world enough and time
Copyright 2009 Andrew Lucre (with obvious free sources)
Do we really? Ever. Want to be where we are? Always hankering for somewhere/something at least once removed? Isn't the Christmas/New Year season a time where we inhabit that limbo or libidiness of just once in a lifetime? Do we take what seems such an innocent step into the shallow tide only to fall flat on our face in the countenance of a higher something. Curtis in Take Shelter (UK distributed by The Works) is perhaps the Everyman of our civilisation. He doesn't want to say 'I told you so' in post-self congratulation, rather, 'I think it is so' in celebration of what it is to behold our planet. Such is the magnetic truth of Jeff Nichols' film (also a Sundance 2011 hit) that any cavils are out-anchored by such a dictum. Particularly in America where normality is projected as so much of a given. After Lars von Trier's typical laser dissection of family-hiss in the face of Melancholia and Earth's extinction in all its Medusa beautification, Another Earth (opener for this year's Raindance Film Fest and this year's Sundance Fest hit and on general release by Fox Searchlight, Dec 9) proved an elegaic tale of how otherness ain't necessarily so. While there are many similarities to the 1969 Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (where everything is an earth but in reverse) Another Earth is more akin to the Philip K. Dick world of how everyday mundanity strangely proves the thing itself.
Fox Searchlight are proving to be a frontrunner for studio indie product: who'd have thought they'd ever take on a film for US distribution such as Shame (the latest from artist Steve McQueen)- Momentum releases in the UK. Like all McQueen's work to say it is 'about' something reduces the work to that only. Shame isn't just about sex addiction. It reeks of people trapped and embrassing architecture both of high-rise and its low-rise people. Of predicaments that are as unruly as the elements. And you'd have thought that the story of We Were Here had been recounted before but no. Sentiment that far outways sentimentality.
Terence Davies' adaption of Rattigan's play The Deep Blue Sea is another case in point. Anyone who knows their Rattigan knows that he was truly a dramatist precursor of John Osbourne's 'kitchen-sink' drama (reference the recent Royal National Theatre revivals) and not merely a slate to be wiped clean. Davies' film is a ballet of looks, desires, felled emotions in silent corridors that outweigh any historical context. Davies pushes the use of extant music to its exteme cinematic ends in his films - no less here than with Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto. Any film director who can match that lithe intensity let alone dance with its music of time should surely be allowed carte blanche to create whatever they wish in the future.
It's an interesting double-bill with Anthony Kimmins' My Own Executioner (B/W,1947) that had a rare showing (all that's available is a scratchy VHS copy) at Andrea Sabbadini's bi-ennial 6th European Psychoanalytic Film Festival this November. Conference delegate opinions were divided about the effectiveness of Kimmins Hollywood tropes e.g music, the trad romantic storyline but few were left unfascinated by the film's rare exploration of the analyst's daily practice and sometime dilemma in treating patients. Migration, the theme of this year's conference, also divided delegates. Some thought that the festival should have focusssed more on literal pycho-geographical films rather than those more to do with border crossings within the mind such as My Own Executioner, Hotel Sahara (Bettina Haasen, Germany, 2009) or the stories of steam room men in Steam of Life (Joonas Berghall and Mika Hotakainen, Finland, 2010).
Yet Sabbadini's choices made for lively discussion and dissent foregrounding the important issue that the pain and trauma of displacement is relative only to the patient's own boundaries that may be even more destructive than anything literally geographic. How a film such as The Reverse (Borys Lankosz, Poland, 2009) couldn't obtain a wider release outside its native audience is tantamount to the fickle politics of world film distribution. It's use of poignancy and wit alleviating the burden of historical guilt crosses the divide of art-house and mainstream so very easily. And the denouement of mother/son reunification is a fascinating masochistic/sado-masochism. Should she have told her son who his father was really? Did she survive through denying her son knowledge? Is delaying the inevitable unearthing of history's walls preferable to its more immediate traumatic opposite? (One is reminded of one of this year's most provocative films Jim Loach's Oranges and Sunshine.) The festival opened with Charlie Chaplin's classic 1917 short The Immigrant and closed with Stefan Le Lay's 2009 short The Postcard about a seaside postcard come to life - its male figure falling (literally) for a girl on the opposite kiosk rack. Even with the transgression of boundaries a happy life is possible - and with the help of analysis it need not be just a sugar pill/rush alternative. A totally apposite way of ending the festival.
And if you fancied that paragraph:
Surviving Life -Jan Svankmajer
Ashes and Diamonds
Zelig
Hannah and Her Sisters
Midnight in Paris (out soon on DVD and Blu-ray)
and The Artist
Film and art aren't an escape from reality - in so many ways they ARE the reality. As actor Morgan Freeman said in a recent CNN interview, god resides in ourselves. In our actions. And it's sad that films are seen less and less in communal picture palace gatherings and so more often on a computer screen. The birth of cinema was a monadic epiphany - the one in many and the many in one as humans gathered to be personally awed and collectively challenged. Martin Scorsese's Hugo 3D (and the 3D is pin-point stunning) bear-hugs the beauty of cinema experience urging us to move on in our lives but not at the expense of forgetting and erasing the past. Adapted by John Logan from Brian Selznick’s 2007 illustrated childrens' book The Invention of Hugo Cabret it's about lost hearts and newfound happiness. And in that regard some may find it all just a wee unchallenging. Yet the film's innocence, grace and minutai of detail trick one into thinking you've seen more than you have. It isn't clever like Christopher Nolan or with the Jean-Pierre Jeunet's (Delicatessen) belligerent, bizarre joy. It is quite simply holding out a hand to feel the wind. Of dipping toes gingerly into the sea even though one senses there is no immediate danger. The film's biographical truth is Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) an extraordinary chap who, inspired by the Lumière Brothers, unsuccessfully tried to buy a camera from them and instead made his own, made his own films, directing, acting, supervising the sets, hand colouring the negatives - 531 films between 1896 and 1914 . Only to see WWI and most of the celluloid melted down into heels for ladies' shoes (200 films survived). A more depressing tale just could not be told.
A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la Lune) made in 1902 was restored in colour for the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and the London Film Festival of this year screened before Roberto Rossellini's restored rarely seen 1952 comedy about morals, corruption and a magical camera that kills The Machine That Kills People.
And there's more than a sense at the end of the movie that the kids have have had a jolly good nourishing time but that the adults must close the book and get on with grown-up chores. It doesn't feel that this is inadvertent on Scorsese's part. One couldn't have hoped for better casting in Sacha Baron Cohen's dour railway station cop who relentlessly tries ridding the station of the pesky orphan kids. And one wonders whether his bitterness of life has only temporarily disappeared so scared both physically and mentally was he by a war. Kids will leave this film feeling rather smarter than their adults. Yet in that truth lies responsible on their part not to squander that youthful intelligence on manipulative techno frippery. Rather, to harness that observation for detail, their agility of thought, and not so much to create a better world but be cognoscent that they have that power first and foremost within themselves.
Pipilotti Rist's Eyeball Massage and George Condo at the Hayward Gallery (look out for the tiny surreal 'dolls house' twinkling the Internationale
and Gerhard Richter at the Tate Modern
With much the same message, Aardman, the wacky Wallace & Gromit animation Brit company, have teamed up with Sony for Arthur Christmas. It's a tour de force of technical wizardry and character detail that's unlikely to leave anyone disgruntled (except maybe an old fogey of a reindeer).
Make Someone Happy (Performed by Bill Nighy)
Arthur Christmas (Suite) - Harry Gregson Williams
Tony Bennett/Bill Evans - Make Someone Happy
vintage (that only youth will provide) 1963 Stevie Wonder:
Doris Day
Judy Garland performed live at the Russel Hotel in London, 29 November, 1964. Judy was appearing for her fan-club, and was accompanied by future husband Mark Herron at the event.
Barbra Streisand (2009).
and the version that inspired them:
And just because they were such an adorable pair of songwriters some Comden and Green: Comes once in a Lifetime from their musical Subways are for Sleeping- Judy Garland's version
Doris Day: Who Knows What Might Have Been recorded on Nov. 21, 1961
Mary Martin - Never Never Land fromPeter Pan)
