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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: travel

My film diaries

16 Wednesday May 2018

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

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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

FERRARA MADE ME (3): the search for Antonioni’s tomb

03 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Antonioni, Italy, travel

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Antonioni, Bassani, Comacchio, Ferrara, James Cain, Visconti

In searching the internet in September, prior to my visit to Ferrara, I was pleased to come across a page inviting you to discover the places that had influenced Antonioni’s thinking, “the corners of the city bound to the life of the great director and his masterpieces such as Cronaca di un amore, Le amiche and Beyond the Clouds.”

I was particularly looking forward to a visit to the Antonioni museum at Corso Ercole 17, next to the Palazzo dei Diamanti, as flagged up in our Blue Guide to Northern Italy (12th edition, 2005), only to discover on my arrival that it was now closed, whether for lack of money or lack of interest I could not determine. We had to content ourselves during our walks and cycle rides in taking advantage of the map supplied by the internet site to see these places for ourselves.

I wrote about the Corso Ercole and Corso Rossetti shot used in Cronaca di un amore in my post of 12 October. But in an act of homage I went to see the family house at San Maurelio 10 in the south-east corner of the city, where Antonioni (born 1914) spent life from 1918 to 1929. I hired a bike at the shop at the Porta Romana and looking across the river there was the church of S Giorgio, the very same tower that can be seen in Visconti’s Ossessione. The film has a notable Ferrara episode, when Giovanna goes in search of the wayward Gino, and this still shows Gino jumping onto a lorry in the square very close to the Antonioni house.

oss-12

Did Antonioni witness the filming? It is possible, and the film must have made an impact, perhaps as much for the story as its pioneering realism. It is taken from James Cain’s novel ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’. Giorgio Bassani (whom Antonioni knew, see post of 20 October) translated it into Italian at the end of the war, and Antonioni used the skeleton of the story in Cronaca di un amore. There is something enticing about a film masterpiece being made so close to a house you had lived in. The house itself has a helpful plaque identifying it, and here’s what it looks like now across the piazza (San Maurelio 10 is at the near corner of this block).

ant-house-3

The other Antonioni house is at the via Brasavola 14 (no plaque this time). This is located in the dense streets that form the south-east quarter of the city, quite close to the Bassani family house at via Cisterno del Follo 1 and the Tennis Club Marfisa, where Bassani and he played tennis.

ant-house-4

Antonioni went to study at Bologna University and began to be drawn away from the city, so that the making of the first episode of Beyond the Clouds (1995) in Ferrara and nearby Comacchio was a homecoming of a kind. I knew that he was buried there.

On my last morning there, I just had time to rush to the Certosa Cemetery. On arriving, I was dismayed at the thought of finding the tomb in such a large place,

certosa

but a helpful office for the cemetery directed me to block M12 and gave me a map. I arrived, finally, at M12 and spent several minutes inspecting all the tomb slabs for his name. I was about to come away unrequited when I noticed a street of tomb-houses

certosa-cemy

and sure enough there was an Antonioni family mausoleum

ant-family-tomb

and peering in, I could see Michelangelo’s name.

ant-tomb-2

Quest accomplished, mind fulfilled, I rushed back in order to catch the train to Ravenna. Ferrara, I concluded, was a wonderful place.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Ferrara made me (1): Antonioni

12 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Antonioni, cinema and culture, Italy, surrealism, travel

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Antonioni, Bassani, Castello Estense, Corso Rossetti, Cronaca di un amore, De Chirico, Ferrara

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature film of 1950, Una Cronaca di un amore (‘Story of a love affair’, but better in Italian), the private investigator commissioned by the husband of Paola Molon to find out more about her and her past, spends time in her home town of Ferrara. He goes to the liceo, Ferrara’s notable school,

cronaca-4

he goes to the tennis club to talk to the caretaker,

cronaca-4a

he is seen strolling along Corso Ercole I

cronaca-5a

then round the corner,

cronaca-5c

and the camera follows him to look up Corso Rossetti.

cronaca-7

This last shot is cinematic dead time because it tells us nothing about the story. On the other hand it tells us a great deal about its mood, and foreshadows the end, that this love story will lead to a fruitless, unconsummated, unredeemed end.

Antonioni was born (1918) and brought up in Ferrara, a city of long streets, high walls and the formidable Castello Estense, moat and all, at its centre.

castello-2     dscn8083

He went to the Liceo Ludovico Ariosto (on its old site, in Via Borgo dei Leoni);

old Liceo Ginnasio

he frequented the tennis club in Via Saffi (made famous in Giorgio Bassani’s novel, ‘The Garden of the Finzi Continis’);

Club Marfisa

he also must have liked to stroll up the Corso Ercole

Corso Ercole I

to the crossroads with Corso Rossetti, past the Palazzo dei Diamanti and the Palazzo Prosperi-Sacrati (below).

Pal. Prosperi Sacrati

Another important Ferrarese denizen in his mind must have been Giorgio De Chirico, who while not a native was invalided there from 1915 to 1918, and painted some notable pictures there. ‘Le Muse Inquietanti’ [s.v. Wikipedia] of 1918, for example, features the Castello Estense. His imagination made something quite new out of empty streets, shadowed porticos, statues in the piazza, and lone figures. The bleak absence of the ordinary living human must have informed Antonioni’s own imagining of cities, explored in several of his films, and most famously in the final sequence of L’Eclisse (1961).

The shot of Corso Rossetti in the winter light of an evening is powerfully imagined. This image

cronaca-6

is crucially different from the one above, since it shows a person stepping, like a figure from a De Chirico painting, into the building on the right, defined as much by his shadow as by his figure.

cronaca-6a

Intriguingly, it echoes the comments of English visitors found in the Blue Guide to the Romagna, which I was using on my visit. Hester Piozzi wrote in 1789: “My pen was just upon the point of praising its cleanliness . . . till I reflected there was nobody to dirty it.” In 1826, William Hazlitt wrote in his ‘Notes of a journey through France and Italy’: “You enjoy the most perfect solitude, that of a city which was once filled with ‘the busy hum of men’”; in his ‘Pictures from Italy’ of 1846, Charles Dickens described old Ferrara as “more solitary, more depopulated, more deserted than any city of the solemn brotherhood”.

It’s not like that now. Here is the Corso Rossetti from a position close to the one above. (If you took the photo from the middle of the road you risk being run over.)

Pal. dei Diamanti     Corso Rossetti

The extensive pedestrianisation of Ferrara, preserving cobbles where possible, and the high prevalence of bicycles preserve the poetry of the city but in parts that poetry has been put paid to by the ubiquity of the car whether driven or parked, and the fact that cobbles have given way to asphalt. The city seems to be economically prosperous and there are coachloads of tourists, indeed I was one myself, which drains the poetry of solitude away. I wonder if Antonioni ever regretted this.

Next post: ‘Ferrara made me (2): Giorgio Bassani’

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

 

 

“in the gloom, the gold”

06 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Italy, travel

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Canto 11, Ezra Pound, Galla Placidia, mosaics, Ravenna, San Vitale

This refrain recurs in Pound’s Cantos, most fully as, “In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it” (Canto 11) and in Canto 21 he links it to the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna: “Gold fades in the gloom,/ Under the blue-black roof, Placidia’s”

Maus. di Galla Placidia

This mausoleum is a jewelled appendage to San Vitale in Ravenna which holds the best-known ceiling mosaics in the world (and almost as good as the ceiling mosaics in Monreale in Sicily, albeit they are 600 years earlier than those). I have always thought the reference to gold is to the golden tesserae of which the mosaic is composed adjacent to the blue ones (see photo). These are set on the ceiling catching the light in the gloom as the spectator peers upward.maus-2

But to actually be in the mausoleum in the late afternoon, what is really golden are the windows catching the declining sun since they are made not of glass but of alabaster, a translucent stone cut in thin slabs to make windows. They have an inherent wave pattern in them, like grain in wood, and the light effect they produce is of catching flame. So now I think that this is what Pound may have been referring to rather than the gold tesserae.

maus-3

In my mind a further imaginative leap can be made, for the words are an apt description of the screen in a darkened cinema.

This is the first musing on a recent visit to the Romagna in Italy. The next two will be on Antonioni in Ferrara, and on Giorgio Bassani whose great novel The Garden of the Finzi Continis (made into a so-so film in the 1970s) is set in Ferrara.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Anger in Tivoli

08 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Italian gardens, travel

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A Tivoli Companion, Eaux d'artifice, Italian gardens, Kenneth Anger, Tivoli, Villa d'Este

This post is to plug my new book which is not about the cinema but it does contain a reference to Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’artifice. 

The book is A TIVOLI COMPANION – History and Gardens. Here is the blurb:

An illustrated essay about the Italian hill-town of Tivoli near Rome, famous for its 16th-century garden and fountains at the Villa d’Este. But Tivoli is also the place of the Parco Villa Gregoriana, a natural park graced by a round temple on a cliff that has inspired artists for centuries. Nearby too is Hadrian’s villa, the grandest of its kind in the Roman world. These three places have exerted an enormous influence on European garden design, most notably in England.

The town is a storehouse of history and culture, and tens of thousands of people go there each year. What visitors have lacked until now is a detailed guide in English to the place and its gardens; A TIVOLI COMPANION aims to provide it. It weaves together history, literature and visual aesthetics to create new insights into the extraordinary richness of culture in one place in the Italian peninsula.

Anger made Eaux d’artifice ( i.e. waterworks) in 1953 at the gardens of the Villa d’Este, a superlative creation out of stone, trees and above all water. Shown below is the Fontana dell’ Ovato and, on the right, Anger’s view of it. The film is blue and white, the blue being created by a filter of some sort, a day for night process that magically enhances the place.

DSCN0268     Eaux d'artifice

Here is a link to where you can buy the book: http://bit.ly/ATivoliCompanion

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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…
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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
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  • Italian gardens
  • Italy
  • John Ford
  • Kieslowski reflection
  • Kieslowski reflections
  • literature and film
  • metaphysical film
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  • revivalism
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