• 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: spiritual cinema

FIRST REFORMED second time round

14 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Bresson, God, literature and film, resurrection, spiritual cinema, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bernanos, First Reformed, Port Townsend

This film (see previous entry) continues to stick in my mind. At the end of July I attended a service at St Paul’s episcopal church at Port Townsend, in Washington State (tip of NW corner of USA, looking out on Puget Sound). My Anglicanism is very much Catholic But Reformed, but this Rite 1 communion service was emphatically Protestant, very much focussed on the Word. Just like First Reformed I thought. The church even looks a bit like the one in First Reformed.

St Paul's Port Townsend

Subsequently I dreamt up a Stem of Bernanos, like the stem of Jesse:

Stem of Bernanos PDF [click to open]

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

 

My film diaries

16 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in artists' film, diary films, self-publishing, spiritual cinema, travel, underground film

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Lux

cover-im-for-publicity.jpg

Finally, after fifty years, I have launched my film diaries as a dvd. I started a film diary in 1968 when I acquired a standard 8mm camera, and laid it down in 1987 having compiled some 6 or 7 hours of film edited down to 5½ hours. The material lay in a cupboard dreaming . . . until in 2015 I began to get it digitized, then re-edited it and added voice-over and music. Three years later I had a 3¼ hour diary film with a title: LIGHT YEARS – THE FILM DIARIES OF TIM CAWKWELL 1968 TO 1987. By March I had this in dvd format and by April it was all cased and shrink-wrapped. There is even a 20-page booklet to go with it. And so, on 9 May, at the Poetry Café in London, I was able to launch the dvd to an invited audience. It is now available online from Lux (go to: http://bit.ly/LIGHTyrs) and you can see a taster on Vimeo (http://bit.ly/LYtrailerVimeo) or on YouTube (http://bit.ly/LYtrailerYT).

Here are some images from it:

LY M 5  LY T 4

LY horse

LY Siena 2

The film is divided into three main parts and 25 individual short films. Each can be watched on its own or as part of a whole, a visual self-examination over 21 years.

As I say, available from LUX: http://bit.ly/LIGHTyrs.

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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.

 

 

SLOW TV IN AN INSTANT AGE

10 Wednesday Jan 2018

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

 

 

A REMBRANDT CHRISTMAS CARD

10 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Bible on film, Nativity, painting and photography, spiritual cinema, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

angel appearing to shepherds, Francesca Vanke, Giorgia Bottinelli, Norwich Castle Museum, Rembrandt

Rembrandt etching of shepherds

You could make a film of the Life of Christ based on Rembrandt paintings and etchings. Here is ‘The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds’ from 1634 (when Rembrandt was 28) etched and engraved, plus some drypoint. One of his larger etchings, by the way, but still only 26 x 22 cm.This episode from the Nativity of Christ, often portrayed rather statically, is here full of movement, movement which makes the moment seriously exciting. Naturally it contrasts brightness with shadow and darkness, Rembrandt’s speciality. In order to enhance the brightness round the angel, he has enlarged the piercing in the cloud and filled it with putti. Pity really, as I could have done without them, and I feel it breaks the Rembrandt rule of making the ordinary extraordinary. Instead he makes the extraordinary more so, thus achieving a diminishing return. However the shepherds are terrific, and the animals too, achieving a gothic level of fright. Overall the effect is of a fantastic landscape in which a fantastic event occurs.

41.1.52

What a contrast to the 1651 etching ‘The Flight Into Egypt: a night piece’ (13 x 11 cm), in which the darkness presses in on the Holy Family as they flee from King Herod. Seventeen years on, at the age of 45, Rembrandt has a fuller sense of the sombreness of the ordinary world, a world that remains extraordinary.

I learnt all this from ‘Rembrandt: Lightening the Darkness’, Norwich’s current contribution to civilization. It is an exhibition of the significant holding of Rembrandt etchings in the Norwich Castle Museum, running until 7 January 2018. It has a good catalogue by Giorgia Bottinelli and Francesca Vanke too.

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

*

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

*

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

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

David Larcher’s ‘Mare’s Tail’ (1969)

17 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, Brakhage, British cinema, spiritual cinema, underground film

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Brakhage, Edinburgh Film Festival, Larcher, LFMC

“A symphony should contain the whole world” was Gustav Mahler’s comment on his music. A film that aspires to the condition of music can do the same. Such is Mare’s Tail.

If the whole world is to be contained, you need length, so Mare’s Tail is 2½ hours long. In music, the risk would be tedium from the fact that the symphonic form is too conventional, too predictable, and too tedious, so that immense creative imagination is needed to break out of those constrictions. Mahler had it hence the power of his symphonies. In film, there are no such rules, at least not yet, so the risk for a film as long as Mare’s Tail is tedium on different grounds because the spectator has no idea where the film is going. David Larcher avoids this by threading into it, almost beneath our awareness, a beginning, a middle and an end. The film opens with a blank screen accompanied by a rising drone for some ten minutes. It reminded me straightaway of the droning E flat that opens Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle, and while further parallels should not be pressed, both works signal their epic intentions by this means. The middle of the film is taken up with a trajectory of some kind, from creation, to birth, to sex, to life, to death. And there is an end of a teasing kind. Finally after much shaking of the eyeballs, a written ‘FIN’ appears on the screen. This surely signals the end (although the use of French may be meant to throw us off the scent), only for our eyeballs to receive further jolts by the interspersing of white leader with fragments recalling earlier sequences in the film.

Larcher’s challenge was to glue the whole thing together. His principal way of doing this is by the style of the film. The images are clearly visible, but not in any way we are familiar with, since he uses negative footage, re-filming, stop-motion projection, optical printing, stretched images and other means to de-familiarise the way we watch films. The same strategy is used on the soundtrack, where we can hear words spoken and we can hear snatches of music, but they come to us through a fog filter of some kind so they are muffled and distorted. We know words are being spoken but we can barely hear what. We hear music, but identification is stymied. I thought I heard Bob Dylan’s ‘It’s all over now, baby blue’, but I am far from sure. There were suggestions of classical Indian music. The most identifiable piece was the tune from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in his Ninth Symphony (another piece of music that contains the whole world), but it is played on unfamiliar instruments to give it a jolly, tinny, and quite anti-Beethovenian tone.

The right adjective for it all is an antiquated one from the 1960s – ‘trippy’. It invites us into a vision of the world where we feel free of anxiety. The humans that appear are beautiful people of their time, the animals, especially the frigate birds, are expressive of the wonders of the created order, and when he films a fly struggling on its back, or a fish gasping out its life in the water, or even the mass slaughter of turtles, these death throes feel free of pain. One brief sequence, filmed on the underground, shows a woman dropping down on the floor and playing dead or catastrophically ill; a young man then gets up, looks quizzically at her, crosses himself, and steps out of the carriage onto the platform. Even this death is treated as a tease. Also of its time is Larcher’s embrace of abstraction alongside the traces of the figurative and the autobiographical. By its length, the film disrupts time, and by its abstract particles, its dance of spheres and many other images that resist identification, it combines the microcosm with the macrocosm, and in doing so achieves a disruption of space.

The film was premièred at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1969, Larcher having worked on it for several years, all through the summer of love of 1967, the explosion of flower power, the elaboration of the ‘far out’ culture. “Oh in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” It must have been a temptation to place a rock soundtrack on the finished film, but even if Larcher was tempted, he quite refused it. The whole film dances on the edge of the abyss of Self Indulgence, but somehow Larcher never falls in. Avoiding the facile solution of a rock soundtrack is one of the ways he does so.

Where do his images come from? In a way, they seem to have spilled out of him in a quite unmediated way, and for a British film Mare’s Tail is most unusually linked to the visionary quality of the pre-structuralist American avant-garde, when it was still called underground cinema. Had Larcher seen any of the films of Stan Brakhage? The birth sequences instantly bring to mind Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961), and the whole enterprise feels inspired by Dog Star Man (1961-4), Brakhage’s own epic vision of creation and his world within it. But this is quite speculative, and it is quite within the bounds of possibility that Larcher was making these images without any inspiration from Brakhage. What does link the film to the Americans is the ambition of his project. The 1970s work at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, of which Larcher was a member, only rarely sought to match the scale of the American avant-garde, which itself took its cue from that of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the 1950s.

What does make it British is the fact it is in black-and-white. Surely this economy was forced on him, but Larcher makes the most of it both by his technical understanding of the medium of film, and also by the fact that when colour is used, it jolts the spectator, as if the annoying suspense of waiting for colour is resolved by the relief and the pleasure of its arrival. Like many good film-makers, including commercial ones, Larcher is focused on stringing good sequences together, always trying things out. You sense that there is never total mastery, but his technique never lets him down either, as if total mastery would banish the experimental, ‘open-field’ quality which he wants to convey.

So, is the film formless? Yes, but it is immersive and keeps drawing us in. Watching it, you can fall asleep certainly, and when you wake up you are re-engaged. It needs to be seen projected on a screen in a black space in order that we are properly underwater. In the end, its depiction of the whole of creation has an omniscient, life-affirming quality.

But I am still to discover why it is called Mare’s Tail. So what?

[Mare’s Tail was screened at the Close Up cinema in London on Sunday 15 January 2016.]

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

1971 revisited

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, Brakhage, Creation, metaphysical film, spiritual cinema

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Baillie, Belson, Brakhage

sftc-1

In 1971 I made an 8mm film called Sketches for the Creation, drawing on my understanding of the films of Stan Brakhage, Jordan Belson and Bruce Baillie for its inspiration. I was 23 at the time.

This year I had it digitized and have produced a new digital version, slightly reduced in length and with some brushstrokes of sound (nothing coercive, naturally). It is 12 minutes long.

If you are interested in seeing it go to: https://vimeo.com/194487765

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

← Older posts

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

Create a free website or 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