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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: silent cinema

PORDENONE FESTIVAL OF SILENT FILM 2018

18 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in silent cinema, Uncategorized

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Feyder, Giornate, Lubitsch, Pordenone, Scandinavian cinema, Stahl, Tiepolo

DSCN1145

Italy is rich in its cities and towns. I had never heard of Pordenone, a small to medium town an hour or so north of Venice on the plain fronting the Dolomites, until I was persuaded to come to its Giornate del Cinema Muto or Silent Film Festival, an Italian gift to the world but this is yet another attractive Italian place. This Italian richness comes also from their food and their ice creams, and from their architecture, for which they have a special genius.

DSCN1158

Duomo by day . . .

Duomo at night 1

. . . and by night

Look at Pordenone’s Piazza San Marco with Duomo facade and bell-tower (above), and the mediaeval Gothic town hall, at the core of the historic centre (below), a portion of which was lost to Allied bombing in December 1944.

DSCN1166    bell tower reflected

But also striking was the Piazzale 20 September, a broad square with a hospital for war wounded put centre stage (see at end). This is a piece of Fascist-era (I think) architecture, with a resounding inscription: quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur; quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est (which being translated reads: “Where Fate keeps leading us, let us follow; whatever it will be, all conquest comes through endurance”). This is iron-clad, golden-era Latin by Vergil, the poet of Roman imperialism, who like Fascist-era architecture is in our present time suspect but whose time will surely come again. Just as good is the newly built Teatro Verdi in which the majority of the festival’s films were shown, an imposing modern building of clean lines and curves.

Teatro Verdi day

Teatro Verdi night

The Pordenone Festival had several themes, two of particular interest to me: the silent films of John M Stahl, and a scatter of Scandinavian films. I found myself being drawn to the idea of reputations, how they are received and built and knocked down. Here are five thoughts:

1              John Stahl is a forgotten film-maker, undeservedly. In the new book, ‘The Call of the Heart –John M Stahl and Hollywood Melodrama,’ Charles Barr, one of the co-editors, argues that his strong association with melodrama and the ‘woman’s film’ is a key to this neglect. “Those mainstays of popular cinema are no longer the object of critical scorn or indifference, but Stahl has until now hardly benefited from this welcome change in attitude.”

Bruce & Charles

Bruce Babington and Charles Barr, joint editors of ‘The Call of the Heart’, leading a discussion on the merits of John Stahl

What is more, Stahl died too early to feature in Kevin Brownlow’s ‘The Parade’s Gone By’ (1968) or to be lionized as one of the Hollywood long-distance auteurs such as Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Walsh and others.

It probably made it harder that the genre he worked in was melodrama which I once thought of as an acquired taste, but as I have got older, I find I have acquired it and can now accept that narrative implausibility can be trumped by dramatic impetus. I think Robert Bresson himself was not immune to the seductions of melodrama in which the ordinary is rendered as extraordinary; at least, his Diary of a Country Priest (1950) can be seen through the lens of melodrama, and his first film, The Angels of Sin (1943), which is set in a nunnery, even more so.

2              Ernst Lubitsch’s career has a different trajectory. The filmgoer in the radical 1960s could read about his reputation and his fabled ‘Lubitsch touch’. Consider the verdict in Georges Sadoul’s ‘Dictionnaire des Cinéastes’ published in 1965: “An able man who even when he was vulgar never lacked verve and know-how.” To me it all felt old-fashioned at the time, and in several decades of rather desultory contact with his films, I have not found Lubitsch to be my glass of tea. A screening of his Forbidden Paradise (1923) in a pristine print and with beautiful musical accompaniment of violin, piano and percussion was a chance to overturn my prejudices. It did not do so, although the rest of the audience was positively enthusiastic; my embarrassment was deepened by the fact that the screening was attended by Lubitsch’s daughter, Nicola, now an elegant and vivacious elderly lady who, in a separate session, reminisced with engaging stories about her father and her life. I felt I should treat her father better than I could bring myself to do.

Nicola Lubitsch w D Robinson & J Weissberg

Nicola Lubitsch with David Robinson and Jay Weissberg (on right), the Giornate Director

Nothing risks suffering from shelf-life like comedy. Forbidden Paradise is about Catherine the Great of Russia’s love affairs. A revolution was going on in the background, entirely free of violence; the Imperial soldiers were kitted out like a chorus line in over-the-top uniforms; the lord chamberlain advising Catherine (Adolphe Menjou) was a forerunner of Sir Humphrey in the TV sitcom, ‘Yes, Minister’. It was as if Lubitsch hid reality behind a veil of lightness for fear of confronting its tragic quality. This is a perfectly tenable position, if not my own, and it is a reflection on our present time that Lubitsch should be coming back into fashion. Reputations rise and fall, and rise again.

3              I did not feel that the reputation of Jacques Feyder was enhanced by a showing of his L’Atlantide (1921) torpedoed in the middle third of its narrative by the dreary décors of the secret city of Atlantis and even more so by the casting of Napierkowska as the Queen, who was definitely lacking in the femme fatale department. Georges Sadoul wielded the knife in describing her acting as ‘très 1910’.

4              The fourth reputation I had to revise in my mind was that of Gianbattista Tiepolo (1696-1770), the painter of walls and ceilings in churches and palaces to enhance the illusion of heavenly space. I went on the bus tour to the nearby town of Udine to see the Tiepolos in the Diocesan Museum created from the archiepiscopal palace. Most extraordinary was the waiting room where his technique could be studied close to, and the throne room where a remarkable version of the Judgement of Solomon

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was painted on the ceiling. Like other great painters, he had the technical mastery of sky, light, fabrics, faces and flesh, and allied these gifts to compositional brilliance, taking Renaissance perspective to a more elevated level.

DSCN1221

the angel appearing to Abraham’s wife Sarah

Tiepolo is closely linked to the flourishing of baroque architecture, another taste I have had difficulty in acquiring. I sense that fifty years ago his reputation was perhaps not as stellar as it is now and he provides another example of the fickleness of human taste. In our present culture of hyperbole, he has become an adornment.

DSCN1233

staircase in the archiepiscopal palace

5              Like painters, filmmakers have to adjust to the ravages of time, a process which brings us back to the festival. Its purpose is to ensure that silent films get exposure, since without it they are never going to receive the critical judgement and appreciation due to them. Without the work of archives and the exposure of their labours at events like the Giornate we would be deprived of the opportunity of seeing the Scandinavian films of the silent era. We know about Hollywood before the coming of sound, about German Expressionist cinema, about French masterpieces of the time, about silent Hitchcock in the UK, but alongside these must be put the dramatic masterpieces coming out of Scandinavia. A film-maker like Victor Sjöström from Sweden made remarkable use of landscape and setting, and in Körkarlen / The Phantom Carriage (1921) one of the great ‘bottle or bible’ narratives, silent or sound; Carl Dreyer from Denmark was represented by his Prästänkan / Parson’s Widow (1921), a delicious comedy that turns powerfully poignant by the end. But there were other film-makers as well. I especially liked Walter Fürst’s Troll-Elgen/The Ghost Elk (Norway 1927). One hopes that further opportunity can be given to showing these Scandinavian films, since their reputation is only going to grow.

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I do not quite know why but being in Italy always prompts in me bizarre reflections, so I must conclude with them:

item 1:      why should the grand Hotel Villa Ottoboni accompany its breakfasts, held in a grand breakfast room, with relentless europop? The mighty are fallen.

Item 2:      I need a decent bowl of decent muesli to set me up for the day. In this same hotel, the best cereal they could offer was coco-pops – but fear not, it was labelled brazenly as ‘muesli’. In the country that produced the two greatest writers on the gap between the appearance of power and the reality of power, namely the Roman historian Tacitus and the Renaissance thinker Machiavelli, what you read is not what you get.

Item 3:      from the outside and in the news Italy appears to be a single unified country, but the reality is that it is fissiparous. I spotted two sets of graffiti on motorway bridges: ‘Basta Italia, semi Veneti / Italy go to hell, we are Venetians,’ and then later ‘Basta Roma, basta tasse / Rome go to hell, we’ve had enough of taxes.’ Despite these sentiments, Italy is still one country, so perhaps the solution to this problem is to conclude that while Italy’s appearance is of a divided country, in reality the country is unified by its dislike of central authority.

Piazzale XX Settembre

The Piazzale XX Settembre: the date records the capture of Rome as the culmination of Italian unification in 1870. 

‘The Call of the Heart – John M Stahl and Hollywood Melodrama’ is published by John Libbey Publishing (see http://www.johnlibbey.com). It is distributed by Indiana UP,  and is available on Amazon. It covers all his films and I have contributed the essay on Stahl’s The Keys of the Kingdom (1944).

FILM PORTRAITS 2: TACITA DEAN

03 Thursday May 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in artists' film, avant garde, documentaries, painting and photography, silent cinema

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Hockney, Merce Cunningham, Merz, National Portrait Gallery, Tacita Dean, Twombly, Warner

The National Portrait Gallery in London has an exhibition of film portraits by Tacita Dean. It runs until 28 May 2018.

The first one you see is the trademark profile of David Hockney with his trademark circular glasses, and an even more recognizable trademark – a cigarette smoked without inhibition or self-consciousness. Love him, love his cigarette. There are a few edits of this sixteen-minute film so that we also get some idea of his studio in Los Angeles where he was preparing a selection of painted portraits for an exhibition in London. The screen hangs in the middle of a dark spatial cube with the film projected from a corner and the beam angled at 90 degrees by a mirror onto a backlit screen. This effect was terrific.

Sixteen minutes. When did I last spend sixteen minutes at one time looking at a painted portrait? The answer is that I never have. To see this exhibition you need to give at least an hour and a half to watching all the films one after the other – assuming of course that is what you do, which is not what I saw the trickle of visitors doing.

So what is the right length for a film portrait? Too long and the experience just becomes tedious; too short and it fails to become immersive. In the latter case why not have a series of photos? For example Mario Merz (2002), one of Dean’s first portraits, is 8½ minutes long. We start by being teased by a shot of Merz’s face in shadow, but in due course our wish to see the face properly is granted, and at the end we see him shuffling in his garden, poignantly enough since the film was made a year before he died. His prop was a pine cone because he was fascinated by the Fibonacci Series (Google it). Would it have been the same if we had seen four photographs: face in shadow, face in sunlight, garden, pine cone? At least the film draws us into spending time in his presence provided we are patient, whereas a few photographs would be viewed in a minute or so, and leave a different impression. A photograph gives a likeness; a film portrait can give a likeness but also an atmosphere.

Another relatively early work is Michael Hamburger (2007) made in the author’s Suffolk cottage, a film that comes closest to a conventional film portrait, except that its capturing of the atmosphere of the house and garden as much as of Hamburger himself breaks out from these conventions. Hamburger was a poet and translator, but the film particularly focuses on his interest in the different varieties of apples he grows and the orchard belonging to the house. So weather is important in the film and it ends with a shot of a rainbow over the house, a sacralizing event.

There are disappointments. Providence (2017) is shot on anamorphic film (which produces a wide-screen ratio of 1 (height) to 2.35 (width), effective enough in the case of Michael Hamburger) so that Dean can juxtapose the actor David Warner in profile, filmed in the UK, with hummingbirds filmed in Los Angeles. If you wonder about this juxtaposition (and there is no obligation to do so – just accept it) you have to be told in the caption that Warner loves hummingbirds. This is at the same time banal (who would not love watching hummingbirds?) and annoying (why do you have to read a caption to learn this? Could this information not be incorporated in the film in some way?). I had my own private disappointment with the film, which is not Dean’s fault. I have still a vivid memory of Warner as Henry VI in The Wars of the Roses at Stratford in the early sixties, and as Hamlet at Stratford in 1965, playing him as a disaffected student and thus chiming with the mood of the times. Seeing this low-key film of him somehow felt flat: I wanted him to launch into Shakespeare. Still, there is an interest in seeing an actor onscreen trying not to act. Was Warner deliberately trying to avoid performance? This is an interesting point about all film portraiture. Perhaps even with painted portraiture it could be said that Titian’s subjects (for example) could all be said to be performing. Photographic portraiture on the other hand is just as good when it captures the subject off-guard, a technique that Degas and Lautrec, for example, tried to make use of in the nineteenth century.

Nor could I be bothered with Manhattan Mouse Museum showing Claes Oldenburg arranging objects in his studio. My indifference may have had more to do with observation fatigue on my part as much as a lack of interest in the subject, which I concede might be very revealing to Oldenburg fans.

That fatigue was partially caused by trying to take an interest in the 29-minute film portrait of Cy Twombly (Edwin Parker, 2011), made in Twombly’s studio in Lexington, Virginia but being hardly familiar with his painting I somehow could not rouse any great enthusiasm. The film certainly had a characteristic gentleness and respect for its subject and the glimpses of his studio made him feel elusive, which is probably the point. Similarly elusive was the visit he makes with two friends to a restaurant in Lexington which was a desultory affair reinforced by their inaudibility as they made conversation. Dean also shows in the exhibition fifty or so underwhelming photographs taken in Twombly’s studio, especially disappointing.

The best in fact came last. A large space, which I measured as roughly 35m long by 13m wide is given over to a six-screen installation of a film portrait of Merce Cunningham (Merce Cunningham performs Stillness, 2008). Here is a rough sketch of these six screens and the projectors to show how the spectator could wander around the space:

Tac Dean installation of Merce C portrait

The film loop is relatively short because it is of Cunningham ‘listening’ to the composer John Cage’s piece ‘4 minutes 33 seconds’, a silent composition except that it is not silent because it makes you listen to ambient sound, which in this case is coming up from the New York street below, emphatically ambient you might say. With the six soundtracks going in one space, plus the sound of six projectors, the effect is positively raucous. Between them these six projected films of Cunningham make up something of a hologram, a definite virtual presence in a way the other portraits are not, and by far the most immersive work of all.

In the end I realized I was fatigued by watching all these elderly men, since of the eight works shown only GDGDA (2011) is of the relatively young female artist Julie Mehretu.

I should not be telling Dean nor the NPG about their business but I did want more variety of portraiture: more people, not just celebrated elderly male artists. And I wanted shorter, sharper, wittier films. I was disappointed too by the number of technicians involved for each film. For example, I counted eight for the Hockney film portrait plus a number of laboratories involved, which made the film seem overdetermined. Surely these film portraits can be made with someone operating the camera, someone doing the sound, and Dean making it all happen in the way she wants?

 

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SLOW TV IN AN INSTANT AGE

10 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in British cinema, silent cinema, spiritual cinema

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BBC, Doug Mackay-Hope, Morvern, Namibia, Slow Odyssey, Turtle Eagle Cheetah

One of the best things on television in the past year or two has been the emergence of ‘slow tv’. I’ve now watched various programmes on the BBC under this heading. Although they may exist on other channels I’ve not spotted them. In any case the intrusion of adverts would seriously upset the rhythm, nor do I want slow adverts which would to my mind be a particularly refined torture.

I was introduced to slow film early on in my late teens encountering Warhol’s slow films, e.g. Chelsea Girls, Harlot, or his wonderful film portraits. Then there was Michael Snow’s Wavelength and other smaller versions such as Larry Gottheim’s Fogline. I am sure there are many other examples. And maybe if I searched YouTube and Vimeo I would find plenty more. Digital technology of course now makes it easy whereas back in the sixties it was much more expensive.

BBC slow television tends to focus on nature as a subject, very reasonably as the two are a natural fit. But last year they screened slow films of three Benedictine monasteries to marvellous effect (see my blog entry of Saturday 4 November 2017), again the two making a natural fit.

But their nature slot reached new heights on Wednesday 27 December when BBC4 screened ‘Turtle, Eagle, Cheetah: a slow odyssey’ (still available on iPlayer). Cameras were attached to the three creatures and we were able to enter their lives for 30 minutes each, in a 90-minute programme. The very best thing was the way music was banished, except for its brief use at the transition points, and we had to be content (and I am very content) with natural sound. Try for example the rushing sound of the air that accompanies the white-tailed sea eagle moving and drifting over the mountains and coasts of Morvern on the west coast of Scotland (where I have spent countless holidays).

The film climaxed with a cheetah hunt. Three animals, all sibling orphans, were released on the Namibian plains and tracked hunting prey. Since the camera was attached to the top of their heads you got a cheetah eye’s view of the prey being stalked and then chased, first zebra, then a warthog (watch it go!) and then gemsbok (with serious antlers, weapons which made them unafraid to turn and face the cheetah). Disappointingly in all three cases the cheetah had to give up the chase as they had used up all their energy, so the narrative lacked the perfect end of a kill – you identify with the cheetah and want them to succeed.

I repeat, no music, and indeed no voice-over. Instead information was provided with ‘embedded graphics’ that could be read onscreen as you watched the action. You actually are getting quite close to pre-sound dialogue cinema, casting the narrative weight on the visuals, and using intertitles to back up the story. That was a golden, pre-lapsarian age, and it looks like it may be coming back in a new, sophisticated way.

Credit to the programme producer, Doug Mackay-Hope.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

 

SLOW TELEVISION

04 Saturday Nov 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in documentaries, God, metaphysical film, monastery films, painting and photography, silent cinema, spiritual cinema

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Belmont, Downside, Father Alex, Groning, Pluscarden

Monasteries and slow television are a natural fit. That was proved by three programmes on BBC4 shown over three nights in October (24th, 25th and 26th). The three-hour series was called Retreat: Meditations from a Monastery and gave us a look inside the three Benedictine monasteries of Downside (Somerset), Pluscarden (Moray, Scotland), and Belmont (Herefordshire). There was special emphasis on work as a form of prayer – activities like joinery, garment-making, bee-keeping and painting an icon. This made sense in television terms because these are visual activities, when sitting meditating is less so, unless the viewer is capable of an empathetic stillness, or unless the film finds ways of getting inside a monk’s head, not to my mind impossible. You need to find visual equivalences for stillness and emptying the mind.

Big pluspoint: no stifling music, except for the monks’ chanting in church.

In 2014 I published ‘The New Filmgoers Guide to God’ and included a section on the current fashion for taking the camera into the monastery:

“If the certainties of a rock-solid belief in the Almighty no longer seem appealing that is one reason why indirections are an attractive route to the heart of religious cinema, as if it was a maze whose centre was hidden, full of false turnings and dead ends, as if we were to keep running into emptiness. Yet there is no doubt that stories of faith and hope still inspire large audiences. What is missing is the sense of a guiding hand, of an imaginative divine universe; in effect we have become disconnected. This only makes it the more extraordinary that in the last few years, documentaries about monks and nuns have commanded a small but committed audience as if a glimpse into the monastic universe offered some key, if vicarious, insight into the proper form of human living.”

The outstanding example in this genre is Matthias Gröning’s Into Great Silence from 2005, made at La Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble in France, and of an imposing length of 2 1/2 hours, a tiny but potent window into the spiritual world that the monastery is able to create.

Medns fm a monastery - Belmont

The third of the three BBC television programmes did deliver a coup de cinéma. Father Alex is shown creating an icon: drawing the outline, applying gold leaf, and painting it. The programme ends with him taking the finished picture into the abbey church to place it on a side altar. However, despite our own impulse to see the finished result, we are denied a proper view of it, but are instead given glimpses of it in a mirror, or from a distorting side angle in order to whet our appetite. We see it placed in the chapel in a long-distance view. Then we get a sideways close-up of Father Alex asperging it, i.e. sprinkling it very lightly with water, in order to bless it. He then lays it horizontally to kiss it and puts it back in place. Only now does the camera look at it full on, but we are still denied a view because Father Alex’s backside is between us and the painting. Then it comes: the monk kneels and we see revealed his icon of the Archangel Michael, glowing richly with its blue and gold, and showing a piercingly handsome face. It is breathtaking, and this was a magical way of bringing the film to a close.

Executive Producer: Nikki Parrott

Producer/Director: Luke Korzun Martin

Production Company: Tigerlily Productions

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The television programmes are still available to watch on BBC iPlayer, till around the third or fourth week of November.

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You can buy ‘The New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’ on Amazon.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

SILENT CINEMA AND THE IDEA OF OBSOLESCENCE

25 Friday Sep 2015

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Hitchcock, silent cinema, talkies, Topaz, White Ribbon, Zweite Heimat

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In a review of the book, ‘Faxed: the rise and fall of the fax machine’, Conor Farrington (in the ‘Times Literary Supplement’) writes: “the history of fax echoes those of other technologies which reached their zenith shortly before obsolescence, including steam locomotives, piston-engined aircraft and (more recently) the iPod.” In my mind I immediately thought of silent cinema made obsolescent by the technology of the talkies just as silent film narrative attained an unprecedented fluency and expressiveness that makes many cinéphiles lament its passing, including myself in maudlin moments.

Of course it was not a technology that was made obsolete but a form of artistic expression, which entails a different set of reflections. Email replaced fax, and we all applauded this as progress. Sound cinema superseded silent cinema but this was not necessarily to be applauded as progress. In our own time digital has replaced analogue but one can legitimately regret that so few films are made now with pre-digital technology. And then colour superseded black and white, except there is still a place for black and white: The White Ribbon, for example, and indeed Edgar Reitz’s Die Zweite Heimat mixes colour and black and white sections to striking narrative effect.

There is a history to be written of how the sound cinema makes use of silent narrative techniques, in which the fact that they come in the context of sound makes them all the more arresting. I have just been reminded of that watching Hitchcock’s Topaz in which for the sequence of the theft of some documents Hitchcock gives the audience two conversations of exposition behind glass so that they are silent. The effect is electric, for since we don’t know what has been said we are drawn into finding out with our eyes in the action that follows.

Just as with the silent cinema audiences were crying out for sound, so nowadays we should be crying out for images accompanied only by sound effects, if that, and certainly not words and coercive music.

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