starting as a gangster but turning into an informer – a very good story – but The Godfather has an arc transforming Michael Corleone from war hero into godfather living in grim isolation – not just a good story but a tragic one. It is sombrely melodramatic, like nothing so much as Jacobean revenge drama, a dimension which for all its pyrotechnics is missing from Goodfellas.

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A ‘Stabat Mater’ for our times

03 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in crucifixion on film

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Bologna, Harry Christophers, James MacMillan, Niccolo Dell'Arca, Stabat Mater, The Sixteen

James MacMillan’s new choral piece, his Stabat Mater, was premiered in Norwich last October and while I don’t think Norwich’s was the very first performance it was almost the first. It was performed by The Sixteen and the Britten Sinfonia, both ensembles being ones that have forged a close relationship with MacMillan in the past decade or more. The performance was outstanding . . .

. . . but then so was the original music. I am writing about it here because not many masterpieces of music have their premiere in Norwich, yet this was one of them.

It is in 4 parts:   1   Stabat mater dolorosa;   2   Quis non posset contristari;   3  Sancta Maria, istud agas;   4  Fac, ut portem Christi mortem.

Each individual section has its own quality and the whole quartet contains its own dramatic progression from a plangent start to a quiet amen. The violins keen, the cellos growl and rumble, and the players slap their instruments with the bow. The violin melody is plaintive; but there are also stabbing chords like Bernard Herrmann’s music for Psycho. I thought too of the opening of Act 3 of Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’, with its powerful premonition of darkness, and of the pain articulated in Shostakovich’s string quartets. Praise too must go to the rhythms of the Latin, words that are plain, direct, and dignified.

S Maria della Vita: Lamentation by Niccolo dell'Arca – Version 2      Version 2

Version 2

A month before the performance I had been in Bologna in Italy, and saw for the first time Niccolò Dell’ Arca’s ‘Lamentations’, a group of six sculpted figures gathered round the dead Christ (to be found in the sanctuary of the church of Santa Maria della Vita). This is in effect a visual version of the Stabat Mater, created in 1463. It is startlingly different from the normal perception of Mary’s pain in paintings of the crucifixion or the deposition, which paint tends to distance from the observer. Instead you are made starkly present. The route runs directly into our feelings via the emotions, not through our thought processes.

As ever at performances of such religious choral music I am struck with puzzlement at what this subject, whether in sculpture or in music, must mean for a secular audience, or even a Protestant, non-Marian (anti-Marian even?) one. And yet it communicates something visceral.

We live, I think, in a culture that responds more to feeling than fact, to emotion more than thought. That is why the Dell’ Arca sculpture has been rediscovered, as it were, and why a work like MacMillan’s Stabat Mater can burst through our secular carapace to an inmost response.

James MacMillan was present at the concert in Norwich and with Harry Christophers, conductor of The Sixteen, talked to the audience about the work in advance of the performance. Memorable.

The CD of the piece has just come out on the Coro label. See https://thesixteenshop.com/

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Recent Posts

  • 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…
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  • artists' film
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  • British cinema
  • cinema and culture
  • cinema of hyperbole
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  • crucifixion films
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