More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 October
This film was shown in conjunction with a live relay from The Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton, in which the host introduced Sophie Fiennes (who grew up watching films there), its director, and later interviewed its presenter, Slavoj Žižek
The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) is a very good film, but, for a documentary, a longer one at 136 minutes : a little in the way of some non-narrative features, one kept wrongly thinking that it was making a move towards resolution, but that is an element that will be less present on a re-watching, which it well deserves.
Not least when sitting in Row C in Screen 2 (where one does not have the distance on it), it is not easy to keep with Žižek, because, although he may sometimes be tongue in cheek, he is always quite intense. In addition, the snorting, touching the nose with one hand, then the other (which are not feigned – if they were, he did them in the Q&A), can be off-putting. I say this merely to prepare a prospective viewer, as there is much, much more that is positive, and which draws one in.
One attraction, as one might gather from the trailer, is a wealth of film material that Žižek references here and – sometimes in more depth than in other cases – whose significance he analyses. It ranges from pre-war footage of Chaplin (plus Nazi commentary that criticizes him as typical of what is despicable in Jews) to Freeing Berlin from around 1944, which tells the story, from Stalin’s perspective, of what led to that event (and even portrays Hitler and him).
Žižek has many other examples, which encompass David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968), and Seconds (1966), as well as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), and The Dark Knight (2008).
Where Žižek is amongst his most expansive is in pulling apart James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), saying how ludicrous Kate Winslet partying with the lower decks to be with Leonardo DiCaprio is as a representation of class solidarity, and how hateful the denizens of the upper decks are made out to be by contrast. Most of all, though, how out-of-sorts Winslet is doing little more than feeding on DiCaprio to regenerate her flagging energies, even if at the cost of letting herself be abused.
Not that Žižek says so, but an arrangement of mutual benefit. However, he does ask, as one would know from the trailer, what part the iceberg plays in the development of the love-story, and he suggests that a worse disaster was averted by the couple’s not disembarking together and splitting up after two to three weeks of sex. He also comments how Winslet saying words to the effect that she will never let go of DiCaprio are literally at odds with thereupon releasing her grip on him so that he sinks into the water.
Throughout the film, through largely effective dummy-ups, and to much amusement, we see Žižek in a lifeboat beneath the stars to introduce this section about Titanic. He is then, variously, in the head in Jacket, relaxing by some of the furniture from Orange’s Korova Bar, or even on Travis Bickle’s bed – as good a way as any to draw attention to the artificiality both of the medium (in the original film, and in this one), and of what it passes of as distinct, real things.
Of course, this method also draws attention to the words that we hear Žižek saying, not least when, back to Titanic, he ends the film with an assertion and a power salute, and to how cinema can teeter on having us believe something and showing us that it is contrivance. Which is partly what he appears to be saying about the love-story in that film, that the real-life iceberg dramatically serves to make enduring the love that he predicts would have quickly petered out without it – no one wants the iceberg for that, but predicating a film on a doomed voyage would only be done to exploit it.
Žižek, as he did at length in the Q&A, states his views vigorously, but seems to disregard the reaction of the audience of Titanic when it was released, which must have known, at some level, that (a) the love was likely to be doomed, (b) it was being shown a fictionalized / idealized encounter between the classes, and, as a composite of these, that (c) the order of things is maintained.
No matter, as there is so much to follow in Žižek’s analysis*, that one loses the impression of being on top of it, for it is also part of his thesis that we chose our dreams and that we are complicit with engaging with ‘ideology’. Punchily, by showing us a scene from Guys and Dolls (1955), where one of the gang impersonates Officer Krapky (?) and the others make excuses that are grounded in their upbringing, and contrasting it with footage from the riots in the UK in 2011 and what was said by some then about why it had happened, he shows the connection between ‘ideology’, life and art. With scenes from the suppression of ‘The Prague Spring’ in 1968, he draws the lesson from Titanic that killing off the uprising allowed it to live on as a dream, not what he posits might have happened.
Necessarily, because Fiennes has had Žižek talk to camera* and then edited it together for her film, the creative act is hers, but the polemic may have, in the structure and order that she chose for it and the takes that she selected, have had its dynamics altered : I failed to hear this in the Q&A, but presumably (nominally) Žižek endorses the film, if only on the basis of having produced copy that is grist to someone else’s mill.
End-notes
* Incidentally, he told us in the Q&A that Fiennes read all of his books, worked for months beforehand, and, as she told us in the introduction, on nine months of solitary editing. He stated that his part was to shoot for two hours per day for two or three weeks in two locations, and was graphically explicit about how irritated he got when he was improvising, asked, because of technical issues, to do a second take, and then Fiennes asked him for a third take, saying that what he had said the first time had been better. Altogether, a strange collaboration.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Showing posts with label Stalin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stalin. Show all posts
Sunday 6 October 2013
Sunday 28 October 2012
Blair and Barnhill
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 October
Many will know that George Orwell = Eric Blair. Perhaps fewer know that, partly out of fear of personal retribution from Stalin following publishing Animal Farm, Orwell went to live for several long stretches at Barnhill (the estate shown), in the white property in the photograph.
Barnhill is located close to the more northerly tip of the wild and remote Isle of Jura, one of The Western Isles.
In the end, probably because he had tuberculosis before he went back there for the last time, he had to be taken off the island, and he died in London, but he had been working on the novel that, by the expedient of reversing the final digits, became Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This is not the first time that I have taken shots of Barnhill from as close as, unless one is renting the property, one can get from the private road, but I will have to look out those earlier images...
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 October
Barnhill is located close to the more northerly tip of the wild and remote Isle of Jura, one of The Western Isles.
In the end, probably because he had tuberculosis before he went back there for the last time, he had to be taken off the island, and he died in London, but he had been working on the novel that, by the expedient of reversing the final digits, became Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This is not the first time that I have taken shots of Barnhill from as close as, unless one is renting the property, one can get from the private road, but I will have to look out those earlier images...
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Wednesday 8 February 2012
The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 5)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 February
* Contains (almost nothing but) spoilers *
Probably full circle, and definitely the end of this group of postings, and to that alleged film The Future* (2011) and how, no less, it was sold to me by that clearly blasphemous publication, Picturehouse Recommends - sooner read Uncle Joe Stalin Rather Unequivocally Recommends**, and at least know where I stand and the permitted level of adoration!
I am confronted, once more, by that whole-page image of July*** (I think that the background has been edited out to make it more stark, as far as I recollect), leaning urgently out of the window as if - and this is the clever bit!? - some emergency is happening beneath her, and she is doing her best to intervene.
Rather than, when they both know that he should not be able to hear her (given where they both live), shouting nonethless - I forget what she does shout - to see if someone she has spoken to one the phone for the first time after all does. The image, as I say, suggests a crisis, because one wouldn't - unless Sophie (July) - go to the window with a hair-dryer and stick one's torso so emphatically out of it just to shout to someone who's not there, but it provides a great opportunity for the hair-dryer, a love-gift that has just been presented, to be pointed out of the window and suggest, in a phallic way, the direction of events and where her interest lies.
Redolent of that crazy connection that there is between teenage friends, who might try such a thing, rather than a woman of 35 trying to engage with an older man (Marshall) whom she probably didn't even meet when her partner Jason talked to Marshall and his daughter, and Jason, who had seen the drawing of the daughter's hamster (or whatever it was - possibly to raise funds for the animal welfare centre, possibly to line Marshall's pocket, as I don't recall, and don't intend to find out) bought it for Sophie.
The facing page is in two parts, the top about the film, the bottom about July. Here, mainly in order, are some quotations from what the write-up alleges (mostly, as if it were stating facts) from the top part, with a commentary as to why I take issue of them and believe that they built up a sigificantly misleading portrait of The Future:
July returns in typically charming fashion
I think that it’s very much a matter of opinion whether this film is charming – a Sundance jury might have thought it so, where a differently constituted one might not – and might not have found any real depths in this piece of work.
A film about confronting the stark realities of adulthood
Well, to be honest, this couple (meaning a pair of people, not an entity) does not have a clue about any sort of reality, and, if so, they have left it half their lives to address things that another generation does much younger than 35 (please see below - they are not a thirtysomething couple).
After weighing up all the pros and cons
I must confess that, aiming to skip the trailers, I missed the very opening minutes, and only met the three of them (including the cat, who confronts stark realities, for my money, far more meaningfully than Jason or Sophie does) when the humans have gone to collect the feline.
Only to be told that, allowing time for healing of the wounded (bandaged) paw, they must come back in twenty-eight days (or was it a month? I don’t care). They also learn that the thing that they have clearly been banking on, life-expectancy of six months, could be five years with love and care.
So whatever they weighed up offscreen to me, the two were never looking for a pet capable of surviving, but, frankly, an opportunity for short-term do-gooding, not a commitment to an animal’s life and well-being.
Of course, if they were wholly cynical (which they are too soft to be), they would go away, realize their mistake, and just call in to cancel the arrangement. But what arrangement? The clinic is crazy enough to say (words put into its mouth by July, and purely for reasons of the pretty thin plot) that it will put the cat down, after feeding and watering it for almost a month, if they do not show up – brilliant ethics for an animal shelter, and an insane way of spending someone’s money on sick or injured animals that you end up killing****.
[They] decide to take the next big step in their relationship: they are going to adopt a cat
As outlined above, they have no intention, at the outset, that this cat will be around very long – what big step? It’s more like an extended version of pet-sitting, with a limited duration. I do not know whether the clinic misled them initially, but they know that what they believed was wrong, and somehow, with a limited access to their own psyches, feel trapped with their previous decision. The write-up does not acknowledge any of this in:
But before they can bring their new pet back to their cost apartment, they will have to wait an entire month for the rescue centre to give them the all-clear
So, it’s hugely convenient that, when they expect that they are collecting the cat, they have a month in their questionably cosy dwelling (which may or may not be given a once-over by the centre) in which to regret being tied down – a bit like going to the dentist for an appointment for a filling, only to find that it is just one at which you are asked what sort of injection you’d like, and you have to come back another day for the filling.
With the big day marked on the calendar, our couple soon begin to fret over the consequences of their commitment
Yes, they fret straightaway about learning that it could be five years, but there is no actual commitment: they could pick up the phone and say ‘We’ve changed our minds’ – and let the centre kill the cat then and there? – is that the issue?
This mog’s going to tie them down; they will be trapped in a round-the clock routine for the next 10 years of their lives
It may be that what I missed is that this an HIV-positive LA cat, and thus that such a routine could be relevant, otherwise do these people really not know how capable cats are of looking after themselves? (They also, then, cannot have any friends who could do pet-sitting so that they go on vacation, and don’t know that, anyway, such help can be hired.)
Where ten years crept in from, I do not know, but Jason makes a rather fatuous speech that has been written for him to say that 5 years onto their 35 is 40, 40 is the new 50, and there’s nothing worthwhile in life then, so they are effectively dead now. Sadly, not very convincing, and even The Sophists of old came up with better reasons than that for the things of which they wished to persuade others: but it does need to allow those watching the film to believe these two credible, and their lacklustre thinking doesn’t do that.
[D]ay by day they drift apart. Until, that is, a moment of catharsis reunites their souls and reconnects them with their suburban world.
Funny, not in the film - of the same name - that I saw. Yes, they drift apart, but what is this cathartic moment supposed to be? Whatever it is, nothing reunites anybody's souls, and the rest is just fanciful padding!
Narrated by Paw-Paw (July herself putting on her best purr), The Future is a contemplative indie gem from one of American cinema's most enlightening free spirits.
So am I seriously being told that this film is enlightening? (And, yes, that was the cat's name, but, no, it doesn't narrate the film - it just narrates its own experience in the rescue centre of getting excited about going somewhere else and being happy, then reconciliation to not going there, then being killed, but there's an afterlife, so that's OK, and really contemplative, too!)
This may just be enthusiastic opinion, but it is making some pretty big claims, for July and The Future. In the section about her:
Like her films, she is understated, she is a citizen of a world far removed from the showy artificiality of Hollywood: the real world.
Oh, I think that I might vomit! It's not the studios' gizmos, hype and big budgets, so it must be good and appeal to those who prefer arthouse films - law of the excluded middle, again, for even if all Hollywood did = Bad, it doesn't follow that non-Hollywood = Good.
I end, speechless (at both ever having read this twaddle / seen the film), and feeling only that there is an enormous effort in this write-up to strong-arm me into why I should see / like it, viz.
Call her kooky or cute, but there is a truth in July's works that distinguishes them from other like-minded films. Without the slightest shade of pretence, The Future captures a tentative step along the potholed corridor towards middle age and an existential dead end*****.
End-notes
* Even Philip French (who he?) doesn't like it - he dismisses it in one outraged paragraph at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/nov/06/the-future-miranda-july-review.
** By the way, none of this 57 varieties stuff about which I've just piffled on (at, funnily enough, 57 alleged varieties) - one bloody tin of soup and, if you're lucky, you might be at the head of the queue when that one tin is on the shelf!
But it beats all this possibility for deliberation as to whether this bloody 18-month-cured prosciutto is better than a 12-month-cured packet of real Parma ham... Reminiscent of 'Should I see The Future, or save my pennies for The Artist?'?
*** With just the title top right in pinkish capitals, and some details of actors, director, etc., bottom right.
**** Perhaps Sophie and Jason are paying (even though they went there to collect the cat)?
***** There is another sentence, but I just don't feel the need to inflict it on both myelf or anyone reading this posting.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 February
* Contains (almost nothing but) spoilers *
Probably full circle, and definitely the end of this group of postings, and to that alleged film The Future* (2011) and how, no less, it was sold to me by that clearly blasphemous publication, Picturehouse Recommends - sooner read Uncle Joe Stalin Rather Unequivocally Recommends**, and at least know where I stand and the permitted level of adoration!
I am confronted, once more, by that whole-page image of July*** (I think that the background has been edited out to make it more stark, as far as I recollect), leaning urgently out of the window as if - and this is the clever bit!? - some emergency is happening beneath her, and she is doing her best to intervene.
Rather than, when they both know that he should not be able to hear her (given where they both live), shouting nonethless - I forget what she does shout - to see if someone she has spoken to one the phone for the first time after all does. The image, as I say, suggests a crisis, because one wouldn't - unless Sophie (July) - go to the window with a hair-dryer and stick one's torso so emphatically out of it just to shout to someone who's not there, but it provides a great opportunity for the hair-dryer, a love-gift that has just been presented, to be pointed out of the window and suggest, in a phallic way, the direction of events and where her interest lies.
Redolent of that crazy connection that there is between teenage friends, who might try such a thing, rather than a woman of 35 trying to engage with an older man (Marshall) whom she probably didn't even meet when her partner Jason talked to Marshall and his daughter, and Jason, who had seen the drawing of the daughter's hamster (or whatever it was - possibly to raise funds for the animal welfare centre, possibly to line Marshall's pocket, as I don't recall, and don't intend to find out) bought it for Sophie.
The facing page is in two parts, the top about the film, the bottom about July. Here, mainly in order, are some quotations from what the write-up alleges (mostly, as if it were stating facts) from the top part, with a commentary as to why I take issue of them and believe that they built up a sigificantly misleading portrait of The Future:
July returns in typically charming fashion
I think that it’s very much a matter of opinion whether this film is charming – a Sundance jury might have thought it so, where a differently constituted one might not – and might not have found any real depths in this piece of work.
A film about confronting the stark realities of adulthood
Well, to be honest, this couple (meaning a pair of people, not an entity) does not have a clue about any sort of reality, and, if so, they have left it half their lives to address things that another generation does much younger than 35 (please see below - they are not a thirtysomething couple).
After weighing up all the pros and cons
I must confess that, aiming to skip the trailers, I missed the very opening minutes, and only met the three of them (including the cat, who confronts stark realities, for my money, far more meaningfully than Jason or Sophie does) when the humans have gone to collect the feline.
Only to be told that, allowing time for healing of the wounded (bandaged) paw, they must come back in twenty-eight days (or was it a month? I don’t care). They also learn that the thing that they have clearly been banking on, life-expectancy of six months, could be five years with love and care.
So whatever they weighed up offscreen to me, the two were never looking for a pet capable of surviving, but, frankly, an opportunity for short-term do-gooding, not a commitment to an animal’s life and well-being.
Of course, if they were wholly cynical (which they are too soft to be), they would go away, realize their mistake, and just call in to cancel the arrangement. But what arrangement? The clinic is crazy enough to say (words put into its mouth by July, and purely for reasons of the pretty thin plot) that it will put the cat down, after feeding and watering it for almost a month, if they do not show up – brilliant ethics for an animal shelter, and an insane way of spending someone’s money on sick or injured animals that you end up killing****.
[They] decide to take the next big step in their relationship: they are going to adopt a cat
As outlined above, they have no intention, at the outset, that this cat will be around very long – what big step? It’s more like an extended version of pet-sitting, with a limited duration. I do not know whether the clinic misled them initially, but they know that what they believed was wrong, and somehow, with a limited access to their own psyches, feel trapped with their previous decision. The write-up does not acknowledge any of this in:
But before they can bring their new pet back to their cost apartment, they will have to wait an entire month for the rescue centre to give them the all-clear
So, it’s hugely convenient that, when they expect that they are collecting the cat, they have a month in their questionably cosy dwelling (which may or may not be given a once-over by the centre) in which to regret being tied down – a bit like going to the dentist for an appointment for a filling, only to find that it is just one at which you are asked what sort of injection you’d like, and you have to come back another day for the filling.
With the big day marked on the calendar, our couple soon begin to fret over the consequences of their commitment
Yes, they fret straightaway about learning that it could be five years, but there is no actual commitment: they could pick up the phone and say ‘We’ve changed our minds’ – and let the centre kill the cat then and there? – is that the issue?
This mog’s going to tie them down; they will be trapped in a round-the clock routine for the next 10 years of their lives
It may be that what I missed is that this an HIV-positive LA cat, and thus that such a routine could be relevant, otherwise do these people really not know how capable cats are of looking after themselves? (They also, then, cannot have any friends who could do pet-sitting so that they go on vacation, and don’t know that, anyway, such help can be hired.)
Where ten years crept in from, I do not know, but Jason makes a rather fatuous speech that has been written for him to say that 5 years onto their 35 is 40, 40 is the new 50, and there’s nothing worthwhile in life then, so they are effectively dead now. Sadly, not very convincing, and even The Sophists of old came up with better reasons than that for the things of which they wished to persuade others: but it does need to allow those watching the film to believe these two credible, and their lacklustre thinking doesn’t do that.
[D]ay by day they drift apart. Until, that is, a moment of catharsis reunites their souls and reconnects them with their suburban world.
Funny, not in the film - of the same name - that I saw. Yes, they drift apart, but what is this cathartic moment supposed to be? Whatever it is, nothing reunites anybody's souls, and the rest is just fanciful padding!
Narrated by Paw-Paw (July herself putting on her best purr), The Future is a contemplative indie gem from one of American cinema's most enlightening free spirits.
So am I seriously being told that this film is enlightening? (And, yes, that was the cat's name, but, no, it doesn't narrate the film - it just narrates its own experience in the rescue centre of getting excited about going somewhere else and being happy, then reconciliation to not going there, then being killed, but there's an afterlife, so that's OK, and really contemplative, too!)
This may just be enthusiastic opinion, but it is making some pretty big claims, for July and The Future. In the section about her:
Like her films, she is understated, she is a citizen of a world far removed from the showy artificiality of Hollywood: the real world.
Oh, I think that I might vomit! It's not the studios' gizmos, hype and big budgets, so it must be good and appeal to those who prefer arthouse films - law of the excluded middle, again, for even if all Hollywood did = Bad, it doesn't follow that non-Hollywood = Good.
I end, speechless (at both ever having read this twaddle / seen the film), and feeling only that there is an enormous effort in this write-up to strong-arm me into why I should see / like it, viz.
Call her kooky or cute, but there is a truth in July's works that distinguishes them from other like-minded films. Without the slightest shade of pretence, The Future captures a tentative step along the potholed corridor towards middle age and an existential dead end*****.
End-notes
* Even Philip French (who he?) doesn't like it - he dismisses it in one outraged paragraph at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/nov/06/the-future-miranda-july-review.
** By the way, none of this 57 varieties stuff about which I've just piffled on (at, funnily enough, 57 alleged varieties) - one bloody tin of soup and, if you're lucky, you might be at the head of the queue when that one tin is on the shelf!
But it beats all this possibility for deliberation as to whether this bloody 18-month-cured prosciutto is better than a 12-month-cured packet of real Parma ham... Reminiscent of 'Should I see The Future, or save my pennies for The Artist?'?
*** With just the title top right in pinkish capitals, and some details of actors, director, etc., bottom right.
**** Perhaps Sophie and Jason are paying (even though they went there to collect the cat)?
***** There is another sentence, but I just don't feel the need to inflict it on both myelf or anyone reading this posting.
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