Wednesday 12 November 2014

A review in Tweets : The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and King's College Choir

A review, in Tweets, of the opening concert of Cambridge Music Festival 2014


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


12 November

A review, in Tweets, of the opening concert of Cambridge Music Festival 2014 (@cammusicfest), given at King's College Chapel (@Kings_College) by its choir (@ChoirOfKingsCam) and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (@theoae) under Stephen Cleobury, with soloists Elin Manahan Thomas (soprano), Susanna Hurrell (soprano), Tim Mead (counter-tenor), James Gilchrist (tenor), and Ben Appl (bass)























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

Monday 10 November 2014

Football without a ball

This is a review from Cambridge African Film Festival of Timbuktu (2014)

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


9 November

This is a review of Timbuktu (2014), which screened on 1 November 2014, the Opening Night of the 13th* Cambridge African Film Festival (CAFF / @africacambridge)

At Cambridge African Film Festival, Timbuktu had a hard act to follow in Dankumba (2011), a work that made a feature of the staged nature / staginess / choreography of encounters, as well as of the sheer cinematic joy of a well-composed shot, which says so much just in the way in, and with the care with, which it has been constructed.

Dankumba was being shown in tribute to Bakary Diallo, a Malian director who had died, en route home, at the age of 34, and, although we had kindly been provided with a translation of the dialogue, having one seemed hardly necessary. For the telling was in a sequence such as the presentation of a pair of feet on a colourful mattress, the feet reaching out for the floor, and the body rising erect above them – of course, a twelve-minute film has a different objective and approach, but it still made one hungry for shots assembled how these had been.

A desire that Timbuktu (set in and around that city in Mali**) satisfied to begin with, for example, in some beautiful views of the light on the water (or, as a blindfolded man is being led down into a valley, varying the perspective), but this narrative style, for which Dankumba had made us ready, was not to prove the main one, and did not essentially belong to this setting. Yes, the film utilized the technique of introducing us to elements and challenging us as to whether and, if so, how they would relate to each other, and doing so for as long as some arthouse films might (if not quite as Norte, the End of History always did, though one was in other ways reminded of it).

In some ways, though, Timbuktu (2014) seemed not so much to dissect its subject by doing so, or usefully open it up, but to give the impression of fragmenting one’s involvement with the principal storyline, and, in consequence, of making a disconnection from it. Maybe that was deliberate, but, if so, it was done in a way that hardly suggested artfulness : even when the film returned, at the very end, to the opening motif, of men in a military four-wheel drive, who determine to chase a gazelle-type creature to tire it out, that gesture – of evoking a highly applicable image (that might have encapsulated all that went before) – failed to bring it together.

Four Corners (Die Vier Hoeke) (2014), set in Cape Town and also being shown during CAFF 2014, was reviewed here when it came to Cambridge Film Festival earlier in the year. Unlike this film, where the very simplicity of the core story mirrored that of Norte, the End of History***, the extreme relatedness of everyone to everyone else in a small group meant for a feeling of contrivance.

Here, partly for reasons already given, one feels at a distance to Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) and his fate (not least as one wonders what, given what happens, it would have been anyway, before the new regime). Unless, of course, the expectation was that one would have read up about the film in advance (an assumption that can make for the incautious construction of documentaries and feature films alike), and it would not need any context beyond that of Abdelkrim’s (Abel Jafri’s) armed men coming into the mosque, at the time of prayer, and being challenged by l’Imam (Adel Mahmoud Cherif).


Not that one did not see, very brutally in at least two cases, lives being disrupted and disjointed by the unflinching imposition of laws and rules in the name of a regime of divine justice and obedience, but they almost seemed not to be part of the same narrative. Beyond establishing quite straightforwardly that the regime actively prohibits – amongst other things – smoking, women with bare hands, adultery, music, football, the film does not integrate the cases of severe punishment into the central story (e.g. that of the beautifully voiced Fatou la chanteuse (Fatmoumata Diawara)) :

It is almost as if the scene of Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) being whipped, in 12 Years A Slave (2013), were introduced not to further Solomon Northup’s story, but just as an unrelated piece of barbarity – in the way that we have the football, studiedly bouncing down the steps in a personified spirit, momentarily reminding us of many a film where an object becomes 'conscious' (e.g. The Yellow Balloon (1953), which Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) references in his A History of Children and Film (2013)).

Not that we do not have a victim, who, when brought before a tribunal, is told that admitting that he knows that football is banned itself justifies a penalty, but there is no consistent message, because the jihad is also shown mocked, by showing a religious enforcer, who is confused by some youths who parade before him a game of football – with everything but a ball****…

A number of films set in the time of unrest or war, ranging from The Book Thief (2013) to René Clément’s La bataille du rail (1946) (or, more controversially perhaps, in Argo (2012)), make use of various features (in common with Timbuktu, and in no particular order) : the perspective of the ultimate victor*****, humour, and representing the enemy / opposing or occupying force as clodhopping clowns.

(Of course, one says ‘in no particular order’, but it is the rational assurance, after the fact, of the first that allows one to do the third.) Here, then, there were other moments (than the game without a ball) of punctured authority, such as when Abdelkrim takes the wheel of a vehicle and succeeds (on this attempt, at least) at doing little more than making it kangaroo or run off course. Or when his secret habit, banned by his own organization, later proves patent to his driving instructor (who says that everyone knows) : in both cases, the driver deflates his pomposity. (No doubt in retaliation, Abdelkrim picks on other things : Your Arabic is so bad.)


Yet some laughter in the screening was a little hard to cope with, as it was not made in response to such a moment of comedy, but felt as though characters were being laughed at, not the situation found amusing in a way that did not target them. At the same time, one element of the film was, clearly, highlighting the buffoonery of the occupying militia, perhaps to heighten the effect of more violent or brutal behaviour – if so, and even if true to when La Police Islamique took control, perhaps ill judged ?

By contrast, at least, with Half of a Yellow Sun (2013), where, in the Q&A with director Biyi Bandele earlier this year, it was clear that the audience had been confused as to whether the characters themselves were meant to be risible.


At root, mentally shorn – as it all too easily was – of its offshoots of incidental action, Timbuktu showed us the typical hypocrisies of a repressive power, whether interpreting party dogma or a religious text to its own end, or when the interview with Abdelkrim (and the amount of 'blood money') seems more important than the trial.

We saw defiance, some of which was struck down in ways that repel us, and some indulged because of a connection with the person who offered it (as in the case of the eccentric Zabou (Kettly Noël)), but little to tell us why the occupation began (or why it could or would end ? - admittedly, perhaps, putting us in the ignorance of the time, as to whether all this would last).

At one level, the film appears to deal in actions that, as one was aware at the time, threatened to overshadow Mali’s rich history and culture, especially its tradition of music, but, on another, it leaves one ignorant as to these actions and where they came from. If it spurred us to find out more, that might be something - rather than our simply consuming the content / story of Timbuktu...


End-notes

* Every festival now has to be the nth ‘edition’, as if no one can be trusted to understand that calling something the nth particular Film or Music Festival means only that, as the nth, there have been n - 1 such events before, not that its ranks nth out of all of them…

** Not that, to be frank, one gets any sense of the real scale or historicity of the city. In addition, where Satima and Kidane live (with their daughter Toya, and her son Issan), the stretch of water where Issan runs into problems with Amadou, and Timbuktu itself are three important exterior locations : one has little notion how they can relate to each other.

*** Or even of Oklahoma, centring on ‘The Farmer and The Cowman should be friends’ ? (Here, there is a cow called GPS – just look at The Jersey Herd Book to see where that fits in the pantheon, with a beast called Salisbury Musical Flashlight…)

**** A motif that, not uniquely, occurs in Sieniawka (2013), as premiered at Cambridge Film Festival 2013 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF)

***** Assuming that there ever is a victor, as such, in an occupation or invasion.




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

Friday 7 November 2014

Remember me, but forget my fate ~ Dido and Aeneas, Henry Purcell

This is a review of Mr. Turner (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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7 November

This is a review of Mr. Turner (2014)

Probably too much has already been written, spoken or just thought about Mr. Turner (2014) since its win for Timothy Spall at Cannes (as well as for cinematographer Dick Pope), and its nomination for the Palme d’Or. (And maybe it has not attracted much attention, but the scoring of the film is so intelligent, just even with the simple falling motif on alto sax (four saxes are credited), picked up by the strings.) So the unaccustomed aim here will be (relative) brevity :

The simple truth is that Spall, Pope and director Mike Leigh, amongst others, have collaborated on an excellently cinematic piece of work. Whether or not one wishes to interpret the composition of shots as somehow mimetic of Turner's painterly art and / or vision, the quality of them, and the care behind them, is profound : unlike some films, incidentally using this medium (as a way of reaching an audience with a story), the film is indissoluble from the story.

Just as, in Mr. Turner, we see the artist having confidence in his work* (declaring that he is leaving it, as a collection, to the nation : the collection that, indeed, we have at Tate Britain (@Tate)), Leigh likewise has every reason to be pleased with what this film looks like and says.


Whether the details of art history (or of biographical fact) are correct is for others to debate (to the extent that we can know). Others, for example, can research Turner's known relations with his father or his niece, or observe on what basis we can say what did happen with that daub of red paint at the summer exhibition (?) at The Royal Academy. The fact is that, with Spall (and others), Leigh has - as he said himself to Radio 3 Free Thinking's (@BBCFreeThinking's) Matthew Sweet - someone who can be seen to be sketching, applying paint to a canvas, scumbling.

Leigh has no need for Spall to be Turner through and through, researched ad infinitum, but a man such as we see could have happened to be such an artist, a man embodying an economy of means and words, who was J. M. W. Turner.

In fact, it is actually of no importance to the worth of this film whether there ever was a Mrs Sophia Booth in Margate - she could be conflation, or pure invention, for all that it matters. Even more vigorously and vividly than Daniel Auteuil does Marseille in Marius and Fanny, Leigh creates this Margate, the industry on the foreshore, the close quarters on land, the sails from the front windows : we believe that Turner would choose such a spot, such scenes, such a woman (as Marion Bailey becomes, in Sophia).


It is almost, in a rather Becketttian way**, as though Leigh creates the creating Turner as his creature, in which aim Leigh is in no way about what Ralph Fiennes worked to achieve with Dickens in his The Invisible Woman (2013). That film seems to tell his lack of moral courage and to rehabilitate him sympathetically in our eyes at the same time ; although Mr. Turner does share an era with when Dickens' illicit relationship took place, the mores here seem to be quite different.

Spall may be 5’8”, but the sense that Leigh’s framing and Pope’s camerawork give is of the presence of the man, his bulk in the scene, as what balances it and makes it complete*** - just as we see him, discovered as we follow two local women along a canal path at the start, working from the perfect point on the opposite bank for the view that he wants.

Or, for example, when Turner is on his way (to Chelsea ?), we are confronted with an assemblage of people, who are there for us to view as he strides past. The assurance in the construction of this film matches Turner’s confidence about what he was giving the nation :



Although it was tempting to use another quotation, No good deed goes unpunished, this review is titled with one from 'Dido's Lament' (from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas) : not for nothing does Leigh have Spall, feelingly if obviously not expertly, sing along to Miss Coggins' (Karina Fernandez's****) playing this number. As Turner reaches for the words (finding, as happens with even the best-learnt text, synonyms that fit the scansion), he is virtually writing his own epitaph.



Content with himself, as he strolls around the Academy show, being acknowledged, making comment, he is most of all a man who has a position that he knows - or knows himself by his position ? Having a daguerrotype made - and then persuading Mrs Booth to do the same with him - he is not the obedient subject, but exercising his intellect to understand the mechanism and the medium, rather than accepting what is presented, and how that is done.

And, there, Leigh cannot resist giving him prescience for our modern obsession with making / distributing images.



End-notes

* We also see that it could have been far from facile to maintain that belief, because of trends in fashion / art such as that which began just with the initials ‘PRB’, before The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ventured its name…

The young John Ruskin (in a scene that some view as unforgivably disrespectful of him) cannot venerate Claude as Turner does, but seeks to worship Turner in his stead - the key point, other than that Ruskin is young, is that Turner's estimation of his own work does not depend on no longer valuing what went before : he likens Sophia to a representation of Aphrodite, he respects Claude for painting the sea 'from the land'.

** Thinking of the late 'novels', Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho.

Quick - leave him !

*** Not in the same way, exactly, as in the montage that closes Calvary (2014), but the closing shot is of absence, of grief. And, when we see the dying Turner, it has been arranged so that Sophia Booth, to his right, is in a shallow depth of field, and is the one in focus.

**** Another Leigh regular, along with Lesley Manville (Mrs Somerville) and David Horovitch (Dr. Price) - as was Spall himself, in the mid 1990s.




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

Sunday 2 November 2014

An Education revisited - or Why did they include that on the DVD ?

This is a follow-up piece to a review of An  Education (2009)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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2 November (updated 4 November)

This is a follow-up piece to a review of An  Education (2009)

* Contains spoilers *

The advice is always to hand in your working, as well as your answers, at the end of Maths exams* (probably applicable to those in Physics, too).

We get to see the film-makers’ working (having been shown it by distributor E1 Entertainment) on the DVD of An Education (2009), which was, as it were, ‘educational’ – but only in how not to tell a story (or how to undermine the story that you have just had the likes of Mulligan, Molina and Pike tell on the disc).

In this case, it is less that one bothered to film these false steps (i.e. the deleted scenes) in this BBC Films’ production, or even scripted them in the first place : for one should be in little doubt that, when Sam Mendes says (on Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3blog’s) Night Waves (now re-labelled as Free Thinking – @BBCFreeThinking)) that another ending for American Beauty (1999) tempted him, there probably was one.

Yet, even if it was not, at the time of the original VHS release, generally the fashion to put ‘Bonus Features’ or ‘Extras’ at the end of the video-tape, one may wager that Mendes would not have allowed that other ending (if it had survived) anywhere near the DVD re-release (in July 2006) – quite sufficient that he should mention it on air some six years later…

More than any of this, it was just the misjudgement embodied in including this material as a ‘Bonus Feature’, as if it ‘might interest’ the viewer who had just watched An Education – although, almost necessarily, this critique is from the viewpoint of having seen the film as released, and treating that assemblage of scenes as having ascendancy over those that were wholly rejected (or which here appear in a different, usually longer, form).

That said, maybe one can already program modern DVD-players to add in or cut out scenes, so that one has (and can store the settings for) the viewer’s cut at will, an idea with which – in connection with an unfinished version of this posting – Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) was horrified quite a few months back at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) (when he brought A History of Children and Film (2013)) !

Even so, there is barely anything here that one would have wanted to keep, albeit some are decisions that would easily not get made until editing – too much time with the school-friends has been wisely relegated, because Jenny’s (Carey Mulligan’s) interaction with them there either adds nothing to the whole, or overstates what we already know / infer : when they are in the window of the café, one asks ‘What do you do all day, Lady Muck ?’, to which one of the answers is ‘Helping to look at some flats’. Or when the three meet for a post-mortem on Jenny’s romance, and, again, we learn what was better not mentioned, but passed over - or guessed at.


Yet the possibility that we probably least want to see filmed is that of David being ahead of Jenny at the end of the street in Oxford as she cycles with a male friend** – and, when she has asked the friend to wait and approaches David on foot (please see transcript, below), his seeking to make her accept his apology / explanation, and inviting her to resume a relationship with him (as if she is likely to agree, even in principle) :

On one level, the scene wants at once both to impart the fact that David has been in prison (You probably know I’ve been away), and to suggest that it is realistic that he would already be at liberty during Jenny’s time at university : Jenny tells him that she knows, because of a piece in the local paper that her mother sent to her, that he asked for 190 other offences to be taken into consideration : One hundred and ninety ! You must have ‘liberated’ most of the antiques in The Home Counties !

To be able to credit this scene, we would have to believe – as, for good reason, Jenny no longer does, having met David’s shocked wife Sarah (played by Sally Hawkins in a quick scene*, who was shocked at Jenny’s age) – that she, out of the others (of whom Sarah makes Jenny and us aware), has been special to David (Peter Sarsgaard).

Which is what the film has us believe only so far, then chips away at it, first with his convenient lying (about visiting C. S. Lewis), and his morals in ‘liberating’ an old map, and managing to justify himself to Jenny afterwards in terms of mere pragmatism (that he cannot buy her drinks, etc., otherwise).

As a closing moment, this request (whose refusal the deleted scene shows him simply accepting) asks too much of us, i.e. that David should really have cared about Jenny, for him to be making this approach, this speech – although it is consistent with what he says to Danny (Dominic Cooper) at Walthamstow, when he has been challenged about his intentions : to look at Jenny, and see that she is different.


Even if it happened in Lynn Barber’s memoir, on which Nick Hornby based the screenplay (and which might now be worth checking…), we are better off not having David appear in Oxford, or our hearing what happened to him. Not to make a better ending, but because it seems consistent with the scene with David’s wife Sarah Goldman, which, in the film is shorter (and without a child in a pram, or Jenny listening to everything that Sarah has to say), but carries the same meaning :

David’s involvement with other women (at least one of whom, even in the included version of the scene, he has made pregnant : You’re not in the family way ? – that’s happened before) has clearly enough been a repeating pattern of offering himself as available, when he is not, but not (as Sarah views it, again in that longer scene) being able to go through with it, because he loves his children**. (As Sarah says, answering her own question about whether Jenny knew about the house, child and her, They never do.)

For the film as made, with Jenny’s voiceover about getting to Oxford (and having had to make out to a boy who wanted to take her to Paris that she had not been), physically - though not necessarily emotionally - distances us from what she has gone through : even the closing shot does not retain the splendour or triumph implicit in a crane-shot, and then drawing out, but just slowly backs up to a wide shot and a blackout (as against a slow fade, after a significantly long hold).


The original memoir would, one imagines, have been in the first person. However, in the film, Jenny has not been at much distance from her own story before, or outside it, and has only been seen telling it to others in the fairly immediate moment – or, indeed, trying to avoid doing so, after finding the letters in the glove compartment***, and having required David to take her parents and her straight back home :

At this point, and despite being unfairly urged Don't be like this (which echoes his words Please don't be unkind in the deleted closing scene - please see below), she had put him on the spot with When were you going to tell me ?, and seems to take at face value when he replies Soon… it just never seemed like the right time. He tries to divert onto the good times, to justify asserting I can get a divorce – everything will turn out for the best. The truth, though, is that he drives off, when she requires him to speak to her parents and his wife.

The effect of giving Jenny a voiceover implies exactly the opposite of having her meet David, an accommodation with a past about which she feels very differently from when he tried to manipulate her with it there : Which, in this alternative world that we are shown, she has to express to David, who conveniently obliges by turning tail, and she goes back to her life in Oxford.

For this version to be on the DVD, David’s approach to Jenny has to be plausible and worth showing, neither of which it is, when he seems to invest no real energy in convincing a woman who now can have no reason to listen to him, let alone believe him – and David has always been seen to talk around the people whom he knew that he could persuade, because he knew how, not that he thought his powers to be unfailing.


Characterization of the first twelve deleted scenes

1. After Mulligan has whispered to Sarsgaard ‘That was scandalous’, regarding his manipulation of Molina’s mood and morality (approval that suggests a greater level of complicity / endorsement), closing business with his putting his hat over her eyes.

2. Pike and Mulligan, clearly having swapped hats, and the former initially lying on the bonnet of the car, and casually (as her character is) being quite candid about how little there is to do in the places where Sarsgaard and Cooper (Danny) stop.

3. A kiss in what initially looks like a railway compartment, but, as we draw back, is a private booth (where one can hear the 45 of one’s choice).

4, 5. Mulligan and her school chums caught smoking (when they thought themselves out of view around a corner), and then brought before Thompson – ‘Not surprised to see you’ (to Mulligan).

6. Curling around the café, in a pan, to the picture-window where Mulligan and co. are sitting. After she has put one of them right that the literature question that she is looking at asks for two examples (and the light quip from one friend that the other is excused, for being ‘rubbish at maths’), they turn to asking her about her (post-school) life : ‘What do you do all day anyway, Lady Muck ?’, to which Mulligan answers (not altogether convincingly) : Um (Pause.) I’ve been… trying on dresses, helping to look at some flats – I’ve been reading a lot, too.

7. In through the door of the kitchen, where Mulligan is being tutored, by Colman (her mother) in how to make afternoon tea, and we realize that Sarsgaard is there : he is asked, again, where the flat is, and eventually answers Down near Russell Square – two minutes’ walk from the Underground.

After Mulligan jokes about putting the tea-cosy on her head, Colman leaves. When questioned about where he is living now, Sarsgaard, after saying that he has only stayed there a couple of nights, states – when pressed – that Mulligan must think him very odd (You do seem to float around…), but I live at home […] – just [with] my mother, my father’s dead […].

8, 9. Inconsequential scenes, with Colman at the foot of the stairs (That’s what David sees, lots of nice places / You won’t be bored, you know – he’s not boring.), and outside the house, Sarsgaard kissing Mulligan, and sweeping her off her feet.

10. Extended scene with Hawkins (after No, don’t tell me… Good God, you’re a child !, and just before the moment when Mulligan walks away), where a longer speech from Hawkins catches her :

You didn’t know about any of this, presumably – no, they never do. Did he ask you to marry him ? Yes, of course he did. You’re not ‘in the family way’, are you, because that’s happened before ? […] (Brings out pram.) […] That’s why he never goes through with anything – he does love them. […] He’s four months old […] Perhaps you can remember a night, four months ago, when my husband seemed… a little distracted. […]

11. By the river / weir, distractedly smoking, then throwing the cigarette-packet away into the water.

12. Mulligan with her friends, around a table at the back of the café (where she had been waiting for them) – I’m sure my uncle knows someone who could kill him, if that would helpThere was lots I didn’t tell you, plus a moment of attempted profundity : That’s the thing about our lives, isn’t it – it’s so easy to fall asleep, when there’s nothing to keep you awake….



(Transcript of the last deleted scene


13. Mulligan cycling, Sarsgaard in distance, and, as is revealed in a wide, tracking-shot, the Bridge of Sighs in the near background. Concentrating, though, on the dialogue (rather than the shots) – and what a quantity of dialogue for a scene that was not used (the whole sequence is 3 minutes 25 seconds) !

Mulligan : Good God !

Sarsgaard : Hello, Jenny.

Mulligan : What are you doing here ?

Sarsgaard : Uh (Pause.) I came to see you.

Mulligan : I think, in this case, ‘Better never, than late’.

Sarsgaard : Please don’t be unkind. (Pause.) You probably know (Pause.) Um… I’ve been away. (Pause, nodding.) So, I couldn’t come before—

Mulligan : Yes, my mother sent me a piece from the local paper. You asked for 190 other offences to be taken into consideration. One hundred and ninety ! You must have ‘liberated’ most of the antiques in The Home Counties !

Sarsgaard : I wanted to make a clean start, for a new beginning – (Slight pause.) together. (Pause.
) I came to tell you… I’m going to speak to my wife about a divorce.

Mulligan : Don’t you understand what you did ?

Sarsgaard : Jenny, I do, I really do, and I know that… my behaviour… must’ve… been – confusing. (Pause.) Um. (Pause.) We never sat down and had a chat about it all, the ‘why’s and the ‘wherefore’s – that can wait. (Slight pause.) The important thing (Pause.) is – (Pause.) you’re still my Minnie Mouse (Pause.) – and… (Pause.) I love you. (Long Pause. She looks across at her friend, waiting.) And we had fun, you know you had fun.

Mulligan : (Long pause.) Yes, I had fun. (Long pause.) But I had fun with the wrong person. (Pause.) And at all the wrong times, and I can’t ever get those times back. (Pause.) But I’ve got my own life back now. (Pause.) Look, David – I’m at (With a boast.
) Oxford.

Sarsgaard : (Snorts.)



End-notes

* Not surprisingly, in reviewing How I Came to Hate Maths (Comment j’ai détesté les maths), Mark Liversidge (@MoveEvangelist) remarks as much.

** Admittedly, this argument conveniently uses the content of one deleted scene to prove that another deleted scene has no merit, but the upset to Jenny in finding out that David is married is, in its own terms, so great that, having gone further and met his wife, she is likely to believe that he has taken her for a ride.

*** In truth, there is no clear reason why she looks in there or now, and not only now, but not before.




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

Monday 27 October 2014

La Bretagna all'Italiana - or La Serenissima in Cambridge (Part I)

A review of La Serenissima's concert, performing with Mhairi Lawson at Trinity College, Cambridge

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


27 October

This (over)lengthy review is of a Cambridge Early Music concert given by La Serenissima, with soprano Mhairi Lawson, in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, on Monday 13 October

The programme for the evening was entitled La Bretagna all’Italiana, and La Serenissima (@LaSerenissimaUK) was led (and introduced), as ever, by violinist Adrian Chandler (@AdeSerenissima), with Mhairi Lawson (soprano), Gareth Deats (cello), Robert Howarth (harpsichord), and Eligio Quinteiro (theorbo) – the ensemble’s full complement of players, on which Adrian calls for Vivaldi concerti and the like, is given on the beautifully presented web-site, at http://laserenissima.co.uk/about/*


Introductory

For the purposes of this review (NB This gushing overdue posting is just for the first half), Adrian Chandler is styled ‘Adrian’, because one simply must do so after having been to The Eagle on a couple of occasions with Gareth (and Robert ?) and him…


The first of which was after those three, as a trio, gave their Pisendel recital during one Cambridge Summer Music Festival, material founded in the original ‘Per Monsieur Pisendel’ album (which now has a tempting-looking sequel – Santa, please note !) : an intriguing story, fascinatingly told by Adrian between the pieces (and in the CD booklet), of the expert violinist who turned composer with the help of Antonio Vivaldi, one Johann Georg Pisendel, who rightly deserves – as La Serenissima believes – to be better known.



On that occasion, La Serenissima was not, as it has sometimes done, giving an all-Vivaldi performance (though he is ever present), and that was a link with this recent Cambridge recital – along with Adrian’s continuing search for rarities, star works by other composer / violinists (Pisendel being but one) that we may not otherwise (tend to) hear.


Opening half

Programme

1. Due Canzoni da Battello ~ Anon. (c. 1730)

2. Sonata Scozzese ~ Francesco Maria Veracini (1690–1768)

3. A Scots Cantata ~ William Boyce (1711–1779)

4. Sonata II in D Major (‘Manchester’), RV. 12 ~ Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741)


Mhairi Lawson began by singing two (1) Canzoni da Battello – and two further ones began the Closing half (write-up in progress), all thought to date to around 1730. At this time (and from the late seventh century until 1797), Venice was still a Republic : Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia – or just La Serenissima, from where the band takes its name**.

In the solo violin introduction to Si la gondola avere, Adrian brought out a sweetness of tone, which heralded richness in Mhairi’s voice, itself a contrast to the robust, yet delicate theorbo, before a close with violin again. In the second piece, Cara Nina el bon to sesto, Mhairi gave us more lightness, and the overall impression, with theorbo accompaniment, was less formal than in the opening song.


Neither of these Canzoni is attributed (please see next paragraph), and they typically have texts in Venetian dialect (as Adrian tells us in his programme-notes). Since he is necessarily mentally and historically rooted in Venice, Adrian provided much detail in the programme, but one also wanted to heed these short numbers – and their lyrics, fleeting as the may-fly, for there was little or none of the ruminative word-setting that we know from Handel or Bach. (And one knew that one could read over his notes later, in serene tranquillity !)


Afterwards, Adrian told us that these pieces survive, both in collections in manuscript form (in libraries, music colleges, etc.), and because they made their way into three volumes published, in London, by John Walsh (in the 1740s). (The notes tell us that there are occasional, usually sole, compositions that give Hasse, Pergolesi or Lampugani as their author.)


Adrian introduced the (2) Sonata Scozzese by outlining how Veracini migrated to London from Florence in the 1730s, and, through playing in the Entr’acte of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, came to write this piece, with its Scotch snaps, and its variations on Tweeside.

Scored for the quartet of instrumentalists, the sonata is led by the violin (rather than its having a solo part), and opens with what sounds like Scottish intonation, before becoming more Italianate – quite an extended movement, reminiscent of the dance.

Formally, there is an Adagio between the Allegro moderatamente and the final Scozzese, but it appeared to be run together with the latter, and was – not least in comparison with the Allegro – fairly brief. The Scozzese is marked Un poco andante e affettuoso – Largo – Un poco andante e affettuoso :

Before the Scots tune was stated, the movement was characterized by deft down-strokes in, and hesitancy about, the violin-writing, and it then developed with the feel of ‘The Pipes’, and with the bow skating on Adrian’s strings. In the Largo section, a little akin to that in Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 4 in F Minor***, Op. 8 (RV 297, ‘Inverno’ (‘Winter’)), there was an inward, reflective mood given by the solo violin, before we moved back to the opening theme proper at the work’s close.

In and through hearing these pieces, and seeing – if quick enough – Adrian’s agile finger- and bow-work, we witnessed how a variety of techniques and effects for violin are part of this repertoire. As, in different ways, no doubt Béla Bartók places demands on his soloist in, say, his Violin Concerto No. 2 (BB 117) – or Johann Sebastian Bach in his Partita No. 3 in C Major (whose works in this set of Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, BWV 1001–1006, partly inspired Bartók’s own Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz. 117, BB 124). However, of course, delving around in and then interpreting eighteenth-century (or earlier ?) treatises on string-playing is all part of the groundwork for what we hear in performance…


Mhairi stepped up again from sitting at the side of the chapel for Boyce’s (3) A Scots Cantata – maybe, when Tom Stoppard was giving us Vienna in a craze for things Scots in his adaptation On the Razzle, that seemed a little unlikely (albeit a century later, in 1842). However, it is clear from what is in this programme that something Caledonian was afoot in London in the first half of the eighteenth century****, which the local and (as Adrian puts it) ‘imported’ composers strove to serve.

Having duly referenced the recent vote ‘north of the border’, Adrian observed that the form is essentially recitative / aria – twice. Although being Scottish may have made Mhairi’s construing her text easier, it was the least of her qualifications to perform this piece when singers’ meat and drink is conveying meaning through a tongue that is likely to be unfamiliar to much of the audience – and many may relish settings of, for example (for this is not), Burns without being able to understand every nuance.

Even so, these central words (set in the second section of recitative), probably deliberately, pose no problem to following what is happening :

These tender notes did a’ her pity move, with melting heart she listened to the boy;
o’ercome she smil’d and promis’d him her love; he in return thus sang his rising joy.


Jeanny’s reaction, then, is the pivotal moment, the impetus for Jonny’s vigorous rejoicing in the second aria, where the scoring for voice dwelt on the phrase ‘dear enchanting bliss’ as the undulating accompaniment held the tune.


Regarding why the work that closed the first half, Vivaldi’s (4) Sonata for Violin and Continuo, RV 12, is numbered amongst what are called The ‘Manchester’ Sonatas, Adrian was quick to say that Vivaldi never came to England, but that the third largest collection in the world has ended up in that city, in the Henry Watson Library (for reasons that his notes and he went into…).

It opened tenderly, with a Preludio – Largo, but became spiky and quasi-military, before seeming to resemble the counter-tenor aria ‘Erbarme dich’ from Bach’s St Matthew Passion***** (BWV 244). Next, the Corrente – Allegro, full of energy from the off, with accents and a rising scale. Later, a falling figure and highly fluid solo writing in this movement left one feeling full of excitable emotion.

The following Giga – Allgero repeated and developed its initial phrase, progressing a bit as an eight-bar blues might. Yet what was most noticeable, other than Vivaldi’s typical employment of a driving violin style, was his use of ornament and emphasis. Throughout the movement, Gareth and Adrian were in visual interplay to give and receive cues, a noticeable feature of the close ensemble of La Serenissima (as well as seeing pleasure shared on Gareth’s face in reaction to some turn, or phrasing).

To close, the Gavotta – Presto was firmly in il prete rosso’s rhythmic style, and seemed to revisit the theme from the first movement. Not beyond being crafty with our expectations, and after laying a false trail as to where he was going, Vivaldi used the note that he had set up to springboard a coda in conclusion of the piece.


Audience reception and interval

Music this good (score and playing) is infectious ! One need not just have judged the effect of this performance by the applause, for the CD stall – with Adrian taking almost no break before signing – was very busy, and with an impressive range of titles (at least one per year since the group started).

Adrian was heard to say about a very good relationship with Avie Records, and that, in almost all cases, La Serenissima itself owns rights to the recordings, and can thus keep them in circulation (i.e. it could prevent titles being deleted).

Some time soonish, a companion posting will attempt to complete a write-up of the second half without being so novelistic...


End-notes

* Through elision, a URL that looks for all the world, on a quick glance, as though it is for some dubious suppository that involves lasers ?!

** Unless one has been there, it is hard to describe how glorious it is.

*** From, of course, a set of twelve concerti in all, Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (The Contest Between Harmony and Invention), Op. 8 – of which, Concerto No. 7 in D Minor, RV 242, is known as Per Pisendel.

**** From the Internet, it seems that Boyce was not alone in setting this material, for we have one Signior Lorenzo Bocchi’s composition, ‘The Tune after an Italian Manner’.

***** Asked in the interval, Adrian could not place Ebarme dich (which one dared not try to hum / whistle), but said that it must be coincidence, on the basis that he understands that Bach did not know the Vivaldi piece.




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

Thursday 23 October 2014

Virunga (2014) Q&A with director Orlando von Einsiedel (@virungamovie)

Virunga (2014) Q&A with director Orlando von Einsiedel

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


22 October (updated 24 October, and link added to @virungamovie's Facebook Q&A)

* Inevitably, contains 'spoilers' (if you can have them with a documentary...) *

Virunga (2014) Q&A with director Orlando von Einsiedel


An account of when Virunga (2014) came to The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) for a Q&A with its director Orlando von Einsiedel, hosted by your very own Agent Apsley (@THEAGENTAPSLEY), on Sunday 12 October 2014




Prologue

To get a better idea of the appearance of the film (than, otherwise, on a simple 15.6” laptop screen), the Marketing Manager of The Arts Picturehouse (APH / @CamPicturehouse) cudgelled his 50” Internet-connected t.v. into displaying it (via that private Vimeo link) so that The Agent and he could watch in preparation.

Then, for various reasons (not worth going into), the copy of Virunga (2014) that needed to be screened had to come by the agency of Orlando von Einsiedel, its director, when he arrived on Sunday afternoon… Yet, thanks to the skill and dedication of APH’s wizard / chief projectionist, Joe Delaney, this impediment in no way stopped the film looking stunning in Screen 3 (at Festival Central) in a very short time !




As will be seen, there had been some build-up on Splatter, which may have helped account for a very pleasing turn-out at APH, not least for a Sunday matinee.


Introductory matter

After a convoluted greeting, involving how the audience had forsaken the outside to come inside to see more of the outside, we started with a mention of other recent films to consider, also either set in or relating to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and three of which had screened at Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) :

* Blood in the Mobile (2010)

* War Witch (2012) (it won the audience award in 2012 for best feature film)

* Black Africa, White Marble (2012) (which was the winner of the audience award in 2013 for best documentary)

* Sixteen (2013) (seen at Bath Film Festival* (since when, pleasingly, more than 100 page-views))


There was, just as importantly, an exhortation – since, as was stressed, we were watching a film in a cinema – to look at it for its cinematic qualities, and to ask questions on those first (before turning to substance or content). In other words, aspects such as feel, look, editing / cutting, camerawork, music ahead of what Virunga is about…

If for no better reason than that many a documentary’s Q&A can be prone to rush away with discussing whether what the film ‘presents to us’ is right or wrong**, rather than considering how it conveys its messages – as a product in the often highly constructed medium of film. (One recent example (at APH) was that for Return to Homs (2013), which skatingly considered this question in the host’s initial enquiries, but scarcely went near it again [whereas The Agent, for one, thought it a highly relevant one].)


Getting back to that Tweet about Hollywood now, the way in which the film builds on – and has the appearance of – a film drama had partly been where the injunction to look at the elements of its construction started. As a friend, who had been at the screening, later said :

I thought it was helpful getting people to think about ‘form’ before watching, as the content was so emotive.
[£10 to him for saying that !]


In fact, that motive had not been consciously identified as a reason for approaching the Q&A in this way, but – as it is usually part of film-making to set out ‘to say something’ – it had certainly been inherent : a matter of not getting carried away with the What before considering the How – and the Why.


Opening business

Over the closing titles, the song ‘We Will Not Go’ (music and lyrics by J. Ralph) is reprised, which is excellently performed by Salif Keita, Youssou Ndour and Fally Ipupa (along with, according to IMDb, J. Ralph ?) :

The opening question – directed to the audience, not to Orlando (but with his agreement, as the song had only recently been recorded) – was whether they had liked it, and they indicated that they had. (As to the other films, when this was next checked, only a couple of people had seen them in each case.)

Orlando was then keenly welcomed back to the front, and began by outlining how he had come to make the film (his first of feature length), essentially summed up in this quotation (taken from IMDb, and whose latter part was quoted later in the Q&A) :

The thrust of the project was to try to tell the story of the rebirth of the eastern Congo because there'd been a period of stability for a few years, and I came across the story of the park's brave rangers. And I thought their story was a sort of metaphor for the wider rebirth of the region. Within a few weeks this new civil war started, and I found out about the oil discovery. So I ended up making a very different film.


As Orlando came on to tell us, he had been aware of those films from Congo (which had come to Cambridge at Film Festival time), and had wanted to be able to say something different about the country and its situation. Yet, as he went on to say, just as the process of making / editing a film changes what it is or could be (please see next paragraph), so had events since they had arrived on the ground in 2012.


Form

As to style, Orlando was asked first about ‘the history of suppression and exploitation’ (a description with which he had agreed), which is succinctly summarized in footage and facts that are presented near the start of Virunga***. We learnt that the summary had not always been part of the film, but that it had been found essential, because, without it, people later proved not to be following what was going on.

The tick-over of that summary, with its teleprinter-style captions / titles, seems to set the pace and feel for the film, so Orlando was asked whether that aspect of how it looked had always been part of the conception of how it would appear, or only arrived at in editing. (Before the Q&A, it had been established that it was quite consciously a form of presentation that one might see, say, in the Bourne films.)




Orlando explained that there had been a desire to maintain interest, so that people would be engaged to watch, and that a drama editor [Masahiro Hirakubo] had especially been brought in to work on this aspect (although Orlando did not specify at what stage, or at exactly whose behest).

He agreed with the proposition that what we feel is rooted in what we see through four people – the two rangers of Virunga National Park (André [Bauma] and Rodrigue [Mugaruka]), its chief warden (Emmanuel de Merode), and the foreign journalist (Mélanie [Gouby]), who had already been on the ground for eighteen months – and that the crew had taken time to acclimatize to the developing situation, both with the British-registered oil company SOCO and the rebels of M23.

The Agent’s comment was that the interviews and other footage with the four principals seemed to have been shot in a plain, unforced way. Orlando also remarked on the remarkable work and person of André, acting as parent to the orphaned gorillas cared for at the centre at Rumangabo, and how André’s character had endeared him to those who met him through the film at screenings [such as at Tribeca Film Festival, as pictured at IMDb].

A woman in the audience commented that she liked the music (scored by Patrick Jonsson) – asked if she could characterize it, she said that it suited the film. Then, no one (least of all Orlando) understood The Agent’s remark that there was a smudged quality to some of the music, which thereby failed to convey this [unvoiced] message : there is a sound used in the mix that makes the texture seem to be stretched / distorted**** (almost as if the natural world, and what it means, is being erased)…

Orlando, though, spared everyone's awkwardness by proceeding to talk briefly about other qualities in Jonsson's score, for example the fact that he had used a large variety of musical instruments, some of them indigenous to this part of Africa.


Content

Regarding the statements by SOCO included at the end, and the film’s closing slides about SOCO’s continuing activities, Orlando said that the public declaration made about SOCO’s intentions had been put in context by a leaked e-mail (to which he referred), which suggested that making the declaration had been out of expediency. (However, he did not quote from the e-mail directly, or have its text to hand.)

One questioner wanted to know why some of Mélanie’s covert filming had been re-created, to which Orlando replied that buttonhole cameras are very hard to direct and that it is not uncommon to end up with footage of tablecloth, which they had decided was best substituted, in this case, in the interest of not detracting from the accompanying audio. As he had already indicated before the Q&A started, he stated that they had provided equipment to Rodrigue and Mélanie to further the procurement of evidence that both Emmanuel and his team and she already desired to obtain.

Another questioner asked whether Emmanuel de Merode is, as claimed in the film by opponents of the interests of the park (and so of Emmanuel), a member of the Belgian royal family, to which Orlando answered that he is (in some minor way), but that he had been brought in because he was external to the existing situation in Congo.

Perhaps in the same way, The Agent suggested (in relation to Tony Benn : Will and Testament (2014)), Benn’s hereditary peerage had been used against him politically to question his qualification for speaking for the working classes. (In the film’s covert recording, we had seen a bribe given to Rodrigue, heard cynicism about whether the staff of the park could really care for the animals (rather than just holding out for a better offer before withdrawing protection of Virunga), and a racist attribution of a kind of blood-lust to the Congolese people.)


A number of people who attended clearly knew of the situation (or even Virunga National Park itself in one case), and some of them, and others, commented on it or the power of Virunga. The Agent referenced Anthony Baxter’s film A Dangerous Game (2014) (his follow-up to You’ve been Trumped (2011)), where Donald Trump is permitted to have a golf-course built on the Aberdeenshire coast (in the constituency of Alex Salmond MP), despite the fact that the dunes where it is situated constitute part of a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) :

Orlando expressed hope that the fact that Virunga is a World Heritage Site, and that the desired mining and drilling activities are unlawful under Congolese law, can be brought to bear, along with gathering attention through the film (please see below).


Closing matter

At the very close, Orlando gave several means by which people could support Virunga National Park (@gorillacd), including spreading news of their reaction to the film on social media, giving financially to the park (through the web-site), not divesting from portfolios with interests in oil companies, but putting pressure on SOCO through them, and by signing up for updates through the web-site at www.virungamovie.com.

Since the film is being distributed via Netflix from 7 November, one can only assume that it does not have links with the oil or mining business that it would compromise. It is to be noted that Leonardo DiCaprio is also on board with the film, listed as one of its (executive ?) producers.

Many who had not asked questions came to speak to Orlando in the short time before his taxi back to Cambridge station.


To any whose questions (and Orlando’s responses) have not been recollected here, many apologies – hosting a Q&A makes one have eyes to the time, where the next question will come from, and everything about the moment, and can militate against taking in too much, beyond in outline, of what is actually being said. But Tweet @THEAGENTAPSLEY, and that can be remedied by editing in the material !

Orlando has also been interviewed by scene creek

STOP PRESS : Now see the Facebook Q&A here
NB no responsibility of any kind is taken for the views expressed in, or content of, the wholly external web-page to which this is a link



End-notes

* A film that was made with the resources and other support of the film-school in Bath, and which concerns a former child-soldier (played by Roger Nsengiyumva), adopted and living in the UK (with Rachael Stirling’s character).

** Or, which are separate (if often connected) questions, whether the film-maker has rightly or wrongly represented ‘the facts’ and / or rightly or wrongly employed these very tools of the medium, e.g. colouring one’s impression of footage that was shot without audio by the use of music and / or sound-design…

*** Some aspects of the historical summary are disputed by a user on IMDb in a review there headed Beautiful and brave film spoilt by historical inaccuracies. Orlando had answered, when asked, that it had not been easy to decide, in terms of facts and footage, what to include.

**** An effect, in fact, used by composer Ant Neely in the score to Sloane U'Ren's and his Festival film Dimensions (2011).


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