02.28.06
Posted in Forteana, Dreaming of England, Film, Flotsam at 1:17 pm by Jon
I’m horribly aware that I’m not posting much here again, as the parcels of time I have to hand tend to be small right now. So, the last resort of the harrassed blogger, I resort to lists. Here are five things that have been giving me great joy over the last few weeks:
- The North York Moors
- Life on Mars, starring the equally excellent John Simm and Philip Glenister (who, in a moment of brilliance, seems to have partly based his rough & ready copper on Brian Clough)
- Battrick, the cricket management game
- Kate Bush
- Babies who sleep through the night
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09.16.05
Posted in Film, Throat singing at 8:39 am by Jon
“What I wanted to do was go right to the heart of the North. When it’s -25, you don’t hear lower registers. You hear the cracking of snow, the wind and breathing, people talking. So then, there’s only the flute and voices, and the cracking comes from the percussion.”
Tantalising news seeps through of a showing tonight of the classic documentary of Inuit life, Nanook of the North with a new soundtrack of flutes, drums and throatsinging. Although I’ve concentrated on Tuvan throatsinging in the past, the techniques are found in several cultures, including parts of Southern Africa and among the Inuits. Sadly for me, the performance is in Toronto.
The Nunatsiaq News, from which this article derives, appears to serve a territory that had previously escaped my attention, Nunavut:
“In the Inuit language of Inuktitut, Nunavut means “Our Land”. It is the name given to the ancestral home of the Inuit of the central and eastern Arctic, and to the new Territory of Nunavut in Canada’s eastern Arctic.
“
Nunavut was created from part of the Northwest Territories of Canada on 1 April 1999.
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01.04.05
Posted in Film at 5:14 pm by
“I try to listen out for things - accidents and coincidences and hidden messages. I am a person who always finds photographs on the street and I think they are messages for me.”
Inadvertantly continuing the paranoia/edges of perception trope from the previous post, the next thing I read contains the lines above. It’s the brilliant, idiosyncratic Lukas Moodyson talking about how he doesn’t know what he’ll do next, and how he is certainly not the designated son of Ingmar Bergman:
“I was putting together a list - just because I like lists - of the things that have influenced me most in my life. And at number one was the Cure. At two, three and four were Swedish music and writers you won’t have heard of. And Morrissey was at number five. I tried to put some films in there but the first director was David Lynch at number eight, and that was more because of Twin Peaks than anything else. So you see, Bergman really was not a major influence.”
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Posted in Forteana, Film at 5:06 pm by
The winds must be whispering again. A film based on Electronic Voice Phenomena is about to be released, and the excellent Mind Hacks site is talking about the balance between our bottom-up experience of the world and our top-down interpretation of it:
You can see your top-down processes at work best in situations where the bottom-up processes are weak. With vision this might be in the dark, or where you only glimpse something or someone for a fraction of a second. In hearing this might be where background noise is loud. Poor resolution, brief or noisy information tips the balance in favor of top-down information. What we see comes to reflect more of what we already know and what we expect. Hence we see things in the dark: our brains fill in what is most likely there, what might be there, or what we fear could be there, based on small clues from what actually is perceivable there.
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10.25.04
Posted in Film at 1:42 pm by
Michael Winterbottom’s controversial new film, 9 Songs, is to be released uncut.
This doesn’t, of course, mean that it was in danger of going to go down to only eight Songs by various popular alternative bands. It’s the bits in between the songs (which are, um, full of bits), that were under consideration.
Winterbottom - whose Welcome to Sarajevo and adaptation of Jude the Obscure were two of the glummest films of recent years - is undeniably a serious film-maker. Quite why he decided to make a film that features only shagging and shaggy haircuts is a little beyond me, but I’m sure all will become - abundantly - clear when it’s released in February.
In the meantime, the BBFC has added to the gaity of nations by setting the Ann Widdecombes of this world a moral conundrum. According to their director of communication, Sue Clarke, although anyone is welcome to complain, only complaints from people who had seen the film were likely to be taken seriously.
No statement could be more expressive of the 180 degree turn in the BBFC’s attitude in recent years than this calculated brush off to the Concerned of Middle England. Ann Widdecombe won’t be able to complain unless she admits first that she paid her tenner to watch an hour and a half real rumpo show.
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10.12.04
Posted in Film at 4:35 pm by
I’m slowly growing to love BBC Four. It’s a slow affair because Four is so desperately, despairingly bad at telling you what lovely things it’s up to.
Take this week’s Lukas Moodysson season.
Until ten minutes ago I didn’t know there was one.
It seems that I’ve already missed the dark and daring LILYA 4-EVER, much to my chagrin. I’ve just discovered in time that Moodysson’s first film, Show Me Love is showing late tonight (meaning that I must finally work out how to persuade my video to record from Freeview). Finally, Moodysson’s best-known work, Together is showing on Friday.
Great; but what I want is to be told, in advance, that there’s a Moodysson season coming.
(Addendum: Aha! There is a weekly BBC Four newsletter , as well as a monthly one for the channel’s extensive (if dumbly named) documentary strand, Storyville. Sign up for them here.)
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10.07.04
Posted in Film at 1:18 pm by
A quick thought.
I think alone of film magazines I’ve seen, only the BFI’s venerable Sight & Sound does anything other than lump the plot in with the review. Sight & Sound gives you three sections.
The first lists extensive credits (though not, if you look closely, complete credits: every song on the soundtrack will be be listed, but only heads of department will be given amongst the actual film-makers).
The second gives the plot, in horrible detail.
The third section is the review.
Unfortunately for those who would really rather not have the plot given away, the review section tends to assume knowledge of the plot summary, rather defeating the object of the exercise.
Now the idea: what I’d like is film reviews (in particular) divided into two sections. The first part to be read before seeing the film, essentially telling you the genre and style, the overall competence and guiding you on whether the film is worth your time and effort.
The second part is the analysis, to be read only after seeing the film in question. This is the part which is happily left out of tabloid reviews, but causes much heartache in broadsheets. Your broadsheet reviewer earns his or her beans through skill at analysis, not awarding stars. And some of the time they’re not just informative but interesting. Separate it out and allow the reader to read the section that is relevant to them at the time.
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08.26.04
Posted in Film at 1:21 pm by
A wish-list of the top ten science fiction films as chosen by scientists, you say?
There it is, proving that even scientists watch Steven Spielberg blockbusters, and that they don’t seem any more intellectually demanding in their speculative fiction than the average punter.
Three of the films (Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris) would be on any well-considered list, but the rest are just the best-known sci-fi films. I found it dispiritingly easy to knock together a vastly superior top ten in a couple of minutes:
Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)
Metropolis (1927)
Frankenstein (1931)
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)
La Jetée (1962)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Westworld (1973)
Brazil (1985)
The list is a bit top-heavy with American b-movies (and, in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, its British equivalent) but I didn’t want to repeat anything in the scientists’ list.
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07.05.04
Posted in Film at 1:59 pm by
Is there anything guaranteed to cause as much of a critical ruckus as a best-of list?
The New York Times has released its second list of the 1000 best films.* All lists like this are a challenge.
First, how many of the films have you seen? A quick count-up shows that I’ve seen 275, including only those I’ve seen from beginning to end and can specifically recall seeing (which rules out several of the westerns, which I would probably recognise as having seen before if I watched them, as well as Topsy-Turvy, in which I fell asleep). That’s over 1 in 4: not too shabby, particularly as there’s a whole bunch of supposed classics that I’ve completely missed: Godfather II, The Sound of Music, Get Carter.
The next challenge is to see how far the list is ’standard’ and how far it is idiosyncratic. To this end, bear in mind that 1,000 films is a very large sample; around 10 for every year that cinema has existed. Try to think of 10 must-see classics from 2002. See? You do get the feeling that the list should contain pretty much every great film you could name.
You would, of course, be wrong. Looking down the list we find some extraordinary sideways choices.
For a start there’s the bargain basement comedy of Airplane!, Clueless and Naked Gun, but barely any Marx Brothers, no Monty Python and no sign of the grandaddy of the lot, Hellzapoppin!
Worse is the great tranche of middlebrow arthouse flicks, grotesquely overrepresented by the likes of Little Women (the 1994 version), The Piano, Driving Miss Daisy and Howards End.
Then there are the curious selections from a director’s work. Peter Greenaway is represented by the sly Drowning by Numbers and the awful Pillow Book, but why no Draughtsman’s Contract? Karel Reisz gets in the list with one of his least films, the deeply eccentric Morgan A Suitable Case for Treatment (as well as the must-have Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), but why not The French Lieutenant’s Woman? The Coen brothers are represented by Fargo (yes) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (no, no, no). Hitchcock inevitably appears throughout but who, honestly, could say that his late, feeble Frenzy is one of the best films ever made? For every challenging selection (Mike Leigh very well represented, including the little-seen High Hopes) there is an oddball omission (nothing by Ken Loach, not even the impossible to dislike Kes).
I could go on: Broadcast News, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Risky Business but no Passion of Joan of Arc, no Sunrise, no Metropolis, no Magnificent Ambersons, no Burnt by the Sun, no Spirit of the Beehive, nothing at all (unless I overlooked it) by Eisenstein, Tarkovsky or Kusturica.
Ah, best-of lists. The most fun you can have with consecutive numbering, and no mistake.
* Actually, the NYT calls it “The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made!”, which is ugly in oh so many ways, not least the redundancy of “ever made”. It’s like saying “the 100 most beautiful statues ever sculpted”.
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07.02.04
Posted in Film at 6:29 pm by
So the last great American actor is dead.
As usual, Jack Nicholson provides the ringing summation:
“Brando is the best, the actor that we all look up to. When he goes, the rest of us move up one place.”
[In the fine Kubrick documentary A Life in Pictures, Nicholson offered the rather similar: “Everyone says that Stanley was The Man. I’m inclined to think that underrates him”.]
All the same, Brando’s last interesting performance was in the late 70s, and his last great one the early 70s. Think what he could have done if he’d kept it together.
Funny, but I was going to post about a completely different titan of the cinema. I saw with absolute, unadultered delight today that both Nick Broomfield and JG Ballard fingered Tarantino’s endlessly childish Kill Bill as the worst film of all time.
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01.04.04
Posted in Film at 9:32 pm by
screenonline, the site that the British Film Institute have been threatening to accomplish for so long, is finally here.
It’s very patchy right now (I recognised five out of the fifteen films it lists for the 90s), and, to my despair, the film clips are only available to schools, colleges and libraries. But please God let them keep funding it properly until it’s the comprehensive map of British film we so badly need.
This is a still from the late John Schlesinger’s Terminus, his 1961 documentary showing a day in the life of Waterloo station. For me, the site immediately achieves the single most important result, which is to make me want to get up and seek out some of this wonderful cinema.
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11.12.03
Posted in Film at 1:45 pm by
20th Century Fox are about to release a completely new creature into the world. At the start of December you will be able to buy all four sci-fi/horror/action films in the Alien series, as the Alien Quadrilogy on DVD.
What the hell, you may reasonably ask, is a quadrilogy? I can only suppose that the producers considered the correct term — ‘quartet’ — to be effete and dry. However, the problem with coining ‘quadrilogy’, apart from it making them look like barbarian know-nothings, is that it’s an oafish neologism. It manages to lumpenly fall halfway between suggesting ‘four’ (they must have been thinking of ‘quad-bike’), and ‘three’ (’-rilogy’ really doesn’t leave many options, does it?). Worst of all, thanks to the global reach of these films, some coked-up production manager has successfully launched a real three-legged word into the world where it will gain increasing usage.
If I’m sounding snobbish about this, I’m not particularly sorry. Let me repeat: I don’t mind them coming up with a new word to indicate a group of four related things. Anything that saves us from yet another film trilogy is a Good Thing. What I object to is them coming up with such an obvious dog of a word, and not caring enough to run it past anyone with a semblance of sense first. ‘Quadrilogy’? I ask you.
Rant off. What is interesting is a quick shuftie at what you get in your quadrilogy:
- Two versions of each of the four films.
- Commentary from director, cast, writers, producers on each film (although it’s not clear whether there’s a different commentary for each version.
- A myriad of making-of, pre-, in- and post-production documentaries.
- Deleted scenes.
- Any other rubbish they could find. I mean, anything.
What I find interesting is that one of the big selling points of DVD ’special editions’ is the Director’s Cut. Films, more than novels, for instance, are subject to pressures from and interference by a whole host of people who consider the film to be ‘theirs’. The director, the editor, the producer(s), the stars, the studio, the distributors, all potentially have the power to change aspects of the film they’re not happy with. And they will.
Nevertheless, the myth of the director as auteur persists even in mainstream cinema, and the audience often suspects that there was once a pure, magnificent vision of the director that has been wrecked by the meddling of ignorant producers. Just as often, of course, it’s judicious fixing of the director’s first attempt that saves a turkey, or elevates it from being tolerable to something rather better.
Regardless, I know plenty of people who invest in DVD editions of films on the basis that they offer something truer to the director’s vision than the original cinema release. And yet, what the original cinema release offered was a single, uninterruptable, linear experience. Film is designed that way. That’s what makes it so radically different to books, to painting, or to oral narrative. That’s what relates it to theatre so closely. Filling up the DVD with tinkerish bits and pieces of extra ‘film’ explode this idea of a single experience. Including deleted scenes makes mincemeat of what the film is. Does it include the information or emotions contained in a deleted scene? Or is it the other way round: is a suggested meaning in the film thereby erased if we’re aware that it was made explicit in a deleted scene?
And don’t even get me started on watching films with commentary. What fresh madness is this? Can you imagine reading a book with accompanying author’s notes explaining how certain scenes came about, what was intended, including amusing anecdotes about the book’s production. I’m sorry to say it, but the ‘real’ film, if such exists, is your rapidly fading memory of the first time you saw it, in the cinema, in the dark, with no cues or clues, as not the director but the Lumiere brothers intended.
Cinema is dead. Long live the fractal film experience.
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07.29.03
Posted in Film at 4:31 pm by
I still haven’t seen the Steven Soderbergh version of Solaris. I did, however, finally set aside three hours over the weekend to watch the Andrei Tarkovsky version.
Tarkovsky’s 1972 film is typically stately and melancholic. It starts with weeds undulating slowly in a river. A horse wanders into a barn. Eventually Stanislaw Lem’s philosophically laden plot about the difficulty of communicating with a sentient planet starts its laborious exposition.
The film snaps into black and white as Kelvin, the protagonist, watches film of a troubled flight over the mystery planet. There is nothing but dense white mist filling every corner of the screen: no, wait, there is a flicker of something moving in a gap. It’s gone again, whatever it was.
Tarkovsky sublimely prefigures the journey to Solaris with a five minute sequence of cars winding through the tunnels and overpasses of a modern Russian city. This is big, confident, grown-up film-making, unafraid of becoming ridiculous. It’s saved from this by its mesmeric, shimmering, elegance.
Shortly after arriving at the lonely station above the planet (this is about an hour into the film, mind), Kelvin dares to stand with his face next to a porthole. The camera teasingly zooms into the blackness outside, then eases back again. Has something happened? It’s difficult to know.
Then, without warning, we’re back to the white mist. I strain to make out anything moving deep within it. Was that something? No, it was my shadow on the screen.
Hell, this is daring. The whiteness just goes on, unbroken. Unforgiving.
Then it goes black. And stays black.
It continues black for another minute.
Unless every review and listing of this film is in on some enormous practical joke specifically upon me, this blackness is not, I realise, part of Tarkovsky’s artistic vision.
In fact, the final two-thirds of the film is entirely missing from my tape. My lovingly produced British Film Institute video of this classic movie is a dud. Curse it. Curse it all. I am destined never to see this film; either version.
Although…
Although the Soderbergh version is now out on DVD, and I’ve seen a cheap one on sale on the market stalls down the end of my road of a Saturday. What are the odds of that being a dodgy, incomplete copy too?
Only one way to find out…
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07.25.03
Posted in Film at 11:44 am by
John Schlesinger, the last of the film directors from the British New Wave of the early sixties, has been taken off a life support machine after a long illness.
Like many British film makers, Schlesinger started in documentaries and ended in Hollywood. Unlike most of them, he made some important and emotionally vibrant films before being swallowed up by the system. In recent years he complained that it would not be possible to make a film like his own Midnight Cowboy any more. He was probably right, and we are fortunate that between 1961 and 1971 he was able to make seven films in a row that should be seen by anyone with an interest in film.
Schlesinger’s first feature was a day in the life documentary about Waterloo station, Terminus, that won a Golden Lion at Venice. He followed up with a powerful early contribution to the Angry Young Man genre of the early sixties, A Kind of Loving.
1963 brought an adaptation of the Keith Waterhouse novel and play, Billy Liar, in which Schlesinger allowed the young Tom Courtenay to charm and rant his way to stardom as the eponymous idle fantasist. The film also brought the fabulous Julie Christie to international attention, Schlesinger giving her one of the great entrances in cinema, striding her way back into a bleak post-industrial town, swinging her handbag and, with it, bringing the first intimations of the swinging sixties.
Schlesinger worked very successfully again with Christie over the next few years in Darling and Far from the Madding Crowd, helping to establish her as an icon of the sixties.
At the end of the decade Schlesinger went to America to make what is now his best known film, the haunting Midnight Cowboy. His last major film was the thriller Marathon Man in 1976. He carried on making films right up to the end of the century, his last being the weak Madonna vehicle, The Next Best Thing.
When fellow New Wave director Karel Reisz died at the end of last year, the coverage was disgracefully thin. If, as seems to be expected, Schlesinger dies imminently, I fear the same will happen with him; we may be lucky to get a late night showing of Midnight Cowboy, as if everybody hasn’t already seen it.
The man is one of the greatest British exponents of cinema, and deserves a proper retrospective. So how about making your own little John Schlesinger season at home? The British Film Institute recently included four of his films in their Top 100 British Films of the 20th Century. Why not start with these?
The four are Billy Liar, Darling, Far from the Madding Crowd and Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Your local video shop almost certainly won’t have any of them, but try a specialist store or your local library. Failing that, the ever excellent Movie Mail will sell or rent anything currently in print in the UK (which sadly, doesn’t currently include Sunday, Bloody Sunday; just imagine the French or Italians allowing one of the 100 most important films made in the country to become unavailable).
Me, I’ll be watching and remembering Schlesinger’s role in launching a new and vibrant British cinema, alongside Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson. And I’ll be remembering Julie Christie, forever swinging her handbag in some northern town, reflected in the glass windows of the new shopping arcades, defining a hopeful new Britain that got lost somewhere along the way.
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06.02.03
Posted in Film at 1:46 pm by
June is another big month for the National Film Theatre as it holds its first season of films by Carl Theodor Dreyer for 40 years. Gloriously, the season includes all 14 of Dreyer’s features, from 1919’s The President to Gertrud in 1964.
Dreyer, who was Danish, is often seen as akin to Ingmar Bergman as being (in Clyde Jeavons’ words) ‘a purveyor of unrelenting Scandinavian gloom’. Certainly his bleakly beautiful expressionistic style and scouring explorations of spirituality infer affinities back to Kierkegaard and forward to even Lars Von Trier (who filmed one of Dreyer’s scripts as his 1988 film Medea).
The BFI is issuing a new print of Day of Wrath (a tale of 17th century witchcraft), but it is always Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc that garners most attention. The film, which is closely modelled on the records of the interrogations, is often cited as one of the most ravishing ever made, its beauty made more poignant by the fact that it was almost lost. The negatives were destroyed in a laboratory fire, and Dreyer disowned a reconstituted version put out in the 1950s. Then, in 1981, with a gothic flourish of which Dreyer presumably would have approved, a complete print of the film was discovered in a Norweigan mental hospital. Astonishingly, given that old prints are so fragile, and that prints quickly degenerate when shown repeatedly, it was in almost perfect condition.
My interest in The Passion of Joan of Arc started when I heard Richard Einhorn talking about his choral work Voices of Light. Einhorn had watched Dreyer’s film in a small viewing theatre at the BFI and was inspired to create a composition that featured the words of Jeanne d’Arc, among others. The result left me, for one, aching to see the film. As so often, greatness begets greatness.
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05.01.03
Posted in Film at 1:04 pm by
“The English, so visually blind in most ways, are mad about flowers” - John Berger
Some serious work got done in the garden last weekend. Such effort for a space approximately 30 feet by 15. The urban garden indicates more about our predicament than I think we’d like to know.
It got me thinking about my favourite tape right now, which contains Lindsay Anderson’s 1957 documentary about the old Covent Garden flower market, Every Day Except Christmas.
Given that my horticultural expertise is limited to identifying about a dozen of the more common flowers, it’s a curious choice. But then, it’s a glorious documentary; precise, unfussy and respectful. That it looks wonderful helps; Anderson and cameraman Walter Lassally gorge themselves on the lyrical evocation of urban space and the harsh poetry of normal faces in close-up.
But it’s the tone of the piece that moves me to tears. Anderson, though heading up the Free Cinema movement that called for an unflinching acceptance of the detail of everyday experience, is far from being a brutal realist. He is endlessly fascinated by the details of working life, cataloguing and describing the rhythmical movements of labour like some displaced 1930s poet.
In fact, the style is most reminiscent of the previous high-point of British documentary, the work of Alberto Cavalcanti and Humphrey Jennings. Every Day Except Christmas is, in effect, a belated prose continuation of Night Mail and Coal Face.
There’s no Auden, of course, to render the motion of these working men and women into rock-solid, echoing verse. Anderson does more than adequately without, using the soft Welsh voice of Alun Owen to caress the viewer into friendship with the characters who turn up, including one particularly noticeable sequence in the open-all-hours cafe.
As the porters take a well-earned break for a cuppa in the small hours, the voiceover introduces the other customers, who drift in ‘from who knows where’. The obvious queerness of many of them easily covers the gap in the narration, and this too is moving, these chaps who pass in the night sharing the warm snug with the workers.
Throughout, the cold shot of gritty reality is ladled over with Anderson’s warm, warming milk of human kindness. It may be too sweet for some, but this type of understated solidarity is the only kind of sentimentalism I can really bear.
I can’t put it better than John Berger in his Sight and Sound article ‘Look at Britain!’ (the Ford-sponsored series for which Every Day Except Christmas was made):
‘There is the image of Bill unloading and stacking boxes, the camera moving with each box across the necessary two yards, this is not the hardest work but we are given the measure of it. There is the image showing the experienced way of getting a sack of potatoes up on to the shoulder. There are the old women flower sellers searching for the cheapest blossoms that with their blarney must earn them their livelihood. There is the boy with thoughts in his head heaving boxes of flowers piled high on top of it. There is the quickest way of polishing an apple. There are the big buyers, busy, shrewd and utterly practical; the earth and what grows thereon is a commodity. There is the moment when the night ends; a new city day, accordioned, not cuckooed in. Above all there is the work, the crooning, clowning, smoking, and again work, of the young porters who have restless hopes on the far side of their knowledge.’
Every Day Except Christmas is available on the Free Cinema compilation.
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03.26.03
Posted in Film at 10:51 am by
“The theory back then was that you were making TV plays, not films, so you had to make them electronically in the studio. But the BBC did allow you two or three days to do location shooting, like shots of people getting in a car, driving somewhere, then getting out of the car, whereupon you’d cut back to the studio. So we said ‘OK, we’ll take those two or three days,’ but we actually managed to nick four days of location shooting altogether. And in those four days we filmed half of what would end up in the final 72-minute piece. I had a young cameraman, Tony Imi, who just put the camera on his shoulder and ran for four days.”
Ken Loach on the filming of Up the Junction, in Loach on Loach, edited by Graham Fuller (Faber & Faber, 1998)
And the result is immensely powerful, particularly for anyone who dismisses Loach as a grim-up-north-realist. ‘Up the Junction’ is a passionate celebration of the spirit of working people - no surprise there - but presented as a giddy whirl of moving cameras, bopping teens and leery, half-heard pub arguments.
In 1965, when Loach made this ‘Wednesday Play’ for the BBC, he was, like most young people interested in film, under the influence of the nouvelle vague, the French new wave. You can still see the influence in 1967’s Poor Cow, with it’s impromptu dialogue and disruptive use of intertitles.
I recall an interview with one of the creator’s of the 90s TV seriesThis Life proudly describing how they chose the radical step of filming conversations from across the street or across a pub, to create a feeling of immediacy. How embarrassing that Loach, that stalwart of worthy social drama, had stylistically preceded them by over 30 years. Then again, in the sixties even the workaday Sidney J. Furie was pulling the same tricks in The Ipcress File.
I haven’t seen the 1967 film version, but comparison will be interesting, particularly as the play has a very loose narrative, concentrating instead on sketching quick portraits of characters making their way in and around Clapham Junction. The ensemble acting and the emotional highpoints provided by music - whether courting couples dancing in a bar or young women singing Beatles hits as they take their washing to the launderette - also prefigure the sentimental community portraits that Mike Leigh has now made his speciality.
With this film and the same year’s devastating Cathy Come Home, Ken Loach not only made a lasting name for himself, but showed the dramatic impact achievable in the previously dubious genre of the TV play. It’s not that challenging social dramas no longer get commissioned - BBC2 shows a couple of gems a year, and even EastEnders can be more genuinely daring than the majority of single plays ever were in the ‘golden age’ of the late sixties and early seventies. But, soaps aside, social drama will never again be prime-time viewing. And Loach, even with his films now regularly released to worldwide acclaim, will never find an audience as large as for those Wednesday Plays.
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03.10.03
Posted in Film at 1:19 pm by
Well, that’s another story, but in lieu of my still projected Forthcoming section, I’m noting that I will not miss ‘Up the Junction’ when it’s shown at the NFT on March 19th.
Sometimes the BFI does something just wonderful. This time it’s a gallery of stills and posters of Ken Loach’s films. I’m particularly taken by the poster for ‘Poor Cow’, even though it makes the film look more like ‘Alfie’ than a Ken Loach film.
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02.24.03
Posted in Film at 1:32 pm by
The Quatermass TV series and, later, the Hammer films of the same stories, pretty much invented the sci-fi invasion story. I remember as a child hearing adults talking with a shiver about ‘Quatermass and the Pit’, and that was twenty years after being shown by the BBC.
I’ve only seen the films, but I’d love to see the TV shows, even knowing that they would look ham-fisted and stilted now (they were broadcast live, of course).
I don’t know why the BBC site only covers Quatermass II, by the way. I’d guess they’ve lost any tapes of the other two series.
All this provoked by Diamond Geezer’s quick guide to TV nostalgia. Other highlights were the theme from Bod and the LWT ident.
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01.31.03
Posted in Film at 11:56 am by
I just got out of North London before the snow really hit yesterday afternoon, and made it to the South Bank for the early evening viewing of Metropolis.
This was the version compiled by the FW Murnau institute from all availalble prints and negatives. It’s still missing something like 40 minutes from the original cut made by Fritz Lang, sadly, but at least this version keeps the plot reasonably coherent through a judicious use of explanatory intertitles.
We all know key images from the film, like the obviously female ‘Man-Machine’ (above), but what struck me on this viewing were a couple of themes that I hadn’t really associated with this, the grandaddy of sci-fi films. One is the almost resigned expectation of a workers’ revolution, the feeling that the masses will turn at any second.
The other is the streak of real (by which I mean biblical) apocalypticism running throughout. Freder hears the Apocalypse of St John in the cathedral, and is later seen reading the book. When he sees an accident at the Heart Machine, he hallucinates the machine as a demon’s mouth swallowing the workers. Just in case he might miss the point, the intertitle blares:
“MOLOCH!”
I saw the film with veteran friend Paul, and had a proper night of it afterwards in Azzurro then in the NFT bar. Looking back, most of the conversation seemed centre on politics, religion and the end of the world. But I laughed pretty much all night.
I think that might be a definition of friendship.
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