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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: crucifixion on film

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

A ‘Stabat Mater’ for our times

03 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in crucifixion on film

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

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

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

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

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

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

Version 2

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

 

Pasolini’s and Van Gogh’s self-crucifixion

24 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema and culture, crucifixion on film, painting and photography, Pasolini

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Delacroix, Gospel according to St Matthew, Pasolini, Stabat Mater, Van Gogh

Among the paintings in the current ‘Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art’ exhibition at the National Gallery, is Van Gogh’s ‘Pietà’, included because Delacroix was an important painter for Van Gogh, and this particular painting is based on a Delacroix painting which Van Gogh only knew of as a monochrome print, so he reworked it as a vivid colour picture using lemon yellow and Prussian blue. Not only that, but he took the liberty of turning the face of the dead Christ into a self-portrait.

Van Gogh - pieta

Seeing it, I immediately saw a connection with Pasolini’s Gospel. In ‘The New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’ I had written:

“[In filming the crucifixion] Pasolini latches onto verses 55 and 56: ‘A number of women were also present, watching from a distance. . . Among them were Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee’. This becomes an excuse for this group to be witnesses at nearly all stages of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. . . Central to the group are two figures from John’s gospel not mentioned in Matthew, that of Jesus’ mother Mary, falling again and again in grief in a filmic version of the mater dolorosa, and the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’. What is more the old Mary is played by Susanna Pasolini, Pier Paolo’s mother, and it may not be fanciful to discern a touch of autobiography in the film: in the uncomprehending but loving sight of his mother, he plays the prophet seeking a kingdom of the sacred and being crucified for it.”

crucifixion 2

Susanna Pasolini as Mary (left) watches Jesus being lifted up

crucifixion 4

Van Gogh is an archetype for the artist whose life in painting was a via dolorosa; the oppositional Pasolini too identifies with the suffering Christ, and inscribes himself into the screen through the presence of his mother. This identification gives particular meaning to the text which he inserts as an intertitle to the crucifixion about how Jesus’ message is heard but not understood, a classic statement of the position of the Romantic artist, prophetic but misunderstood. The text appears in Matthew’s gospel (13:14-15) where Jesus explains why he speaks in parables – as if he purposely wished to baffle his listeners – as a fulfilment of words given to Isaiah when he has a vision of God in the temple (Isaiah 6). The full text is as follows:

“You will listen but for you there is no understanding. You will watch but there is no perceiving. The heart of this people has become dull. Their ears are slow to listen, they keep their eyes shut, so that they never see with those eyes or hear with those ears.”

In making his version of the gospel, Pasolini wanted to make as wide-ranging reference as possible to two millennia of Christian art. In this sequence he throws in the concept of the Stabat Mater and of the Romantic Agony.

crucifixion 7

Jesus dead, his head filmed sideways in order to fill the screen

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

Just missed out on Calvary

01 Thursday May 2014

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in crucifixion on film

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Bernanos, Brendan Gleeson, Calvary, Diary of a Country Priest

Image

The NFGG paperback has just arrived, prior to publication. A good moment. But last night I saw Calvary and realized the book is already out of date. Calvary is about a priest in rural Ireland, the rock which waves of human sinfulness beat but cannot erode. It opens with a bald, shocking premise: in the confessional the good priest learns that he is to be killed in seven days’ time as atonement for the sexual abuse by a bad one that the anonymous confessor suffered as a boy. Its parentage is the French novelist, Georges Bernanos, filtered through Robert Bresson’s version of his Diary of a Country Priest and Maurice Pialat’s Under Satan’s Sun (compare Gleeson’s bulk under the soutane with Depardieu’s in that film). But it also nods – consciously or not I’ve no idea – to Winter Light (the fracture between priest and parishioners), I Confess (the secrecy of the confessional) and Léon Morin, Prêtre (the attractiveness of the priest to the woman).

So, NFGG is out of date, already. A bad moment for me? Not really. It was bound to happen. Maybe I should start planning for THE RETURN OF THE NEW FILMGOER’S GUIDE TO GOD in a decade’s time.

 

‘Rome Open City’ shows Rome’s Crucifixion

10 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in crucifixion on film

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Rome Open City, Rossellini

The priest, Don Pietro, kneels at the foot of the dead Communist, Girgio Manfredi

The priest, Don Pietro, kneels at the foot of the dead Communist, Girgio Manfredi

Rome Open City is a central film to ‘The New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’. The other day I saw it in the cinema in a new digital restoration, and was yet again transfixed. It is partly because Good Friday approaches, and while the film is a compelling story on its own it is at a deeper level the story of Rome’s crucifixion, or Rome’s Passion if you like. I expand on this in the book, and adumbrate the links the film has with Puccini’s opera ‘Tosca’, which help to give the film a greater resonance, since the operatic echoes deepen the sense in which Rome Open City is a quintessentially Italian film. Other countries suffered terribly in the war, but this was the uniquely Italian version of that suffering.

This is a story that never fails to reach some inner core in me. I first saw the film at the age of 19, and have had a lifetime’s experience of it.

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  • EMPIRE – WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS
  • yearning for the sixties
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