Showing posts with label August Strindberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label August Strindberg. Show all posts

Tuesday 13 October 2020

Light, glass, dust : Aesychlus meets Strindberg in Chess of The Wind* (1976) (work in progress)

This is a response (work in progress) to Chess of The Wind** (1976), streamed during London Film Festival 2020

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 October

This is a first-blush response (work in progress) to Chess of The Wind (1976),
streamed during London Film Festival 2020**, in a 4K restoration, on BFI Player



Not, as one might have predicted from the title, a re-run of Victor Sjõstrõm, but equally not nearly as Bergmanesque as seeing people's comments in passing had led one to believe :


Yes, the finery was gorgeous, and the shots of the house*** are almost too exquisitely set up, but that is only to expose a contrasting brutality in self-interest and settling scores that smacks of ancient origins in works such as The Oresteia. Thematically, Bergman did employ such primal sources, but this film does not try to reproduce either his feel for doing so, or his look - if Bergman makes things appear staged and / or unrelaxed, he does so for other purposes.


Lady Aghdas, with her cat and acquired 'flail' (a miniature ball and chain), is perhaps a little too much like a Bond villain, and Shaban, one of her stepfather's adoptive sons, seems modelled on Marcel Proust (for looks), but this is a film where two or three major characters each have a held (i.e. deliberate) moment of looking straight to camera, so it would be unrealistic to try to construe the film-making as naturalism, or in any way an unknowing enterprise. Therefore, without explicitly saying that the figures depicted have archetypal qualities or might have populated Mt Olympus, there are folkloric or fairy-tale elements (such as of djinns or Bluebeard's castle), and Chess also has us flirt with the notion of Lady Macbeth's mental lability, or of Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, cracking under investigative pressure from Porphyry.


For some, a film such as this, and the finding of the negatives and making a 4K restoration, will be wonderful in their own terms ; for others, who think it good, it may stand more as an artefact of history, not in seeming 'dated' as such, but in pointing to the work of others who may have seen it in some degraded form (or just heard tell of it) in between, and to other cinemas (The Handmaiden (2016), for example, shares ground with it - as did, before it, The Wicker Man (1973) ?)



[...]



End-notes :

* Or The Chess-Game of The Wind ?

** An artefact of the streaming, on #UCFF's set-up, was to introduce a hiccup at what seemed one-second intervals (built-in thinking time, or an involuntary Verfremdungseffekt, for a reviewer ?) :



*** Whose exterior we finally see properly at the end, before the camera lifts off, and pointedly surveys the sky-line, which is clearly contemporary to the film's being made. (Arguably, after a disappearance into the hinterground of a character in whose look A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) seems rooted, the shot could have been more effective with an elevation to take in the façade, but without the pan (less is more ?) ?)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 15 November 2014

In my Father's house, there are many rooms : A Festival review of Ingmarssönerna (Sons of Ingmar) (1919)

This is a review of Ingmarssönerna (Sons of Ingmar) (1919)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


13 November



This is a Cambridge Film Consortium review of Ingmarssönerna (Sons of Ingmar) (1919) as performed at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) with live solo piano accompaniment by John Sweeney

If you missed it, the film is to be shown again on Sunday 16 November at 1.00 p.m.



Trish Shiel, of Cambridge Film Consortium, introduced the event, telling us that it was being projected from a 35mm print and that, to add in an English translation of the inter-titles (which are in Swedish), manual dual projection was being used - stressing that The Arts is one of a few cinemas equipped to mount such a performance.

She also said a few words about the film, its history, and its director, male lead and co-writer, Victor Sjöström, who later worked with Ingmar Bergman (who remarked of the film Where did Sjöström get the idea of composing these incredible sequences, these remarkable, exciting scenes ?). That said, nothing prepared for the pleasure of learning who played the principal female role of Brita (on whom, more below...) :





The title of Ingmarssönerna (1919) has been translated as Sons of Ingmar, but they are more like 'descendants' than sons : suffice to say that it reveals little to say that, in thought if not in reality (whatever reality is, when one can feel oneself to be part of a line of men who have occupied the same land for centuries), Young Ingmar goes to meet his father, Old Ingmar, with a dilemma.

And, before he gets there, we have visuals of a ladder up to heaven (and down from that ladder) that give us all the evocations from Jacob's ladder to Jack's Beanstalk to The Tower of Babel. Quite a quaint sort of heaven, however, where only the directly ascending, male relatives are there (and, from what follows, they are unaware of what befalls those still alive) ?

Be that as it may, Young gets Old to come into a side-room and tells him a whole story, where the inter-titles, from time to time, remind us with an icon that this is still in heaven and still telling the background to the dilemma...


A risky stratagem for a film, one might think, to rely on the patience of the audience with such a lengthy narration, and which is hardly a strength of the structure here any more than it is, celebratedly, in Anne Brontë's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Yet, after the decision that is pressing on Young Ingmar has been explained, and when omens have been interpreted as guiding his way, the film distinctly picks up in energy and emotional pull, as the core story that was within that daring flashback now unfolds.


Harriet Bosse, playing in Strindberg (apparently in To Damascus)


Perhaps naively, we may imagine that, because film was in its relative infancy, a dramatic approach to contextualizing our mixed motives and feelings in life through this medium was necessarily novel. Put this in context, though, and this film's Harriet Bosse (as Brita) was, briefly, August Strindberg's third wife, and Strindberg wrote the roles of Eleonora in Easter (1901) and Agnes in A Dream Play (1902) for her (amongst others), the latter of which alone shows the psychological depth of theatre at the time :

Although Dream Play was not to be performed until 1907, that is a clear decade before the present film, so we can guess that Sjöström and Selma Lagerlöf - of whose novel Jerusalem this film adapts the first part (and Karin Ingmarsdotter (1920) the conclusion) - would have known some of Strindberg's significant plays, which date to when Lagerlöf was writing her work.


Though it is true to remark, say, that the preoccupations at the time of the United Artists, from Mary Pickford to D. W. Griffiths, were very different from that here**, one only needs to delve into an overview such as Francine Stock's In Glorious Technicolor: A Century of Film and How it has Shaped Us to realize that, just because these films now look old (physically, they are), we need not imagine their makers to be unknowing - any more than we should imagine that our grandparents knew nothing about sex.

Without giving away the main story, there are so many reminders here of other works. For the subject-matter, though it has its particularities, is universal :

* Schumann's last acts outside the locked door of the asylum

* Cocteau's La Belle et La Bête*** (1946)

* Shakespearean pairs such as Much Ado About Nothing's Beatrice and Benedick

* Even Chaucer's long-suffering Griselda**** (in The Clerk's Tale)


In the screening, what made the impact was the subtlety of Bosse's expressiveness, the action going on in the eyes and the look of her face (when not, very demonstrably, throwing herself on her pillow, or the ground), and one need only reach back in time to what she might have been like on the stage. Now, though, one is haunted by Sjöström's long-jawed face, and, in the context of the film, he is having himself be La Bête, with a largely down-turned, hangdog mouth, until he finds out who he is.

Which is where the story closes, not concerned with the expected resolution, but with a reverie of the kind that James Thurber gave us for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), when we gained a name for that type of character / behaviour :

Since this is just the first part of the story (seemingly re-made, according to Amazon®, in Jerusalem (1996)), though it stands complete in itself (despite the puzzling absorption in Ingmar's being elsewhere), one might detect a hook here, from Sjöström, for Karin Ingmarsdotter...


In introducing the screening for those unfamiliar with silent film, Trish Sheil had rightly pointed out that the painting of the scene in the accompaniment is part of what makes such films different - as is knowing that it is the accompanist's skill to give that portrayal whilst keep pace with the unfolding of the film.

In his inspiringly colourful accompaniment, John Sweeney (who gave us Hitchock's Blackmail at Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) 2012) organized himself around themes for the various moods and evocations of the film, from anxiety to tenderness, or to depict energetic behaviour as against reflectiveness - and, likewise, using unsettling rumbles alongside bell-tones (the high and low registers of the keyboard).

Sweeney had a very warm round of applause at the close, and had provided us with an excellently enjoyable musical experience to match the emotional range of the film.

And now there is a follow-up piece about the effect of inter-titles in the film...


End-notes

* Which, thanks to marketing manager Jack Toye's Tweet from the second screening, looks frighteningly complicated :




** With, for example, Pickford continuing to play the role of a young girl / woman when she was very much older - just as, here, Bosse and Victor Sjöström are too old to be taken literally for Brita and Young Ingmar (Bosse was 41 at the time of the film's release).

*** In Young Ingmar, a similarly gruff and hidebound figure, desiring wisdom, but finding himself locked in by duty, and Birta, against her will, in the equivalent of La Bête's domain : even requesting Birta's hand, his vacillating nature intervenes, and his heart is never quite in it.

**** The magnanimity of You'll have to forgive me for all the pain that I have caused you, Ingmar and I wanted to ask your forgiveness, although also the exposed feeling of O, dear God, I will be saved of nothing ?, when he insists on reading her letter.



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 12 October 2013

Sympathy for the Vampyr

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


13 October (updated 21 October)

The British Film Institute (@BFI) trailer for the release of the restored Nosferatu in its original version for the first time - due out on Hallowe'en - quotes Time Out as calling it one of the most poetical of all horror films, an evaluation with which I concur :




Nosferatu (1922), one will gather, was performed with live accompaniment by Neil Brand, and it was a very fine one :

In all of this, Brand brought out the passing of time with key moments when a clock strikes, for much in this film happens at a pace - Hutter's journey across to where Count Orlok lives - and much, when there is no immediate movement, has a sort of febrile negative inertia, a sort of immanence that the shining arpeggios or alternated chords bring out.

For example, when Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) energetically, boyishly even, dashes the book that tells him all the mysteries of the vampires to the floor, we suspect that he is trying to convince himself in youthful disrespect that all this is nonsense - and the music played out that half-hearted self-deceit. We, as observers of the film, are in a different relation to its subject, set, I guess, in something like the seventeenth century, when distances maybe seemed further and we did not have the same instantaneous media by means of which to learn things about the world, e.g. do a Google search about Orlok and his castle...



We would expect no less from Brand that his playing is humane - he does not imbue a live performance with qualities that are not there, but he so knows and loves this pre-spoken form of cinema that he can draw out the story, the visible emotions, the hidden feelings, and we trust him with seeing this film because he invests of himself and his talent. I am not sure whether, technically, they are themes or leitmotifs, but they recur, they remind us of earlier moments, and they help us be inward with the characters.


The film revolves around Nosferatu himself, who is involved in some land deal that will bring us back where we started and to his fate. In these times, some of the visual effects and the nuances of the film, for those not used to films of the time, will seem ludicrous, so there was a fair amount of laughing in Screen 2, but I hope that there was also an appreciation that there is a sort of obsessive love-story at play here, not just of a vampire for blood : the film's subtitle is eine Symphonie des Grauens, and a symphony requires more than one theme.

As a reviewer at IMDb has judged that Max Schreck (the name means something like 'fright'), who plays Count Orlok / Nosferatu, is Nosferatu, and he is both sinister, but at the same time desires beauty, in Ellen Hutter (played by Greta Schröder) : her character name means someone who keeps watch, and ultimately, by doing so, she defeats the infestation that responds to the control of Orlok.

As I say, there is an unfulfilled sense of longing, and this was in Neil Brand's masterly playing, showing that even the ugly Orlok can have desires in 'an Expressionist film' : if we can be in touch with the art of this time, whether the ambiguous states of mind in Edvard Munch's paintings, woodcuts and other prints, or the artworks and diaries of August Strindberg (not often enough thought of nowadays as a painter), we will see the action as something to engage with more seriously, and not limited by its technical constraints.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Friday 4 January 2013

Fabette's Beast

This is a review of Babette’s Feast (1987)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


4 January
This is a review of Babette’s Feast (1987)

* Contains spoilers *

Babette's Feast, newly released by the BFI (British Film Institute), is not exactly a suspenseful film, but there are tensions, and they have kept me pondering it, and so not writing this review, for several weeks. (Which is very often a sign of a good film, i.e. that it should defy instant analysis.)

When one does not have an original screenplay, but an adaptation, one never quite knows not just what has been changed*, but also how things made manifest in the written work (which may be so ambiguously, provisionally or tangentially) have been embodied on the screen. In some ways, cinema can be more indefinite than a novel, in others it almost cannot fail to state things.

One is the location. Quite apart from what the narration tells us, we can see that it is a small community in a remote spot, and we might subconsciously, even before shown anyone who lives there or, less still, having mention of a sect, infer qualities in those who (choose to ?) live there - and not be so far wrong ?

As to the buildings that, real or specially constructed, we see, no amount of lulling the senses can conceal the fact that they are smaller on the outside – this, though, is not Doctor Who**, and the scenes with which we are presented could often not be accommodated by these modest dwellings, even allowing for the cinematographer being the other side of where a wall should be.

There may be several reasons for having the exterior shot in a way that draws attention to proximity, intimacy and even claustrophobia, but I shall choose the fact that the isolation and vulnerability to external forces are heightened by the smaller scale, giving a sense both of how precarious life there is and that it may be prone to further influences for change. At any rate, that is how I interpret it.

This is Jutland, in Denmark, in – in the present, as shown – the early latter half of the nineteenth century, but what I need to find out is how the various wars between the Scandinavian countries had affected the population geography (I refuse to say ‘demographics’), and whose territory this island had been at various times. I say this because the spirit of August Strindberg hovers over this film for me, and I want to understand things a little better. That inquiry must wait for another time…

Strindberg is first very evident when Babette goes away to make arrangements for the feast, and the sisters have to take over duties that they last performed before she came, in the caricatured responses of those on the receiving end of their charity to the food presented and the fact that it is late, but the whole notion of this sort of meals-on-wheels generosity chimes with later works, too, such as his A Dream Play from 1902. (Does one, though, attribute that feeling to Babette’s Feast because of Karen Blixen or because of the screenwriter?)

Where the feeling is most relevant is at the feast itself, with the sharply defined moments of what neighbour says (or whispers) to neighbour, which is a sort of kaleidoscopic one for me, because I did not feel myself tasked with keeping track of who had a specific grudge with whom until shown them again, but of having an impression of the levels of unrest or discontent – the Strindbergian element is in people saying to each other what, dreams apart, they ordinarily would not reveal, and goes all the way back to a puzzling little play such as Easter.

They most discomfort the two worrying sisters (and they, too, I found it hard to distinguish from each other, though not for want of concentration*), who appear to see any ignoble behaviour or sentiment as ultimately a bad reflection on their father, without seeming to appreciate that maybe, even if he was not a charlatan who just wanted power and authority, he knew these people’s nature better than they do.

That is one of the tensions, but, preceding it, has been the sisters’ regret of allowing Babette to prepare this meal, which they have come to see as beastly and probably satanic, after encountering the live ingredients: in a paranoid response – and the elderly sisters are highly skittish – they come to suspect that the act of kindness is for their ill, and tell all the guests so, who are ready to believe it.

As I see it, the general unrest could, depending on our disposition and mood, affect us differently – we could reject it as their baseless superstition, or think that there might be, in the unfolding of this feast (the English word is laden with significance from Belshazzar to The Last Supper to the feast that is Christmas) be something sinister. As to the latter response, for example, why is the instruction for General Löwenhielm’s glass to be kept topped up, and is he meant blessing by it, or some harm of over-indulgence ? In those terms, indeed, what does this elaborate food and drink for these simple-living people mean ?

That question we come to later, but the night itself embodies dissension and enmity, which almost seem brought on by the feast and clearly disquiet the passive and peaceful daughters of the pastor : to what, one imagines them thinking, has all his work come, if the reaction to this meal in his honour takes the form of the uncovering of deep grudges and hatreds ? Is that the truth, or is there some more magical act of redemption going on, which means that, when the guests (other than Löwenhielm and his aunt, who have already left for home) dance around the well-head and sing, they are truly and fully reconciled to each other, rather than this being a papering-over the cracks ?

At any rate, the naive pair, with no idea how much such elaborate food and expensive wine would cost, have been blessed by Babette (along with the villagers), and had not figured that she could possibly have spent her whole winnings on it all. They had been mean enough to wonder how they would manage without her, if she went back to France – and, indeed, we are shown them struggling, and with the grumpy reactions of those to whom they give charity.

The fact that she did not have anywhere to go to in France does not explain the staggering decision not to buy herself an easier life somewhere else, and that generosity is so baffling that it almost only works on the level of parable, very much in what we are told of Griselde in Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale. It remains a puzzle to me, even on some reading (as I have heard critics advance) that wants to see the feast itself as the healing sacrament that these people needed : if there is a synthesis between the pious, remote North and the South of the warmer Parisian lands, then this is really no more than Löwenhielm says, who maintains a commentary on food and drink, both at the level of identification, and at that of gourmandizing wit and wisdom.

It is his presence at table, he who is used to this quality of food from when Babette worked elsewhere, that strikes an alternative note, and, whilst he might guide the others into enjoying the food, he seems as if in a dream, not being amazed at how such things could be in a poor and remote place. He leaves without seeing Babette, and, outside her kitchen, she takes no part in the feast, since she directs the others what to serve and how. It has all led up to the sisters learning that she is not to leave them, with and because of this meal, and there the graciousness of the gesture remains, for me, at the level of allegory.


End-notes

* For example, I know that Tove Jansson was Finnish, but she came from the Swedish-speaking part of Finland, and had Swedish as her primary language. However, this map delineating the extent, at various times, of the Swedish empire shows that, although it encompassed parts of Norway and Finland, and even Bremen and Riga, it did not touch Denmark, for some reason.

However, as flicking through one of these books of the type 385 Films You Must See Before Breakfast revealed, I now know that the story has been translated to Denmark from Norway anyway.

** TARDIS – to come…


*** I could not swear that the daughter whom her father delights in having subject to the philandering of the French musician Papin, just so that he can impiously delight that he has been snubbed, is not the same one whom Löwenhielm seeks to court, even if parity would have one disappointed suitor for each.