Wednesday 22 July 2015

An environmental thread at #CamFF 2014 : Energized and (incomplete) Last Call

An environmental thread at Cambridge Film Festival : Energized (2014) and Last Call (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 July

An environmental thread at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 : Energized (2014) and (incomplete) Last Call (2013)

There is synergy (no pun intended !) between Last Call (2013) and Energized (2014), which is why they should be being reviewed together. (That said, a clash of programme at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF)* meant that only the last part of Energized could be seen – and the review of Last Call has been ‘forever’ finishing itself, so it will continue to linger, and we hope that it may follow…)



The latter seems more focused, because its sections, although in some ways discrete, bleed into each other – in a short space of time, we get a good sense of the energy-independency of Murnau, in Austria, with examples, facts and statistics concisely given, and then move on (via narration and then a caption) to a related topic. This is the style of the film, which means that it can cover much ground by linking segments in this way.

Who benefits from large-scale solar arrays, the possible merits of a super-grid for power distribution, and the competing claims about power loss when conveying electricity over vast distances were all presented – quite apart from France’s near-total reliance on nuclear as a source of energy, and the concerns about the integrity of how its nuclear waste is kept (nothing to do with the risk of terrorists gaining access, but the relatively poorly understood systems of storage that were apparently used in the early years (as mentioned in the review of Containment (2015) at Sheffield Doc/Fest (@sheffdocfest)), but which no one, except the campaigner shown (who installed them), seems to want to acknowledge and revisit) – the film is a compendium of issues that affect the choices that nations make for the future of Earth’s resources.



Yet one simple example hits home very hard, that of a farmer growing sunflowers on one-tenth of his farmland. He told us that harvesting crops (one assumes that he meant the whole process of planting seeds, spraying, harvesting, tilling and levelling) uses 23% of the world’s consumption of fuel. However, he has converted his machinery to be powered by the sunflower oil that he produces (and in a way that satisfied his wife that he was not ruining the machinery) : the oil not only provides fuel for his farm, but gives him the means to plant and harvest future sunflowers.




By contrast, Last Call (2013) takes a longer view, because its ambit is from when the study The Limits to Growth was published (in 1972 – we see footage of the hopeful launch), how it came to be written, and what has happened since. It suffers – not inevitably – on this account, because, at times, its focus seems to be on where its authors were twenty years on, a subtle shift from how the study itself is being viewed at that remove (although, for those still alive and campaigning, there is common ground).

With the fortieth anniversary, it becomes even less clear whether we are following the authors’ fortunes or that of their work, some of whom, such as Dennis Meadows, are still addressing conferences, whereas others, such as his ex-wife Donella, set up an environmental community (and had died before the anniversary)… The narration also suffers from the fact that the voice used seems to have a patronizing tone to it, which tends to make one feel that one is not being given credit for what one already knew :

 For example, Geography lessons at school (shortly after the report had appeared) had treated things such as the impending population explosion as understood – even if, when it comes to governments, they generally have not, of course, had the resolve to do very much to address it, despite the related problems of increased consumption of limited resources…

 What one did not appreciate, until now, was the existence of The Club of Rome (as instigated by the invitation of Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King), which had a significant role in the publication of The Limits to Growth, because it sponsored the visit to MIT and commissioned the report. Likewise, one does not recall footage of Jimmy Carter addressing the American nation about the challenges that it faced, and also putting solar-panels on The White House :

That with which one is more familiar is the attitude that ignored or disdained the possibility that mankind might be having any effect on the environment, typified by further footage, this time of Ronald Reagan, dismissing any idea of limits to growth as unthinkable – as if growth were a God-given right, even an undeniable virtue, and so anyone talking of limiting it were calling for a curb on the American spirit itself, if not pronouncing anathema.

 One takes from the film the idealism of the writers of the report, imagining that their views would be influential for good, and their not expecting a vigorous and very hostile reaction against them, which in the press – as a file of newspaper clippings show – rarely, if ever, engaged with the real issues, or represented the writers’ arguments for what they were.

 The report had been a scholarly plea, based on the best modelling available of the world’s interrelated and potentially ungovernable infrastructure (i.e. if left until out of control), to consider what growth upon growth would yield for the Earth’s future : just as Carter embraced the possibility of changing path to ensure mankind’s survival, so – because politically motivated – Regan’s administration ridiculed it.

 Probably (though other advocates are not much mentioned) they ridiculed Isaac Asimov, a scientist as well as a science-fiction writer. Green-house gases, and the effects that they may have had on the environments of other planets in the solar system, may have been fine for extraterrestrial science, but it was only in the little knee-jerk ban of CFCs (carbon fluorocarbons), when a hole was found in the ozone layer, that we have seen any obvious response to a consideration of Earth’s atmosphere.

 For Dennis Meadows, even if the point may have been passed when the foot could have been taken off the throttle with regard to the effect on Earth, he keeps on campaigning and fighting for this cause. [...]


End-notes

* Watching Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) (1930), with interpretative commentary from Neil Brand and Jeff Davenport, meant that one was elsewhere at Energized's start-time of 5.00 p.m.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday 21 July 2015

People Watch People Watching : New work from Streetwise Opera

This is a review of the premiere of Streetwise Opera’s People Watch

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 July

This is a review of the premiere of Streetwise Opera*’s People Watch, which opened Tête à Tête / The Opera Festival at The Place Theatre, King’s Cross, on Tuesday 21 July 2015 at 7.00 p.m.




The mise-en-scène was we, looking at them, looking at us. Beneath a banner that was to be lit differently for a different theme (and most clearly visible in the image that is embedded in the Tweet at the foot of the review), we had The Ligeti Quartet (@LigetiQuartet), dressed as black cats** and on a dais, with sideboard and dresser, and the various performers – as when we entered – of Streetwise Opera (@StreetwiseOpera), ranged on sundry items of furniture across the stage before us.


Streetwise Opera’s voices and those of The Ligeti Quartet in an integrated ensemble

Photograph by, and by kind courtesy of, Claire Shovelton


Near the opening of Stef Conner’s (@StefConner's) score, we heard strokes in the cello against voices, which gave way to laughing, and for which cellist Val Welbanks provided an ostinato. Right at the start, director Timothy Burke had brought up the sound of the voices, which were talking quite naturally, but there was now a deliberately forced Hee-hee quality to the laughter as it developed, accompanied by hypnotic, circular writing.

After a short pause, a huge laugh (almost alarmingly so, and no longer seeking to be in rhythm with the quartet ?), overwhelmed us, and we became aware that singer Susannah Austin (@SusannahAustin), who had already been noticeable for being dressed in a silken dressing-gown, had stood. With an unfussy, clear voice, she performed against string-writing that seemed vestigial – in sounds, the instruments began to pick up the character of her words, and of their cadences. She brought us the words Quiet, and Silent, and whoever she may have represented, there was a Slavonic feel to the instrumental sound :

Susannah Austin, who has risen from within the ensemble to sing

Photograph by, and by kind courtesy of, Claire Shovelton


As Austin sang We keep our peace, the quartet sounded set apart from the tenor of her voice, as a separate strand. She continued, rendering Our reaction is gentle, with an initial threefold repetition of ‘gentle’. As she continued to sing the word, we heard a sound as of keening, and, led by Richard Jones on viola, the quartet built up volume until the chorus joined in, their voices restful in the ensemble. Gentle, Austin urged – when the tone became one of yearning, she reflected it, and sat down.

Interjection after the fact :
One is now reminded of the delightful moment of corporate calm, at the end of the filmed sequence in The Answer to Everything (#ATEOpera), where Elizabeth Watts (@LizWattsSoprano) has charmed troubled breasts with a lovely arrangement of Handel’s beautiful lascia ch’io pianga – what, after all, Streetwise is all about bringing to people and their lives* ?


Familiar as The Chairman of the Board in #ATEOpera, Rob Gildon, as Gary, heralded a section that parodied t.v. advertisements, with Squirt The Dirt, which closed with a brief rodeo style of transitional theme, and a squeaky tremolo on viola. It was at this stage that we came to appreciate that this was not just one huge living-room, in some sort of group home, but that the central armchairs and sofas were a resource that allowed the cast to move around, and for other faces to come in and out of prominence and form new configurations. A tense, pulsing feel accompanied the realization that Children in Need was on the imaginary screen : Not that again ! came the reaction to the BBC’s big charity campaign.



The post-modern response to seeing natural history on t.v. :
booking a trip on one’s phone to go to see it ?

Photograph by, and by kind courtesy of, Claire Shovelton


The rodeo section recurred, and we were brought to confront the different attitudes about that dog – ‘Look at him go !’ – from Britain’s Got Talent, before positions switched back, with a tremolo from viola. From ridiculous admiration for the canine to the sublimity of exclaiming It’s so beautiful, and a hypnotic quality to the quartet-writing, with the viola appearing against short repetitive passages in the background – it was as if material were in the act of emerging, as we listened.

Dressed for night, like some goddess of sleep, Susannah Austin stands again, and moves to those whom, now that there are spots on them, we notice (also dressed in white) in a group stage left (though there are individuals stage right [one is visible in the first image (above)], whom she later visits, with comfort). The chorus gives a wordless hum : the instruments have a ‘summery’ feel to them, but there are discords in the writing for first violin. Also, a sense as of keening, and with tremolos being played sul ponticello. Lyrical writing for violin is joined by cello, but with a ‘squeaky’ tremolo on viola, and then the quartet gives us bowed harmonic effects, up and down the fingerboard, as Austin sings, again, her soft encouragement.


Fellow singers in white from amongst the Streetwise Opera performers
Photograph by, and by kind courtesy of, Claire Shovelton


A riff is interjected by speech, then repeated, and the tone becomes ironic, and squeaky. The rodeo theme ushers all the voices in, and Austin sits again, before another switch over on stage, the quartet punctuating the vocal exchanges.

The musical mood has gone to melodrama, and, again different reactions to what is seen : It’s just so wrong !, objected one of three women in black, but no one will ultimately turn it off. The chorus sang Beautiful, but with tired undertones, which undercut the word***. The quartet tentatively, through cello and violin, stated material, before a short pizzicato section for the three women, and the re-emergence, after the rodeo phrase, of Gary with Squeaky Shine (which apparently had a testimonial for polishing pets ?).

All stood, to solemn playing, to which a ‘scratchy’ tremolo was added, and we noticed a red coloration to the banner, behind everyone, and with its six silhouetted heads. Not for the first time, a ‘sinking’ sensation, as there was a sliding move down the fingerboard. We heard the words Permanently confined to his home, but with ‘sour’ undertones, and the discord fed into the instrumental writing, as the gold stars on the banner became clearer.

We pick out where the quartet is attempting to establish a theme, as Austin sings Quiet, and the others reply Silent, her words initially on three notes (the first syllable split over a pair), and theirs, si – lent, on a falling interval. It is a meditation, with a Sepphardic sound to it, and it turns into a paean, with a recursive sense of ensemble :

What we see, and as we listen, sung with full force, as the banner’s stars show brightly – What we make of what we take in, with Austin singing Quiet into the midst of the emotions expressed.

To questioning tones from the quartet, lighting comes on full, and we hear the chorus singing open chords. The three more mobile members of the quartet stand, and silently hold their instruments, as if turned back into china cats. Almost in a round, the choir’s voice and Austin’s mesmerically follow each other, again and again.






When Timothy Burke brings the piece to a close, it is to much and buoyant acclamation, with several standing in the audience. Stef Conner and director / lyricist Bill Bankes-Jones (@billbj) were enthusiastically fêted, and it was all that the ushers could do, as everyone was being clapped off the stage, to try to encourage the audience to leave and make way for the next event in a busy opening night for Tête à Tête...





After-thought :




Though, as composer, the final word should go to Stef Conner :



Stef Conner (pictured with wordsmith, etc., Bill Bankes-Jones)

In its early days, opera entertained the masses and then somewhere along the line people started associating it with classical literature, etiquette, fine dining and posh gloves



End-notes

* Streetwise Opera (@StreetwiseOpera) is an award-winning charity that uses music to help people who have experienced homelessness make positive changes in their lives. It runs weekly and termly music programmes in homeless centres and arts venues across England and Wales, and stages critically acclaimed opera productions.

** Fortunately, one checked with lead violinist Mandhira de Saram (still so dressed – and with what proved to have been vivid rims to her eyes, which had made placing her gaze as she played disconcerting), otherwise that would have read black mice : the concept was apparently that china cats come to life from time to time to comment.

*** Sometimes, as within depression (though that really seems like the wrong word for some people’s experience, which is more like suppression ?), we can know that something is glorious – our family or friends, or the natural world – and that we should take joy in it, but we do not, and we cannot :

It is as if the body’s responses are suppressed (to protect it, and us, from engaging with a world beyond us ?). The knowledge, in one’s head, that something is wonderful or in which one should take pleasure (the nagging words of our own, and others’, criticism in the deepest of depression), does not connect with the feelings of the heart (itself under attack at knowing that it does not do as it ‘should’). We sense our confusion and our woundedness (yet even that only partly, not in full aliveness)...



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday 15 July 2015

Containment - the vessel and the djinn

This is a Festival review of Containment (2015)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 July (account of the Q&A added, 16 July)

This is a Festival review of Containment (2015), which screened at Sheffield Documentary Festival on Sunday 7 June at 12.15 p.m., followed by a Q&A with directors Robb Moss and Peter Galison

This review – started on 7 June – has been a long time coming : not for want of what to say, but how to organize it (it failed, in every way, to write itself)




One could not fail to be struck, at the beginning of the film, by the graphics that directors Robb Moss and Peter Galison had commissioned for Containment (2015), which were based on the outcome of a US government project [the ‘far future’ consultation group], to engage viewers with another era, and with [fears about] what mankind’s knowledge-base* might be in AD 12,000 : as the film unfolded, it is ironic that it had been conceived that, at that remove, people might stumble across the thitherto undisturbed site of WIPP, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad (New Mexico), and – of course, because one simply would – just start digging through the surface there, not knowing what lay below.



Therefore, the consultation group had been tasked with establishing means to warn those people, ten millennia distant, not to do so – and why. The strongest emotional conception, built on the notion that somewhere that felt physically very unsettling would deter them from wanting to be (or stay) there, is used in the poster for Containment (as above). And yet talking about the project – perhaps quite unnecessarily ? – took up [what felt like] quite a bit of space in a running-time of 81 minutes (?)*

The reason is that there is a significant issue of balance with having included that topic [much as one knows, e.g. from the participation, in the film's Doc/Fest Q&A, of the script consultant of Match Me ! – How to Find Love in Modern Times (2014), that some films need several strands ‘to work’] : containment, in the sense of rendering (and keeping safe) nuclear materials, even in its own terms (please see below), is such an unexplored (or poorly explored) area that to consider imagining that one had succeeded (both during and after the process of nuclear fission – which is another widening of the film’s scope), and succeeded so well that 3,500 generations later maybe people knew too little about what had been done not to be at risk of harming themselves, seemed a leap**. Even more, an arbitrary one (regarding the remit of the project), since ten thousand years is not even what we are told is one half-life for Plutonium-239 (Pu-239), one of twenty radioactive isotopes of Plutonium*** (link to the Wikipedia® web-page).




In this connection, it has to be a fault of Containment (but an easily rectifiable one, by adding on-screen text, or a voice-over, at the first reference) that it does not take a moment to say what ‘a half-life’ is (i.e. the time in which, through radioactive decay, one ends up with a mass of the substance half that with which one started : that radioactive isotope will constitute 50% of the mass of the material, whatever isotope(s) of that (or another) element [radioactive or not] it may have broken down into) : as suggested by the words quoted in the Tweet above, to have assumed that all those watching the film will already know and understand the jargon takes away its power to present this topic widely and coherently, when the safety of keeping nuclear material is of obvious relevance to us all.

Actually, as mentioned, the treatment in this film of what might be meant by the theme of ‘containment’ is itself wide. (It is also arguably at least as conventional to use it in the context of nuclear fusion (rather than fission, the process that a nuclear reactor is engineered to induce), denoting how to contain [or the problem of containing] the matter to be combined at phenomenally high temperatures.) That said, we do not even know, from sequences that deal with WIPP, how much Pu-244*** it was trying to store, or how, because that isotope will necessarily be around for a very long time to pose a threat (yet, from the way that we see the waste physically handled (please see below), one would not know it).



Instinctively, though, one always thought that it was highly presumptuous to imagine that, far into the future, one would get to that position (please see below). (Not least in the light of the qualms about the storage for waste in France (a country that has made itself wholly dependent on nuclear power) that are expressed in Energized (2014) [to a highly overdue account of which that now links…] by the person responsible for its design : as one recalls, his concerns came to affect his health (which, in our world, served to undermine his credibility), but he came to regret what he saw as the faults in the methodology whose implementation he had overseen.) For picturing the far future assumed (a) the lack of any site-specific mishaps, let alone (b) the survival of members of the human race who might mistakenly intrude. (Watching Last Call (2013), the companion film (for review purposes) to Energized, does not exactly leave one hopeful on (b)’s account…).




A little impressionistically, the film takes WIPP as just one of several foci for the purposes of looking at containment, including a secret US government site on the Savannah River, and the Fukushima nuclear plant, in Japan, and the landscape around it that remains contaminated – albeit not, seemingly, contaminated enough for a woman not to visit the nearby town, and the family restaurant there where she had last had lunch, or a man to go back to his former home most days ? (In the Q&A (in which Robb Moss and Peter Galison both took part : more on the Q&A below), the last, rather pointed question – seemingly put by someone with expertise in these matters – observed, having asked after figures for measurement of contamination in the area, that the film had simply not quantified the levels of radiation that surround Fukushima, or even made a comparison with Background Radiation (link to a definition from Wikipedia®)).

At other points in the film, we had had to wonder (as the film left us doing so) why a man was handling a turtle from the Savannah River whose shell he had said was contaminated with radioactive Caesium – so he seemed to be saying, as Robb Moss had to agree, in conversation afterwards, it did sound [although Moss went on to interpret the turtle as having previously been contaminated (or that others like it had been ?)]. Or why thin rubber gloves sufficed to protect employees at WIPP from the vessels, containing nuclear waste for storage, with which they were working. In themselves, in the orthodoxy of scientific understanding, there might have been reasons why this is [thought] adequate protection / safe, but the film did not explain, and thereby (as it wants to tell us itself) hangs quite a tail about what anyone really does know of these matters :

* Containment gives time, just before showing us the turtles, to show us a minister of religion on a vessel on the Savannah River, commenting on the proximity of the site to where people from his church live (although he takes it that they are deemed not to be in enough numbers for them, or any risk to their health, to be a consideration ?), and how the warning notices about fishing relate not to privacy, but to radioactivity in the fish

* What happened at Fukushima, the result of a tsunami consequent upon an earthquake, had revealed the flaws in its design, in that the pools that contained the spent fuel-rods from the reactor had been deprived of supplies of coolant, and so the danger that was posed was as much from them overheating as from the reactor(s) doing so – though, as was commented in the Q&A, it appeared that the set-up would not have survived the smaller size of quake that it had been intended to withstand ?

* Towards the end of the film, we hear how there has been an explosion at WIPP (in 2014 ?), which is not only attributed to human error in the design of the vessels constructed to hold waste (in making them, the word ‘organic’ had been misinterpreted for ‘inorganic’ (or vice versa ?), which led to using constituents that, combined, gave rise to a chemical reaction : the simple mistakes that threaten great consequences), but also proves that the underlying assertions about how geological layers, between which the storage is taking place, and which are supposed to work to guarantee its integrity, are simply wrong – since radiation did, after all, escape to the surface


The last that we hear is that operations at WIPP have been suspended – as is usual in life, or politics, it takes a mistake to displace [over]confidence such as that of The Mayor of Carlsbad, and the claims of the geologists, which would otherwise be accorded credence : all that thinking about how to alert people to the existence of a secure facility that has been discovered not to be secure…

In essence, the film contains a lot of material, as well as reminding one vividly of the situation of Meryl Streep, Cher, and Kurt Russell in Silkwood (1983) : one does have to ask oneself how far we have really come since then, or, indeed, how close is the world of that film, still, in terms of our competence, of what we really understand about dealing both with nuclear waste – and what our experiments with nuclear fission have done with Earth (and left us with*) ?


Detail that emerged in the Q&A (and later…)

In the Q&A, it was put to Moss and Galison – when asking about the ‘far future’ project – that they had given space to this aspect, but had also, by contrast, not chosen (or chosen not ?) to pre-date the circumstances of Fukushima by referencing what had (or could have) happened at Chernobyl (or Three Mile Island) : with little explanation of what this actually meant, Containment just told us that there had been ‘three meltdowns’ at Fukushima (another tacit assumption of knowledge on the part of the viewer ?), albeit it suggested that the situation had very nearly been much worse (yet without saying in what way, or how).

Although it seems to turn out that the scenario first envisaged by Ralph Lapp in 1971 (and retained by the world of film in The China Syndrome (1979)) is more of a fictional one, and that, if this popular description is therefore used (in the nuclear field), it denotes a lesser catastrophe, one asked, for example, how close to that syndrome events at Fukushima had been (and the rest of the Wikipedia® article goes into detail about such nuclear meltdowns, which, in their answer, the directors did not).

They said, but without a complete explanation for not doing so, that they had considered talking about other sites, such as Chernobyl (and may have said that they had been there), but that they wanted to look at linguistic and sociological aspects of the subject, by making part of the tone of the film to imagine the future, too – to suggest a measure of distance on what was being shown. As well as having an artist realise some of the designs, they achieved this aim with and through stylization (e.g. we see an animated sequence both of naive discovery, and of deploying an earth-boring machine that is distinctly reminiscent of The Mole from Thunderbirds).




In the event, the question that was mentioned above (about contamination at Fukushima, compared with that at Chernobyl), elicited nothing from them in terms of units (or doses), but generalizations : although the mountain area was further away, it had higher levels than a flatter one that was nearer, because of the direction of the wind, which had changed twice at the time.

In the bar afterwards, some viewers were heard (who must clearly have approved of the film), critiquing the questioner for having challenged the film-makers (presumably because of the enquiry about Background Radiation) – as if in the same breath as those who had (once) advocated dumping nuclear waste in the oceans (which he was not remotely proposing)… ?

Before that, in the space just outside the screen, there was a lot of chat going on with Messrs Galison and Moss, which is where that query about the turtle was made (please see above). As to the handling of containers at waste at WIPP, Moss made the puzzling assertion (which then had to be checked – please see below) that one can hold a piece of Plutonium with no ill-effect, because the danger is inhaling its dust into one’s lungs. One’s knowledge of radiation, though one could not grope for the word isotope (in the depths of one’s memory), suggested that a substance, almost by definition, had to emit, at the very least, alpha-particles to be radioactive : as one recollects, one did blurt this out to Moss, to which he countered, by saying that a piece of paper will stop them.

As, by now, the lateness of the hour had made one abandon plans for what to watch next and (after making notes, and coffee, in the bar) head for a drink****, the word ‘Becquerel’ came stumbling into one’s mind (a standard measure of radiation). Over a pint, one was soon checking – on the Internet (when the source of information about isotopes (above) was found) – what had been claimed about Plutonium (apparently, according to Wikipedia®, first made by bombarding U238 with deuterons) :

The web-page confirms that Plutonium 238 (Pu-238, with a half-life of 88 years) emits alpha-particles, and talks about the significance of the spontaneous fission of Pu-240 in connection with terms such as ‘weapons grade’ Plutonium. Thus, ’Supergrade plutonium’, with less than 4% of plutonium-240, is used in U.S. Navy weapons stored in proximity to ship and submarine crews, due to its lower radioactivity.

Somehow those statements about safely holding a piece of the element begged the question what sort of Plutonium one was talking about…






Seen at Sheffield : Doc/Fest films with full reviews


End-notes

* And, having said that, some of its ideas had saved – as if it has an inherent, rather than a given, meaning – the symbol on a yellow ground with a round core, and a triangle of pulses that, almost sonically, emanate from it (pictured below, in one of several versions). If we have, in these postulated far-off generations (and we saw endless scenarios that had been envisaged), forgotten about nuclear waste, why, then, will that symbol signify ? (Surely, a fantasy that we will be nuclear free, with the States and others so keen on their arsenals ?)



** As an abiding problem, only briefly touched upon as [the idea of] the safety and integrity of WIPP was talked up by Carlsbad’s Mayor (as well as addressed, in general terms, by Allison MacFarlane – who chaired the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2012 to 2014, and who seemed to have more questions than answers).

*** Plutonium-239 (Pu-239), with a half-life of 24,110 years, may have to be seen as a major headache that the twentieth century has caused, but others are far more persistent : the half-life of Plutonium-242 is more than 15 times longer (373,300 years), and that of Plutonium-244 a staggering 80.8 million years.

**** For those interested, The Sheffield Tap (@SheffieldTap) was a good discovery at Doc/Fest :






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday 14 July 2015

Thaxted Festival, from several years ago : Charles Owen demolishes Schumann, but builds with Bach

A much-delayed review of a recital given by Charles Owen at Thaxted Festival

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 July

Much delayed (through having hidden itself in a sub-folder), a review
(now impressionistically completed) of a recital given by Charles Owen at
Thaxted Festival on Saturday 30 June 2012

By which title one means that Carnaval, Op. 9, when played, coheres, but this performance had the opposite effect.

One cannot claim, of course, to be able to play the work, with its demands, but would one wish to, if it sounded as measured, as ‘balanced’ as this ? :

One had taken more pleasure from hearing the close of the work played, by chance, on Radio 3 an earlier day, and longed to play a CD of Martha Argerich to counteract this impression of performing the work, but without actually seeming to play it.

It was not that what Charles Owen did was four-square as such, but that, in each movement, every phrase or gesture balanced every other one out, feeling as if it were leaving nothing. Also, in terms of a feeling of a whole, nothing linked each movement, and it was only when we got to the Davidsbund, in that there then has to be a leading-up to something, that using restraint seemed to come off – but too late.


So there were reservations about how The Goldberg Variations, following the interval, would fare : there was the promise that, led by feeling, it was likely that most of the repeats would be played, but would one stay, and be there for seventy minutes or so, regretting it ?

No, for this was a recital of two halves, and, as night atmospherically fell in Thaxted Church, and one could see less and less, and focus less and less on seeing Owen in a pool of light (there with Bach, in his score, and the page-turner), one experienced the greatness of this work, its inevitable, but always surprising, unfolding – leading back, as we know that it will when we get to Variations 30 / 31, to the simplicity of the Aria.

We had been told that what to notice were the three variations in the minor, and the performance did really work around them. Unlike with Charles Owen’s Schumann, where one felt that we had heard – and he had brought out of it – nothing but the notes, the essence of the Bach had been present to us here, and one lingered in the darkness, satisfied, before daring to applaud as the impression of the quiet close Aria died away.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Le marteau avec maître : A Q&A with Alix Delaporte

An account of a Q&A with Alix Delaporte for her Le dernier coup de marteau (2014)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 July

A little account of a Q&A with director Alix Delaporte for her
Le dernier coup de marteau (The Last Hammer Blow) (2014), as screened at
The Arts Picturehouse on Monday 13 July at 6.00 p.m.




When one thought of it, the story about Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, and the two (or three) hammer-blows, is oft told (one was in the screening without a grasp of the title – but it proved not essential to watching the film, and one almost respects the art world for the fact that Untitled is an abiding description) : to Alix Delaporte, who did not know this work (or the composer), this story had attracted her to make a film around the work. That said, she said about Samuel Rovinski that she first needed to give the father a job / profession, so why not that of a conductor ?

Actually, we do experience Grégory Gadebois (as Samuel), seen from within the orchestra as he sits on his stool, quite well* : it is our way into who he is, as against the convincingly big, bluff, blunt man who strides around The Opera Berlioz as if he is Stourley Kracklite (from Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect (1987), played by Brian Dennehy), denying his paternity. (Just in that respect, as the generous rehearsal time that the film affords (against the time to make a recording in the 1990s) is hardly realistic for nowadays, the film reminds of our relating to Stéphane (Daniel Auteuil) through his music in Un Cœur en Hiver (1992).)



It is at that level of connection that we have an understanding of who people are : as is clear, and as Delaporte confirmed in the Q&A, she leaves these things open so that, in a way, we construct our own film (or our own understanding, at any rate, of what happened, and why, and what it means). So we do not have explained to us, as another type of film-maker might (so that it is established and fixed in our mind, as a given to work / build on as a necessity of plot-driven cinema), things such as :

* Who Miguel is and what his relation is to Victor

* What (other than geographical proximity) brought Nadia** to have a relationship with Samuel (as we gather, she is not a fellow musician)

* Likewise, what (except, patently, shortage of resources) caused her to move to this place three years or so ago to bring up her family (one is reminded of the location of Bombay Beach (2011))

* What happens, except by implication, between Victor and his father when they are off screen


We heard from Delaporte how pasty-faced young Parisian actors who auditioned for the part of Victor did not suit her conception of someone who lives where he does, and how Romain Paul’s affability made her love and want to put him on screen (confirmed by his warmth on set). She was asked about his resolution and determination (in relation to how he is filmed), and she characterized him herself as a serious boy who does not seek typical teenage rebellion against his mother (parents, now that he comes to meet his father).

In relation to the specific question about using a shallow depth of field, both (but not only) when Victor enters the auditorium, and has the orchestra behind him, and in the closing moment***, and when that had come into the conception of how the film would look, Delaporte told us that she does not work on a film in such a way : that it had not been planned beforehand at that level, or structured or themed (not her exact words) as to the choice of shots – hence, as here Tweeted :





End-notes

* If, though, we also know about music, we know that the players whom we see are miming (and not producing what we hear), and the orchestral sound does not quite match what we would expect, e.g. from where Victor is in the auditorium.

** Clotilde Hesme, who plays Nadia, reminds a lot of Kristin Scott Thomas, when younger, and how she might play such a role.

*** When Victor is on the top of the building, with his mother, and he is sharply foregrounded against Montpellier (which someone in the audience thought was deliberately referencing Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) (1959), but which Delaporte said had not been in her mind / her intention).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday 13 July 2015

Blackmail and Brand at Saffron Hall

This is a review of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) with full orchestra at Saffron Hall

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 July

* Contains spoilers *

This is a review of a special screening, at Saffron Hall, of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), with a score by Neil Brand, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the conductorship of Timothy Brock




From the opening blasts on the brass in the overture to Blackmail (1929), composer Neil Brand (@NeilKBrand) establishes a contrast between a martial, accented tone, where Morse code is not out of place, and a softer one, complete with, in the ranks (no pun intended !) of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (@BBCSO), a celeste. As conductor Timothy Brock and he were to agree in the Q&A*, Saffron Hall’s (@SaffronHallSW’s) acoustic response is incredibly live, which made for a thrilling evening of silent cinema, adeptly accompanied by at least a hundred players.






Moving from a quickly rotating wheel to a police-van, crammed with listening / transmitting gear and personnel, so a tone of grandeur was established, and it was communicated – in scenes that led to an arrest where violent resistance was attempted – the impression that this was a film, too, of high energy and high anxiety, with ‘swirly’, kaleidoscopic string-effects that felt as if they were in tribute to Bernard Herrmann and his score for Vertigo (1958) (also, of course, Hitchcock).




Here, as for Underground (1928), an appropriate appreciation of pace is the hallmark of Brand’s writing, and, even in the quieter moment of the identity parade, he marks the presence of time in the moment by a chime, and soon after engages us with a jazzy feeling that he gives to muted trumpets (as well as nodding towards the signature-tune of Alfred Hitchcock Presents for the usual Hitch cameo).



The boldness of Hitchcock’s direction, and his love of symbolism, is all over this film, with plonking a waitress smack in the middle of Frank and Alice, after they have fought it out with another couple to get seated at the same table (momentarily, we have – till a better opportunity seems to present itself – one member of each couple facing the other in a stand-off) :


We ‘hear’ their words through the inter-titles, of which there is here a plethora, but he teasingly deprives us of their faces, and so their expressions (although, from the note that we see Alice take from her handbag, we know that she is not playing Frank straight**). Hitchcock, when Alice has given Frank the slip, also has the big shadows of ‘The Artist’ and of the man whom we come to know as Tracy all over where Alice is waiting for the former outside where he lives : there, after she has ascended through more shadow (with staircases cut away so that we can see their upwards progress), she then comes to be haunted by his laughing image of a jester.

Even before we get to his atelier, which madly – in keeping with having painted a jester – has the look of a mediaeval castle, those shadows, and Brand’s score, have told us that no good will come of a girl accepting an invitation to a Bluebeard’s dwelling of a place like this… Alice, who is willing to conform to the idea of a girl who just wants to have fun, just cannot resist exploring, and (with her host’s help, happy to be that close) creating an androgynous painted monster. Maybe, too, that little dress, so conveniently left out, is not meant ‘to be resisted’ ? – already, when she has toyed with getting into it, the commanding words Put it on have uneasy undertones in the orchestral writing, reminding us that this may not be the best fashion choice ever.

When, with what is perhaps spontaneous, but no longer a borderline playful removal of Alice’s own clothing***, the pair end up tussling, it is a struggle of shadows that we see – and, of course, we are catapulted forward twenty-five years to imagery of Grace Kelly, resisting attack from Robert Cummings, in Dial M for Murder (1954) (although the hand that emerges is with the knife – in 3D (yes, it was so made), it seems to come out of the screen).




Afterwards, strings and an eerie kind of playing [for those who had not seen, we were told in the Q&A that it was not a theremin, but the effect of bowing a vibraphone on full****], give the immediate psychological significance – although, by contrast, Hitch and Brand make Alice seem very purposive when dressing, covering her tracks, and leaving.

However, the shadows are there, and Alice now seems to descend a toy staircase (as if she is beginning to disassociate – as, later on, in Marnie (1964), which Brand acknowledged was in his mind now). Soon, then, we hear and are shown, in how she hesitates to cross the road, and in the daggers that she hallucinates in the neon of Piccadilly Circus (against which, not for the last time, she seems so small), her purpose is much less so, as she drifts all night…

At this stage in the proceedings, and by kind courtesy of Neil Brand himself, a link to his piece in BFI's (@BFI's) Sight & Sound (@SightSoundmag) :




With the police at the scene of the crime, once the alarm has been called, the military-type theme returns, in a heavy guise. Then Frank arrives, and is directed to have a look around : when he recognizes first Alice’s glove, and then that the dead man is The Artist, the moment is pure theatre, but we do not linger with him, as there is dramatic irony in Alice’s mother saying, via the inter-title when she has brought in a cup of tea, that anyone would think that Alice had not been to bed. And then, just as soon, Alice is left alone to get out from under the covers, in her clothes and even shoes, and with her thoughts. As she repairs her overnight damage in the mirror, a little touch of the sound of Vertigo, and we somehow know that life is never going to be the same :


* At the breakfast table, when asked to cut the bread, the combination of hand, shadow, and knife brings it all back

* Behind the counter, and against the towering shelves, Alice White, newsagent’s daughter, looks small again

* We have a spectral, soft-focus Alice, but we also have Frank, showing her the glove, and (ironically) saying This is the only clue that you were there

* When Tracy comes onto the premises, Hitchcock steps back with the camera, and we have space for deliberation, with these figures just standing there – in the Q&A, Brand told us that, scoring this, he was challenged, and just had to strip back and think of the sub-text

* Tracy reaching towards Frank’s pocket, somehow knowing that the glove is in there – and then he shows us that he has its pair


Vertigo seem to be with us again : when asked in the Q&A, Brand said that he only quoted the themes for Hitchcock Presents and, when the patrolling bobby knows nothing of what is happening high above, that of Dixon of Dock Green. However, he said that the chordal structure of the main theme from Vertigo, with its elevenths and thirteenths, is capable of being both major and minor, and Brand was glad to learn that a Bernard Herrmann sound had been heard through the use of this structure, with which he meant to evoke film noir, but without directly quoting the theme*****.

At the heart of the plot, the nub of the problem faced by Frank and Alice is in the awkward breakfast and its aftermath, with Frank at the back, on the step, and Tracy sniffing the cigar that he forced Frank to buy him. Elsewhere, though, Mrs Humphries is calling at Scotland Yard, with the note that Tracy had left for her lodger. With his score, which Brand was keen to stress to us that Timothy Brock had orchestrated and developed, we hear how paced it is, and how it is in and out of themes as emotions rise and fall.

So, when a search is under way, looking for Tracy through a montage of mugshot books and wanted bills, the martial quality in the music is there in louder form, but, very soon after, we have jazzy notes accompanied by strings : talking about Hollywood orchestras later, Brand said that that string players were always classically trained, but those on trumpets or saxes were jazzers, who were able to deliver with an immediate, full sound.


When the photo of Tracy is found, we are given harp glissandi, and then, on xylophone, dashes and dots of Morse. In Frank’s perception, Tracy becomes, as he calls him, a suspicious looking man with a criminal record, and, with a big sax swagger, he leans cockily on the mantelpiece – domesticity itself, and the assertion that a man, once fingerprinted, is assumed to lose credibility. In large form, a reference to that Vertigo sound again, before we end up with ‘brassy’ negotiation, and then, with ‘pregnant’ strings – Tracy trying to persuade himself as much as Frank that he has reason to be believed over and above Alice and him (my word against hers).

But his nerve does not hold, when other police arrive, and the whirl / swirl of the orchestra must reflect as much his state of mind as Alice’s confusion, having tried to tell Frank that she does not want him to do this and that she has something to say, but being silenced. Out through the window Tracy goes, and we revert to the opening image of the van-wheel in motion, as he flees, but keeps encountering police officers, to whom, rightly or wrongly, he thinks that his status must be known:


So it is that, after he has paused for a drink, we see him as the pursuers do, as a speck against the hugeness of the façade of The British Museum, between whose monumental columns he passed, and which towered above him. Inside, massive Egyptian heads also stress his insignificance, and his likely fate being in larger hands, and – when he descends a chain – there is another huge head behind him, with Brand giving us heavy brass, and throaty trombones. A momentary glance into the Reading Room, and then – terribly small again – Tracy is on the breast-like dome, and, next, has plunged through the glass, back into the famous space below.


As at the opening, when Alice is waiting for Frank (and berating him for keeping her waiting), we are at Scotland Yard. There is an open, gracious theme as she asks to speak to the inspector, and is told that she needs to fill in a form. In terms of instrumentation, we are down to her small voice, and, when she is shown in, we find that Frank is there : again, he is wishing to head her off in the light of Tracy being implicated. Just when she is about to speak, news of what happened to Tracy obliges the inspector to leave her in Frank’s charge.

As they leave the room, we can see her torment in her tortured hand on her bag, and then, now that she tells him, and when Frank finally realizes what did happen, he drops her hand (with nothing offering a way back).




At this dramatic conclusion, the applause was enthusiastic.

Brand was welcomed to the stage, where he warmly embraced Brock, and where the orchestra and both men took several curtain-calls : the film had been honoured by this playing, and this score, and this first venture by Saffrons Hall and Screen had been very well received.


But do not take one's word for it, as there is verification by Tweet here, with even a link to another review :






End-notes

* Which was hosted by Saffron Screen’s (@Saffronscreen’s) Rebecca del Tufo (@BeccadT), since this successful community cinema, also based with Saffron Hall at The County High School, was its projection partner for the evening.


Neil Brand, Timothy Brock, and Rebecca del Tufo at the Q&A (left to right)


** Seeing, further on, the portrait of Frank as a constable in Alice’s room suggests that they have been going steady for a while (he has now risen through the ranks), as does the dutifulness with which, when prompted, he gave her a peck on the cheek when she has waited for him after work. Is having him as a beau more to satisfy her parents’ needs than hers ? (My Russian friend, pragmatically, had no sympathy for Alice for putting herself in harm’s way with The Artist (and being no better than she should be), but that is just she…)

*** Contrast with the mucking around, even with a stranger, in Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) (1930), which Brand (and Jeff Davenport) played for us at Cambridge Film Festival 2014…

**** One heard / seen recently when, in chamber configuration, Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) performed Joey Roukens’ new work Lost in a surreal trip (2015) (where these ears, at least, detected North by Northwest (1959)).

***** And, on the use of the theme itself in The Artist (2011), Brock and he said that they gathered that the theme had been used as a place-holder, which, when those composing for the film did not satisfy the director with anything else, simply came to be used at that point in the film : Brand agreed that the direct use of the theme not only is a musical strength that is not ‘earnt’ by the film, but also that it inaptly connects us straight to the pair of Kim Novak and James Stewart.




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