some things that happen for the first time, Seem to be happening again....
Sunday, 20 October 2013
Sunday, 6 October 2013
A planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.
[we are very attentive to structural engineering on Planet Lucre given scarce resources. So let it be said that even if Maestro Bonynge was ever wrong it's hard to believe that Bellini would have doubted his integrity. Checking the original score, Bellini never writes lento or piu espressivo, lamentoso, patetico even tenerezza in the opera's finale. He very simply does firstly ask for a lento, and then almost instantaneously, a tempo, then piu moderato with a calendo (an interpreted slowing), and at the very least a meno assai (less fast) but then again, an incalzando (hurrying) a crescendo.] In layman's terms: Bellini asks that Norma doesn't have a little sob and plead to her father. It isn't even a human rights issue. It is simply: being human.
Moreover, what Norma really feels is weeping buckets at the end of the opera but you can't sing bel canto and do that at the same time. Or can you?! No name dropping but a very famous and respected Broadway star once told me that in a certain play she had to do the lines over and over and over and over AND over again so she didn't weep and feel the pain. It's the audience who should feel the heartbreak. That's why Callas is so much more than even a legend.
One wishes that a full recording was released of Werner Schroeter's 2003 passionate Dusseldorf staging of Norma (there are tantalizing excerpts filmed by Alexander Kluge in his Schroeter doc). And 'they' weren't exactly beating down the doors to see a NYFF preview of the great Jean-Luc (Godard)'s Hail Mary (Je vous salue Marie) (1985) that 'arguably' has one of the most fascinating filmic uses of Mahler's 9th Symphony in the history of the planet! So go and enjoy with like-minds the sheer brilliant Godard artistry in the NYFF associated retrospective: Passion is well-worth seeing again on the big screen, Nôtre musique. Not showing is Godard's contributon to Don Boyd's Aria: Lully's Armide that Godard (unhappy with the result) entirely re-shot at his own expense.
Tuesday, 1 October 2013
...___...
...___...,,,
Something that was real, something that they could see and touch. An aim not devoid of merit. ...when we have control:...[We] never had control! That's the illusion!
Something that was real, something that they could see and touch. An aim not devoid of merit. ...when we have control:...[We] never had control! That's the illusion!
Sunday, 29 September 2013
but a wilderness of tigers
51st New York Film Festival
Many of the New York Film Fest films are also playing in this year’s London Film Festival. But there are also many, like The Square that aren’t. And seeing dozens of films in a short space of time really does sharpen your awareness of where one is on this planet. Maybe it’s true now of most cities in the world but take away someone’s mobile and internet for just 2 days and they go into withdrawal spasms. The Square is a perfect example of what the new tools of mobile and internet video are best at: disseminating crucial info that doesn’t always hit the mainstream press. As one commentator noted in The Square, one of the mainstream media termed Cairo’s protesters as “so-called revolutionaries”. If there’s a criticism to be made of The Square (and after all it was being edited up to the minute and post-Sundance screening with all the changes taking place in Egyptian rule) it is that more factual background would help i.e. why the military is so much more powerful there than in other countries. As the director noted in her Q&A (but not in the film) many young men see the military as the only place where they can rise through the ranks and succeed.
Another political subject, Agnieszka Holland’s mini-series Burning Bush begs the question would a documentary about the subject not be more interesting? Everything looks fantastic, great to see all those Czech actors in parts other than Hollywood terrorists or Eastern girlfriends and every music cue just that bit too ‘on cue’. ‘Godfather’ of documentary film Frederick Wiseman offered what was to many an overlong (4hours) mixed blessing in At Berkeley (he’s finishing up his latest on London’s National Gallery). In his usual style he just lets the camera roll, allowing his footage to speak for itself with no music or explanatory titles. Shot over 12 weeks, he confesses that his style is “novelistic rather than journalistic”. And it is interesting enough to not seem like a long haul, but again, many of my colleagues found that it lacked focus. One interesting element is the issue of middle-class students being caught ‘between a rock and a hard place’ when it came to rising tuition fees (the entire campus is down to one lawn-mower) and minority group grants- a girl literally bursting into tears about her parents’ predicament. Another (arguable) idea was floated was that “America gives you a shot [at success]. It doesn’t promise you everything.” And you do have to live in this country to understand the complexity of that idea. That success is really ameliorated by being constantly competitive (and therefore aggressive to your competition) and dare it be said that no-one ever makes significant money n America without ‘kissing arse’. The upshot is most thankfully that Berkeley is teaching students to think outside the box. Hopefully that includes the box of American ‘successes’.
Sundance Special Jury Prize doc winner American Promise was 14 years in the making as middle-class parents Joe and Michele pointed a camera on their son Idris and his best mate Seun. If you ever thought that the ‘race’ issue had been solved post-Obama then think again (as was clearly debated too by students in At Berkeley). These kids are at the prestigious private school of Dalton (Manhattan). And they are the token non-white kids. As one teacher notes quite aptly, ‘no one ever thinks if putting white kids in a black school’. Is this doc too long too? Well maybe. And yet the subject is still so interesting that it almost demands Wiseman’s long form approach to impart even more information. The ADHD question of Idris is also an interesting one and how Afro-Americans are ‘wrongly’ more often misdiagnosed due to non accounting for cultural differences.
Claude Lanzmann’s documentary The Last of the Unjust is in a league of its own. If one were to suggest to one’s ‘date’ seeing this documentary on a Friday night it may seem like a laughable line from a Woody Allen movie. But at over just under 4 hours it is truly a riveting masterpiece. All the more because the questions it asks painfully resonate far beyond the subject of the Holocaust. As its subject Benjamin Murmelstein quotes the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer: “All Jews were martyrs but not all Jews were saints”. Murmelstein likens the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt and it’s cremation furnace to the paradox of Rome’s Coliseum- that without the Jewish deaths there would be no need for a camp nor its occupants. A Catch-22 if ever there was one.
A more ‘entertaining’ shall we say doc of the Fest is The Dog- the ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ story of John Wojtowicz on whose bank robbery escapade the Al Pacino film Dog Day Afternoon was based. And there is an unflappable logic to one point he makes when speaking of being criticized for trying to make money out of his crime e.g. standing outside the bank after his release signing autographs and photos. ‘How much did Warner Brothers make out of my crime’? That begs a whole bigger question…
When it comes to ‘real life’ it is great to see a mini-retrospective (2 films plus her latest, Exhibition) in Emerging Artists (Fernando Eimbcke’s Club Sandwich is also well worth catching) of now stalwart London Film Festival fave Joanna Hogg. Her films really do hold their own in a very tough crowded Festival field. And what’s more with a totally individual voice. Her camera lingers on the mundane of human interaction culminating in a solitary mediation of where one is on this planet. And of course in a quirky British bent. It’s a world away from Indy American cinema but it is the same world.
More to come…
Many of the New York Film Fest films are also playing in this year’s London Film Festival. But there are also many, like The Square that aren’t. And seeing dozens of films in a short space of time really does sharpen your awareness of where one is on this planet. Maybe it’s true now of most cities in the world but take away someone’s mobile and internet for just 2 days and they go into withdrawal spasms. The Square is a perfect example of what the new tools of mobile and internet video are best at: disseminating crucial info that doesn’t always hit the mainstream press. As one commentator noted in The Square, one of the mainstream media termed Cairo’s protesters as “so-called revolutionaries”. If there’s a criticism to be made of The Square (and after all it was being edited up to the minute and post-Sundance screening with all the changes taking place in Egyptian rule) it is that more factual background would help i.e. why the military is so much more powerful there than in other countries. As the director noted in her Q&A (but not in the film) many young men see the military as the only place where they can rise through the ranks and succeed.
Another political subject, Agnieszka Holland’s mini-series Burning Bush begs the question would a documentary about the subject not be more interesting? Everything looks fantastic, great to see all those Czech actors in parts other than Hollywood terrorists or Eastern girlfriends and every music cue just that bit too ‘on cue’. ‘Godfather’ of documentary film Frederick Wiseman offered what was to many an overlong (4hours) mixed blessing in At Berkeley (he’s finishing up his latest on London’s National Gallery). In his usual style he just lets the camera roll, allowing his footage to speak for itself with no music or explanatory titles. Shot over 12 weeks, he confesses that his style is “novelistic rather than journalistic”. And it is interesting enough to not seem like a long haul, but again, many of my colleagues found that it lacked focus. One interesting element is the issue of middle-class students being caught ‘between a rock and a hard place’ when it came to rising tuition fees (the entire campus is down to one lawn-mower) and minority group grants- a girl literally bursting into tears about her parents’ predicament. Another (arguable) idea was floated was that “America gives you a shot [at success]. It doesn’t promise you everything.” And you do have to live in this country to understand the complexity of that idea. That success is really ameliorated by being constantly competitive (and therefore aggressive to your competition) and dare it be said that no-one ever makes significant money n America without ‘kissing arse’. The upshot is most thankfully that Berkeley is teaching students to think outside the box. Hopefully that includes the box of American ‘successes’.
Sundance Special Jury Prize doc winner American Promise was 14 years in the making as middle-class parents Joe and Michele pointed a camera on their son Idris and his best mate Seun. If you ever thought that the ‘race’ issue had been solved post-Obama then think again (as was clearly debated too by students in At Berkeley). These kids are at the prestigious private school of Dalton (Manhattan). And they are the token non-white kids. As one teacher notes quite aptly, ‘no one ever thinks if putting white kids in a black school’. Is this doc too long too? Well maybe. And yet the subject is still so interesting that it almost demands Wiseman’s long form approach to impart even more information. The ADHD question of Idris is also an interesting one and how Afro-Americans are ‘wrongly’ more often misdiagnosed due to non accounting for cultural differences.
Claude Lanzmann’s documentary The Last of the Unjust is in a league of its own. If one were to suggest to one’s ‘date’ seeing this documentary on a Friday night it may seem like a laughable line from a Woody Allen movie. But at over just under 4 hours it is truly a riveting masterpiece. All the more because the questions it asks painfully resonate far beyond the subject of the Holocaust. As its subject Benjamin Murmelstein quotes the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer: “All Jews were martyrs but not all Jews were saints”. Murmelstein likens the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt and it’s cremation furnace to the paradox of Rome’s Coliseum- that without the Jewish deaths there would be no need for a camp nor its occupants. A Catch-22 if ever there was one.
A more ‘entertaining’ shall we say doc of the Fest is The Dog- the ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ story of John Wojtowicz on whose bank robbery escapade the Al Pacino film Dog Day Afternoon was based. And there is an unflappable logic to one point he makes when speaking of being criticized for trying to make money out of his crime e.g. standing outside the bank after his release signing autographs and photos. ‘How much did Warner Brothers make out of my crime’? That begs a whole bigger question…
When it comes to ‘real life’ it is great to see a mini-retrospective (2 films plus her latest, Exhibition) in Emerging Artists (Fernando Eimbcke’s Club Sandwich is also well worth catching) of now stalwart London Film Festival fave Joanna Hogg. Her films really do hold their own in a very tough crowded Festival field. And what’s more with a totally individual voice. Her camera lingers on the mundane of human interaction culminating in a solitary mediation of where one is on this planet. And of course in a quirky British bent. It’s a world away from Indy American cinema but it is the same world.
More to come…
Tuesday, 17 September 2013
a foggy day in London town, picks me up/New York in June, where the he---ll were you?
is New York more exciting than London? Is it seasonal or is it...? Londoners (who've crossed the seas) would say (after only a week) and rather reluctantly: well yes. Whereas NYorkers would race to the defense of London (probably even if they'd never been there). The jury really is out on that one. We ponder only on that question twofold because a) a very London transport experience was to be had traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the subway this morning- the first day of 2013 New York Film Festival screenings and the subway is f***ed so we arrive 30 minutes late. Though some would say no great loss to Frederick Wiseman's 4hour documentary At Berkeley. And b) the MTA New York subway is heaven compared to London Underground's ...ah...well..umm: where does that devil in devil cake live? Or to put it more wisely: one needs to know what hell is like compared to take-away heaven!
The same criticism seems leveled at Wiseman's doco At Berkeley. Not enough, too little, too much. While writing continues on this and many other ummm delights please pay close attention to your stewardess video on survival:
William Kentridge: Second-hand Reading- VIDEO HERE
The same criticism seems leveled at Wiseman's doco At Berkeley. Not enough, too little, too much. While writing continues on this and many other ummm delights please pay close attention to your stewardess video on survival:
William Kentridge: Second-hand Reading- VIDEO HERE
Wednesday, 11 September 2013
of course what happens in New York ...stayles New York or is that Jersey...
of course, the plot of Allan Dwan's Silver Lode is a world, if not planet, neh solar system away from present day New York. Such honorable men, women and mutants. What say you Jennifer Lawrence....Of course sir Robert de Niro would say Everybody's Fine. I've been hearing about this old German film The Wave- is that some Japanese pic in which Virginia Woolf is now portrayed anime as a rock battered on the coastline? Or is she playing Sisyphus? Thought there was now a cure for that....How r u mr Harvey...love social media donst thou? What's a blog if one can't blig?
Monday, 9 September 2013
The LGBT Film Festival (NewFest) 2013
The LGBT Film Festival (NewFest) celebrates
its 25th anniversary, and with the U.S. Supreme Court gay marriage ruling what a
celebration to be had. So often with ‘themed issue’ festivals one approaches screenings with more than a little trepidation of ‘will this be agit-prop’?
Based on only seeing 3 films there’s not a scent of agit prop anywhere! Those
who can’t make tonight’s screening of Who’s Afraidof Vagina Wolf? (Mon Sept 9)- director Anna Margarita Albelo
attends for a Q & A- are strongly urged to find a copy. It may be sort of a
gay anthem Hollywood ending, but then, some things in life do happily end ever
after. Did we also say it was very, very funny and quite sad? The Festival’s closing night film (Sept 11) Chris Mason Johnson’s Test also ends if not happily then melancholic rather than maudlin. If you were
around circa 1985 the brilliantly remembered details in this film certainly
draw a smile e.g. not getting that phone call because the telephone cord is
tangled, and the remote yet strangely intimate answa-machine message that plays
like an old LP record - something that mobile phone messaging/mail just can’t
seem to beat. The acting is great, the music and for once superb dancing and
choreography. And actors who can dance!- they are all in close-up and there are
no doubles listed in the credits. Brian de Palma’s Passion was seen at last
year’s New York Film Festival and is what it is. And as with all de Palma
brilliantly is: exquisitely choreographed with some Jerome Robbins' ballet Afternoon
of a Faun thrown in for very good measure.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)