Women's Lib

Something reminded me the other day about the Women's Liberation Movement (I think it was a newspaper article about how today's young women are indifferent to feminism, finding it irrelevant). Looking back I see it as something that was a fashion, something you did, because everyone else did. I know that I was very enthusiastic , buying The Female Eunuch and marvelling at it. I also read Kate Millett and some others whose names I can't quite remember at the moment, though I'm sure I'd recognise them if someone reminded me. Oh, I know - Jill Tweedie in the Guardian and of course pioneers like Mary Stott.

Anyway, I started to trawl my memory - I went along to weekly meetings of the local Women's Lib group with a couple of friends, one of which was a New Zealander, Heather, who arrived on our doorstep at the squat in Oxford that myself and my boyfriend had just moved into. She'd been looking for somewhere to live and someone had told her. She was, at the time, a radical feminist, dressed glamorously in an ankle-length ex-Nazi leather coat she'd picked up in an Amsterdam flea-market. She was as thin as a rake and stood on our doorstep, smoking a roll-up. 'Hi - I'm Heather', were her first words, in the broadest Kiwi accent. I'd never met anyone like her before. and her direct, down-to-earth Antipodean good sense soon sorted our flaccid hippy haven.
She introduced me to the burgeoning feminist movement and, along with a few others, went along with Heather to the early meeitings of the local Women's Liberation group. It was in a small church hall type of place and we all sat round in a circle and talked, and sometimes shouted. Our boyfriends would come along with us and sit in the garden of a nearby pub waiting for us, with an air of amused tolerance. Anyway, I don't remember much of what we discussed, except one occasion when someone brought along a film of miners' wives, and the support systems they'd created to help their husbands and their communities during the recent miners' strike (this was around 1973-4, so we were right in the middle of the ill-fated Heath government). This film caused a right storm - I think the woman who'd brought it along had intended to show us that working-class women were as capable of organisation as us middle-class types, but someone got up and angrily asked the group why we sitting watching stuff about a load of housewives, who, of course, were slaves to servility. There was a huge row about the direction feminism should go in - anywa, it was all pretty unedifying, and as someone, probably the only person in the room apart from Heather, also from a humble background, who had some personal experience of working-class life. I don't remember any other meetings, and we soon lost interest in going, though not before we'd participated in an event that still brings me out in a cold sweat every time I think about it.
The group had heard that the students at St Catherine's College, Oxford had hired a stripper to 'perform' in their Junior Common Room (JCR), so it was decided that we'd infiltrate the event and disrupt it. Although the college was all-male in those days, the students had been allowed to bring women to this event so it was pretty easy to get in and sit there unnoticed. What transpired was truly scary - the stripper got going and this was the cue for us to stand up and start shouting things like 'this degrades women' and chanting. There were quite a few of us, but the room was crowded and there were a hell of a lot of students. They went ballistic and chased us out - I don't know what happened because I fled into the nearest ladies' loo and cowered until the mayhem died down and I could slink out unnoticed. The noise was terrific and what was most scary was the bile and viciousness that emanated from the thwarted crowd. I suppose they'd worked themselves up into a state of high sexual anticipation and excitement, and we'd thwarted them. Anyway, I was terrified, not only of the students, but of being found out by my braver colleagues and labelled a coward, which of course I was. The whole episode told me that political activism was not for me and I went on to have babies and acquire the status of the dreaded housewife.
I wonder what happened to everyone there? I know that one of the group went on to marry a vicar and become a well-known writer, and Heather went on to forge a great career at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation after many ups and downs, becoming an Australian in the process. She's stayed a good friend and we've kept in close touch, but I sometimes think about all those other young feminists and wonder where they are....

Woollies

The news of the demise of Woolworths brought back many memories for me. I haven't set foot in Woollies for years so it was hardly part of my emotional landscape, but it provided me with my earliest work experience, so I have some long-ago, fond memories of the place.
I was 14, and in those days you could work legally for 2 hours a dayso I did Friday evenings. It was a small branch in a typical 60s shopping precinct and opened until 7pm on Fridays only in those far-off days before extended opening. Even that was considered pretty revolutionary.
The staff consisted of a handful of embittered regulars and the rest were schoolgirls. We had few customers, and our most frequent visitors were a gang of Rockers (we're talking about the mid-60s, so there were still Mods and Rockers, in the days before there were hippies) who would loaf around, shoplift and drop off stink bombs.
My memories are pretty fragmentary, but I seem to have spent most of my time there working on the biscuit counter, where we had those old-fashioned tins ranged in front of us, and we'd sell them loose. And of course there were the famous tins of broken biscuits. It seems unimaginable now, but people used to buy them! Why can't we be as frugal nowadays? I suppose we may have to be in the coming months as the credit crunch starts to bite, but Woollies will be long gone.
After we'd finished work, we used to go over to Lewis Separates which stayed open a bit later, and spend all our wages on clothes. We were Mods, of course, or tried to be - anyway, clothes, and music (increasingly) were all we thought about (boys weren't quite so important). Looking good, and knowing the latest dance steps were what was really important. I do remember vividly the exhilarating feeling of having my own money after years of a few coins pocket money and the unconfined joy of spending it on whatever I wanted - bliss! I felt I had the world at my feet.
So, while I can't feel much emotion at Woollies demise, I have fond memories, and I'm sure I'm not the only one as not many places were willing to employ girls as young as us. I know my brother found it much easier to work, and he seemed to have loads of jobs.
Anyway, once I was 15 I graduated to working all day Saturday, but that didn't last long. I got a much-coveted job usheretting at the Oxford Playhouse, but that's another story.....

stationary

I was thinking about stationary the other day as I was writing my diary. My diary's a beautifully designed moleskin-bound thing from Paperchase, with an elastic bookmark. It's heavy, luxurious, and perfectly-formed. I'm about to start on my second one - though I've been writing a diary for a few years using other designs, I finally discovered these lovely objects in the Paperchase concession in Borders.

It got me thinking, and reminiscing about stationary. Now, I'm one of those people who love stationary, who have a bit of a fetish about it. I know that it's a syndrome as I remember reading an article about stationary-addiction, so I know I'm not alone. In fact there was an article in The Times the other day about a love, no, need for lovely leather-bound diaries in today's era of email and text.
Anyway, stationary-addiction can be defined, if such a thing can be defined, as a love of paper, pens, diaries, and all ancillary items. Computer stuff does not count. But where does this love of everything to do with writing come from?

I can only speak for myself, but I can trace it right back to childhood. I would go into town with my parents, and rather than drag me round Sainsbury's or the Co-Op, they would leave me in a wonderful emporium which I don't think had changed since the Edwardian era, called something like Oxford Educational Bookshop. At least I think it was called that but I may be wrong, but it was something like that. It was a two-story emporium - dark and overflowing with stationary stuff. The ground floor was relatively uninteresting, full of rubbers and pencils, but upstairs was where the action was. Or rather, inaction. It was usually empty of people, apart from me and the occasional browser, but it was full of piles of paper, exercise books - stationary. I would wander its aisles, such as they were, fingering the stuff, looking at it, stroking it, reading it, and, I guess, fetishizing it. I would spend hours there. And I could. No-one ever challenged or questioned my right to be there, in fact I don't remember the presence of any staff.
The funny thing is, when my daughter left school at 18, and decided that she wanted to work for a year to save up enough money to go to Australia for a year, she ended up working in - guess what? A stationary shop! And it was a wonderfully old-fashioned place that hadn't changed in decades. Not quite the Edwardian emporium of my memory but a 1970s-type of place with absolutely no 80s ambience at all. Anyway she spent a very happy year there, and still returns every now and again to see the staff. And it still hasn't changed. Though whether it'll survive the economic storm that's coming remains to be seen.
Anyway, one thing I've found in adulthood is that I'm definitely not alone - in fact I imagine that it may become more prevalent as stationary becomes a bit of an endangered species. Nothing can possibly replace the joy of pen on paper, especially moleskin-bound paper. And of course, the pen has to be a green Pentel rollerball pen with black ink. I've just discovered the WH Smith website so have been able to buy a big job lot of them. It's one of my biggest secret terrors that they'll be discontinued. Along with black notebooks!

Of Time and the City

I went to see Of Time and the City recently, directed and narrated by Terence Davies. It's his paen to the Liverpool of his childhood, and was received with great acclaim at Cannes in the summer.
I went with a group of friends, one of whom was someone who'd grown up in Liverpool at around the same time, the post-WWII period. He was deeply moved by the film, appreciating Davies's grasp of Liverpool, not as a geographical entity, but as a place of imagination and feeling. I feel very much the same about Oxford - the place where you grew up becomes part of your DNA, a place that you feel rather than see. I visited Oxford a couple of years ago - the first time for quite a while. I'd left at the age of 32, after spending virtually my whole life there, and had only returned a few times, but walking round the streets of the city, it was as if I knew every paving stone, every brick in the wall. Even though much in the city has changed beyond recognition, everything is still there, not just in my memory, but in my unconscious, in every fibre of my being.

So I recognised where Davies was coming from, and so did my friend. On Mark Kermode's film review slot on Radio 5, he talked about the torrent of mail he'd received after he'd praised the film to the skies the other week. Many people had gone to see it after hearing his recommendation, but had ended up bored, or hating it. Though there were some who'd loved it. Davies's voice was a problem for some, and it's not a normal one - like other Liverpudlians he had elocution lessons (Beryl Bainbridge is another) as the L'pool accent was seen as a massive handicap before the Beatles came along and made it fashionable. So his voice is fruity and posh, with an acerbic, but yearning tone which encapsulated the act of memory, of return, of looking back, perfectly
The film is a collection of found footage woven together to form a tapestry of Liverpool then and now. And that's basically it, though I cannot overemphasise that it's actually much, much more. I will certainly buy the DVD when it's released as I think it will be a film that I'll return to over and over again. Thank you, Terence

Dylan again

I watched my videos of the BBC's collection of programmes they screened a few years ago the other day (I think they're from about 2005). I watched them when they were first shown, and I taped them all as I knew I'd want to see them again. The first was Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home which one of my sons has on DVD and I'd borrowed it from him a few months ago. but I couldn't resist seeing it yet again for the third time.

Here is an artist at the height of his powers, but who's clearly realised that everything's beginning to get out of control. I was struck this time by how acutely intelligent and perceptive Dylan is during this period (early-mid-60s). It's as if he has a kind of X-Ray vision and sees stuff no-one else can. He's a sponge, and soaks up everything that's going on around him. No Direction Home is interspersed with snippets of recent interviews with him and he's at great pains to tell us, as he has done throughout his life that he has no interest in politics or attitudes, or opinions. This was horribly at odds with 60s attitudes, and got him into much hot water as he repeatedly came up against people who wanted him to be their spokesman and a mouthpiece.
Dave van Ronk says in No Direction that he somehow tapped into the collective unconscious of the early 60s and could see that there was a fundamental sea-change going on (as evidenced by his famous 'something is happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?'). He was a cultural magpie, and his endlessly fertile brain soaked up everything around him like a sponge. This, together with his fascinatiopn with words, and their power, enabled him to produce epics like Hard Rain in which vast spaces and distances open up - giving us new visions with a myhtic, epic quality that have never been surpassed.
Tambourine Man was a kind of catalyst (it certainly was for me). Its wild, poetry took off into the stratosphere, taking us young folks who were ready and waiting with it, giving us a feeling that there wasn't anything that we weren't capable of. His quicksilver mind always outwitted the clumsy preconceptions of his interviewers, who were left trailing in his wake of his fierce intelligence.
There's wonderful footage of his performance at Newport in 1965 with the Paul Butterfield Band. The coruscating guitar of Mike Bloomfield begins Maggie's Farm, and in a way, it's even more cataclysmic than his later stuff with the Band. Boos and jeers ring out, and people who were there queue up to try and distance themselves from the hatred and rancour that greeted him. Few are prepared to admit now how much they loathed it all.
I remember clearly hearing Like a Rolling Stone for the first time and feel privileged to have been able to do so. It was on Radio Luxembourg, with its dodgy reception and Horace Batchelor
ads. What a time that was! To me, it remains his greatest period - Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde. His motorcycle accident happened soon after, but he was still able to produce the magisterial John Wesley Harding. Then something happened - and out came the dismal Nashville Skyline and although I dutifully bought it, Dylan was never the same for me.
I've just started reading Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic, about the Basement Tapes, so perhaps that'll shed some light. I'll post more when I've finished.
Anyway, No Direction is a wonderful picture of an artist at the height of his powers and Dylan has atremendous chronicler of his life in Scorsese. More please!

The Leopard

I watched this film twice (my latest DVD rental) - I'd always wanted to see it but had never managed it so finally caught up with it. I'd long had a fascination with Italian cinema ever since I did an Open University course in post-war French and Italian society which had a substantial component on Italian neo-realist film.
Visconti was an especially interesting character - a Marxist, homosexual aristocrat who made one of the earliest neo-realist films, Ossessione. We were sent a video with various film clips as part of the study pack and there were several clips from Ossessione, but I soon obtained it on video, and even went to see it at the cinema a few years ago. I can't remember why it was on, but there was a one-off screening at the Watershed one Sunday afternoon, so I couldn't possibly miss that. It had become one of my favourite films - gritty, in black-and-white, it depicted the underside of Italian society for the first time ever. It was made during Mussolini's regime - I don't know how Visconti managed it, but it was an act of great courage. He went on to make La Terra Trema a seminal film in the neo-realist canon, but post-war, his career path followed a highly individual trajectory.
The Leopard was released in 1963 and by then Visconti was making large-scale epics about Italian history, notably Rocco and his Brothers in 1960, which I remember my father going to see on his own. It was about a family of boxers (my father was a huge boxing fan) and of course it had subtitles. Dad's hearing had been damaged in the war, so the subtitles made a huge difference. He didn't go to the cinema much, so this must have been pretty special for him, though I have no idea what he made of the film.
Senso, which was set in the mid-19th century, dealt with the Italian aristocracy, a subject of which Visconti had a feeling for, and knowledge of which was unsurpassed. I haven't seen Senso, so it'll go straight on to my rental list. Later he made The Damned which was about the German upper classes' complicity with Nazism, and starred Dirk Bogarde. I did see that a long time ago, but my appetite has been whetted so that'll go on the list as well.

The Leopard was graced by Burt Lancaster in the leading role as Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, the head of a decaying Sicilian family, buffeted by Garibaldi's revolution. I written about Lancaster before, and although he's dubbed here, his presence illuminates the film from begininng to end. Dubbing is perfectly normal in Italian cinema, even Italian dialogue is often dubbed for Italians, so it doesn't really seem out of place. It does enable actors such as Lancaster, Bogarde, and Alain Delon, another Visconti favourite who features here, to feature quite comfortably in Italian films. Anyway, Lancaster's performance is masterly. His character knows and accepts that he and his class are doomed to pass away, and the final scene, in which Salina leaves the grandiose ball alone, on foot, leaving everyone else to drive off in ther carriages, and slowly wanders the darkened streets, stopping and quitely genuflecting as a religious procession passes by, manages to be deeply moving. I can't possibly explain why - Lancaster's in long shot, the camera's withdrawing and letting the action unfold - but after nearly 3 hours in his company, both he and Visconti have managed to make us care about him.
It's full of glorious set pieces, the centrepiece the ballroom scene at the end which is a full 40 minutes. I suppose many would consider it goes on for far too long, but it lets us in to the heart and soul of Sicilian society - magnificent.
I must mention the music. Visconti uses music a great deal, in fact his films are operatic. It's yearning and emotional, and pretty old-fashioned. I loved it - it's elegaic, emotional and full of longing and sadness. It's by Nino Rota, who was responsible for the music for The Godfather. I can imagine it wouldn't be to everyone's taste, but it's a perfect marriage of sound and vision.
Italian cinema nosedived in the 1970s but appears to be on the brink of a resurgence - ;et's hope so, the Italians have a rich cinematic tradition. Meanwhile I'll revisit some of its greatest hits.

Brideshead Revisited

I saw the new film of this book last week; it wasn't at the top of my 'to-see' list, but my daughter wanted to go, so, as we knew nobody else in our mostly male family wouldn't want to go, off we went to the local multiplex.
We thought we were going to be the only people in the audience (we were, once before, when we saw the Hamlet set in a present-day New York loft apartment, starring Ethan Hawke. It was quite good actually, but a rather weird experience, watching Hamlet in a deserted multiplex auditorium). But 2 more people turned up, so the 4 of us settled down, rattling around in a huge cinema.

Brideshead is something I feel very attached to; I read the book back in the 1970s, so I was very much the age my daughter is now when I first encountered it. I read it several times, luxuriating in Waugh's perfect prose and inimitable storytelling. I went on to read most of Waugh's other novels, and then his diaries and letters. His l;ife was fascinating - although far removed from my own world, I was seduced, and still am, by the whole Waugh milieu.
Anyway, along came the ITV serial in about 1981, starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews, which of course became a benchmark for so-called 'heritage' drama serials. In the days when there were only 3 channels, it became compulsive viewing for millions, and the nation was riveted. I remember looking forward with high excitement to the final episode, which was screened just before Christmas. The nation was frozen under a blanket of snow and ice; the Solidarity protests were underway in Poland, and people over there were starving; the Tory spending cuts were taking hold and the country was still only beginning to recover from the late 70s recession, yet we were all held in thrall to this elegy for British country house aristocratic life before WWII.
Jeremy Irons essentially read the book as a voiceover, and his elegaic, understated style set the tone for the whole dramatisation. John Mortimer wrote the script and I can't see any deviation from Waugh. Mortimer is a socialist atheist, about as far removed from Waugh as is possible, yet he captured the spirit of the book perfectly. The casting was perfect - I've said this before, but it's one of my bugbears, so I'll say it again - they could all speak Waugh's dialogue, and, try as they might, none of the actors in the new film could. Emme Thompson as Lady Marchmain did her best, but even she couldn't manage it. Claire Bloom played her in the TV series, and portrayed her icy elegance perfectly. Thompson was good, but somehow too robust, and coul;dn't quite manage to excise the estuary from her voice. Patrick Malahide as Charles's father did better, as did Michael Gambon as Lord Marchmain, but when you know they were following in the footsteps of John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier then even these fine actors are going to seem somewhat diminished. Gielgud caught Mr Ryder's unworldly yet lethal self-absorption so perfectly, it's hard to imagine it being done any better.
I must also mention Phoebe Nicholls as Cordelia. She captured her heartfelt goodness perfectly. She only made the most perfunctory appearance in the new film - a merely token presence only, but in the book, and the TV series, she's central. She's a living embodiment of how Catholic lfe should be lived, and example to all the other characters, and she could have been insufferable, but Nicholls made her enchanting. I suppose the filmmakers either couldn't find anyone who could play the part convincingly, or they just couldn't be bothered with her, seeing her as just a priggish goody-goody.

Anyway, what was good about the new film was Ben Whishaw as Sebastian. I love Whishaw as an actor, and I think he's something very special. He had some bad reviews and I couldn't find anyone who was prepared to say a good word about his performance. But I though he captured Sebastian's damaged fragility perfectly. Anthony Andrews was of course superb, and managed to convey Sebastian's self-knowledge and deliberate self-destruction beautifully, but he was physically wrong - too tall and too robust. He towered over Irons which somehow seemed wrong, while Whishaw seemed as is he might break at any moment, which is how I always imagined Sebastian.
Mortimer, in spite of his atheism, never shied away from the religion, which is central to the book. Waugh says in the preface that it's the subject, but the film pushed it aside as a kind of annoying extra that they had to somehow fit in, but wasn't really interested. Mortimer was interested, and in the book Charles comes to recognise the operation of grace - something which the film ignores. Film Charles remains a doubter, which is wrong. Which makes Julia's refusal to continue their relationship meaningless. And that's another thing - Julia. Diana Quick in the TV series was perfect, brittle, but vulnerable. Again Hayley Atwell did her best but was too solid. You just couldn't imagine her giving up Charles for God.

So, a missed opportunity perhaps, but I don't think the book is filmable nowadays on any level. You have to be able to call on people who are prepared to take Waugh seriously, and I don't think any one is these days. Oh well....I suppose we'll never see another good Waugh adaptaion, though there are plenty out there already. Kristin Scott Thomas in A Handful of Dust - another actress who can speak properly And does anyone remember the marvellous Sword of Honour BBC serial in the 1960s, with Edward Woodward? A creditable version was done a few years ago with Daniel Craig which I remember as being rather good, but, in the end, the books are so good that they spring to life in one's head.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy's book has been dramatised before, notably by Roman Polanski nearly 30 years ago. I saw it at the time, but I need to revisit it -Nastassia Kinski was Tess and that's about all I can remember.
I first read the book as a young teenager; I'd never heard of Hardy until I read an article in the teen magazine Petticoat when I was about 12 or 13. Petticoat was a new publication which sought to capture the burgeoning early-60s ethos and attempted to be different from longer-established mags such as Jackie. It contained the usual cartoon-strips and articles on fashion, makeup and relationships, but it also touched on cultural topics, and its earliest issues had celebrities talking about their favourite books. Jean Shrimpton, the Kate Moss of the 60s, talked about Tess of the D'Urbervilles and what it meant to her, and I was captivated. Something I've never forgotted was her description of the passage where the dairymaids cross a stream on their way to church dressed in their best clothes. Shrimpton talked about the skirts of their white muslin dresses flying up and butterflies being trapped in them, and what a miraculous image that was. I was captivated and resolved to read Hardy as soon as I could.
Of course I wasn't aware that the 60s saw a renaissance of interest in Hardy's novels. He'd fallen out of favour since his death, but his books had begun to appear on the 'O' and 'A' Level syllabuses. We did The Woodlanders for 'O'Level and The Return of the Native for 'A' Level, and we all loved them, but Tess, and Jude the Obscure were not surprisingly kept off the syllabus. Of course these two, both emotional rollercoasters are strong meat, and were my favourites. Tess is the perfect book for romantically-inclined adolescents, but I think it really must have beed a sixties thing, as ny children, when asked to read Hardy at school, were unmoved. I don't know it was because they were boys, but I have a feeling that Hardy's books caught the temperature of the times, and the 80s were less sympathetic to his work.

Anyway, the TV series. This production was a typical 2000s BBC costume drama; high production values, great care lavished on sets and costunes, a lush musical score and easy-on-the-eye actors. This can have mixed results - for example, Gemma Arterton as Tess looked perfect, very much as I'd always imagined Tess; tall, beautiful and with a slightly other-worldly appearance, a bit apart from everyone else, with a faraway look in her eyes. The actor who played Angel though, was wrong, wrong, wrong. He looked far too young, and had a petulant look on his face, as if he was always about to stick his lower lip out. He was also too small. I'd always seen Angel as a big man; fair-haired, yes and a chilly character, but he was a man of weight and substance. This version was a callow adolescent. But maybe it's my vision that's wrong.
Anyway I enjoyed the first 3 episodes, but the final one dragged, and although I dutifully watched it through to the end, I'd lost interest long before. Tess's fate left me unmoved, and I'm not sure why. I suppose I just didn't believe a word of it. The thing with Hardy is that you do believe it when you're reading it, however preposterous the story.

Anyway, time to have another look at the Polanski, I think.

Theme Time Radio Hour

For quite a while now I've tuned in to Radio 2 at 11.00pm every Thursday night for Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. As I've said before, Dylan's part of my life and I grew up with his music, so it's a huge and unexpected treat to hear his voice talking to me every week.
One would never have imagined in the 60s that he'd end up as a DJ, especially one playing old stuff from the 30s, 40s and 50s, though actually it's clear that he's a musical scholar of enormous erudition. He often talks at some length, reciting poetry or excerpts from Shakespeare. His language is like his songs, and his book, Chronicles is the same, freewheeling, sometimes random, but highly literate. I gloried in it and look forward to any further volumes, if there are any, with great anticipation.
Sometimes he takes off, and there's more Dylan talking than music which is fine by me. He doesn't actually talk, but speak - there's a big difference. I could never have imagined that he would go down this road, and of course he still makes music. I haven't heard any of his recent stuff, and some of it is, by all accounts, excellent. I've always deliberately steered clear of everything post-John Wesley Harding, but I'm thinking that I might have to think again. I did hear Most of the Time by accident recently and loved it.
Anyway, he clearly loves being a DJ and he's uncovered some remarkable, obscure old stuff. I love listening to him and 11.00pm on Thursdays has become a highlight of my week.

Times and Winds

I loved this film, and after immersing myself in Turkey while reading Snow, I found it fascinating on many levels, but it's the sense of ferment, of tension between a deeply traditional society and the forces of modernisation, which co-exist and sometimes collide with each other.
It's a hard film to describe - it's basically a portrait of the lives of a group of teenagers in an isolated, rural part of Turkey.In spite of the way of life that governs them, something that's been embedded for centuries, there's television, telephones and education. The female schoolteacher doesn't wear a headscarf, unlike the mothers of the children she teaches. She's a force for modernity, as is the television which is always present in the children's often harsh and sppartan home surroundings. One of the boys she teaches has a crush on her, and it's clear she must seem like a goddess to her pupils, whose mothers and sisters labour under the yoke of tradition.
There are scenes of great beauty in this film, helped by Arvo Part's music. I know it isn't to everyone's taste, and it was pretty pervasive, and loud, but it gave the film a seriousness and grandeur which it deserved. A small masterpiece.

The Duchess

I went to see this with my daughter - we knew that no-one else in our male-orientated family would want to see it, but we both enjoy costume dramas, and we enjoyed it very much. It's funny how they've acquired such a bad reputation, but those who like them love them.
It had received some bad reviews in the usual predictable quarters - Peter Bradshaw, I mean you, though he wasn't the only one, practically every reviewer sneered at it. But my hero, Mark Kermode on FiveLive, came to the rescue. He's usually highly critical of costume films, and has savaged Keira Knightley (who played the eponymous duchess) in the past, but he approved of the film, so that in itself intrigued me.

I knew a bit about Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire as I'd read the biography by Amanda Foreman on which the film was based. It's an excellent book, and the Gainsborough portrait of her on the cover shows a character who looks as if she has a wicked sense of humour - she's not conventionally pretty, but she's intelligent-looking and feisty and it's easy to see how Foreman, as she confesses in her introduction, fell in love with her subject. It's very much a scholarly work, with footnotes and an index, but it's compulsive reading.

Georgiana's story is amazing, even by 18-century standards. Her arranged marriage at the age of 17, to the stratospherically wealthy, but emotionally cold and distant Duke of Devonshire gave her the chance to shine in society and she grabbed that opportunity with both hands, becoming a leading light in the ton as it was called. Her downfall came when she committed the crime of producing daughters, which distanced her even further from the Duke, and even though she eventually produced a son, by then she'd had a passionate affair with the man who eventually became Lord Grey (famous for introducing the famous Great Reform Act in 1832 - an event and date engraved on my memory from school history lessons).

You couldn't invent her life; and the film doesn't give us the half of it. That's its main failing, I think, as it gives us a too-happy ending. Nevertheless, it gives us a convincing picture of the period and I have to say that Knightley gives a sterling performance. I have a feeling she's going to become a Helen Mirren-like national acting treasure - her choice of roles is increasingly interesting, though she needs to stop making those hideous Pirates of the Caribbean films. I look forward to following her career.

The Orphanage

I'd meant to see this at the cinema when it was released but it didn't happen, so as soon as it came out on DVD I put it at the top of my rental list. I had to wait a while before it came, and it was pretty near the top of the DVD charts for quite a while, so it was obviously extremely popular. Anyway it finally arrived, so I had a real sense of anticipation.
Was it worth it? I watched it twice, as I was pretty sleepy the first time and knew that I may have missed the odd little chunk or two. Also I wanted to see it again to make sure that my feelings of flatness after seeing it were justified.
It's beautifully filmed, but where have I seen that look? It's the greyish-blue tinge to everything, and the creepy, country-house setting, very different from the National Trust look of many British films. We first saw it in The Others a few years ago, a ghost story set in the Channel Islands during the 1940s and it set the template. I thought it was excellent - scary children, weird, ghostly sets, and Nicole Kidman, brittle, fragile and heartbreaking, producing one of her best performances and Alejandro Amenabar proved himself an extremely accomplished director. Certainly Spanish cinema has produced some extraordinarily original films in recent years, and The Others, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labrynth have been prime examples.
The Orphanage is in this vein but, unlike those films it didn't convince. I'm happy to completely suspend disbelief when watching films, but the film has to make you do it, and this one didn't.
It obviously succeeded with many, and the reviews were adulatory, so maybe it's just me.
The Orphanage's narrative doesn't compel. It lacked narrative drive and structure and, although it was well acted and beautifully filmed, it was all over the place. The basic story, that of the childless couple attempting to set up a home for children with severe disabilities in the country house in which the wife, herself an orphan, had been brought up. The house had been an old-fashioned orphanage and the couple had now bought it. Their adopted son begins to collect imaginary friends, who turn out to be the ghosts of his mother's playmates, who were murdered....and so it went on. I've forgotten who the murderer was.
An implausible scenario, which doesn't disqualify it by any means; after all, the same might be said for many of the greatest films. But I didn't believe a word of it and the ending was ludicrous and had a tacked-on feel. It's one of those films where I have a blind spot - it doesn't happen too often, but occasionally I find myself out of step. Oh well......

David Miliband (5)

It's been a while since I've written about Miliband, and he was initially pretty quiet after he became Foreign Secretary, but he's been in the news quite a bit recently, especially since the Russia/Georgia stand-off started.

David Hearst in the Guardian today was damning, deriding him as 'blissfully unaware' of the history between the two countries, and accusing him of 'stepping blindly and foolishly into a minefield' and 'making vacuous commitments to a country he knows nothing about, and which he is in no position to honour'.
The blogger AppallingStrangeness is brutal, asking 'Does anyone else feel slightly embarrassed when they read about David Miliband prancing about on the international stage?' And goes on to describe him as having the 'general charisma of a snail crushed underfoot'. One of the most important jobs in government has been given to someone 'the political equivalent of Adrian Mole'.
Certainly he's seemed clearly out of his depth, and of course it's the first time he's been tested in a significant international situation of geopolitical importance. He's persistently labelled a 'Blairite' and therefore someone with leadership ambitions and he was suspected of mounting a leadership challenge recently after an article he wrote for the Guardian which didn't even mention Brown. With the undoubted forthcoming demise of the Government in the next couple of years it's difficult to see where he goes next - down with the sinking ship, I suspect. Whatever happens, he's dead meat, though young enough to rise from the ashes in the distant future, though in what form - who can say?

Man on Wire

I went to see this at the cinema the other day - I'd read the fantastic reviews and decided it must be seen. And the reviews were right, it was worth it.
Philippe Petit walked across a tightrope strung between the World Trade Centre's twin towers in 1974, and the film sketches the background, with interviews with Petit and the people who helped him. That's it, basically, but the film is so much more than that brief precis. The ultimate fate of the twin towers is never mentioned - it didn't need to be, but it's there in the background, all the time, especially as there is quite a bit of footage in the film of their construction.
The film gives a fascinating glimpse into life in 1974 - 34 years ago, a lifetime. No-one filmed Petit's feat; people didn't do that kind of thing then, the cameras would have been too difficult to conceal anyway. Now someone would pluck a mobile out of their pocket and capture the whole thing - if they could get up there in the first place, sceurity, although pretty tight then, would surely be impenetrable nowadays.
Petit is an engaging character, and it was easy to see how he managed to bring others on board to help him, but it was startling to see the contrast between his recollections and those of his friends. He told the story as a knd of personal challenge, but they remembered their terror of being discovered, the tension surrounding the whole affair. petit became a huge celebrity at the end, but the others disappeared into obscurity. Such is the nature of fame, I guess.
There was film footage of petit practising in what looked like a back garden, and of his other escapades, including his tightrope walk between the towers of Notre Dame in Paris. Yes, he's clearly a publicity seeker, but a very brave man. Self-obsessed, yes, but we still need people like that. The same applies to all those great Olympians, such as Steve Redgrave. You can ask 'what is the point?', as some journalists have written in the wake of the fantastic British success at the Beijing Olympics this month, but such killjoys deserve oblivion.
People like Petit add to the sum of human greatness, so thanks, Philippe.

Charlton Heston

I recorded El Cid recently on video - it's a popular film for filling the Saturday afternoon schedules, and I noticed that it's on yet again next week. So I whiled away a wet Sunday afternoon last week by watching it.
I really don't know why I love Charlton Heston, his right-wing views in recent years were a bit scary, but that doesn't make you a bad actor; he died this year from Alzhiemer's, but he was 88, so had a good innings, as they say. And in spite of becoming a leading light in the NRA he was a very early public advocate of civil rights, long before it became fashionable. So, a fascinatingly contradictory character.
Maybe it's because Ben Hur was the first wide-screen spectacular I'd ever seen. I was at an impressionable age, about 10 or 11, and it had an enormous impact on me. It was in the days when cinemas had only one screen, and it was huge. Ben Hur was in Todd AO as well, so it really was a massive experience for me.
CH was sold into slavery, endured the galleys, was rescued by the Romans, and became a hero in the arenas of Imperial Rome; he then escaped, bumped into Jesus who healed his sister and mother from leprosy, and found his long-lost love after his years away - what a story! I can't think of any, any actor, past or present, who could have carried it off. But especially now - Tom Cruise? Harrison Ford? I don't think so.
There's something about his expression - it's the stricken integrity in his eyes - you just know that he's always going to do the right thing, and in El Cid he has this quality in spades. Again, he endures all manner of hardships and humiliations, but prevails. The final scene has passed into cinema iconography, he's dead, but leads his men to victory while strapped to his horse on a Spanish beach. Tremendous even by Heston's standards!
He went on to be Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, and John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told, then he took a different tack and made Will Penny, one of the very first 'revisionist' westerns.
He went on to make some fascinating films - science-fiction such as Soylent Green and The Omega Man, both excellent, and then his piece de resistance, Planet of the Apes. What a career!

Summer Hours

This was a lovely little film. It was definitely something that probably only someone over a certain age would really appreciate, and the cinema was pretty full of middle-aged people, and myself and the friend who accompanied me fitted in well. But then you would only really 'get' it if you'd had to deal with ageing parents, the dissolution of families as everyone carves out their individual lives, and the fractured nature of modern adult life.
It's one of those closely-observed portraits of modern bourgeois life that the French do so well - British versions, for example, Mike Leigh films, always seem to be satirical, laughing at middle-class pretensions. The French don't seem to be as hung up on class as us, and use such films to examine human nature and behaviour.
Anyway, Summer Hours was a treat. It's Helene's 70th birthday, and her 3 grown-up children and their families gather together in her country house, the family home. Helene is devoted, even obsessed with the memory of her uncle, a celebrated painter, and his works. She's a gracious lady who holds court in her extremely comfortable and well-appointed residence, though we become aware pretty quickly that there is a deep-rooted tension between each family member.
Helene dies - and the remainder of the film chronicles the adult children's wranglings over what to do with the house. The eldest wants to keep the property and Helene's art collection as something with which to hold the family together, but it's clear that his younger siblings aren't interested. One is off to China with his family to work, and the other is going to live in New York. The family is falling apart, but at the end the next generation gather at the house with their friends. Olivier Asseyas, the director, isn't interested in portraying nostalgia, though, and everyone's choices are seen as valid. He sees that times change, so do people and families. Those of us with grown-up children know all too well that families fracture, however close they seem. Differences are real, and often irreconcilable. We do our best, but everyone has their own very individual path.
I watched the latest instalment in the genealogy series on BBC last night, Who Do You Think You Are? It's an object lesson in the fissuring of families - sometimes events intercede, such as war and revolution, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Anyway, a film that has stayed with me. The final scenes, in which the children of the siblings and their friends hold an impromptu party at Helene's house, is filled with optimism. They run wild and care nothing for her art collection, but they are the future, like it or not.

Snow

I took ages to read this book, but persisted, and it was worth it. I found it on my shelf - I hadn't bought it myself so wondered where it had come from. Intrigued, I decided to give it a go. It turned out that it belonged to one of my sons, and he'd left it with me without telling me. A friend who'd read it also recommended it, so I felt I had to.
First of all, it gave me a window on Turkish politics, something I knew absolutely nothing about. I was vaguely aware of controversy over headscarves for women, but that was all. Headscarves are central to Snow but it's about much more. Orhan Pamuk, the author, who I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of, is one of Turkey's most celebrated writers, and of course, I now see his name everywhere.
I won't attempt to describe the events in the book, it's too dense and complex for a brief precis, but to cut a very long story short, it follows the progress of an emigre writer and sometime poet, Ka, who is commissioned to write an article on the seemingly large numbers of girls in the snow-bound town, Kars, where he grew up, who are committing suicide because, apparently, they have been forbidden by Turkish law to wear headscarves. A lot happens, which I won't pretend to describe, but the events in the book take place while the town is blanketed by thick snow, and this metaphor provides the central organising principle behind the book.
There are several themes running through the book - that of the impact of exile; Ka is viewed with suspicion, as tainted and polluted by Western values, yet there is enormous interest in him and he acquires something of an exalted status almost immediately.
Ka battle throughout with his atheism and the resurgent Islamism he finds all around him. Turkey is a country riven by conflict, but this makes it a vibrant, questioning country, in ferment. It's torn asunder by those who want it to becoome a fundamentalist state, and those who want it to be accepted into the EU, and become fully westernised. There's a much better review here which will relate the events in the book more effectively than I can, as it really is extremely complex, and I don't want to do the book a disservice.
I must say, though, that the translation isn't great. it's by the journalist Maureen Freely, who is British, but grew up in Istanbul. I suppose it's descriptive rather than literary, but I felt all the way though that I was missing a great deal - it seemed incomplete somehow. The prose didn't sing. Translation's tricky, but when it works, it's wonderful and there are some great examples. This isn't one of them, but the book still made me want to find out more. I now read news articles about Turkey in the paper with great interest, and it was Snow that gave me this. Not many books do that. A great achievement.

The Dark Knight

I saw The Dark Knight a couple of days ago - it's the sequel to Batman Begins which came out in 2005. Both reboot the franchise, which had started promisingly in 1989 with the Tim Burton films, then degenerated horribly, reaching its nadir with Batman and Robin. In didn't see that one, but it's dreadfulness was legendary, nearly scuppering George Clooney's caree before it had properly begun.
Anyway, I thought Batman Begins was tremendous, and I enjoyed it enormously. For a start, Christian Bale (one of my favourites) played the caped crusader, and it possessed a compelling atmosphere of dingy menace. I found the DVD on my shelf - I think it belongs to one of my sons - so I took the opportunity to see it again to get myself into the mood for The Dark Knight.
The Dark Knight will, first of all, go down in history as one of Heath Ledger's last films before he was found dead from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. I always hesitate to use the word 'tragedy', and in the scheme of things, a well-heeled Hollywood/Aussie star crashing and burning is not the most pressing of issues. But Ledger had been showing signs for a while that he was moving away from routine leading man parts (see his performance in I'm Not There) and was becoming an extremely interesting actor, choosing parts which stretched and challenged him.
His performance as the Joker is superb; seriously scary. He really is someone with no moral compass on any level and knows it: 'Do I look like I have a plan? I’m just a dog chasing cars…I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. I just…do things.' My only criticism is there's not quite enough of him, but whenever he does appear the temperature visibly rises. His make-up is not designed to be amusing, but cadaverous, as if he's just been dug up.
Batman isn't much in evidence in this film - he's shown as seriously weakened by the Joker, and in many scenes, he's vulnerable and damaged. Bale has refined his portrayal somewhat, darkening and deepening his voice whenever he dons mask and cape.
This film has proved pretty controversial in this country due to its 12A cerificate, which allows children of any age to see it if accompanied by an adult. Many believe it should have been a 15 - I don't know, I can see their point, but I know that I would have allowed my children to see it. I once discovered that one of my sons at the age of 4, back in the very early 80s when videos were only just beginning to invade private homes, had happily watched a copy of Dirty Harry round at a friend's house. The friend's father had bought it and allowed the children to see it. So what can you do? It hasn't turned him into a raging psychopath, just a lifelong Clint Eastwood fan! In the end, I believe that it's always down to the parents to create the kind of atmosphere and environment at home that can withstand assaults on their values.
Anyway, I don't know how long this incarnation of Batman can run. Bale is certainly capable of much more, as is Christopher Nolan, who directed both films. Bale has been catapulted into 'A'-list territory, so we'll see - anyway, in my view an excellent summer blockbuster, though the cinema was pretty empty when I went. It's dark, dark, dark, both visually and thematically, perhaps too much so for popular taste, but apparently it's been a huge hit financially, and we all know, that's what matters.


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The Jewel in the Crown

A friend lent me the DVD boxed set of this famous TV series from the early 80s and I've just finished watching it. Of course I'd seen the original when it was first broadcast, so I was familiar with it, but that was over 20 years ago, so it was an interesting experience to revisit it.
I suppose the first thing that strikes one is that it was an ITV series. It's inconceivable now that the channel would be remotely capable of making a prestigious series like that. They'd recently produced Brideshead Revisited which was an enormous success, redefining British television drama and Jewel was another sign that the mantle of prestigious British TV drama had moved away from the BBC.
One of the most crucial points in both series was the use of eye-catching locations and film, as opposed to studio production recorded on videotape, which had been the Beeb's standard mmode of production ever since recording had begun in the early 1960s. They'd invested heavily in their studios at the newly-built BBC Television Centre, and filming on location had been sidelined. So the ITV series, both produced by Granada which was fast becoming a powerhouse of production, were a serious challenge to the BBC's hegemony.
Jewel is graced by marvellous performances, notably from the peeless Peggy Ashcroft. Her portrayal of Barbie Batchelor, the elderly missionary who has spent most of her adult life in India, and is now thrust aside as so much useless detritusas the country edges towards independence, is heartbreaking. Her lower-middle-class origins, her lonely spinsterhood, her gradual exclusion from British Raj society as everyone jostles for survival, is one of the greatest performances I have ever seen on television. I must also mention Judy Parfitt, lurching genteely around the comfortable bungalows and terraces of the Raj, glass in one hand and cigarette in the other, all the time ruthlessly disposing of anyone whose face doesn't fit, is frighteningly plausible . And Geraldine James and Susan Wooldridge, who play the young women caught up in it all - part of it, yet seeing all too clearly what is happening, are both superb.
I suppose I found myself thinking - how could I not? - that, not only would it be impossible to produce anything on this scale - certainly not without American money - but where would you find the actors who would be capable of depicting the British in India. For a start, the accents - is there anyone under the age of, say, 50, who could produce the sort of cut-glass accent that would be essential. Estuary would surely creep in, however hard anyone would try.
And of course, the subject. It's the story of the British, so, while Indian society is very much there, it's always peripheral to the main action. It could not be made now, however much money anyone came up with, because of that. A shame, but I guess that's progress for you. We're different now, and, while we've lost something, we've gained as well. We now have The Wire instead, which is a pretty good deal in my book.
Anyway, I still enjoyed it enormously, relishing the slow unfolding of the story, the camerawork, the locations, the acting, the lack of jittery camerawork, and the fact that I didn't have to switch the subtitles on to hear the dialogue - perfect diction all round!

Accident

I watched Accident the other day - a British film directed by Joseph Losey and released in 1967 and now vanished into the cinematic ether. I'd videotaped it years ago but had never watched it, so was catching up.
I remember going to see it when it was first released (I used to see practically everything in those days) but hadn't seen it since, so it was an intriguing experience, rather like revisiting the scenes of one's childhood. I can't remember what certificate it was, but I obviously managed to get in without any problems if it was an X. I do remember that it was a pretty notorious film at the time, with its sex scenes, and 'permissive' (in the parlance of the time) attitudes, and of course it featured Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker, both 'A' list British actors who were attempting to reinvent themselves after a decade or so making endless war movies, and in Bogarde's case, Fifties froth such as Doctor in the House. Part of this process involved working for Losey, for whom both he and Baker had already worked. Losey, an American, was a director of some distinction, who had come to Britain after being blacklisted by Joseph McCarthy, and, after starting with potboilers, proceeded to make films which became increasingly more complex and intriguing as the British Sixties film boom took hold.
The 60s saw the beginnings of the sexual revolution, which was depicted in films as consisting of predatory men and submissive and available women. Accident was no exception, though it did take a more nuanced view, showing Bogarde as tormented and confused by women, and the Baker character as opportunistic and callous.
Seeing the film now was a strange experience. I can't remember what I thought of it in the 60s, but this time I found it brought up a great many memories. I think it's the Oxford setting that did it - it caught the atmosphere of the time perfectly. Claustrophobic, with beautiful women, pretending to be enigmatic by whom one always felt threatened. It somehow captured the feeling of the period - I found myself remembering long-forgotten parties in sprawling suburban houses I'd never been to on the edge of Oxford. We'd hear there was something going on - that someone's parents were away, we'd all pile in someone's Morris Minor and rush off to God knows where for a party which almost invariably turned out to be a disappointment.
I suppose that's what adolescence is all about - excitement, uncertainty and let-down. You thrive on the rush, the buzz and it doesn't matter really about the outcome, though occasionly you'd get lucky, and meet someone, or actually have a good time.
Anyway, it really is a peculiar little film. It was obviously made pretty cheaply, but Losey makes the most of what he's got. There are several long takes of Bogarde's country house scattered throughout the film, and there's a rather unsettling lack of music, I suppose the cinemtic equivalent of Pinter's famous silences.
An interesting experience. People get all nostalgic about the 60s, but not me. I prefer the 70s, that supposedly God-forsaken decade. I was older, happier, wiser - and the music was better!

Nick Cave

Nick Cave is someone I've always been aware of , yet I've only got into his music relatively recently. I watched a compilation of his appearances on Jools Holland's Later the other day and it was fascinating to see the way in which he's evolved over the years. The earliest performances were from around 1990, when he would have been in his early 30s, and the most recent in March this year, so there was nearly 20 years to look at and appreciate.
He has certainly, unlike many musicians, become rougher round the edges as he's got older - his performing style is pretty deranged nowadays. The 50-year-old Cave is a true original, wild and woolly, and his recent garage-band album, Grinderman, and his latest, Dig, Lazurus, Dig, are albums I'll certainly be getting as soon as possible. I think my musical taste is evolving along a similar trajectory.
He's open about his insistence on dying his hair a stern and uncompromising black, has a fearsome moustache, and often dresses in an un-popstar-like suit and tie. He has an extensive online presence, with personal websites and a MySpace page which has several tracks available for listening. Films are something he's heavily involved in, doing the soundtrack for The Proposition and appearing in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a wonderful film, whose treatment at the hands of the distributors was nothing short of scandalous. (It appeared at the Watershed in Bristol for a couple of weeks, and that was that. Although Roger Deakins won an Oscar for his cinematography, it was shamefully neglected in all the other categories, in spite of it featuring Brad Pitt's finest performance to date - I could go on...).
I discovered from his Wikipedia site that one of his songs featured in Ascension, an X-Files episode. Apparently, although he doesn't watch much television, he's a fan of the show, which in my book, is a major badge of honour. (I'm a massive fan myself, and will be blogging soon on the subject). I could go on on - what is there not to like? He also writes and paints, but one of his most endearing features is his Australian nationality. In spite of the fact that he now lives in Brighton, he's very much an Aussie. His singing's a bit tuneless, and his 'dancing' is not great, but he's retained a punk sensibility, while becoming a fascinating personality, and a bit of a polymath.
Anway, he's a pretty recent discovery for me, so there's lots to look forward to as I discover his stuff.

In Search of the Midnight Kiss

I went to see this the other day, and enjoyed it very much. It's a tiny, low-budget film, made in black-and-white; very much in the mould of Before Sunrise/Before Sunset; clearly a major influence. 2 people, a young man and young women, meet up by chance on New Year's Eve, and wander the streets of Los Angeles all night. And that's basically it. It sounds simple, and it is, but it's a funny, touching picture of how people actually talk and behave, and how city streets actually are, not how they appear in movies.
Wilson, an impoverished and miserable aspiring screenwriter, posts a personal ad online, and meets up with Vivian, an aspiring actress on New Year's Eve. She's brash, challenging but beautiful, and they walk the streets of LA. There's plenty of funny, spiky dialogue, and I was able to enjoy my penchant for city streetscapes at night.
It gives us a very different view of the Los Angeles we know from TV and the movies - it's an unfamiliar LA, with small shops and grungy apartments. It shows us that ordinary people do live there, living ordinary non-Hollywood lives. It's not just a film set. This is underscored by a shot of the famous HOLLYWOOD letters up on the hills outside the city which pops up intermittently. There are no stars in this film, just people.
Anyway, it's a film which, in spite of its small scale, resonated. It's about something which concerns us all, and as the blurb which was handed out at the cinema tells us, 'the nature of romance in the age of texting, Facebook and MySpace'. But, as the blurb also noted, the film has 'a classic, timeless feel'. It mentions the cinematography - it's shot in black and white, which instantly gives it an extra edge, and disguises the low budget.
I loved it, and hope for more from this director. Very refreshing.

Sebastian Faulks

I've just finished a Sebastian Faulks marathon - I was lent a pile of his recent books and I read my way through them. I fancied reading them together to get a feel for his writing and style.

He's very much the popular writer of his age, but I detect in his more recent books, a desire to complicate and challenge. The actual content and themes of Human Traces and Engleby, his most recent books, although not at all difficult in terms of their style, were testing. Human Traces is concerned with the pre-history and germination of psychoanalysis, and it asks, implicitly, what if a different path had been taken? Freud isn't mentioned at all, yet his shadow hangs heavily over the book. The two protagonists, Thomas and Jacques, are striking out a path through the undergrowth of psychiatry in the late 19th century, but have no-one to guide them. It's an ambitious book, but not wholly successful, I thought. Faulks struggles with period settings and has trouble getting his characters to speak and behave as if they're actually living in the age into which they've been born. For example, Sonia, the main female character, can't help living speaking and breathing as a 21st century woman. Characters frequently employ modern vernacular and behaviour, and this made it difficult for me to be convinced by the book. Also Faulks has a rather literal, plodding style and sometimes you long for a poetic passage, but that's not his forte at all, so he sensibly steers clear.
Engleby was better, I thought, as it was set in the 1970s and 80s, a period though which Faulks has actually lived himself, so the book was much more convincing, though it still didn't stay with me after I'd finished it. He's not much good at narrative, and I felt both books meandered, and lacked a real focus. His books don't really satisfy, and don't linger long in the memory. I feel as if I've just munched on a Kit-Kat rather than a few squares of Green and Black's.
The Fatal Englishman was better. It's non-fiction for a start, the stories of three young men who lived in the 20th century and died prematurely for various reasons after living lives of great promise. I enjoyed the last one most, the story of Jeremy Wolfenden, the young gay man who died just before homosexuality became legal. Yet again, though, the books didn't stay with me for long, and failed to be truly memorable.
I don't know, perhaps it's just me getting old. Maybe my brain is less receptive. I'm going to go back to reading Jane Austen and the Brontes soon to test myself against the classics.

We Are Together

I went to see We Are Together last week, a film about a children's choir in an orphanage in a South African township. It's an inspiring story, and very moving; the children are mostly AIDS orphans, and the film follows their progress as they overcome all sorts of difficulties, most of which would be unimaginable to Western children.
In the course of the film, Slindile, who turns out to be a wonderful singer, suffers the death of her older brother from AIDS whhich has already carried off her parents. You get to see her sorrow, resignation, but also incredible powers of endurance, as she eventually gets to New York, along with the others from the orphanage, to perform with Paul Simon and Alysha Keys.
It's a feel-good film and has been criticised for it, but I can't see that it's anything but inspirational. We are far too complacent about the little frustrations and hardships that come our way, and although there's not a lot we can do about global poverty and AIDS, its instructive to be reminded of out good fortune, and to know that we can, and must live more frugally and humbly.
Anyway, sermon over - it's an entertaining film, well put together. It was only on for a week in Bristol but the cinema was packed for the late-afternoon showing. Perhaps if the cinema chain had had a bit more faith more people would have seen it - it's the sort of word-of-mouth film that builds an audience a bit more slowly than distributers like, but can pack people in for weeks if they get the chance.

The Forsyte Saga

A friend has just lent me the boxed set of videos of the original 1967 BBC serialisation of the Forsyte Saga, and I've found myself completely hooked. Why? It's ancient telly, black and white, videotaped in cramped BBC studios. The hairstyles and costumes are antideluvian; a lot of work's gone into the costumes and set dressing, and I know that at the time it was considered an expensive production, but, by today's standards, the whole thing looks rickety and a bit makeshift. And then, there's the mid-60s hair and make-up, with the women looking like Chelsea dolly-birds in Victorian costume. Nearly everyone is clearly wearing an alarming wig - hairsprayed to death.
The concept of period authenticity was in its infancy in the mid-60s, but the Edwardian period was still a living memory to many, and there was an authenticity about the tone which seems remarkable these days. The actors knew how to speak Galsworthy's dialogue convincingly, which they don't today, so we now get lumbered with Edwardians speaking Estuary English in too may production. So the production may look pretty flakey, but it sounds brilliant, like a window on a lost world.
Anyway, I have to declare an interest - a few years ago I researched the serial as part of an academic thesis, so I know an awful lot about it, though I could only manage to get a video with the first 4 episodes so this is the first time I've been able to watch all 26 episodes.
I do remember watching it when it was first broadcast, as I was still a young teenager who was usually in on Sunday nights. I invariably had homework, which I always left until the last minute, and ended up doing it late on Sunday night, so watching The Forsyte Saga, in those long-ago pre-video days, was probably a good excuse for putting it off.
In spite of the clunkiness, then, it's compulsive viewing. The whole thing is basically a high-class soap opera, and in those days there wasn't any such thing so the novelty value was enormous. Each episode ended on a cliffhanger and the serial introduced compulsive viewing to the bulk of TV viewers. Soaps barely existed - Coronation Street and Z Cars had begun but this was different. Of course the original novel was a major blockbuster when it was published and there must have been many people still alive in 1967 who could remember its publication and knew the book well.
It was an astonishing world-wide success. I've seen documentation stored in the wonderful BBC Written Archive Centre which tell of it's extraordinary impact in, for example, both the US and Soviet Russia. Public events were postponed all over the world so that people could watch it, and audiences all over the world were enthralled.
It resurrected Kenneth More's career, which had slid downhill badly after his affair with Angela Douglas, many years younger, became public. His experience and charisma reminded audiences why he had been so popular and his presence was crucial to the success of the production. But it was Eric Porter's performance as Soames and Susan Hampshire as Fleur which captivated audiences.
Anyway, it still stands up, whereas the recent lavish ITV production a few years ago has sunk without trace. The 1967 production is now available on DVD and the reviews from punters on Amazon testify to its enduring quality. Old telly has become a cottage industry and I found a leaflet insert in my latest Radio Times which advertised tons of old series which can now be acquired in box sets. The old Forsyte Saga was listed, but not the new one - says it all....

Ken Loach

Ken Loach is another British director (see Mike Leigh) who stimulates ambivalent feelings in me. Why? He's a national treasure, a living legend etc.etc., but I've sometimes found myself hating his films, for their schematic politics, predictability and unsympathetic characters. No doubt he would argue that this is because he sets out to challenge preconceptions and that this is uncomfortable for people, but the problem is that I don't find his films challenging, but predictable.
But we're talking about ambivalence, and there's a lot to appreciate in Loach's films. His methods - using untried actors, some of whom have gone on to greater things, as well as household names, and his resolute independence are admirable. And this is the trouble - one admires Loach's films, but finds it hard to love them. I'm sure he would say he doesn't want to be loved, that's not what he does, but I'm thinking of films you want to see over and over again, because they're just so damn good, endlessly stimulating, leaving you wanting more. Loach's films, however, interesting and politically challenging, don't do this. Again, I'm sure that's not his intention, but it means I don't automatically rush out to go and see his films at the cinema, as I would, say, a Scorsese film.
I did go and see The Wind That Shakes the Barley; that was good, and certainly Loach's films have become more nuanced in recent years. There's always an overriding theme, though, that ordinary people are endlessly betrayed by those in power and always will be. I find there's a deep pessimism at the heart of Loach's films, even when there's an ostensible message of hope. Betrayal is inevitable.
This was most strongly expressed in Land and Freedom. It was my most recent rental from Amazon - I'd never seen it, and had always wanted to, so decided that it was about time I caught up with it. It was the first (I think) of Loach's ventures into history, as he decided to address the Spanish Civil War. This is pretty much virgin territory for filmmakers, scandalously, really, as it's a fascinating subject, full of possibilities. Perhaps it's because it's not a straightforwardly simple situation, the various factions, and, of course, there are large helpings of betrayal.
George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is the only book I can think of by someone who was actually there, and, Loach's film has prompted me to revisit it, so I'll be catching up on it soon, digging out my old, faded, Penguin copy. Orwell joined the POUM, the anarchist grouping who were shafted by the Communists, and Land and Freedom focuses on a band of POUM members. They're a feisty bunch, and there's an American fighting with them, and guess what? He's the one who argues that they need to join up with the Communists, that they're finished, and he does just that. You can see it all coming, and it's inevitable that it's an American who does it, not the noble working-class Liverpudlian, played by Ian Harte, whose story is at the heart of the film. The POUM members are passionate, and are a mixed bag of firebrands and more sober souls, but their hearts are in the right place. Of course, the Communist s, funded by Stalinist Russia, overwhelmed any outbursts of individuality in the Civil War, and they're a doomed little band of brothers. All is lost, but they go down nobly. I enjoyed it, but a Loach film is essentially a cerebral experience.
It's left me feeling that I must revisit his earlier stuff, but what I really want to see is his famous Days of Hope TV serial, firat broadcast in the late 1970s. I missed it when it was on, and, although it was celebrated at the time, it was extremely controversial, and has since sunk without trace. A DVD special edition is long overdue - come on BFI!

Miss Austen Regrets

I watched this last night, being unable to resist costume dramas, and it was the BBC, so my expectations were pretty high. I though it was excellent, on the whole, though with a few caveats. There seems to be a costume drama template these days - persistent, lush music, long shots of country houses, most of which are surely too grand for their inhabitants, and nice costumes (of course). Productions which diverge from this pattern, such as the recent Bleak House, stand out startlingly, and I wish there was a bit more innovation and imagination. It's as if the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, which was such a stunning success, has redefined cotume drama for ever, and that model has become set in stone.
Anyway, this wasn't bad - I was intrigued and attracted by the casting of Olivia Williams, an actress who I think is shamefully underused. I remember her in Rushmore, and The Sixth Sense, an interesting British presence in these 2 US films, and she's been in several films since, but nothing prominent. I see on the IMDB that she's had 2 children in the last 3 years, so that would explain quite a bit. Maybe she has one of those interesting faces that looks better in middle age, and as I see she's nearly 40 I suspect we may see more from her.
She was excellent, I thought - endowing Jane Austen with wit, character and intelligence. Her sister Cassandra was played by Greta Scacchi - unrecognisable. I didn't realise it was her until I read an article in the paper. She's aged with dignity as well, and it was nice to see a programme with 2 middle-aged, Botox-free women in starring roles.
Both women reinvented their characters for the 21st century, but there's nothing wrong with that, period productions have done it since the dawn of cinematic time. But what's refreshing is to see actresses with intelligence and lack of vanity, making their characters spring to life for us. It's not new, but it's not always the case. It's essential, for period drama to work, that we can believe in the characters, and this production succeeded admirably.

Mike Leigh

I've always felt a tad ambivalent towards Mike Leigh's films. I suppose, coming from a working-class background myself, I've sometimes found his portrayals of the working-class life to be patronising, with an undercurrent of nastiness, and plain wrong. Now, I don't know much about his background, except that he's from a Jewish Mancunian family, and that he's even older that me ( a quick look at the IMDB confirms that he's 65), but his work seems to have been part of the landscape in one form or another for as long as I can remember.

Abigail's Party, his 1970s TV play for which he's celebrated - well, I have to say I never found it funny, and thought Alison Steadman's performance was grotesque and a caricature. She repeated it years later in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice (the famous Colin Firth one in 1995) as Mrs Bennett, and I thought Brenda Blethyn played the part much better in the recent film.

Anyway, back to Mike Leigh. I thought Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake were both wonderful - it's as if making a period film released him from something. They were both warm, humane and engrossing, with marvellous performances from all concerned. They both captured their respective periods perfectly - I took my mother to see Vera Drake and she was deeply moved. I noticed that it was set in November 1950, the month in which I was born, and its recreation of the cramped, dark, spartan, yet warm and convivial lives was almost tangible. My memories of the early 50s are fragmentary, but for her, as a young woman, it would have been like going back in time to see it so perfectly evoked.

So, I went along to see Happy-Go-Lucky, his first film since Vera Drake, buoyed by the largely favourable reviews it received everywhere, though he's usually given a pretty easy ride by the press. I suppose his caricatures of the lower middle classes resonate with metropolitan professionals, as it's the background from which so many of them have escaped. Anyway, although Leigh usually uses cheerful titles ironically, it was refreshingly free of all that, but it was hard to appreciate Poppy, the relentlessly cheerful and optimistic heroine. We see this straight away, as the bike on which she sails breezily round the streets of London, is stolen, and she blithely accepts it, and doesn't even kick the railings to which she'd locked it. She responds to everything with cheerfully sarcastic backchat, which is never funny, just annoying, but you end up sort of liking her, though she'd drive you mad if she was your friend.
It's her acceptance of what life has offered her, and her determination to make the best of things, however unpromising, that does it. She's 30, lives in a cramped rented flat with her friend, and is a primary school teacher, and is clearly in a job she loves. Her energy and enthusiasm is infectious, and you end up wishing there were more people like her around, even if she does drive you up the wall. It's her lack of vanity which does it, and her goodness of heart -
After deciding to have driving lessons before getting a car, she hooks up with grumpy, misanthropic driving instructor, played by Eddie Marsan, who, in typical schematic Leigh fashion, is the polar opposite of Poppy, and puts her in sharp relief.
Another thing I liked was the use of unfashionable parts of London - no Gherkin or Tate Modern - just Finsbury Park, more the London I'm used to; the streets seemed very familiar.
So, a decent Leigh film, in the end, and one I enjoyed. I guess it may be time to revisit his earlier stuff and take another look.

The Aviator

I watched The Aviator a couple of nights ago on BBC-2. It was, oh, about the fourth time I'd seen it, but I never need an excuse to see a Scorsese film, and to have on on prime-time telly (not a common occurence) was too good to miss. I'd seen it twice at the cinema and once on TV already, but I still found it as fresh as a daisy.
This film is the one in which one can safely say Leonardo Di Caprio came of age. It's the first one I can think of in which he had to age, playing a fully-fledged adult, and he did it in style. I think it's a fantastic performance, but it received relatively little recognition, as did the film in general, which is pretty normal for Scorsese. OK. he got his Oscar last year, ostensibly for The Departed, but everyone knew it was a rather shamefaced recognition for a lifetime devoted to brilliant film-making. I thought The Departed was fine - comparing it to the good but comparatively run-of-the-mill American Gangster puts it into perspective. it's a far more substantial work. But, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino, Raging Bull - I could go on, and on and on and on. I watch Goodfellas regularly, just to remind myself that there's no-one to touch Scorsese as a director, just in case I forget momentarily.
Anyway, The Aviator is a tour-de-force - little things, like the way in which Scorsese has filmed each period in Howard Hughes' life in the style of the relevant period. Washy colour for the 20s and 30s, then moving to the more strident technicolor of the 40s. I don't know whether that was Scorsese's idea, but he's very sensitive towards how his films look and would have made it possible.
I loved the justly-famous sequence at the Hepburn house in Connecticut - Katherine Hepburn, in the early days of her affair with Hughes, takes him to meet her large, patrician family at their country house. It's a gruelling experience for him as he endures their rat-a-tat, brittle conversation over the dinner table. Cate Blanchett justly won the best-supporting actress Oscar for her performance as Hepburn, but there are plenty of other superb performers on display in the scene, such as the marvellous Frances Conroy from Six Feet Under as Hepburn's mother. I could go on to list the many people who stand out in the film, often in small but telling parts, such as Danny Huston, Alec Baldwin, and Jude Law, not one of my favourite actors, who plays Errol Flynn, perfectly. (Law peaked, in my opinion, as Dickie Greenleaf, in the late-lamented Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley, another criminally-underated film, and hasn't done anything as good since). And of course the peerless Alan Alda as Senator Brewster, and Ian Holm. Plus an appearance from one of my favourite singers, Rufus Wainwright, singing in the Cocoanut Grove. What more could one ask for?
I love hearing Scorsese talk about film - I have a video of his history of American cinema, and I taped his Italian film history when it was on BBC-4 a few years back. He talks passionately and intelligently about cinema and I could listen to him all day. I won't be going to see his latest film Shine a Light - he loves the Stones, but I really can't pay to watch a bunch of sixty-somethings prance aroud the stage. I'll catch it on TV but I'll watch it because its Scorsese. The Stones story is, I suppose, over-familiar for me, stale and uninteresting.
Nevertheless, Scoresese's left a remarkable legacy, and even if he never makes another film again, which isn't going to happen, his films can be watched over and over again. The man loves the medium, and it shows in every frame.

Ed Wood

I watched Ed Wood the other night on pay-per-view TV - I'd seen it before quite a while ago, but fancied it again, and anyway, to be honest, I don't need much of an excuse to watch a Johnny Depp/Tim Burton film.
It's a subject ready-made for a film - the story of the least-successful, least regarded film director in cinema history. I'm sure there were plenty of others as bad, but Ed Wood is nearly always singled out, and his Plan 9 From Outer Space regularly tops the charts as worst film ever made.
Wood's exotic personality helped - he was a transvestite, with an absurdly inflated opinion of his own film-making talents, but Depp plays him as one of nature's innocents, with a delightful lack of self-awareness. When confronted with a setback (which happens frequently), he gazes into the middle distance, then a wide-eyed smile lights up his face as he thinks of a solution. He clearly loves film, but has no concept of what makes great cinema. He gazes in wonder and delight as his hopeless actors speak his dreadful lines. He breathes 'cut', imagining that he's just filmed Citizen Kane, as another excruciating scene is shot.
The cross-dressing scenes could have been difficult, but Depp, who of course looks great in women's clothing, rises to the challenge, portraying Wood's penchant for dressing in women's clothing as a response to any difficulty. He simply feels more comfortable dressed as a woman, and it shows. Only an actor with Depp's obvious self-confidence and daring could pull it off. He's shown time and time again that he's not afraid to go that little bit further. He made the hideous Pirates of the Caribbean franchise as successful as it was, putting the hapless Bloom and Knightley firmly in the shade, where they belonged, by giving the character a life of its own.
Anyway, Ed Wood's a delightful chamber piece and well worth catching again. Special mention to Jeffrey Jones - a character actor who's rarely noticed, but who never fails to illuminate a film no matter how insignificant his part. He first came to my notice as the Emperor Joseph II in Amadeus, with his famous 'too many notes' aside during the first performance of Figaro.
Martin Landau won an Oscar for his heartbreakingly affecting performance as Bela Lugosi and the film is littered with gems. I can't praise it too highly - it's a gem!

Robinson in Space

This is a real original - I'd seen and taped (I still have it) London, made by the same director, Patrick Keillor around the same time, the mid-1990s, and knew that Robinson existed, so I decided to rent it from Amazon.
Well, above all, it's a period piece. Released in 1997, it chronicles a Britain on the cusp of electing a Labour Government by a landslide, after nearly 20 years of Thatcherite conservatism and the seismic changes wrought by that government. Labour was to preside over a similar level of change, but of course no-one was to know that in 1997. A kind of malaise hangs over the country but of course now we know what happened after it is loaded with unintended meaning.
Basically 'Robinson' is commissioned by an unspecified employer to investigate the 'problem' of England, and undertakes 7 journeys with his companion, the narrator, voiced by the late, great Paul Scofield. I had a look at some stuff on the web about the film, and apparently it's a contemporary version of Daniel Defoe's travels as a spy around the country in the 17th century.
Anyway, I found it a fascinating film. All it is is a series of shots of the landscape; shopping malls, factories, used and disused, bypasses, motorways, service stations, building sites, historical monuments and properties, railway stations - but also Oxbridge and Eton. The narrative tells a hidden story - visibly, the country seems to be in decline - there's dereliction everywhere. But underneath runs power, it's in the hands of the few, and it's invisible.
So there's a powerful message, but, to be honest, I was held by the images, the sort of places that
I've always loved - railway stations, places of transit, run-down city areas, I have a natural affinity with them. They make me feel comfortable in a strange way. Somehow I prefer city streets to empty landscapes, which sometimes have an undercurrent of menace. But that's just me.....
So, now for London - I saw it years ago but I've forgotten it ; I shall look forward to it with anticipation.

Derek Jarman

I've been having a bit of a Derek Jarman-fest over the last few days. I taped a film portrait which was screened on More4, together with Blue, and found an old tape I'd made years ago of The Last of England, and then The Garden, my latest rental from Amazon. I taped Derek, a biographical portrait, and Blue, his last film when they were screened on More4 recently, so I finally got around to watching those as well.

I first came across Jarman without realising it in 1971 when I saw Ken Russell's The Devils. Jarman was responsible for the extraordinary sets - modernist white walls and tiles for a film set in 17th century-France. The Devils remains one of my top ten films and is scandalously unreleased on DVD, though I have a bootleg copy I got on Ebay. It demands a special edition with copious extras but Warner Bros won't play ball....sigh.

Anyway, back to Jarman. Of course in 1971 I had no idea who Jarman was, but over the years I became aware of his forays into the frontiers of avant-garde Super-8 film. So, was he a 60s, 70s, or 80s figure? It's difficult - he was born in 1942, so was in his 20s in the 1960s, but came to prominence in the 70s, and was at the heart of the punk scene and of the anti-Thatcherite Gay Liberation movement in the 1980s, eventually dying of AIDS in 1994

Watching Derek though, it's clear that he was always immersed in anti-establishment, 60's values and beliefs. His life from the moment he went to the Slade in London was a revolt against his upbringing, which was a very typically middle class army background. Derek is full of home movies showing an affluent, suburban household, with nicely dressed children playing on manicured lawns, yet in all Jarman's work there is a very 60s nostalgia for the trappings of his parent's life. This was always one of the great paradoxes of the 60s - as evidenced by the fashion for dressing up in Victorian costume and facial hair. Yes, it was a fad, but old photos and films became part of the visual landscape in a way they had never done before, and I think it was part of a reaction against the post-war obsession with modernity at all costs. The rejection of modernist architecture was part of all this. Jarman's films are saturated with the past - even though he is nearly always angrily rejecting it, attacking it, or satirising it or laughing at it.

Anyway Jarman, although a child of the 60s, came of age with the advent of punk and obviously felt far more comfortable with it ethos, such as it was, than with the hippies. And, as a gay man, he had more to reject. Although gay lib grew out of the 60s demands for liberation, free love was largely a heterosexual affair.
The Last of England, made in 1988, is a distillation of his feelings towards his native land. Made at the height of the AIDS panic/crisis, it's an angry, often confused but also elegaic vision of post-industrial decline, steeped in apocalyptic alienation yet replete with beautiful, startling images. It's full of home movies and 'found' footage, with a paradoxically upper-class voice speaking Jarman's narrative (actor Nigel Terry).
Today it looks a period piece and reminds me of the films we used to make at art school in the late 60s. Armed with a Super-8 camera (which is what Jarman used in many of his films), we went out into derelict houses and shot bizarre, meaningless little movies, which we took extremely seriously. There's a scene in The Last of England in which a couple of men have sex on a Union Jack spread out on a floor and it's the sort of filming we would love to have made in 1969.
The Garden was released in 1990 and by now Jarman knew he had full-blown AIDS. It's a strange film, made in the now-famous garden of his cabin in Dungeness. It's clearly an amazing place, inspirational and haunting, with the huge nuclear power station looming in the near distance and Jarman was obviously inspired by living there. The film's full of religious imagery - in Derek he talks about his education, and he was at St Juliana's, a private convent in Abingdon, for a while. I remember the place - we used to play them at netball. I'd be amazed if it's still there; it was one of those tiny little private schools, of which there were many in and around Oxford. Anyway, The Garden is full of Catholic imagery - obvously the Church had come out heavily against homosexuality, but in Jarman's films, there's always this split personality there, love and hate. There's a lot of gay martyrdom, and the whole Clause 4 debate and the AIDS panic must have engendered a feeling of intense persecution among gay men.
Much of The Garden is tediously tiresome, but I'm glad it was made, and it's great to have footage of his garden, as now it's become a bit of a tourist attraction, something I'm sure he would have hated.
Blue was his last film, and is simply a blue screen with a voice-over. By now Jarman was virtually blind, and the narrative chronicles his descent into the privations and huniliations of his treatment. It's rather wonderful and, typically, iconoclastic and challenging. It's funny, but in the interviews with him recorded for Derek, it's clear that he was such a nice man, funny and charming, with a great deal of self-deprecation - typically English, one might say, and that's clearly how he saw himself.
I'm looking forward to seeing some of his earlier films - they're rather addictive and compelling. I must mention the sound and music - it's tremendous. He worked with the same composers repeatedly, and in fact a glance at the IMDB will tell you that people worked with Jarman over and over again. There's the famous ones, such as Tilda Swinton, who could almost be called Jarman's muse, but many others turn up repeatedly. he obviously attracted people to hilm and they loved him - simple as that. It shows.

There Will Be Blood (part 2)

I went to see this again last night, and my view broadened and deepened that this is one of the finest films in recent memory. I took a son who hadn't seen it before and the one who came with me the first time came too as, like me, he was keen to see it again.
The beginning has to be one of the most audacious ever attempted. Plainview is prospecting, alone, the camera follows his progress in close-up, and there's no dialogue. It's a brutal scene, and it gives us an astonishingly visceral picture of the lives of the people who forgedAmerica, and created its wealth. I noticed the sound this time - it gets you right into the heart of Plainview's world. Jonny Greenwood's music is crucial, dissonant, unearthly at times - it's the bedrock of the film.
The first time I saw the film I wasn't really aware that Paul Dano played 2 parts - Paul and Eli Sunday; I sort of knew but forgot, as Paul appears near the beginning, informing Daniel that there's oil on his family's land. Eli, of course is his brother, the preacher. It's deliberately confusing, I think, and I've seen it suggested that it's intentionally ambiguous; that we're never quite sure that Paul and Eli are distinctive characters - they could be two sides of the same person. It's an intriguing possibility, and perfectly plausible, given the intelligence and complexity with which the film is constructed.
It's a film of extraordinary richness, but I don't know if I could ever bring myself to watch it on DVD. It demands to be seen on the big screen. A masterpiece.

Emeric Pressburger

I've just watched a tape I found which I'd made years ago of a Channel 4 documentary, made by Kevin McDonald (director of The Last King of Scotland and Touching the Void among much else), about the early life of his grandfather, Emeric Pressburger. Pressburger life pretty much typified that of many central Europeans. Born in 1902 in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he found himself to be living in Romania after the First World War had redrawn the boundaries of much of Europe. This radically changed everything as his hitherto comfortable and prosperous Jewish family life was now heavily circumscribed by Romanian law. He moved to Germany and worked for UFA, the revolutionary film studios which flourished in Weimar Germany, then, of course his life changed yet again as the Nazis gained power. Anyway, like many emigres he landed in Britain, thankfully long before war broke out, and, , after sleeping rough for a while, he found shelter in a block of flats in Marble Arch which was entirely occupied by emigres.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, he met Michael Powell, the film director, and the rest is history. The pair, with Powell directing, and Pressburger's scripts, called their partnership the Archers, and were responsible for several landmark British films, such as A Matter of Life and Death, I Know Where I'm Going, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Black Narcissus, among many others.
McDonald's film focused on his early life, and how he found sanctuary in Britain, eventually developing a deep love of Britain and becomeing 'more British than the British'. Many of his films, notably Colonel Blimp, touch on this theme, and Anton Walbrook, who plays the German soldier who flees Nazism in the Thirties, embodies the deep affection for, and admiration of, British culture which Pressburger learned to love so much. Walbrook played another gentle German in the Archers' 49th Parallel, and this was a theme that recurred throughout their films, that of the almost mystical love of Britain by foreigners, which was intensified in the crucible of war.
Anyway, a fascinating film, and one which had a special resonance in the week in which the BBC explored the impact of the torrent of immigration, notably from Eastern Europe, on British society, in their White Season.