• 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: cinema of hyperbole

COLD WAR: battles are fought at the edge of maps

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Bresson, cinema of hyperbole, Polish history, War

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cold War, Michael Ondaatje, Pawlikovsky, Warlight

I first heard the precept “Battles are fought at the edge of maps” from a friend of mine whose father had been in the military, but I was unclear exactly what it meant. It did sound intelligent if gnomic.

I then came across it in Robert Bresson’s ‘Notes on the Cinematographer’, his collection of pensées, wise if still gnomic, distilled from his experience of film-making up to 1975 when he had already made eleven features. His formulation was as follows: “What happens in the joins [French jointures]. ‘The great battles,’ Général de M. . .  used to say, ‘are nearly always begun at the points of intersection of the staff maps.’” (The general’s name is coyly withheld – who was this genius? Actually I feel that the idea was just as likely to have been formulated as a throwaway thought by some anonymous officer, an unconsidered trifle which was then picked up and made into something more considered.)

My friend from whom I had first heard the aphorism clarified for me that it came about he thinks in the Second World War when in doing reconnaissance (since “time spent on reconnaissance is rarely wasted”) officers found that the area they wished particularly to study required two maps side by side, or even four maps corner-to-corner, because as sod’s law would have it the particularly interesting terrain, the terrain of particular concern for the battle to come, was right on the edge or at the corner of the map. (The problem is solved now by the maps all being digital so one can choose where to have the centre point.)

I can understand this militarily, but confess some puzzlement as to what Bresson was thinking. My interpretation is that it is in the juxtaposition between shot A and shot B of a film that significant meaning arises: at the point where the shot changes, i.e. the joins, the spectator is pitched into a new development, or the unexpected, or sudden enhanced anticipation of what is going to happen.

The general idea continues to have traction: the gnomic can somehow be mesmerising. Lo and behold it is the epigraph to Michael Ondaatje’s new novel ‘Warlight’ in this form: “Most of the great battles are fought in the creases of topographical maps.” In the acknowledgements this is credited to ‘a remark made by Robert Bresson during a filmed interview’. That brings the two strands together: the idea somehow current in the ether and the name of Robert Bresson. Roll over, Général de M.

Well I remain uncertain as to quite what Bresson meant, and wish he was still alive so that we could ask him. I think it may also relate closely to the precision of his film-making, especially in the reconnaissance stage, but also when he was improvising on set. Does it refer to stripping away everything to leave some essence?

Although Pawel Pawlikovsky’s Cold War could not be described as Bressonian, it does have that sense of precision that you find in Bresson’s films and which can be such an unexpected ingredient of compelling story-telling. I particularly admired the way that the narrative made jumps forcing the spectator to fill in the gaps, without ever at any point making this too difficult. It shares too with Bresson the quality of compression that makes the film much larger than its 88-minute length. In a hyperbolic age, this is extremely valuable.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

FIRST REFORMED, SCHRADER REINVENTED

17 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Bible on film, Bresson, cinema of hyperbole, Creation, crucifixion films, Doubt, God, metaphysical film, Pascalian cinema, predestination, redemption, spiritual cinema

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

apocalypse, Bergman, Bresson, Schrader, Tarkovsky

Paul Schrader was born in 1946, so he is 72 years old and maybe feeling the chariot of death pressing on behind. While there is time he needs to make not just another film, but to revisit his youth in all its intensity: the rigour of his Calvinist upbringing, the life-changing discovery of moving images, the heady atmosphere of radicalism engendered by US involvement in the Vietnam War.

So, obviously, he must go back to Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman, art-house deities of his youth. Schrader belongs to that cine-literate Hollywood generation that emerged in the 1970s – Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Lucas and others – only his cine-literacy was as much in the European arthouse film as in commercial or pulp film-making. As a measure of his precocious obsession, he published a book on Dreyer, Bresson and Ozu in 1972 at the age of 26, and when he got down to script-writing and later directing, their intensity informed his narratives. His main protagonists are ulcerous, and it seems in character that Schrader started his script for Taxi Driver while hospitalised for ulcer treatment in 1972. Travis Bickle wrestles on behalf of us all.

First Reformed draws on two particular films, Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne/ Diary of a Country Priest and Bergman’s Nattvardsgästerna/ Winter Light, and the Reverend Toller is in a lineage that begins with the young curé of the Journal, and moves to Pastor Ericsson in Winter Light. (Bergman claimed to have been tremendously fond of Bernanos’ original novel, and had seen Bresson’s film of it seven or eight times before he made Winter Light.) Watching First Reformed, I felt blissfully happy to see that this noble line had not been extinguished.

First Reformed

So – First Reformed consciously, deliberately and imperiously starts from Bresson and Bergman, and in the Facebook age, Schrader asserts a deeper historical continuity about human corruption and the compelling need for salvation. The film is Pascalian just when I thought we had forgotten how to be so. Big question: do you believe in the environmental apocalypse to come? Big answer: it is better to say yes, since if you’re right you will do something about it. Anyway, can you dare bet it won’t happen in view of what we are doing to the planet? This is a version of Pascal’s Wager, and, as Bresson said in 1965, “Pascal is for everyone.” We are predestined for destruction, and although Toller argues that humans cannot predict the future, you have a sense that having wrestled like Jacob with the angel in the person of the young environmental activist Michael, he cannot get rid of the idea that the future is determined for us, and it is grim. This engenders not doubt about the existence of God (as with Pastor Eriksson), but doubt that he can ever forgive us.

For a Hollywood film, it is extremely spare. Admittedly Ethan Hawke plays Toller, well known to audiences from a lot of films, especially those of Richard Linklater, but, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he manages to offload this baggage. At any rate to me the rest of the cast are unknowns, and certainly unfamiliar. Although Schrader is closer to the Bergman mantra, “Actors are trained to express complexities” than to Bresson’s idea of the actor as ‘model’ who is “involuntarily expressive”, yet with his small cast of characters Schrader manages to echo in an authentic manner the whole society Bresson conjures up in Journal.

I watched the film wondering whether it would end with Bernanos’/Bresson’s “All is Grace” but Schrader steers it convincingly in his own non-slavish direction. And the boldest, super-contrarian move he makes is to film his story in the 4:3 format of classical cinema, which in an age of hyperbolical wide-screen film-making especially catches us out, reminding us that this format has not been bettered for allowing the intense, microscope-like gaze of the camera.

The big theme of the film is apocalypse. The narrative not just reinvents the curé’s psychosomatic cancer in Journal, but Michael’s pessimism about the environment rhymes with Persson’s fear of nuclear destruction in Winter Light. It rhymes too with the central idea of Bresson’s most pessimistic film, Le Diable probablement / The Devil Probably, which in the face of man-made environmental catastrophe rejects the church, Marxism, outright libertarianism – and other nostrums – in favour of suicide. Is this too melodramatic? But then so many powerful dramas and films hinge on a melodramatic premise, and in First Reformed the idea makes for compelling viewing. It poses too a central challenge for theists. A director as Bible-literate as Schrader manages deftly to bring in the counter-arguments to outright pessimism: the apostle Paul’s “The whole of creation is groaning for release from bondage” (Romans 8.22) and God’s words in Job chapter 38.4: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” But are they a sufficient counterweight?

How all this comes to a climax should be discussed as well, but I shall refrain for fear of revealing the ending. Suffice it to say that Schrader unexpectedly moves into Tarkovskian territory with the levitation from Offret / The Sacrifice, but then goes beyond it, and miles too beyond the Bressonian universe, with a magical sequence of digital film-making. You almost wish he had done the whole film in 3-D.

Bresson, Bergman and Tarkovsky are central figures in my New Filmgoers Guide to God, published by Matador in 2014, available on Amazon.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

Goodfellas versus The Godfather

22 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema of hyperbole, gangster films

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

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

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