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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: costume narratives

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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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.

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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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BREXIT FROM DUNKIRK

30 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in British cinema, costume narratives, disaster movies, War

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battle films, Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk, First Light, Kenneth Branagh

So far Dunkirk has grossed $129 million (figure on 27 July) against costs of $100 million. It has done well in the UK which is what you would expect, but it has also taken around $75 million in the USA which strikes me as not expected. In South Korea it has taken almost $13.5 million (27 July). This figure is not just unexpected, since it is more than the UK, it is barely credible. (The Harry Styles effect, I am unreliably informed.)

I think the story of the Dunkirk evacuation in the Second World War in 1940 is essentially a British one, and so unlikely to travel. But Nolan’s Dunkirk film is essentially an action film, and thus has the potential to travel anywhere. It was shrewd of him to spot its potential as an action narrative.

I liked especially the way Nolan intercuts his three stories set on land, sea and air, and then as the film progresses he speeds up that intercutting in his aim of creating a visual symphony. To underpin this I found the dialogue largely inaudible (maybe because I’m 69), but it hardly bothered me. And when I could hear the words spoken by the diction-trained Shakespearean Kenneth Branagh, I felt an abrupt change of mood in the film, and a drop in the temperature. On the other hand, the reading out of Churchill’s famous post-Dunkirk speech from a newspaper report is a masterstroke, as the words are read in an anti-Churchillian manner (Bressonian almost, if you know what that means) and suit the ‘desperate-heroic’ tone of the film.

Film is ideally suited to battle action. [See chapter 4 of my book Film Past, Film Future on battle films – available on Amazon.] Seeing Dunkirk made me watch the magnificent BBC/Lionsgate film, First Light, about the Battle of Britain pilot Geoffrey Wellum, since, like in Dunkirk, the aerial sequences are so terrific. Also, it made me want to re-see the BBC’s 2004 docu-drama recreating the strategic background to the evacuation and the tactical difficulties in achieving it.

Dunkirk (2017)

Brexit hell

Now, costume dramas, of which this is one, speak to the time in which they are made as much as to the historical events being portrayed. Five minutes into watching the film, I thought, “Why has Nolan made this film? Why are Time-Warner funding it?” The answer came loud and clear: it is to tune into the Brexit mood in the UK. This was a foolish strain of thought. It doesn’t account for the film’s success in the USA, never mind South Korea (although it may account for only modest box-office success in Europe). Nor does it allow for the fact that Nolan has been nursing this project for two or three decades.

The UK general election in June upset me greatly (and I have written about it in Belaboured. Bats Broken. Britain Shaken  – see http://amzn.to/2eN3irH.) Churchill’s wise pronouncement that wars are not won by evacuations made me think that Britain does not regain its poise and place in the world by its current exit strategy. But maybe it can do so after the EU exit just as the British army went on to success after Dunkirk. And then I realise that history does not repeat itself, necessarily.

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Image

FERRARA MADE ME (2): GIORGIO BASSANI

20 Thursday Oct 2016

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Auschwitz, Bassani, De Sica, Ferrara, Garden of the Finzi Continis, Holocaust films, Jewish cemeteries, Tennis Club Marfisa

Ferrara in the Romagna, Italy was the hometown not just of Antonioni (see previous post) but of the novelist Giorgio Bassani. Antonioni’s dates are 1912 to 2007, Bassani’s 1916 to 2000, so they are close contemporaries, even if not so close as to have been in the same class (assuming they went to the same school). However they did both play at Ferrara’s  Tennis Club Marfisa. I am uncertain about Antonioni’s tennis prowess, but Bassani’s name can still be seen on the championship trophy.

entry to Club Marfisa

The Tennis Club is still there at 44 Via Saffi (see photo), and thereby hangs a tale: for it is the expulsion of the Jews from the club under the racial laws of 1938 that provides one of the starting-points for Bassani’s novel ‘The Garden of the Finzi Continis’. The book is ostensibly a story about the narrator’s amorous pursuit of the elusive Micòl, but it is really a story about the degrading and destruction of Ferrarese Jewry under Fascism: Micòl flees from the narrator’s arms, and is disappeared into the inferno at Auschwitz. In 1938, some 57,000 Jews lived in Italy, and 8,000 of them were annihilated by the end of the war, around 150 of them from Ferrara.

Bassani was not one of them, a small gain to balance against the corkscrew pain of the larger loss. On the other hand, his survival is especially important, since he used his gifts to render witness to what one Jewish family in one Italian city suffered, the snatching away of their Italianità, of their home and roots, of all trace of identity, and in narrating the story of this one family he speaks for all the others. The family includes the clever, attractive, teasing, maddening Micòl who lives for the past and for the present; “for the future, in itself, she only harboured an abhorrence.”

Bassani’s novel was published in 1962, and found an international audience with the film of 1970. Bassani for his part kept his distance from it, even asking for his name to be removed from the credits. When you read the novel, you can see why: where it is delicately expressed, the film blunders about, and in doing so reduces it to a superficiality. Secondly, I have a particular thing about costume dramas: only the cleverest directors can deal with their inherent inauthenticity, a failure which the film exemplifies. Here is the group of young people waiting to enter the Finzi Contini house in order to play tennis: their hairstyles, their clothes, the colour quality of the film are meant to look like 1938, but all they do is evoke 1970. They look to me quintessentially inauthentic.

garden-fc-1

The director of the film Vittorio De Sica was a neorealist, whose Bicycle Thieves feels famously authentic, but he lacks the sensibility to register the subtlety and the melancholy of Bassani’s novel. Naturally, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1972, but then who needs the Oscars?

Bassani’s book is very much rooted in Ferrara, and where the names have not been changed by him, a number of the places mentioned – the wall at Montagnone, S.Maria in Vado, the Corso Ercole d’Este (whose poetry appealed to Antonioni too*), the Temple in the Via Mazzini in the heart of the old ghetto – can still be seen.

Worth a visit in particular is the Jewish cemetery at the end of the Via Dei Vigne. It contains the tomb of the Finzi Magrini

entry to Jewish cemetery

but in describing that of the fictional Finzi Contini near the opening of the book, Bassani in his fictionalising is not so much thinking of the Finzi Magrini one as of this tomb, “which could be mocked as ‘a monstrosity’”.

jc-2

Giorgio Bassani himself has a grave in the cemetery, which judging by the stones placed on it in acts of remembrance, is much visited.

Bassini gravestone
Bassani tomb: front . . .
Bassani tomb: front . . .
. . . and rear
. . . and rear

* When the narrator goes into the town at night Bassani writes: “There was no one, almost no one on the streets, and Corso Giovecca and Corso Ercole 1 d’Este, smooth, empty and of an almost salt-like whiteness, opened up in front of me like two huge ski-tracks.” Antonioni would have known what he is talking about in view of his use of such an image in Cronaca di un amore (see previous post).

Next post: the search for Antonioni’s tomb.

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Posted by Tim Cawkwell | Filed under Antonioni, cinema and culture, costume narratives, Italy, literature and film

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THE GLOBALIZATION OF AUSTENLAND

30 Monday May 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema and culture, costume narratives

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Eric Rohmer, Irish Film Board, Jane Austen, Love and Friendship, Whit Stillman

Love and FriendshipAt first sight Love and Friendship seems simple: a late eighteenth-century costume drama set in English country houses and London, from an unpublished novel by Jane Austen, ‘Lady Susan’. So, obviously a British film for the country house/period market. Second sight reveals something much more complicated. The production was financed by Arte (France), the Irish Film Board and the Netherlands Film Fund. No sign of British funding. Nor was it filmed in England, a.k.a. Austenland, but in Ireland, namely the Newbridge Estate in County Dublin and in Dublin itself. The actors and actresses it is true are British, except for the American Chloë Sevigny, but then she plays an American so that’s alright (but no Americans in the Austen novel, by the way). Nor is it directed by a British director, sensitive to all the class stuff going on and to what is unsaid and misinterpreted, but by Whit Stillman, an American, who seems perfectly attuned to all that British stuff. So, at third sight, the film returns to being utterly simple – clever and witty, in which production values do not overwhelm the film and allow it to strip away all the extras and focus on the narrative. It is Austen territory, but also the terroir of that remarkable late-18th-century sensibility of the modern era, Eric Rohmer. What is more it is aimed at a sophisticated global market and will surely do well there.

THE ASSASSIN

18 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in costume narratives

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China-Taiwan, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, The Assassin

This extraordinary film reached the cinemas in 2015, and even reached Norwich in February of this year. Unlike a blockbuster, it has taken its time to make an impact.

Assassin

I have read some reviews, although I am far from having seen lots of them, but the ones I did see have been silent on one aspect. If it is an aesthetic law that a work of art set in the past always tells you as much about the period in which it was made (i.e. now) as the period in which it is set (i.e. then), what does The Assassin tell us about the present? It is made by a Taiwanese, and is a Taiwan-China co-production, and what it tells us is that for a large country, e.g. China, to destabilise a small country, e.g. Taiwan, is a mistake, morally but also politically. The status quo is disrupted at peril.

The story of the film is the dispatch of the assassin, Nie Yinniang, by Princess Jiaching to Weìbó province in order to murder Tian Ji’an, the jiedushi (military governor) of Hamdan prefecture within Hebei province. This is a move by the Tang Dynasty to increase its power. The film tells how Nie Yinniang then rebels against this order. Why? Ostensibly because her heart tells her to spare Tian Ji’an who it turns out was once betrothed to her as a peace move between the Court and Weibo. But there is a strand of political expediency in her thinking too. Her puppetmaster has tried to instil in her the idea that ‘the way of the sword is pitiless’, but Nie Yinniang argues that since Tian Ji’an’s son is so young, to kill Tian Ji’an would bring chaos to Weibo.

The historical source is a story by Pie Xing called ‘Nie Yinniang’, written in 9th-century China, and covering recent events since Tian Ji’an was jiedushi from 796 to 812. But the film works at several levels, and strict historicity is probably the most marginal.

  • It is a martial arts film.
  • It is a ‘love story’ about the complex relationship between Nie Yinninag and Tian Ji’an.
  • It is a story with a moral: don’t destabilise, be prepared to stand up to power.
  • It is a contemporary fable: ‘China, hands off Taiwan.’ Keep the status quo.

Interestingly, on this last point, Wikipedia tells us the film cost the equivalent of US$14.9 million. By 2010, the director Hou Hsiao-Hsien had assembled a budget but in the end over half of the film’s final budget came from China. This is intriguing: were the Chinese producers of the view that China-Taiwan relations should not be destabilised, or was it more Machiavellian still, that this is a propaganda film through which the Chinese Communist Party supported the film’s message as a cover for the fact that it sought, if not to destabilise Taiwan, then to act in an overbearing manner towards it? After all, the situation between China and Taiwan is a bomb waiting to explode.

A final inscrutable, perplexing thought: Weibo is the brand name for the Chinese micro-blogging website, that is to say the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. So ‘Don’t destabilise Weibo’ (the province) means ‘Don’t interfere in Weibo’ (the microblog). No doubt all parties readily deny such a connection, but if you believe in the secret life of cinema, then you can relish this thought.

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