• About

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

Category Archives: biopics

The bullet that killed Nelson

11 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in biopics, cinema and culture, costume narratives, crucifixion on film, painting and photography, time puzzles

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dunkirk, Lord Nelson, Nelson's bullet, Norwich Castle Museum, Rashomon, Trafalgar

Death of Nelson by West

I saw an exhibition last Saturday called ‘Nelson and Norfolk’ at Norwich Castle Museum. Everyone in Norfolk knows that Admiral Lord Nelson was born in Norfolk and went to school in Norwich, but this fact may have escaped others not born in or not living in Norfolk. Never mind the Norfolk connection, it is a fascinating exhibition, really about the creation of the Nelson legend.

So, in Nelson’s case, given the choice between fact and legend, do you only print the legend? Not quite: in his case the facts firmly underpinned the legend. It made me think of a Death of Nelson film, on the lines of Kurosawa’s Rashomon, that is to say from the different viewpoints of those involved.

It opens in the midst of the Battle of Trafalgar, all smoke, fire, destruction, dead and dying, above all action from the still living (a bit like the film Dunkirk). The camera in a long crane shot comes to focus on a French soldier preparing his musket and crossing himself. He inserts the little round bullet, he kisses it, he shins aloft the mizzen mast carrying the musket (not easy, surely?), and proceeds to scan the decks of the Victory seeking suitable targets. Then he spies the Admiral himself – or is it the Admiral? Yes, it must be, he’s only got one arm. So he manoeuvres himself to a good position, except Nelson keeps moving about a little, and his officers and midshipmen keep getting in the way, so will he, won’t he get his shot in before he loses his chance. And then the way clears, the Admiral stands in view, the music comes to a crescendo. The Frenchman shoots; Nelson sinks into legend.

After the Long Shot, a Middle Distance view. Rewind. Do the same scene viewed by a British midshipman running messages, clearing a passage and so on. We watch the midshipman watching Nelson and then gasping when he sees him shot. (It’s a ‘Where were you when JFK was assassinated?’ moment.)

Rewind again. This time it’s a close-up view, from Nelson’s close friend, Captain Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s shock: he quickly looks where the bullet came from and sees, from a long way off, a Frenchman exultant in the rigging.

After Nelson is struck, we get the doctor’s view, choosing not to remove the bullet because the case is hopeless. Nelson only has hours to live.

The dying Nelson asks for a progress report on the sea battle. Flashback to him briefing his admirals before the battle. Digital/animated reconstruction of scenes from the battle in the manner of contemporary marine painting. Narrative up to point where Victory tangles with Redoubtable. Scene of French officer ordering sniper aloft with orders to pick out Nelson.

Scene of report given to dying Nelson of victory.

A series of tableaux of the Death of Nelson: was it like a photograph, unglamorous fact? Was it like a catholic apotheosis on the lines of a Deposition from the Cross? Was it on the orlop deck (a public spectacle)? Or in the stern cabin (a private spectacle)? The fact that it is public is important for the legend.

Armitage, Edward, 1817-1896; The Death of Nelson

Death of Nelson by Devis

Death of Nelson by Legrand

End with news of the victory and of the death of Nelson being brought to the Admiralty in London. After the sound and fury, silence.

Final sequence: the bullet that killed Nelson is extracted by the doctor from the corpse of Nelson – gruesome, Baconian close-up. What to do with the bullet? Hardy takes the bullet and resolves to mount it in a locket and give it to the King. The final image is of this sacred relic on display in an exhibition in the Queen’s Collection.

Nelson's bullet

‘Nelson and Norfolk’ is on at the Castle Museum in Norwich until Sunday, 1 October 2017.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Dachas on film 1 – Mirror

22 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in biopics, metaphysical film, spiritual cinema

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Brexit, Mirror, Natasha Synessios, Tarkovsky

The measured unrolling of a Tarkovsky retrospective in arthouse cinemas has been one of the pleasures of this summer, at least in the UK, and no film has been more welcome to watch in a darkened chamber on a large screen, with an appreciative audience creating a rapt mood, than Mirror.

Mirror 1

Tarkovsky strikingly said that he knew this private, sometimes baffling film – to the reason, if not to the eye – would strike a deep chord in a Russian audience. So it proved. This intersection of the intimate life of a family with public Soviet history (the episode at the publishing house in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, crossing Lake Sivash during WW2, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, clashes on the Soviet-China border at Damansky Island in 1969 etc.) is a way many of us experience great events: where were you when Kennedy was shot, when the Berlin Wall was breached, when the Charlie Hebdo offices were attacked, when the UK voted Brexit? But as important is the film’s re-creation of the Tarkovsky dacha, this plot of memory-freighted space, this bit of bourgeois property-enjoying, this summer refuge from winter misery. This element is instantly appealing to anyone who has had a family holiday cottage or a regular family holiday destination, the pleasure of first acquaintance being reinforced by subsequent encounters and renewal of the magic. I feel it especially acutely at the moment because I am editing (digitally) my 8mm film diaries from the late 60s and 70s in which Scottish holidays regularly feature.

What baffled me when I first saw the film was a failure to unravel the relationship between the different generations of the family; I learnt on subsequent viewings that Maria is mother, wife and grandmother, that the narrator is looking back to childhood before the war and boyhood during it, and then as father of a boy. Get some sort of a handle on this and you can open a door to the time layers in the film. It is all beautifully explained in Natasha Synessios’s study of Mirror (IB Tauris 2001) which also includes photographs by Lev Gornung of the Tarkovsky family at their dacha in the 1930s. Even when ropily printed, you can see what evocative photographs they are, the potency of which the making of the film has doubled.

Mirror - Gornung's photo

Gornung’s photo of T’s mother, Maria, in 1932 (above) Mirror - NS's book

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

 

Biopics are . . .

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in biopics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

biopics, Bob Dylan, Citizen Kane, Gospel according to St Matthew, John Ford, Malcolm X, Michael Collins, propaganda, Shakespeare, Sorrentino, The Iron Lady, Vaclav Havel

. . . all the rage: they feed our desire to know about the private lives of public people, a desire fuelled by new media.

I went to a seminar last Saturday on biopics. We discussed Malcom X, I’m not there (Bob Dylan), Marie Antoinette, Citizen Kane (WR Hearst), All That Jazz (Bob Fosse), American Splendor (Harvey Pekar), The Iron Lady (Margaret Thatcher). Not all these films are ‘cradle to grave’ narratives, which I think would be part of the traditional definition of a biopic. Some so-called biopics just deal with a particular crisis in a public figure’s life, e.g. Spielberg’s Lincoln trying to get the Thirteenth Amendment to the US constitution through the House of Representatives – and let’s include at this juncture Ford’s outstanding Young Mr Lincoln, dealing with Lincoln’s life as an obscure young man. Or The Queen, focusing on the crisis in the UK monarchy at the time of the death of Princess Diana. Definitely not a biopic.

Five reflections:

1              Shakespeare is our fore-runner here: ‘Richard II’, ‘Henry IV’ 1 and 2, ‘Henry V’, ‘Henry VI’ 1, 2 and 3, ‘Richard III’. These are all ‘bio dramas’ of a kind. ‘Henry V’ is the most ‘cradle to grave’ narrative because we see him as a young man in ‘Henry IV’ and as a king in ‘Henry V’. ‘Richard II’ is the exception: the play revolves round the abdication crisis at the end of his reign. Yet really the drama of Shakespeare’s history cycle is about kingly mortality. We see all these kings die (except for Henry V) and ‘Richard II’ discusses the subject at length.

2              Shakespeare’s plays serve the purpose of Tudor propaganda, which raises the point that all biopics have an agenda to promote. It might be inspirational (Selma), it might be the opposite (Citizen Kane). One of the propaganda purposes of Hollywood biopics is to trumpet American greatness. But it is in fact in an American film that this tension between presentation and actuality, between surface and substance, between fiction and truth, has been most profoundly explored, not in a biopic but in a narrative that sheds much light on the genre: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

3              We should not lose sight of the fact that there are biopics from other countries: Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev for a start (which has its own agenda about Russian greatness, among other things). There’s Andrzei Wajda’s Walesa, a companion piece to Man of Marble and Man of Iron, the three making a sort of Solidarity trilogy. Only with Walesa: Man of Hope, the third film, does Wajda deal with historical people. Ireland’s Neil Jordan has made a very good fist of Michael Collins’s story in his film of that title.

I thought too of Francesco Rosi’s dissections of power in Lucky Luciano, a gangster biopic. More propaganda of a kind. And then there is Sorrentino’s Il Divo about the long-serving Italian politician Giulio Andreotti, further analysis of the corruption of power. Like the Bob Dylan biopic (I’m not there), very difficult to follow if you are ignorant of the subject, but rewarding perhaps if you do.

4              Thinking about the biopic as propaganda brought to mind a favourite biopic of mine: Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew, a true cradle to grave narrative. It gets my treatment in ‘New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’.

5              The biopic I’d like to see made is on the Czech president following the fall of Soviet Communism, Václav Havel – see http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk/vaclav-havel.

Recent Posts

  • RICH MAN, POOR MAN, DEAD MAN – a Covid ode
  • VERSE EPISTLE TO Mr DOMINIC CUMMINGS . . .
  • 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…
Donato Totaro on Ferrara made me (1): Anto…
Tim Cawkwell on Ferrara made me (1): Anto…

Archives

  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • May 2019
  • January 2019
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014

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
  • literature and film
  • metaphysical film
  • monastery films
  • Nativity
  • nuns on film
  • opera and film
  • painting and photography
  • Pascalian cinema
  • Pasolini
  • poetry & verse
  • Polish history
  • predestination
  • redemption
  • resurrection
  • revivalism
  • Rohmer
  • Russian cinema
  • self-publishing
  • sewer films
  • silent cinema
  • spiritual cinema
  • surrealism
  • talkies
  • Tim's poems 2020
  • time puzzles
  • Topaz
  • travel
  • Uncategorized
  • underground film
  • War
  • White Ribbon
  • Zweite Heimat

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Recent Posts

  • RICH MAN, POOR MAN, DEAD MAN – a Covid ode
  • VERSE EPISTLE TO Mr DOMINIC CUMMINGS . . .
  • 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…
Donato Totaro on Ferrara made me (1): Anto…
Tim Cawkwell on Ferrara made me (1): Anto…

Archives

  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • May 2019
  • January 2019
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014

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
  • literature and film
  • metaphysical film
  • monastery films
  • Nativity
  • nuns on film
  • opera and film
  • painting and photography
  • Pascalian cinema
  • Pasolini
  • poetry & verse
  • Polish history
  • predestination
  • redemption
  • resurrection
  • revivalism
  • Rohmer
  • Russian cinema
  • self-publishing
  • sewer films
  • silent cinema
  • spiritual cinema
  • surrealism
  • talkies
  • Tim's poems 2020
  • time puzzles
  • Topaz
  • travel
  • Uncategorized
  • underground film
  • War
  • White Ribbon
  • Zweite Heimat

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
    To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy