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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

Category Archives: cinema and culture

Film Portraiture

16 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in British cinema, cinema and culture, documentaries, humanism, painting and photography

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David Jones, In Parenthesis, Melvyn Bragg, Saunders Lewis, Thomas Dilworth, Tristram Powell

Film as a medium for portraiture has barely been explored.

Painting evolved a method of portraiture that by the sixteenth century had obtained a supreme profundity, combining the portrait as a record of appearance, at least of the powerful, and putting that person outside time and sometimes outside context, in its work of memorializing a celebration both of the particular person and of humanity in general, and the possibilities for humanity in general.

Photography then revives the art of portraiture, not to replace painting but to renew it. In renewing it, it democratises portraiture, taking it out of the ambit of an élite group with the proficiency and the painterly means to create good likenesses and the compelling presences that painted portraits can have. Now everyone’s likeness can be recorded, so that we all have a passport photo, or an identity card photo waiting to be used. Such images can appear in art photography emulating painting, or in the family snap, or in the prison mugshot, or – especially powerfully – in the grouped images of those sent to the Nazi death camps, or to the Gulag in the USSR.

What film can do is take this idea of documenting likeness and reinvent expressiveness. Renaissance painting did not freeze a face in time but, as I say, put it beyond time. Photography, with its split-second facility can freeze a face, a moment, and expression. But film can amplify these things immeasurably, giving us expression, whether settled or animated, and existing in time, not the split-second of the photograph but the face observed in time, the face in duration. Hence the radical brilliance of Andy Warhol’s film portraits (so much more compelling than his silk-screen ones which are exercises in decorating a face) because the face is directly under the scrutiny of the camera running for several minutes with no words spoken. Warhol puts his subject on the spot, as it were: what character will he or she reveal under his gaze?

Even the conventional television interview can take steps towards creating a film portrait of the person interviewed. This line of thought is prompted by coming across an interview with David Jones on YouTube. There was particular pleasure in finding this, since I have been a David Jones aficionado since coming across his poetry in the 1970s (first ‘The Sleeping Lord’ published in 1974, the next ‘In Parenthesis’ published in 1937, and then ‘The Anathemata’ published in 1952). In 1981 I saw the David Jones exhibition at the Tate Gallery which opened my eyes more fully not just to his pictures but to his lettering. Having got started then, I have regularly engaged with his work ever since, notably with the production of the ‘In Parenthesis’ opera by Ian Bell in 2016, done for the centenary of the Battle of the Somme.

Then earlier this year, I read the biography of Jones by Thomas Dilworth. I was under the impression that Jones had lived a life out of the spotlight, but the book rather dispelled that, doing so in various ways including by publishing a number of photographs taken throughout his life, some of which (see Google Images) are expressive and valuable in their own right.

But I wanted to see some film of him and thought this had eluded his contemporaries until I read that the BBC had done an interview with him in 1963, produced by Melvyn Bragg and made by Tristram Powell for the programme ‘Writer’s World’). What is more, I quickly found it on YouTube (search ‘David Jones Tristram Powell’).

It is twenty-three minutes long. In it Jones sits in an armchair answering questions posed by his friend Saunders Lewis, who is mostly offscreen, although we do get one or two shots of the two men in the setting of Jones’s room. (Latterly he lived in a single room that doubled both as living space and as his studio.) The camera largely chooses to go in close on Jones’s face while he speaks, either in medium close-up or full close-up, with occasional zooms between the two.

Jones’s face, it turns out, was eye-catching for being tousled, melancholic and lined with experience, and at the same time marvellously expressive as if waiting for the moment to come to life. Largely in the film it is cast down, as if we were being made privy to his inward musing, without the camera wishing to intrude too much. Here is a close-up of him listening to Lewis who is asking about his joining up in 1914.

1 enlisting

What Jones has to say is always interesting, at least to me, especially as he talks about art and sacrament,

2 art & sacrament

and ‘civilisational challenge’ as he calls it,

5 civilizational challenge

with a serious expression for these serious subjects. But the virtue of the film is its visual quality as much as for the words he speaks. Both Jones’s pictures and his words were the product of much thought and it feels appropriate on two occasions that he should adopt the pose of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’, as if on command from the film-maker.

8 Thinker B

3 Thinker A

On one occasion he covers his left eye with his hand as he wrestles with finding the words to say what he wants to say.

11 lft hd over eye

Gesture is an important part of capturing someone’s likeness, and the film manages to find a characteristic pose of Jones’s, holding an unlit cigarette while he thought and spoke.

7 unlit cig

The most regrettable omission is not allowing us to see more of his room. There is a two-shot of Lewis and Jones,

6 settg w SLewis

which gives us some idea of the ordered clutter in which Jones lived, but I wanted some travelling shots over his studio table or round the walls, even just along his bookshelves, or sight of some personal possession that illuminated his personality. By the sixteenth century artists had become ready to include in their painted portraits some significant piece of information about the sitter as well as their likeness. The photograph can do the same, but then neither can do anything like as much as a film.

Film as a medium for portraiture has barely been explored.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

IN SEARCH OF ONENESS

26 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema and culture, documentaries, God, monastery films, nuns on film, spiritual cinema

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convents, Harold Palmer, Into Great Silence, monasteries, Oneness, Shepherds Law, Stephen Platten

If the cinema more than any other art is a barometer of current concerns, hopes, preoccupations, anxieties and aspirations, then the fact that there has been a spate (well, a small spate) of cloister films is significant. I do not mean dramas in monasteries, of which there are many juicy examples that tell us much more about humans than about God, but documentaries, for want of a better word, that use the camera to go inside cloistered spaces quite outside our experience and which are yet part of our history and culture. Here are some of them:

  • Into Great Silence (Philip Gröning 2005) – La Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble, France
  • The Presentation Sisters (Tacita Dean 2005) – convent near Cork, Ireland
  • No Greater Love (Michael White 2009) – nunnery in London
  • Jennifer (Nina Danino 2015) – Carmelite monastery in Ronda, Spain
  • three slow-TV documentaries (screened in 2017 on the BBC) about life in the British monasteries of Downside, Pluscarden and Belmont.

Into Gt Silence - procession    Into Gt Silence - mending shoe

The outstanding film in this group is Into Great Silence (above), for the making of which Gröning had to wait 14 years. The result therefore has a premeditated feel from a long engagement with the idea but also a quality of delight in what he found to film once he was inside the monastery. It also has a weight to it from its 2½ hours in length, ‘bleeding chunks’ of cloister, church and cell time.

This reflection is sparked by reading ‘Oneness’, a collection of essays edited by Stephen Platten (SCM Press 2017) about the rediscovery of monasticism in Britain, and linked by the editor to Shepherds Law in Northumberland. Shepherds Law is as much eremitical as monastic (i.e. more hermit than monk), as far as I can gather, and is being rooted in its place by the creation of a remarkable set of buildings, a work still in progress (see photographs on Google Images). The inspiration for the site came from Brother Harold Palmer, and both he and the site already appear to be becoming places of pilgrimage.

In this country religious faith is on the decline (it is alleged) and the church, like so much of our common life, seems to be suffering from a loss of confidence. The rediscovery of the monastic virtues offers a new, more encouraging side to the way we live now, and it is good that the cinema has a part in this.

For a fuller discussion of cloister films, see my book ‘The New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’ chapter 9, available from Troubador Publishing and on Amazon.

 

 

FILMING THE ANCIENT WORLD

24 Saturday Feb 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema and culture, costume narratives, Pasolini

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BBC, Danilo Donati, Delphic oracle, Edipo Re, Franco Citti, Oedipus Tyrannos, Pasolini, Silvana Mangano, Troy

There is a new version of the epic of Troy currently running on the BBC in nine 1-hour episodes. It runs the risk, as in all depictions of the mythological ancient world, of making banal the potency of the stories and of the characters. On the evidence of episode one it succumbs to the dangers very readily.

Pasolini was never like this. He made a very strong version of the gospel story, The Gospel According to Matthew, before going on to tackle Sophocles’ play ‘Oedipus Tyrannos’ and Euripides’ ‘Medea’. Like his gospel, the ‘Oedipus Tyrannos’ feels very potent in its depiction of a pre-technological age in which the sense of the sacred (il sacrale) is an integral part of the characters’ world-view. But in the end the film has its disappointments. I can think of four reasons:

1              Matthew’s Gospel is written paratactically: ‘and A . . . and B . . . and C . . . etc’. This offers an excellent template for a film-maker like Pasolini so attuned to seeing the world through images, a gift he had quite as strong as that for vernacular Italian speech. Sophocles’ play is a drama of a single time and place whose story is told through flashbacks. Without inventing a lot more incident which is not in the play, there is not enough action – as opposed to dramatic dialogue – to sustain a strongly paratactic narrative. Hence Pasolini resorts to stretching incidents out beyond their proper capacity to sustain them.

2              Even though Silvana Mangano is a riveting Jocasta, Franco Citti is less well chosen for Oedipus.

sword 2

He is superb as the bullying, vulnerable braggart of Pasolini’s Accatone, but Oedipus needs to be played by someone who is ruggedly good-looking and aggressive in manner while privately capable of showing inner doubt and anguish. It is disappointing too that the love-making scenes between Jocasta and first Laius and then Oedipus needed to be more passionate: the whole business seems to arouse her distaste when she should be a mixture of both erotic lust and disturbed self-doubt at the whole enterprise.

3              Danilo Donati was a noted costume-designer for Pasolini, working on a number of his films set in the past which could perfectly properly be described as costume dramas since it is Donati’s style that the garments draw attention to themselves. As a result, with some characters in the film we never get beyond the costumes, the most egregious example being Polybo, but Oedipus’ headgear in one scene is not much better.

Polybo 1  Oedipus

4              The modern prologue and epilogue felt very fashionable and savant at the time. However, they add nothing new, except as a way of Pasolini artfully drawing attention to himself.

On the other hand, the oracle at Delphi is wonderfully realised.

oracle 2

A quality of the sacred is to be found in the desert, and there is a potent expectancy in the queue of supplicants waiting to put their question to the oracle. When the answer is delivered to Oedipus, it delivers the necessary shock both to him and to us. This is properly paratactic, even if his tearful wanderings as he tries to absorb what the answer means are not.

One good visual idea is Oedipus making himself dizzy when he has to choose which road to take in order to give himself up to chance – in the vain hope of escaping his fate when it is in fact directing chance. Fate-directed chance you could call it.

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MEN WHO SLEEP IN CARS

22 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in British cinema, cinema and culture, Doubt, Kieslowski reflection, literature and film, redemption, spiritual cinema

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BBC, Decalogue, Exterminating Angel, Symons Roberts, The Party

Small screen not large screen. Television not the cinema sometimes does things best. I thought of that seeing The Party in the cinema last weekend. Surely this would be better on television?

The Party was a specimen of The New Heartlessness, although much eclipsed in force and method by Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, hyperion to a satyr. It was also eclipsed by a television film, Men Who Sleep In Cars, shown on the BBC around the same time. Initially I thought this was a specimen of British Miserabilism, of which there is a lot about. But it turned out different. Three men spend their nights not at home but in vehicles (a Proton, a Merc, and a transit van – the car oft proclaims the man) and, while I don’t know anyone personally who does this, it is not hard to imagine it existing. (Search ‘men who sleep in cars’ on YouTube to get a sense of its prevalence.) It is a version of homelessness, and the Miserabilist Message coming our way – so I thought – was that this was a metaphor for the British condition in 2017. I repeat myself, it turned out different, I was wrong: it is a message about insomnia, and the ‘not sleeping’ is more important than the ‘car’ bit – the car just made it more vivid. As a lifelong insomniac myself, I could get a good grip on this, and if the programme was cathartic it was because I fully understood the pain involved in not sleeping.

men who sleep in cars

Cathartic? Maybe not the right word, but there is a curious reassurance in knowing there are others like you out there, who own all sorts of cars. If cathartic, then redemptive: all three men emerge blinking into the dawn ready to start a new day. That felt very true to life; it’s how an insomniac does as much as he or she does.

There was a proper visual patina to the film, using the capacity of the digital camera to film in low-light conditions, that gave visual purpose to the arrival of the dawn. There was a woman in the movie: a ghost in a white robe sort of, in effect an angel, who links all three of the men’s stories, a guardian angel in fact.

What pushed it to another level, and initially ensured that I kept watching, was that the actors spoke in verse. How ludicrous, you may think, but verse ensures a distance between subject and viewer, a barrier against mere gritty realism. That realism is established in the images, and then undercut by the artificiality of the words, not too artificial I hasten to add but definitely rhyming and fluid in their rhythms. The monologues could be published as a book and still be engaging to read, a point reinforced by my learning that it was a radio play first of all, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in February 2014.

Finally, I think there was a major theme to the narrative. In the old days, the circumstances of failure of these three individuals would be set in a Christian context, in which we would be encouraged to find comfort in religion. I think Michael Symons Roberts’s text is looking two ways: there are no comforts in religion; but its absence has left us comfortless. Hanging in the air, unspoken, is this question: should we be going back to an underpinning theory of life – call it an ideology if you like – that helps us understand the world? Our predecessors did that and called it religion.

The BBC just raised its game for a moment.

note: it occurred to me too that the tone of the film is not that far from Kieslowski’s Decalogue, made for television of course and a Polish version of miserabilism made redemptive.

Credits

text: Michael Simmons Roberts

producer and director: Susan Roberts

director of photography: Tim Baxter.

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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

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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

DUNKIRK REVISITED

14 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in British cinema, cinema and culture, costume narratives, time puzzles

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Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk, Inception, Jonathan Nolan, Melies, Memento, Prestige

Seeing Dunkirk  a second time made me spot something which had passed me by in the IMAX image-blitz of the first viewing (see previous post). Nolan deals with three time-frames in the film: a week for the infantryman, a day for Mr Dawson and his boat, an hour for the flight of three Spitfires, and they all come together at a key point around three-quarters of the way through the film. To cope with this, Nolan puts the narrative on pause: we see a Heinkel attack a minesweeper from the air, then we cut away to something else, we then resume the narrative (actually Nolan has wound it back slightly, I think) from a viewpoint in Dawson’s boat. Secondly, the film’s cross-cutting is far from simple since the three stories on land, on sea and in the air are being shown ‘simultaneously’ but did not happen all at the same time.  I hadn’t glued these things together when I first saw the film, but now I have at least a little.

I like time puzzles in films so I like this one, but there is another pleasure because it connects the film to some of Nolan’s others which opt for a labyrinthine manipulation of time and memory: Memento, The Prestige, Inception.

Still pursuing the auteur theory after all these years, I watched The Prestige again to see if I could see how one film-maker made both it and Dunkirk. They share top production values of course, as they do with a lot of Hollywood films. Prestige is much more labyrinthine, and consequently for all the fascination it engenders rather heartless, not an adjective that applies to Dunkirk. However, they do come to some degree from the same mind, although this is significantly complicated by the fact that Christopher’s brother, Jonathan, helped with the screenplay for Memento and Prestige. If Dunkirk is less labyrinthine, is that because Jonathan was not involved in the screenplay? I doubt it because Inception, Christopher Nolan’s most intricate film about time and space, did not involve his brother.

As it happens Prestige has a strand quite of its own. Is it a metaphor – I am sure other commentators have picked up on this – for the invention of the cinema? The film carefully makes sure that the spectator understands the trick behind each illusion of magic, while still preserving the magic. The birth of the cinema, which like the setting of Prestige belongs to the end of the 19th century, is both a mechanical process (projecting each image for a fraction of a second) and a scientific one (the phenomenon of persistence of vision on the retina means we see differently from a camera mechanism). We want the illusion created by moving images but once you know how this comes about you ‘see’ film is a rapid sequence of images.

One of the earliest filmmakers, the Frenchman George Méliès, was a magician before he was a film-maker. Prestige enjoys showing us conjuring tricks as if filmed in real time when film-editing makes them the easiest thing in the world to re-create. But the film narrative, in its pursuit of the Tesla transporter, wants to tell us, just as Méliès did, that there is a magic (or so it seems) beyond the magic: the trick is that there is no trick.

I had to re-see Prestige to get some sort of grasp on the film, and no doubt need to re-see it again to get a better one. Will Dunkirk need these repeated viewings? Maybe, but one would do it more for the pleasure and excitement of images than to fathom what is going on.

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DESCENDING TO HADÈS part 2: THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL AS FILM AND AS OPERA

13 Saturday May 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema and culture, disaster movies, opera and film, surrealism

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Alcoriza, Bunuel, Calanda, Exterminating Angel, Figueroa, Gericault, Raft of the Medusa, Thomas Ades, Tom Cairns

We are familiar with disaster movies, and have been for some time – not just Titanic in 1997 but also the 1953 version. Then there’s the British take on the same disaster, A Night to Remember (1958), the latter title displaying British understatement. American overstatement, titanic you could call it, favoured concepts such as a group stranded on the top floor of a skyscraper in The Towering Inferno (1974). The genre is embedded enough to earn its own spoof title, Airplane! (1980), which exploited its comic possibilities and was wildly successful.

Where did the idea for Buñuel’s disaster movie come from? It had been suggested to him as a young man in the 1920s that Géricault’s narrative painting of 1819 ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ would make a terrific film. It was only in the 1950s that he and his regular scriptwriter at the time, Luis Alcoriza, picked up the idea and wrote a short story, ‘The Castaways of Providence Street’, from which Buñuel later worked up a screenplay. Six years earlier in Mexico he had made La Mort en ce Jardin / Evil Eden about a group of disparate and desperate people stranded in the jungle in a situation like the castaways in Géricault’s painting. The short story gave him an opportunity to tackle the subject again and to inject a darkly comic element. That comedy was partly contributed by the Catholic religion, the mocking of which motivated Buñuel throughout his career. He used the idea here to invert Christian ideas in a sort of ‘transvaluation’. The disaster takes place on the Calle de la Providencia,

2017-05-12 17.42.12

and the victims find themselves damned by Providence rather than saved. Secondly they are imprisoned in a room by a ‘miracle’ (they discover they lack the will to leave even though there are no physical obstacles to their doing so), an event Hume defined as something “beyond custom and experience”: they then find themselves taken by this miracle not to heaven but to hell, which by Act 3 is Hell Cubed.

2017-05-12 17.44.37

Buñuel’s film is satirical, subversive, made for revolutionaries. Although there are plenty of surrealist touches – a disembodied hand, the feet of a dead bird, the amour fou  between Eduardo and Beatriz –

2017-05-12 17.43.27      2017-05-12 17.43.50

it owes just as much to the theatre of the absurd, the godfather of which is surely Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, less terrifyingly comic than comically terrifying. Another key feature of the film is the fluidity of its treatment of time, not to mention the ‘joke’ about physical space, an echo of the fantastical disruption of space and time that marked Buñuel’s first film, made with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou.

Finally, it has no film score, hard to imagine as that is when we are burdened so much by music-saturated television. So, that makes it right for reinventing as an opera? Thomas Adès thought so, although there were other reasons such as the story’s dramatic premise and its claustrophobic atmosphere. In the production in the Royal Opera house, the surrealist touches become a bit contrived – film is so much better at these things –

2017-05-12 17.44.22

but the hysteria inherent in the situation is wonderfully heightened. The film’s visual patina of light and black, created by Gabriel Figueroa’s camera, beautifully crafted as it is,

2017-05-12 17.45.01

the ultimate barbarism: Nobile’s cello is destroyed for fuel

cannot match the musical flourishes of Adès’ score. The film can be criticised too for the difficulty of distinguishing the individual characters who in a way all look the same, the men in their dinner jackets, the women in their evening gowns. Adès and his librettist, Tom Cairns, do something clever here by using what they call the ‘encantada’ (as in ‘enchanted to meet you’) sequence to introduce the twelve characters (down from seventeen) to the audience.

What really distinguishes the opera from the film, however, is its tragic quality. These people are not so much condemned to hell by their bourgeois, ruling-class origins as by the condition of being human. And the opera is to be appreciated not so much by would-be revolutionaries as by people who are a mirror to those on stage: after all the characters are gathered for dinner after a night at the opera listening to ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’. The effect was so powerful that as we left the building it crossed my mind that we would lack the will to exit it, even with all the doors unlocked. Are we meant to like the people in the story? I think the people in the film not, but the people in the opera yes, or at least perhaps – they are our tragic selves.

*

This is Adès’ third opera. His first one, ‘Powder Her Face’ (1995), was also tawdry, and makes full use of the modest musical resources of a 15-piece ensemble. Here such forces are of the fullest and lessons from his symphonic work, such as ‘Asyla’, ‘Polaris’ and ‘Tevot’, make the score sometimes searing, sometimes blasting. Acts 1 and 2 were performed without an interval, and separated by a musical interlude marked by pounding drums, an idea taken from the Good Friday tradition of communal drumming (for 24 hours!) in Calanda, the remote town in Spain where Buñuel was bought up. (That it made a powerful impact on him is witnessed by Buñuel giving it a chapter in his autobiography, ‘My Last Breath’, and in the fact that his son Juan-Luis made a documentary about it in 1960, which can be watched on YouTube – see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jbu6qqdxj8&t=2s)

Act 1 of the opera puts us in the vice, and Act 2 turn the screws on us. Act 3, I felt, was less successful. This may be due to the curse of the interval but the question Act 3 poses without quite answering is how it will all end. In disaster movies, the people are saved (with the good ending happily and the bad unhappily), but would this happen here? The film has an elegant solution which seems to arrive seamlessly and ends with a twist, the most comic moment in the whole story.

In the opera I got confused. In the film the offer of suicide by the host, Edmundo Nobile (noble by name and by nature), is treated in an off-hand away and superseded by Leticia’s eloquent and clever solution.

2017-05-12 17.45.46

Nobile gets the gun with which to shoot himself

In the opera it is a big moment that teeters on the idea of Christian atonement: one man’s death can save others. But then this premise is choked off by Leticia’s big aria, an unmotivated Ladino song, sung in her shrill manner (Ades’ intention, not the singer’s poor technique), that fits very oddly into the whole.

Of course, I have only heard the opera once, and the ending might make much more sense after it has been heard half a dozen times. What will they say in 30 years’ time, and 100 years’ time, and 500 years’ time? I have no idea but I do foresee a long life for this piece, as well as for the film.

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DESCENDING TO HADES part 1: BUÑUEL’S ‘EXTERMINATING ANGEL’ AT THE ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, LONDON

05 Friday May 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema and culture, God, opera and film, surrealism

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Ades, Bunuel, Exterminating Angel, Royal Opera House, Tom Cairns

It is the late 1960s: Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel is on at the cinema, and I am drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Half a century on, I am drawn from Norwich, like a lone iron filing to a far-off magnet, to the Royal Opera House in London on the 3rd  May to see the new opera ‘The Exterminating Angel’ by Thomas Adès (or Hades in certain imaginations), with a libretto by Tom Cairns drawn from the script Luis Buñuel wrote for the film.

I am preparing some treasure-able words on a comparison between the opera and the film for my next blog piece. Suffice it to write now a Trip-Advisorish comment on going to the ROH in Covent Garden.

Oh, splendiferous temple to grand opera and high art. You cannot enter the building without a palpable sense of entering a sanctum of civilisation at its most civilised. Its elegant luxury, and the emanations of power, financial and cultural, that it exudes make me gasp in admiration.

But then, what is this? We paid £72 for our two seats, admittedly not at all a bad price by London standards for a theatre seat, but we were seated on the Left Balcony, which means that by the design of the building – extraordinary when it was first built and even more extraordinary now – you only see two thirds of the stage. We’ve encountered this problem before but never until now have we been so short-changed. The stage design is brilliant in every way, except that a lot happens at the side of the stage and is therefore out of sight to spectators in the left-side balcony. To rub it in, the ROH has ditzy little wall lights all way round which no doubt were le dernier cri when it was built but when you lean over the balcony to see better (thus blocking the view of the person behind you) these pesky objects get in the way. Banish them, I say. Replace them with flat lights from John Lewis.

The photo was taken before the performance began when the sheep that feature in the opera (yes, sheep) were paraded on stage. You can see what I mean about the lights.

ROH 2 - May 2017.jpg

The real story however is the opera, which is a drama about a group of wealthy socialites at a dinner party held after an evening at the opera (‘Lucia di Lammermoor’) that all goes wrong, the dinner party from Hades you might say. When it finished and we were seeking to leave, I had a curious feeling: will we in fact be able to? But that is for the next post . . . coming soon, I hope.

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ASSASSINATION STORIES

17 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Bible on film, cinema and culture, gangster films, God, Italy, literature and film

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Book of Judges, Coppola, Don Ciccio, Eglon, Ehud, Mario Puzo, Robert Alter, Vito Corleone

Consider two narratives. One is from the Modern World: a car travels up a drive to a house and two men get out. They ascend the steps to a balcony to talk to the man of power, bloated with age and the fruits of living, who is taking his siesta. His gunmen see there is no threat and retire. The first man is very respectful and asks to introduce his friend – as a mark of respect. The second man steps forward and asks for the man of power’s blessing, and receives it: the man offers his hand to be kissed, and the second man kisses it. The man of power asks for his name, the second man gives it. But the man of power ‘don’t hear so good’, so the second man leans forward and tells him again, and then adds, ‘And this is for you.’ With that he takes the knife hidden under the coat draped over his left arm and rips open the man of power’s belly. The second man steps back and with the first makes his escape, not without gunfire.

The other narrative is from the Ancient World, indeed the very ancient world. A man goes to a king’s house, to the upper chamber, in order to deliver the tribute of the people under his charge. Those with him then retire, and the man says, ‘A secret word I have for you, King.’ So the king in turn sends away his courtiers. The man says, ‘A word of God I have for you,’ so the king stands up. And the man, with his left hand, takes the double-edged sword strapped secretly to his right thigh, and plunges it into the king’s belly. The king was a very fat man, we are told, and the fat of his belly closed over the blade. The assassin went out, locked the doors, and made his escape.

Speculum Humanae Salvationis, 1360

The first, as you have spotted, is from Godfather 2, a flashback to the episode in which Vito takes revenge on Don Ciccio for having murdered his father, his elder brother, and finally his mother. Aged nine at the time Vito only just escapes with his life – to New York and Godfatherhood.

The second is less familiar. For Lent I read the Book of Judges in the translation by Robert Alter. Not your normal reading, but there it is: the Bible and Lent go together. Choice episodes include the Israelites chopping off the arms and big toes of Adoni-Bezek (‘master of Bezek’): Jael driving a tent-peg through Sisera’s head; Gideon harrowing (literally) the men of Succoth with thorns and thistles; Abimelech burning a tower filled with 1000 men and women; Abimelech killed by a millstone flung from a tower that shatters his skull; a Levite man and a concubine ‘abused all night long until morning by Benjaminites’; not to mention the story of Samson which includes slaying the Philistines, being seduced and blinded, then acting the force of an earthquake in the Philistine temple. The Book of Judges does not just contain death but cruel, violent and degrading death. It is the shockingest kind of pulp fiction.

The story of Ehud’s assassination of Eglon the King of Moab is as vivid and episode as any in Judges, I think because it occurs in a cool upper chamber under a veneer of formality and respect surrounding the delivery of tribute by a subject commander, a scene exploded by an eruption of violence and repulsive detail. When I read it, I instantly thought of the scene in Godfather 2 and instantly concluded that Coppola, and his screenwriter Mario Puzo, were referencing the passage in Judges. Ehud, the assassin, was a left-handed man and it was his left hand that committed the murder; when Vito approaches Ciccio he uses his right hand to kiss the offered hand, the weapon veiled under the coat draped on his left arm. But no, Vito uses the knife in his right hand to kill Ciccio, and the parallelism between the two narratives is just coincidental.

Gf 2.2

Gf 2.3Gf 2.4Gf 2.6

Yet, if one has not influenced the other, they do echo each other in their world-view, of a violence in the world that is tragic without even being cathartic. They both proclaim, “This is what the world is like,” behind our façade of civilisation and of human relations conducted with respect. The idea is so far from edifying to the extent that both stories should be shut out from our lives. Yet this is impossible to do: both of them bewitch us; we watch or read fascinated; and they have that extraordinary quality that when we have read or watched them once, we want to do so again and again, to renew our acquaintance with the ghastly detail.

The biblical narrative is paratactic, in other words an ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’ narrative distilling it into a series of essential details. ‘Cut. . . cut . . . cut. . .’ Coppola’s film narrative has similar qualities: the sequence starting from the car arriving at Ciccio’s villa to its leaving in haste, the deed done, lasts four minutes and comprises some 45 shots, and the sequence on the balcony is a series of shots and reverse shots starting in medium shot and ending in closer shot (but not in close-up). As you watch for the first time, you are lulled with the heat of a Sicilian late summer afternoon, then you palpitate with unease – the rest of the film has taught you that something unpleasant is going to happen – and then you gasp at the sight of the knife being ripped up Ciccio’s front.

I first read Judges as a boy in the King James Version, its violence clear but the detail toned down by the obscurity of the language at certain points. Try Robert Alter’s translation, with his essential commentary, to feel the full starkness of the event.

Finally, I cannot help reflecting in a melancholy fashion that these are both religious narratives. The cultural Catholicism of the Godfather is essential to its atmosphere: the episode of Ciccio’s murder is followed by the sight of Vito and his family leaving church after Mass. And Judges? It is possibly the most violent, God-forsaken book of the Bible – but it is not really God-forsaken since the events happen within the total story of Israel, God’s chosen people. The Bible, like life, ‘contains multitudes’.

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London Film-Makers’ Co-operative: the first ten years

10 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, British cinema, cinema and culture

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LFMC, London Film Makers' Coop, Lux, Mark Webber

I’ve done a review of ‘SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: the first decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative 1966-76′ edited by Mark Webber and published by Lux at the end of 2016. Read it here.

shoot-shoot-shoot

The London Film-Makers’ Cooperative (LFMC) was the counter-cultural distribution centre for underground/avant-garde/experimental/artists’ films that morphed into a place where films could be developed and printed outside commercial operations. It was collectivist in spirit, as enshrined in its various constitutions, and as borne out in practice.

It is a vivid part of vivid times, and this book offers some signposts to how its contribution to film culture may be assessed. Well worth reading.

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