the living stones: cornwall (ithell colquhoun)

We came across Ithell Colquhoun’s artwork at an exhibition in Falmouth. The artwork, which could be classified under the rubric British Surrealism, is extraordinary. Vivid colour, complex forms, organic abstraction, much of it inspired by the Cornish landscape. Colquhoun was interested in the occult, and its relationship with nature. Yet, in this text dedicated to the time she spent in a corner of Cornwall called Vow Cave, where she had a cottage, she comes across as an extremely dry, level headed soul. The book’s chapters escort us on her journeys to witness folk fairs and find hidden wells. She is an archeologist/ anthropologist and her love for her adopted county is evident, even if the book lacks the strangeness and mystery of her artwork. 

What would the world be, once bereft 

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, 

O let them be left, wildness and wet; 

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

throne of blood (w&d kurosowa, w hideo oguni, shinobu hashimoto, ryûzô kikushima)

Cinemateca blesses us with a brief season of Kurosowa’s Shakespeares. For which one is grateful. Grateful to Cinemateca, grateful to cinema, grateful that we are allowed to sit in a cinema at all. Throne of Blood, the director’s take on Macbeth goes unashamedly epic. There’s a lot of galloping horses, a lot of dust and smoke and mist, some of the greatest costumes ever worn, and a truly brilliant closing sequences as Washizu, Kurosowa’s Macbeth, is pinned with arrows fired by his own men. This isn’t the only radical variation on Shakespeare’s narrative the director employs. The relationship between Washizu and his Lady Macbeth, Lady Washizu, is dark and compelling, as it shuold be, with Isuzu Yamada giving a mesmerising performance. But K introduces the twist that she’s pregnant, a fact which helps to justify Washizu’s decision to murder his old friend, Miki (Banquo). Kurosowa also has Washizu visit Lady Washizu as she frantically washes her hands, having gone mad at the end. Washizu has to confront the result of his actions in a way Shakespeare doesn’t make him. This leads to the closing sequence, where Toshirô Mifune’s, bravura acting feels completely right. This is a heroic, warrior Macbeth, brought down by his own code, in spite of his earthy, military goodwill, seen in the earlier scenes with his friend, Miki. The director relishes the clash between the theatre and cinema. There’s a grand theatricality of the spectacle at work in the film, something one can’t help thinking Shakespeare might have been jealous of. The martial elements of Macbeth operate on a thematic and aesthetic level. In the battle scenes the cinema screen becomes a vast stage; one which is in contrast to the pared down intimacy of the scenes with Lady Macbeth or the banquet. Macbeth becomes someone trapped between the exaggerated grandeur of war as spectacle and the intensity of the reduced palette of domestic life, a tension which overwhelms him. At least he dies spectacularly. A fitting end for a man whose machismo cannot be pinned down in the normal sphere of existence. 

paths of glory (w&d stanley kubrick, w. calder willingham, jim thompson)

It’s always intriguing to watch the early work of a maestro. What one sees in this film is Kubrick striving and occasionally achieving transcendence over material whose profundity is undermined by some B-movie tropes. Hence we have the secondary character actors with their quirks; the melodramatic set-up of a trial; the chiselled jaw of the leading man. The opening scene feels stagey, as two generals bat back and forth some heavy-handed dialogue. Initially, one struggles to see what’s distinctive about the film, what’s going to set it apart. Then, all of a sudden, we hit a battle sequence. It’s relentless, noisy, unpleasant, and lasts a good five minutes. Men try and cross No-Man’s-Land and they are cut to ribbons. The noise is positively off-putting and more than this, the sequence is purposefully anti-romantic. The sequence is the godfather of other famous war scenes: Saving Private Ryan; Atonement; Dunkirk. It’s far more shocking and savage than anything in Mendes’ recent 1917. It’s the first time the film reveals Kubrick’s brilliance at constructing epic moments and more soon follow. The editing and the cinematography of the court room scene is both precise and done with a flourish. Daringly, rather than keep the camera close on Douglas as he delivers his crucial, grandstand speech, we follow him from behind a chair, the camera tracking him as he strides back and forth. Kubrick’s cinematic vision subsequently shines through in two further grand set-piece scenes: the closing bar scene where a young German woman brings French troops to tears with a song and, most impressively, in the austere execution scene, which  foregoes any dramatic histrionics to deliver a terrifying representation of harsh injustice. It’s in these elaborate scenes that the film reveals the nascent craftsmanship of Kubrick, a director seeking to elevate his art above and beyond any kind of commercial imperative, something that feels remarkable and unusual for a 1950s Hollywood financed movie. 

curious footnote:

The actor Timothy Carey was fired during production. He was reportedly extremely difficult to work with, even to the extent of faking his own kidnapping, holding up the whole production.

nights of cabiria (w&d. fellini, w. ennio flaiano, tullio pinelli, pier paolo pasolini)

There’s a beautiful quote in the helpful back page of the BFI (NFT) notes from Fellini: “The film doesn’t have a resolution in the sense that there is a final scene where the story reaches a conclusion so definitive  that you no longer have to worry about Cabiria. I myself have worried about her fate ever since.” This quote strikes such a chord because it talks both about the film and about the act of creation. The filmmaker has constructed a character (played by his wife) with whom he has, you could say, fallen in love. At the end  of the film he has to leave her. Had he left her in a resolved ‘happy ending’ scenario, it would have been easier for Fellini to let her drift away, just another of his many characters. As it is, he leaves her deliberately in a state of uncertainty, and so he is compelled, as the quote says, to return to her fretfully, an uneasy god. 

The quote also feels relevant in so far as the happy ending the film almost postulates for Cabiria doesn’t seem faithful to her story. Cabiria is from the margins. This is by and large a cheerful film, one which celebrates its lead character and her world, in spite of its harshness. Cabiria is a survivor, a fantasist whose feet are nevertheless on the ground. Nevertheless, how many poor prostitutes struggling to get by in post-war Italy were granted a happy ending? Had Fellini given her this kind of resolution, it wouldn’t have felt truthful to the world he depicts. It would have been closer to Pretty Woman than Rome Open City. As it is Nights of Cabiria treads a fine line between social realism and something approaching disfunctional romcom. Cabiria is the sort of gutsy character producers dream of because they know an audience will fall in love with them. Giulietta Masina plays her with an irreverent delight. Even the breeze block shack she has created seems adorable on the inside. (A shack so reminiscent of the buildings in slums all over the world.) But, as much as the film delights in Cabiria’s joie-de-vivre (Chaplineque), the realities of her existence are discernible at the edges. A pitiable fate, living in a hole in the ground, lurks. We’ll never know whether Cabiria succumbed to this fate or escaped it. Fellini opted out of a definitive resolution, but in so doing he found a way of being truthful both to the spirit of his times and the spirit of his character. 

homo faber [max frisch]

Homo Faber is one of the more indefinable novels you are likely to read. Part travelogue, part mid-life crisis, part Oedipal nightmare. The novel relates an extended journey taken by Walter Faber, an engineer. His plane has to make a forced landing in the Mexican desert, which then propels him on a journey to meet an old friend in the Guatemalan backwoods. Only the old friend has recently hanged himself. He ends up back in New York where he takes a boat to Southampton and falls in love with a young woman who happens to be the daughter he never knew he had. In most hands this level of coincidence and melodrama might have rendered the tale ridiculous. No-one can plausibly experience this degree of bad fate that Faber does in the course of a few weeks. The gods are crueller to Frisch’s protagonist than they even were to Oedipus. Through it all, the narrator’s voice remains not so much stoic as near-imbecilic, insistent that he doesn’t believe in anything except for a rational twentieth century logic. Faber is almost heroically unmoved by the events that befall him. So much so, that one begins to believe the lady doth protest too much. At a certain point, it feels as though the object of the author’s irony is not so much his protagonist as the reader. Constantly expecting the protagonist to rebel against his fate, but instead finding someone whose tone remains phlegmatic and dispassionate throughout. The blurb suggested this was an ‘existential’ novel. Perhaps there is something of Mersault in all this, but there’s no angst, no expression of alienation. A closer comparison might be that other arch ironist, Houellebecq, another writer half-in love with a kind of Schopenhauerian cruelty. The writing is what might be described as flinty, with staccato dialogue and vivid descriptions. Vultures consume a dead donkey. A man contemplates the shape of his daughter’s hips. Frisch constantly pre-empts the drama, relating that which is to pass. The reader is placed in the god’s chair. Should we judge this curious anti-hero? Or should we accept that morality is flat, life is flat, shit happens, we just have to learn to live with it? 

le beau serge (chabrol) & les mistons (truffaut)

The NFT notes inform that Chabrol mostly financed the making of his first film himself, and that it did not get an immediate release. They don't say whether he felt this was a disaster or not, but note that he immediately got on with the making the next.

Chabrol's film showed at Cannes with Trauffaut's 20 minute short Les Mistons two years after they were both made. You can see why distributors and the like would have been wary. Le Beau Serge is psychologically hard hitting. The eponymous anti-hero is an alcoholic waster, treated with an even-handed sympathy. The narrative describes what happens when his childhood friend, Francois, returns to the village they grew up in. Francois is a well-dressed young man, who's been to university, whereas Serge is a scruffy drunk who never got close to realising his dream of becoming an architect. Francois' ostensible reason for returning to the village is to recuperate following a TB attack, but it becomes increasingly clear that he wants to save his old friend, something Serge, of course, resents.

In a sense, this is the kind of narrative that might have been groundbreaking at the time, but now has become commonplace, the stuff of TV mini-series set in rural backwaters. (In the UK McGovern's The Lakes comes to mind.) But it's not hard to grasp how, at the time, the superficially unsympathetic characterisation and harsh psychological realism would have seemed like a hard sell to distributors. Furthermore, there's no gloss on Chabrol's shire horse. In grimy black and white he captures the mud and rain and dourness of the rural environment. In the final sequence, as snow falls, he succeeds in convincing that this isn't pretty - it's cold and threatening. He pulls this off in part through the minimal, powerful lighting. The outdoor scenes where Francois goes searching for Serge are lit by nothing more than a flashlight, throwing stark, disorientating images onto the screen; conveying the genuine chaos of the night.

The comparison with Truffaut's twenty minute short is intriguing. Les Mistons is all bright Summer memories of youth, as a pack of brats pursue the beautiful Bernadette, who's awakened their adolescent curiosity and fear. This is a gentle, elegiac film, with a clear crowd-pleasing premise. On the surface it would be seem to be the complete opposite to Chabrol's harsh examination of rural life. What knits them together is something which could only be described as 'style'. Which is to say, the straightforward camerawork, the lack of any great emphasis on design, and the use of natural lighting as far as possible. Both films have a freshness to their approach, the sense of cobwebs being brushed away as a result of a wilful lack of artifice.

Cinema is always exploring the duality that exists between its desire to explore technological frontiers, and a corresponding desire to strip the technology back and let the stories speak for themselves. Hollywood, a cultural-technological adjunct of the world's most powerful economy, makes 'em bigger and brasher than anyone else, because technology has always driven cinematic expression. However, whenever a group of directors come together and step back from technology's tyranny, like the Neo-Realists or the Danish Dogmatics or the Nouvelle Vague, the audience feels as though it's learning to see what's in front of its eyes all over again. Like 19th century audiences who stared at the very first screenings of people walking through city streets, or horses running, we're reminded of the most simple cinematic miracle of all: the ability to capture life, once, and play it back again forever.

the seventh seal (dir bergman)

I called the Bergman aficionado from the Barbican. He said, a little sniffily, so you're going to see it for the ninetieth time. Not being a Bergman aficionado myself, I muttered that I remembered seeing it once on TV when I was 19, but even this was a distortion. I'd seen the opening frames, nothing more.

Max Von Sydow sitting on a Swedish beach playing chess with Mr De'ath himself. Horses up to their fetlocks in whippy Northern waters. An eerie, intellectual gloss permeating the scene.

During these first few frames, imposing though they are, I feared that The Seventh Seal was going to prove too austere, too like a Calvinesque cathedral. Beautiful yet far from heart-warming. Which is the preconceived model of a Bergman film, a filmmaker most know more through Woody Allen's failed attempts to become him than his work itself.

The screen was disappointingly small and the print far from great. I girded my loins and prepared to bathe worthily in the great auteur's gloom, as Max Von Sydow set off with his page to avoid the plague.

If the reader wants to retain the Bergmanesque myth, stop here. Because the film itself fails to honour it. Strange things start to happen. A couple, she beautiful, he a quirky fool, awake in a meadow, play with their child, clown around. A blacksmith loses his wife to a knavish actor, then wins her back in scenes of knockabout comedy. The tone of the film becomes warm, comic, charming.

In a way The Seventh Seal can be summarised as a Black Death Road Movie. Which might have a Tarantino/ Rodriguez ring to it. Bergman's sensibility seems populist. He creates characters who are lovable, and exposes them to danger. The audience roots for their survival. Death seems more of a vengeful sprite than a macabre ghoul. The heavy handed costume and make-up worn by Bengt Ekerot loses any taint of horror, as he plots and plans. This is a character from a medieval morality play, a villain and a rogue, whose gleeful sense of humour is revealed in the film's theatrical closing shot.

The wider philosophical and psychological context of the movie passed me by. No doubt there were things that I missed. Yet, like Beckett, another author whose work is categorised as much by its reputation as its actuality, it would be easy to lose sight of the manifest entertainer at work, were one to dwell too ornately on the significance of the imagery. The title, The Seventh Seal has a portentous ring to it, which the film does not shy away from, but Bergman has been careful to root his fatalism within a kernel of earthy joy. So when Von Sydow is asked by Death at the end whether his stay of execution has been worth while, we, the audience know exactly what he means when he replies that it certainly has.

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Note: Less than an hour after writing this I learn that Mr De'ath has caught up with Ingmar Bergman, who shall be playing chess no more.