globe - life in shakespeare’s london [catherine arnold]

This will be the final entry in the blog for 2017, as I soon depart for a land beyond the reach of the internet, more or less. Which will be like going back in time. To a time I cannot help but be envious of, those innocent days when the planet was still a place to roam free, with all the risk and adventure which that implied.

Of course, I am guilty of hyperbole. The planet, or at least our anthropocene planet, has gone through various revolutions of technology and communication. Globe describes one of them. Having read more than a few Shakespeare books of late, this one stands out for the way in which the author places the playwright within the context of his times. Not least making it clear what a young, pristine craft the art of playwrighting was when he arrived on the scene. The pioneers were also the definers; it could be argued that the learning curve in playwrighting is all wrong. The craft reached a peak in this country within fifty years of being initiated and it’s never scaled those heights again. Which might be a little harsh on the likes of Shaw, Pinter, Churchill and their ilk, but there’s no denying the glory of the Elizabethan stage, an explosion of creativity, shaped by ambitious, competitive young men desperate to make their mark. 

Arnold’s book navigates the tricky task of writing about an elusive subject with efficiency. Unlike Shapiro, she doesn’t speculate too much on his motives or the subtexts of his plays. Instead, she carefully lays the groundwork for an understanding of the socio-cultural environment Shakespeare belonged to. A clear love for London helps in this; she reserves her greatest flights of fancy for a re-imagining of the city as it might have been then. The book also does a fine job of tracing the links between Shakespeare and his contemporaries Greene, Marlowe and Johnson. All in all it’s an engaging read and an excellent introduction for anyone wanting to get a handle on who the mysterious genius might have been, he who surfed the net of his new art form with such remarkable agility. 

blow up (w&d michelangelo antonioni, w tonino guerra, julio cortázar, edward bond)

Blow Up is one of those films which has a constant presence at the back of the mind. You imagine you know it backwards. Which is why it’s so good to get the opportunity to see it again on the cinema screen and realise that, in keeping with the themes of the film, what you imagined isn’t necessarily the same film as the one that’s really there. 

For example, I remembered the fake tennis match at the end, but hadn’t remembered that it came, precisely, at the end. It’s an act of sheer brio. A dozen painted-faced youths turn up and play pretend tennis and that’s that. An act of consummate narrative brilliance, pulling all the theoretical threads of the film together whilst making it crystal clear (or crystal opaque) that there’s no use hoping for a neat plot resolution. 

In case you hadn’t got it, this is a film about perception. What we see, what we think we see, what we imagine we see and what we don’t see. Reading some of the notes about the film, there seems to be a suggestion that Antonioni wasn’t interested in dialogue, but this seems like another oversight. Besides the famous “I am in Paris” line, one of the great pre-Lynchian Lynchian moments, there are also some nailed on exchanges as Hemmings’ Thomas talks to Sarah Miles about what he has or hasn’t seen. At other moments the dialogue feels like another musical note in a film that is so obsessive about composition. The lines might feel as though they’re discordant, but that’s part of the film’s deliberate discordance. As is Hemmings’ hyper-active acting, which rather than being forced, feels representative of a time when there was a furious energy at play, but an energy which was never clear as to what its objectives were. 

There is even a latent energy in the propeller which Thomas buys, the implication of a movement which has been stilled. Which is also a way of viewing photography. Roland Barthes’ punctum: the moment which the photograph captures and the unseen life contained within that image’s crystallisation. It might be that Antonioni’s film contains a plea for us to look harder, to penetrate the hidden corners of the visible in order to glimpse the supposedly invisible. Something which a society which has become increasingly image-dependent, without in any way improving its faculty for reading those images, would do well to heed. Further to that, you can see in Blow-Up the way that history’s tendrils stretch back to that supposedly revolutionary time of the swinging sixties, which was far from being all that it appeared. Rather than being the advent of a utopic freedom, it was actually the dawning of advanced materialism. Another Antonioni quote states that he didn’t want the film to be a London film, but the images which capture a city at the beginning of a process of transformation towards the modern behemoth it is still becoming, make it unequivocally a London film. And one of the greatest, without a shadow of a doubt. 

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Note - Edward Bond has a scriptwriting credit for English dialogue, adding to the impression that the film’s dialogue was something that was taken more seriously than has been suggested. With the director, Guerra, Bond and Cortazar on the script side, one wonders if there’s ever been a stronger script team put together for a movie. 

flights [olga tokarczuk]

Flights is almost two books for the price of one. The book is constructed around the notebooks of a travelling woman, who one takes to be the author, as she moves around the world, reflecting on the nature of travel. These observations are made up of brief sections, often less than a page long. In amongst these observations are threaded various stories, some modern, some historical. These stories make up the second part of the book. A man whose wife and child go missing on a Croatian island. A Dutch pioneer of anatomy who becomes obsessed by his own amputated leg. A woman in Moscow who walks out of her own life. Observations from the notebooks infiltrate the stories, so that the reader can glimpse the craft of the author’s architecture. As the book unfolds the recurring theme of the body begins to emerge. What’s revealed when we delve beneath the flesh?  What is a body, after all? Is the body in one place the same as the body in another? Tokarczuk’s restlessness fuels her writing. The book’s structure mirrors the subject of its enquiry, showing the arteries, intestines etc, which sustain the vital organs. Which lends the book a curious, occasionally frustrating brilliance, as we dip into one narrative only to be whisked on to the next. Which, one supposes, is also akin to the process of travelling. On the one hand a superficial occupation which means that you never get to know the place you’re visiting with any great degree of profundity; but also a means to enhance the horizons of the mind, to begin to be able to gauge the extent, variety and richness of this world we have been given to inhabit. 

news from planet mars (w&d dominik moll, w gilles marchand)

How we loved Lemming. Not to mention Harry He’s Here to Help. I think they’re some of my favourite movies from around the turn of the century. Deadpan humour, a sardonic, Hitchcokian slant. Moll was one of the most important filmmakers around, one whose decidedly European sensibility (should there be such a thing) managed to get a foothold in British cinemas. And then, nada, for over a decade. In fact, I note from IMDB that he made The Monk in 2011, a film which passed me by. From time to time, I would wonder, whatever happened to Dominik Moll? So when, casually browsing the Cinemateca webpage, I saw a new Moll film, it was too good an opportunity to miss. 

News From Planet Mars, to give it its English title, is a likeable, if somewhat predictable tale of a downtrodden man who has to turn his life around. Philippe Mars lives in his high rise Paris flat, separated from his TV presenter wife. The film catches up with him whilst she’s on location in Brussels, covering a Euro summit, meaning he has their two teenage the kids for an indeterminate time. His kids think he’s a loser. And it looks as though they’re right. His ear is accidentally severed by a psychopathic work colleague. He survives, as does his ear, but the colleague ends up moving into his flat, and then bringing his equally disturbed would-be girlfriend too. Everything that can go wrong for Phillipe does. But finally he turns the corner, regains his kids’ respect and realises he has to quit his dead-end job. It’s all a bit neat and tame. There are a few touches reminiscent of prime Moll: animals on the loose; the ear incident; the sudden disposal of his sister’s dog, but these are garnishes. 

Whilst it’s good to have Moll back, the edginess of his earlier work doesn’t shine through here. Looking back, it feels as though Europe has become a far less stable place in the last ten years. The uneasiness which underpins Moll’s best work feels prophetic of a society where you can no longer take things for granted, where the carpet is moving under you. Perhaps modernity has caught up with Dominik Moll and it’s left him uncertain where to go next. Like the rest of us. 

you were never really here (w&d lynne ramsay)

Ramsay’s film is one of those frustrating films which are better than most others, but still not nearly as good as you feel it might have been. Joaquin Phoenix, verging on the portly, is military vet who makes a living out of carrying out hits with nothing more than a hammer. He’s haunted by a multi-layered traumatic past, revealed in gossamer-thin flashbacks. There’s the recurrent image of a body/ head twisted in fabric, a link to Ratcatcher. There’s an intensity of image which is both beautiful and potent. The fact that Phoenix barely speaks is immaterial: we still know how his mind works. Using a fertile cinematic grammar, Ramsey explores his psyche through an exploration of the image. 

However, You Were Never Really There is, essentially, a B-Movie. There’s very little in the way of narrative development and the storyline of the Phoenix character deciding he has to rescue a young girl feels like an excuse for a narrative. There’s none of the play of Alice in the Cities, a movie which is perhaps comparable in terms of an older man constructing an unlikely bond with a girl. In effect this is a film with an incredibly detailed surface, without suggesting there’s all that much beneath it. Perhaps it should be approached os an exercise in aesthetics, but the violence (implicit rather than explicit)  carries its own baggage: it is justified? Is a narrative constructed around a violent killer viable entertainment fodder? Lynn Ramsay does Tarantino seems a bit unlikely, but this might have been the film’s real hook. Instead it feels as though the filmmaker shies away from the more complex implications of her chosen story. 

pond [claire-louise bennett]

I am seated in the upper terrace of the food court in Paddington Station. On the table is a coffee of some description, a piece of carrot cake, a phone, this laptop and a book. The book is called Pond. It’s published by Fitzcarraldo, and their books are highly distinctive, with the same blue cover, so if anyone were to pass by who knew anything about them, they might say to me - Which one is that? But I don’t think that’s going to happen. Neither is the author of the book going to appear and say, Oh look, you’re reading my book. Because these things don’t happen. Not in London anyway. They might do in Montevideo. I’m musing about this somewhat idly because I met the author a few months ago, in Montevideo, and told her that when I went back to London, I’d read Pond. I could have bought it as a kindle book beforehand I suppose but I had a feeling that I wouldn’t want to read it digitally. Some books you can read on a screen, and some you can’t. Or, if you do, they lose something. For something reason. Anyway, I’m reading it now. And I can’t remember all that much. It was a sunny day in a leafy garden, Spring time. I was with the man from the British Council, who I don’t really know, and who, it emerged, had an interest in punk, which made him seem far more human than most men from the British Council, who belong to a strange organisation which merely exists in order to remind people that once upon a time, Great Britain, (to give it one of its names) was a concept that had cultural weight, a weight that is now so diminished or crinolined that you’d struggle to feel it if it cuddled up and nestled in your arms. I’ve finished my coffee. That last remark might not be fair to the British Council. It might be full of a vibrant modernity I’ve never been observant enough to discern. Anyway, that was a few months ago and the three of us had a convivial conversation about how novels do or don’t work and I threw in the name of Bernhard as a reference for where I thought the author might be coming from, but I was winging it really, just chucking stuff out there, as you do. Now that I’m actually reading the book it makes me think about other writers. Like Proust or Joyce, or my friend who wrote to me for two months about nothing at all, really, just the fluff of life, and it was the most captivating thing in the world. And I thought that writing, real writing, is the capturing of the parallel life that we constantly live. The life we lead in our minds alongside the life we lead with our bodies. Not the life we lead with the things we say or do. All the rest. The warp and the woof. Which is the hardest thing of all to capture because it’s always just there and then it’s gone. And if you try and capture it and you don’t do it ever so well it’s just verbiage. Cabbage. Some kind of hideous puree which is supposedly nutritious for babies but tastes like recycled codswallop. But if you do it right, it’s like a magic trick. Someone just came over and removed the empty coffee cup and the wrapping of the now-consumed carrot cake. They took them away whilst I was writing and although I looked up at them they didn’t even glance at me. Let alone the blue book on the table. It’s so hard to connect in the modern world that it’s a miracle whenever anyone succeeds. On which note I should probably go to Heathrow and catch my flight back to South America.