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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

Tag Archives: Hitchcock

GOING BACKWARDS

23 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in British cinema, cinema and culture, Hitchcock

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45 Years, Andrew Haigh, Courtenay, Hitchcock, Powell & Pressburger, Rampling

My last post (14 June) was about Little Dog for Roger (Malcolm Le Grice 1968) consciously going back to 1897 and the beginning of cinema. A day or two later I watched 45 Years (Andrew Haigh 2015), a strangled weepie about an old couple excavating a past event in their lives with great pain all round. The main reason to watch it was because it was set in Norfolk, UK, where I live, but it was stimulating enough to prompt serious reflections.

Once again I was struck by the conservatism of British narrative film. Here is a work that – quite unconsciously, as far as I can see – goes back to the first decade of cinema: plonk the camera down and turn the handle, and the actors will do the rest. This they do very well in 45 Years: Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay wear suitably crumpled expressions and weep beautifully. “Actors are trained to express complexities” (Ingmar Bergman) and they do. But you can only lament the wooden-ness of the camera work, a timidity in its use of different camera angles or of the moving camera. The film cries out for close-ups since at its dramatic core is the presence (in the attic*) of old photographs. They are used as projected slides in one sequence, effectively enough, but a photograph in the hand would be so much more rivetting.

And why not use close-ups of objects in the house to show what sort of people Geoff and Kate Mercer are. They like popular music from their youth: why not show some old record covers? Think of the opening of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, or even more remarkably, the tour of Norman Bates’s bedroom in Psycho. In Powell & Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale there is a marvellous sequence in which the camera travels round Culpeper/the glueman’s study, telling us a great deal about this mysterious character.

I blame Britain’s lively, or rather lofty theatrical tradition. We turn out so many good actors and actresses, all speaking comprehensible English, that directors feel exonerated from doing more than just put performances centre stage (although Hitchcock and Powell & Pressburger never felt this way). It’s all made worse by the current fad, at least in the UK, of streaming live dramatic performance on stage to local cinemas. The theatre strikes back, with a vengeance.

* It is a rule of narrative cinema that going into the attic or down to the cellar is dangerous, which is why it happens so often. I liked the idea of the attic containing, not a corpse, but old, ignored photographs with a potent charge.

note       I write about the creative alliance between camera and set designers in ‘Film Past Film Future’, my e-book about creative aspects of the cinema, in chapter 10 ‘Interiority’. See http://bit.ly/FilmPastFilmFuture. Very cheap, incidentally.

 http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

 

The Rising of the Moon

18 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Ireland, John Ford, nuns on film

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Hitchcock, John Ford, nuns, The Lady Vanishes, The Rising of the Moon, WB Yeats

‘You know what nuns become in the director’s eye’ (Barthes)*. It crops up in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes: there is a nun nursing the bandaged patient, but somehow the picture is troubling; the audience senses there is something wrong. And then our heroine spots that the nun is wearing high heels: so – an impostor! The action goes from there.

Did the idea stimulate John Ford (with a Catholic upbringing like Hitchcock) when he made the ‘1921’ episode of The Rising of the Moon (1957)? This is a three-part film of which the last part is set during the Irish Troubles of 1921. Sean Curran is in prison awaiting hanging by the Auxiliary Royal Irish Constabulary, better known as ‘The Black and Tans’. Two ‘nuns’ arrive ostensibly to give him final solace but in fact to rescue him by a ruse, viz. one nun and Curran swapping clothes in order to get him out of the prison, where he is rushed to the local theatre and made up as an itinerant balladeer. The spuriousness of the nun is given away as she leaves the prison, both to us and to a watching constable, by sight of her high heels and sexy stockings. The constable sees but does not act. No informer he, unlike Gypo Nolan in Ford’s earlier The Informer, who enters on a Calvary.

The Informer was tragic, but Rising of the Moon is comic, forming in Ford’s career an opposite arc to that traced in WB Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ concerning the start of the Revolution in Ireland:

“He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He,too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly.
A terrible beauty is born.”

* For more on nuns, and monks, in the cinema, see ‘The New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’ pp. 197 sq.

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  • 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…
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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
  • 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
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