Hidden Agenda (Ken Loach 1990)
Saturday 25th February 2017
In honour of the English director Ken Loach, we are screening Hidden Agenda (1990), one of his less well known films . The film will be introduced by Mel Henry, who will also lead our post- film discussion. Mel, who has been Documentary Film Curator for the Bath Film Festival for a number of years, is a longstanding friend and admirer of Ken Loach.
Hidden Agenda is feature film set in the Northern Ireland of the 1970s about the investigation by an English policeman (played by Brian Cox) of the murder of an American civil rights lawyer (Brad Dourif). The film is put together like a political thriller, like Z or No Way Out but it adds a gritty everyday realism to the story. The American lawyer, along with his fiancée (Frances McDormand), is in Belfast on behalf of the International League of Civil Liberties to gather information on reports of mistreatment of suspected IRA members by the British security forces.
The film is loosely based on a real life episode—John Stalker, Assistant Chief Constable of Manchester, headed a government investigation of allegations of killing of Provos by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Most commendably, Loach and his screenwriter, Jim Allen, don't fall into the trap of presenting the sentiments from either side in simple or melodramatic terms. They leave the issues complex and honest.
The film had only a limited release (it was considered too political) so it has not been widely seen. Moreover the hidden target of Hidden Agenda had of course left office by the time of its release.
How to Change the World (Jerry Rothwell 2015)
Sunday 7th January 2017
The film will be introduced by Jonny Persey, its Executive Producer, who will also lead the discussion following the screening.
The film tells the story of a group of friends in Vancouver who set sail into a nuclear test zone in 1971. Their mission was to stop Nixon’s atomic test bomb in Amchitka, Alaska. Chronicling this untold story at the birth of the modern environmental movement, and with access to dramatic archive footage not seen for more than 40 years, the film centres on eco-hero Robert Hunter and his part in the creation of the global organisation we now know as Greenpeace.
It’s a terrific story of friendship, leadership and determination. The film, which was a Sundance award winner in 2015, was 7 years in the making. It
boasts 5 students and graduates from Johnny’s Met Film School amongst its 19 UK
crew.
All that Jazz (Bob Fosse 1979)
Sunday 18th December 2016
Bob Fosse was one of the most influential and innovative dance masters of his era. His sensual and provocative approach had a revolutionary effect, adapting the traditions that had been established in the first half of the 20th century in Hollywood and Broadway based musical production numbers to the more explicit sensibilities that gained traction in the 1960s and '70s.
In 1972 he won an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony Award all in the same year. In his All That Jazz, Fosse staged an idealised and impeccably staged version of his own exit from this world, complete with celebrity cameos, disco-era stage lighting, a cast of hundreds and a warped, darkly hilarious musical soundtrack to send him on his way into eternity.
The film tells the story of Joe Gideon, a chain-smoking, hard-driving, pill-popping alcoholic womanizer who is also a supremely talented designer of dance routines. We’re introduced to him in a powerful opening scene as he magistrates over an open casting call and then find ourselves in the self-generated whirlwind of Gideon’s life. He’s beset on all sides by pressures from past and present lovers, a neglected preteen daughter who craves his attention, producers demanding accountability for the dollars they’ve entrusted to him and various sycophants seeking to hitch their fortune to his obvious success. Gideon however is on the fast track to oblivion, as a few decades of hard living fuelled by nicotine, booze and amphetamines takes its inevitable toll on his body and psyche. His alone time is disrupted by the increasingly hard-to-ignore presence of Angelique, a beautiful otherworldly messenger played by Jessica Lange. Angelique is basically on the scene to help Joe make his final reckoning, if not quite reconciliation, with all the broken relationships that trail behind him after his 50-odd years of life so far.
Fosse’s method of telling the story is that of a rapidly-cut phantasmagoria, alternating between unvarnished rehearsal sequences that show the creative process stripped of its glamour and focused on the grit, scenes of domestic clashes where Gideon is forced to come to terms with the heartaches and disappointments caused by his infidelities and vain ambitions, and the swirl of memories and fantasies that have fuelled his drive to project himself as something other than the wretched fake and failure that he views himself as when left alone with his thoughts. The needs of his current lover and his daughter belatedly start receiving more of his attention. They capture his gaze (and ours) by virtue of an adorable dance routine they perform on the stairs and floor of the home they share. It’s a welcome humanizing moment for Gideon and his clan, but the tranquillity is short-lived. We’re ushered into a different kind of theatre, that of the surgical variety, in order to get a brief but raw glimpse at open heart surgery powerful stuff for a musical and clearly a note of warning.
The final half-hour of All That Jazz fully lives up to just about any praise bestowed on the film. It’s a full-fledged eruption of Fosse/Gideon’s psyche, the portrayal of all the guilt, fear, cynicism, aspiration, creative genius and desperate clutching after life’s elusive pleasures. Gideon himself takes centre stage, putting Roy Scheider’s talents to their supreme test as he channels the angst and inner tumult that Fosse wrote into the character of his alter-ego.
The film will be introduced by Jonathan Magonet and will be followed by discussion, tea, coffee and desserts.
Citizenfour (Laura Poitras 2014)
Sunday 13th December 2015
We are showing a remarkable documentary about Edward Snowden and
his revelations of the extensive secret surveillance carried out by the British
and American intelligence services. Snowden released many classified
documents that documented how these agencies have been collecting information
about phone calls and emails made by millions of ordinary citizens like you and
me. But, as the German Chancellor Angela Merkel unhappily discovered,
even personal phone calls made by the most senior leaders of friendly nations
have been illegally tapped, recorded and archived.
The film is entitled Citizenfour, the alias Snowden used in his first contacts with Laura Poitras and the journalists with whom she worked. The film has won many awards, including, in 2015, the Bafta and Oscar awards for Best Documentary Feature.
Here is an extract from the review of the film on the excellent
Roger Ebert website:
‘… perhaps more than any documentary in history, [Citizenfour] invites endless questions about what [the director] chose to put in and leave out, to emphasise and to elide. But such debates are only a secondary – if very fascinating –
aspect of a broader national and international discussion that the film deserves to start. They do nothing to diminish its colossal importance. Indeed, no film has ever been historic in quite the way this one is, since it tells a story in which the filmmaker and her work play a crucial part. It’s as if Daniel Ellsberg had a friend with a movie camera who filmed his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers every step of the way. Or if the Watergate burglars had taken along a filmmaker who shot their crimes and the cover-up that followed. Except that the issues Citizenfour deals with are, arguably, a thousand times more potent than Vietnam or Watergate.’
It may be just a coincidence that I am sending out this invitation on the day our very own Mrs May announced her plans for the nation’s future security. While one critic recommends you ‘Buy a ticket to this film… and use your credit card, so the NSA knows you care about this stuff,’ for us the screening is just a seasonal gift, and I do hope you can come. Nevertheless, since the invitation is coming to you by email, who knows who else may have already read it, even though they weren’t invited?
2015 marks the centenary of Frank Sinatra (December 12, 1915–May 14, 1998) and we are screening of two the sixty three films in which he appeared.
Guys and Dolls (1955), directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz, was adapted from the smash-hit Broadway musical, itself based on two short stories by Damon Runyon. We will be screening it on Saturday 17th October.
All the hot gamblers are in town and they're depending on Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra) to set up this week’s incarnation of “The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York.” The only problem is, he needs $1,000 to get the place. Throw in Sarah Brown (Jean Simons), who’s short on sinners at the mission she runs; Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando), who accepts Nathan’s $1,000 bet that he can’t get Sarah Brown to go with him to Havana; Miss Adelaide (Vivian Blaine), who wants Nathan to marry her; Police Lieutenant Brannigan (Robert Keith), who always seems to turn up at the wrong time and the music and lyrics of Frank Loesser, and you’ve got quite a musical.
From Here to Eternity (1953), directed by Fred Zinnemann, was adapted from the best-selling novel by James Jones. We will be screening it on Saturday 14th of November.
The scene is Schofield Army Barracks in Honolulu, in the languid days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sergeant Milt Warden (Burt Lancaster) starts an affair with Karen (Deborah Kerr), the wife of his commanding officer. Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) is a loner who lives by his own code of ethics and communicates better with his bugle than he does with words. Prewitt’s best friend is wisecracking Maggio (Frank Sinatra, in an Oscar-winning performance), who has been targeted for persecution by sadistic stockade sergeant Fatso Judson (Ernest Borgnine). Rounding out the principals is Alma Lorene (Donna Reed), a “hostess” at the euphemistically named whorehouse The New Congress Club. All these melodramatic joys and sufferings are swept away by the Japanese attack on the morning of 7th December 1941. No words can do justice to the film’s most famous scene: the nocturnal romantic rendezvous on the beach, with Burt Lancaster’s and Deborah Kerr’s bodies intertwining as the waves crash over them.
I see this film is as a dramatization of the classical American struggle of individualism versus conformity. It’s a struggle that characterises, for example, the Western. In this case, the conformist authority of the Army is portrayed as both real and actual and as an analogy of American society as a whole. If you accept this view, the important contrast is between the Sinatra and the Clift characters. The two actors give stunning performances, and fittingly it’s these two characters that we first meet as the film opens,
The Sinatra character is the only one that deeply and consistently defies institutional authority and in doing so, loses his life. Though he does in the end succeed in instilling defiance into Prewitt, who thereby avenges his death by killing Fatso, the film maintains the ascendency of the system by having Holmes’ resign rather than face a court martial (in the book he is actually promoted…) and it has Prewitt killed by Americans from the organisation he so admires (and which will require his continuing passivity) as he tries to return to his unit.
The film anticipates the argument of The Organisation Man (1956) in the way it pits the individualism of Maggio against the conformity of the other characters. The captain’s ethos is of advancement through conformity, which attitude is disrupted by Prewitt’s defiance. Prewitt however is a ’30 year’ man who is devoted to the army, in a way that his girlfriend cannot understand, and she too wants to become part of the very system she despises. Maggio however defies authority and indeed is punished for his defiance by torture and death. Maggio has no respect for institutional authority and insists on his self-worth as he confronts the negative stereotype of the Italian American
From Here to Eternity won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and supporting awards to Sinatra and Reed.
On Sunday July 19th 2015 we are screening The Salt of the Earth (2014), directed by Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders.
For the last 40 years, the acclaimed photographer Sebastião Salgado has travelled the world, tracing the footsteps of an ever-changing humanity. He has witnessed and documented many of the major events of our times, taking in wars, famine, genocide and exodus. But now he is embarking on a new journey: to discover pristine territories, grandiose landscapes and wild nature as part of a huge photographic tribute to the planet’s beauty.
Salgado’s accomplished, moving work and his inspirational life are revealed in this Oscar-nominated documentary by his son, Juliano Salgado, and world-renowned filmmaker Wim Wenders (Buena Vista Social Club, Wings of Desire, Paris, Texas, Pina), himself an avid photographer.
It’s a film of remarkable and breathtaking photography, whose exquisite images compel us to ponder the obligations of the photographic recording of history and to consider the aestheticisation and commodification of suffering.
After many alarums, excursions and orthopaedic diversions, I am delighted to announce our reopening, in which we will be commemorating the centenary of Orson Welles (1915 - 1985).
On Saturday June 13th 2015 we will be screening Too much Johnson (1938) and the Lady from Shanghai (1948), and on Saturday July 4th 2015 we will be screening Touch of Evil.
TOO MUCH JOHNSON (1938)
We open the evening with a screening of some recently discovered film that Welles had shot three years before Citizen Kane. The film was designed to be seen in the intervals between the three acts of his stage production of a rapid-fire farce of mistaken identities. It has recently been put together as a feature film.
Too much Johnson (1938) is a silent slapstick comedy. The prologue features Joseph Cotten doing Harold Lloyd antics through the streets and across the rooftops of New York City, in a lively tribute to silent comedy and Keystone Kops chaos. Two shorter sequences open the second and third acts of the play with chases and duels. Despite its being such an early film (Welles made it when he was 23 years old) and a silent comedy, there are already numerous hints of the genius of Orson Welles.
THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1948)
This quintessential film-noir features a blonde Rita Hayworth starring alongside producer, director and screenwriter (and second husband) Orson Welles. His cinematic genius is evident in this thrilling story involving lust, betrayal and murder. As always, Welles designed innovative but tricky shots for his cinematographer, in this case Charles Lawton. In one sequence, Welles had Lawton shoot what biographer Charles Higham called “the longest dolly shot ever seen on the screen.” It required Lawton to keep Welles and Hayworth in focus throughout the duration of a three-quarter mile carriage ride. An even more interesting sequence, one that has taken its place in film history, is the funhouse scene. Here, Welles created an insane maze of mirrors, composed of 2,912 square feet of glass, eighty mirrors seven by four feet. They were one-way, allowing Lawton to shoot through them. The film has recently been digitally remastered and we will be screening the BluRay edition.
TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)
Screenwriter and director Orson Welles gives one of his greatest performances as Hank Quinlan, the corpulent and corrupt head of police in a sleazy town on the U.S.-Mexico border. A bomb explodes at the border crossing at the conclusion of a dazzling extended opening shot. Mexican official Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) clashes with Quinlan during the investigation, jeopardizing the safety of Vargas’ new bride, Susie (Janet Leigh). The film, which also stars Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Xsa Gabor and Akin Tamiroff, deals with racism, police corruption, and sexual confusion in an atmosphere so gorgeously sleazy that the very air is filled with blowing garbage.
The studio removed Welles from the production during the editing phase but he immediately wrote a lengthy memo requesting several changes in editing and sound - work that has been carried out in this digitally remastered version that is now available in a BluRay edition.
A Late Quartet (2012) was written and directed by the American documentarian Yaron Silberman. It’s a subtle, intelligent feature film with a suitably resonant title. The film quietly observes the internal dynamics of the Fugue String Quartet, an internationally acclaimed musical group founded and based in New York that has been playing around the world for 25 years. We encounter the quartet as an entity and then get to know the musicians as individuals. We sense the tensions between them but appreciate that they have been subsumed into their quarter of century of playing together. They have found satisfaction not in discarding their individuality but in unselfishly contributing to a collaborative endeavour. The founder of the quartet discovers he is unwell and finds he is unable to continue, following which personal tensions in the quartet rise to the surface. Their turbulence contrasts with the serenity of the music (Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14, opus 131).
The film is beautifully acted by a stellar cast (for example Christopher Walken and Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and, needless to say, the music is exquisite, particularly because we can listen to the uncompressed sound on a BluRay version of the film. The film invites comment on how we might understand the deep nonverbal communication that underlies certain aspects of our relationships, particularly because at the same time we may fail to communicate in any way other equally important aspects of our relationship to the same person(s).
Carnageis a four-hander directed by Roman Polanski and based on the play written by Yasmina Reza. Starring Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster and Christopher Waltz, the film is beautifully shot and acted. The Blu-Ray version looks and sounds superb.
Following a playground scuffle between their 11-year old children, the parents of the "victim" invite the parents of the "perpetrator" to their apartment to sort it out. A polite discussion of childrearing soon escalates and cordial banter develops a razor-sharp edge as all four of the well-heeled American parents reveal their laughable contradictions, grotesque prejudices and inability to cope with conflicts.
The film will be introduced by Alan Cooklin and Gill Gorell Barnes, both family therapists, who will also lead the discussion after the film.
The Big City (Satyajit Ray 1963) on Saturday 14 December 2013
‘A woman’s place is with her cooking pots’ is the firmly articulated belief of Subrata Mazumdar, a young bank clerk struggling to support his extended family on a meagre salary. He is therefore horrified when his wife Arati (a ravishing, spirited performance from Madhabi Mukherjee) offers to help by going out to work as a ‘salesgirl’.
Satyajit Ray’s wonderfully enjoyable portrait of mid-50s Calcutta, a society still adjusting to Independence, displays warmth, wit and genuine insight into its large, multi-generational cast of characters, including Arati’s conservative father-in-law, her teenage sister-in-law and her benevolently despotic boss.
This new restoration of The Big City is now available in BluRay format. It enables the film’s epic scale and intimate detail—from the portrayal of bustling urban life to the exquisite play of emotions on Arati’s face—to emerge in greater beauty and clarity than hitherto. The film’s emphasis on conflicting social values—and most particularly on the role of women—feels as fresh and relevant as ever.
Tabu (Miguel Gomes 2012) on Saturday November 23rd 2013
There are two parts, or three if you count the enigmatic prologue introducing us to a certain mysterious crocodile, which may or may not turn out to be the emblem or reincarnation of anguished love. In modern-day Lisbon, a devout middle-aged Catholic woman Pilar (Teresa Madruga) is concerned about her elderly neighbour, the fantastically cantankerous and imperious Aurora. She has to be driven home from the casino because she has blown every cent she has on slot machines. It is an addiction which she has inherited from her father, and Gomes shows us that, for all her confusion, the addiction has given her a lively, shrewd sense of life itself being a gamble. In the film’s next section, we flashback to Aurora's youth as a beautiful young woman living a kind of White Mischief existence in ’70s Portuguese Mozambique and falling in love with handsome adventurer Ventura (Carloto Cotta).
The film is in black and white, but this shift into the past is accompanied with a new aged-up graininess, a quasi-silent movie. There is no dialogue, but rather a narrative voiceover from the older Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo). It is a self-conscious conceit, but carried off elegantly. Gomes, if he wanted, could have made the Lisbon section in colour, and the mono-chrome shift would have been even more dramatic. But his concern is to be more subtle than that, a counterweight to the melodrama. It is not just about the transgression itself, but its muted buildup and low-key after effects (adapted from Peter Bradshaw’s review in The Guardian).
Originally made in 1972 and directed by celebrated British filmmaker Tony Palmer, Bird on a Wire follows Leonard Cohen on his 1972 European tour.
After massive editing of hundreds of hours of the original footage, although not by Palmer, the film was released in 1974, had a very limited run and then disappeared. Like many films from that era, it was thought that the original version had been lost but, in 2009, 294 rolls of film were discovered containing many of the original rushes, together with the soundtrack of the 1972 film. Palmer was able to restore much of this footage and it became available on DVD for the first time some three years ago.
Bird on a Wire contains 17 classic performances, 4 poems and a great deal of tour footage. It reveals Cohen’s enormous personal charm and charisma but also demonstrates the stress involved in a long tour of unfamiliar venues. The tour ends quite poignantly in Jerusalem.
We will be screening a number of short films which have been selected by, and will be introduced by, Jan Harlan. Jan Harlan recently introduced and discussed for us The Shining, one of the five films of Stanley Kubrick on which he, Jan, was Executive Producer.
The centre-piece of the evening will be a new, wonderful and very long, short film called Aya (58 minutes). It is a witty and intelligent Israeli film which focuses on a young and charming but somewhat outrageous woman. At my request, Jan will also show a remarkable film by the same director/writer called Lost Paradise, to which he introduced us last year.
We will then see two low-cost shorts addressing the present unresolved topic of Israeli-Arab relationship, a topic that splits the country. Thereafter we will gear-change to short films that serve the maker as a "calling card" to prove real talent. One from Slovakia brought the filmmaker the money to make his first feature, followed by a zero budget film from Poland, a Bulgarian animated film telling the same very short story five times in very different styles and by 5 different filmmakers.
Depending upon the time remaining, I hope we will then see a British Film, a rare combination of acting and animation where real actors are reduced to animated figures. The filmmaker (Vicky Mather) received over 10 prizes world-wide. We will close with a 58 second German exercise in originality.
On
Saturday March 2nd 2013 we are screening Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence,
Nagisa Oshima’s 1983 film about a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Indonesia
after the fall of Singapore. The film is based on a book by Sir Laurens
van der Post and stars Tom Conti, David Bowie, Takeshi Kitano and the Japanese
rock star Ryûichi Sakamoto.
Our
screening comes just a few months after the death of its distinguished director
and the re-emergence of David Bowie as a rock musician. I am thrilled to
announce the film will be introduced by Tom Conti.
In
this captivating, skewed World War II drama, David Bowie regally embodies
Celliers, a British officer interned by the Japanese as a POW. Rock star
Ryuichi Sakamoto (who also composed this film’s hypnotic score) plays the camp
commander, obsessed with the mysterious blond major, while Tom Conti is the
British lieutenant colonel Lawrence, who tries to bridge the emotional and
language divides between captor and prisoner. Also featuring actor-director
Takeshi Kitano in his first dramatic role, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
is a multilayered, brutal, at times erotic tale of culture clash, and one of
Oshima’s greatest successes.
In
one of the many reviews quoted on the International Movie Database, Henrik
Sylow writes:
‘In
many ways Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence is the thinking person’s Bridge
on the River Kwai - not so much about the war but about the consequences of
war. In the final segment of the film, Lawrence (Tom Conti) visits Hara
(Takeshi Kitano) in his cell, where he awaits execution for war crimes. Hara,
who has come to terms with his fate, asks Lawrence why he must die, as he only
did what any other soldier did or would have done if in the same situation, to
which Lawrence replies,
“You
are a victims of men who believe they are right, just as you and Yonoi believed
absolutely that you were right. And the truth is, of course, that no one is
right.”
Merry
Christmas, Mr Lawrence
is one of those rare films, whose perfection dwells in the symbiosis between
story, director and actors. And it was recognized, to some degree when the film
first came out, being nominated for the Palm d’Or and both Conti and Kitano
were in consideration as best actors. More and more over time Merry
Christmas, Mr Lawrence stands as one of Oshima’s greatest films and the
greatest performances by the actors involved. A haunting masterpiece.’
We
meet at 7.30 for a drink and screen at 8pm. Please note this screening is on a
Saturday. Tom Conti will conduct the post film discussion and, as usual,
we finish with tea, coffee and desserts.
CinemaXanadu has been dark for about a year but I am delighted to announce our forthcoming reopening.
The Shining is Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film, adapted from Stephen King’s novel of the same name.
The film is about madness and the energies madness sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them. It is also about writer’s block and unreliable narration. Its stars are Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall.
The film has an interesting history, in that, when originally released in the US, it ran for 146 minutes. Kubrick later reduced its duration to 113 minutes and it is this version, ‘the European’ or ‘Director’s’ cut that we will be showing. We will be projecting it in a high definition Blu-ray version, which I mention because we have a new, very high quality, Blu-ray player and because the cinema’s sound system has been recently upgraded.
The Shining is one of those unusual films that have become the subject of another film, Room 237 (not yet released in the UK). I am thrilled to announce that the our screening will be introduced by its Executive Producer, Jan Harlan, thus providing us with an opportunity to watch and discuss what has become a cult classic with one of the people directly involved in its production.
As usual, we meet for drinks at 7.30pm, screen at 8pm, followed by discussion and then by tea, coffee and desserts. Please note the screening is on a Sunday.
This is the seventh pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and already there was a fear that the successful formula was becoming less popular, subsequently borne out by the poor box office receipts. Nevertheless the brilliant score by the Gershwin brothers, the imaginative dance routines, the charm of the two principals and the fun of the regular supporting players, Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore, make it the equal of the earlier ones.
George and Ira Gershwin had had a long collaboration with Fred Astaire on Broadway, but their previous attempt at a Hollywood musical had been a failure, and the studio moguls feared that their music would be too highbrow, especially post Porgy and Bess. George telegrammed: RUMORS ABOUT HIGHBROW MUSIC RIDICULOUS STOP ABOUT TO WRITE HITS.
Even though they lacked a script, they knew there would be the conventional quarrelling song between Fred and Ginger and wrote Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off. The music that accompanies the ‘walking the dog’ scene was composed by George on the set. The brothers, returning to the discipline of the popular song format after the different operatic framework, found themselves collaborating with a greater intuition of each other’s work, and with a new simplicity - look at how the word ‘that’ gets filled with meaning in ‘They can’t take that away from me’. They also adjusted to the kind of vocalisation required for the intimate film microphone, very different from that needed for the Broadway stage. Though light-hearted, there is a hint in the lyrics at the need to be optimistic against the background of the depression, and an awareness of disturbing changes in Europe with so many refugees in Hollywood - ‘Slap that base’ refers to ‘dictators’ and ‘the world is in a mess’. (References taken from Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist by Philip Furia). George Gershwin died within a few months of the film’s opening.
Edna Ferber heard about the vanishing tradition of the showboat, a floating theatre on which the company lived and acted, performing in small towns along the river. She interviewed any performers she could find and spent a week travelling on one herself. The result was a sweeping novel published in 1926. It attracted the interest of composer Jerome Kern despite its difficult themes of miscegenation, alcoholism and desertion. Working with Oscar Hammerstein II, they persuaded the great Florenz Ziegfeld to produce it and with its opening in December 1927 American musical theatre was completely changed.
“This seminal work revealed that a Broadway musical was free to embrace any kind of theme, however controversial; could deal with serious issues in a suitably mature fashion; could counterpoint light and cheerful scenes with those of human anguish; and yet never need to sacrifice popularity and a memorable tuneful score.” (From Miles Krauger’s notes to the EMI recording of Showboat.)
This 1936 version stars three of the original Broadway cast, notably Helen Morgan, the archetypal ‘torch singer’. The song, Old Man River, became forever associated with Paul Robeson. Showboat was remade in 1951, and a fifteen minute condensation was featured in the Jerome Kern ‘biopic’ Till the Clouds Roll By (1946).
With the arrival of sound, the first ‘musicals’ were little more than filmed variety acts, graduating to ‘backstage’ stories, notably 42nd Street, where the ‘show’ provided the excuse for musical numbers. Later musicals simply integrated the songs as ways of advancing the story. Arthur Freed, the legendary producer of MGM musicals, followed up Easter Parade (Irving Berlin), An American in Paris (George and Ira Gershwin) and Singin’ in the Rain (Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed), by reverting to the early formula with this celebration of the song-writing talents of Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz.
The writers, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, used themselves as models for the Broadway husband and wife team preparing a show for an aging ‘song and dance’ man, played by Fred Astaire (himself aged 53). A running gag is Fred’s worry about dancing with the Cyd Charisse character, a ballet dancer who is taller than he is - itself a genuine behind the scenes concern. Among the many pleasures is Oscar Levant, a brilliant pianist who, whatever the role, plays his own acidic self.
The musical play is ‘hijacked’ by an ambitious ‘arty’ director (played by the ‘English Fred Astaire’ Jack Buchanan) before being rescued in the classic Hollywood mode of ‘we have all this talent, let's put on a show!’, with Astaire and Charisse learning that they can indeed dance together in the exquisite Dancing in the Dark routine in Central Park. There is also the comic ‘triplets’ number which the dancers perform on their knees, though Buchanan was in considerable pain from tooth problems and Nanette Fabray had hurt her leg in a previous number, and Astaire’s moving opening ‘walk’ into Grand Central station, By Myself.
This year Cinema Xanadu looks eastwards. We open with a season of Israeli and Palestinian films and later in the year plan to show films from China and Iran.
The present season celebrates the success of recent Israeli and Palestinian films. In the case of the former it is a particular form of war films that has excited most interest - for example, Beaufort (Joseph Cedar, 2007), Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman 2008) and now Lebanon (Samuel Maoz, 2009).
The latter two films have been particularly interesting, Waltz because of its commentary on the impact on history of the unreliability of personal and collective memory, Lebanon because the metaphor of soldiers invading another country while confined within a tank is very telling, particularly as those soldiers’ sole point of view is provided by their tank’s monocular periscope. A metaphorical - and political - reading of Lebanon has, however, tended to be overshadowed by its audiences’ fascination with the personal drama and autobiographical references played out in the narrative. Whichever approach we take - and both of course are valid - it is a remarkable film, particularly as the film is its director’s cinematic debut.
Ajami (2009) was the great Israeli cinematic success of last year, being nominated for an Oscar although losing out to a much inferior film, no doubt because the standard Hollywood format of the winner was more appealing to the Academy. It is the result of a remarkable collaboration (see below) which we must all hope is exemplary and repeatable.
Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad 2005) deals with the frightening topic of suicide bombing in a serious and compassionate way. It is a film which has been largely ignored, I think in error.
Finally in this season, we are showing The Time that Remains (Elia Suleiman 2009), an account of the history of the formation of the State of Israel, recounted with the Tati-like drollness that characterises Suleiman’s films.
A contemporary crime drama edged with Greek tragedy, Ajami is a despairing but oddly exhilarating joint venture by writer-directors Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. The movie teems with life, energized by fierce formal ambitions that must have provoked cardiac arrest in its insurance underwriters, never mind any casual onlookers of the partially improvised location shoot in a rundown quarter of the Tel Aviv-adjacent city of Jaffa. The mostly non-professional cast is drawn from the neighbourhood, a tinderbox where Jews, Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians from the occupied territories seeking work rub shoulders with volcanic unease.
Barely held together by chapter headings, the film’s action switches dizzyingly between time, place and point of view. The movie opens smack in the middle of its converging storylines with a mistaken drive-by shooting whose victim is an innocent boy working on a decrepit car. Indeed, almost all of the casualties piling up in Ajami are young, sucked willy-nilly into the fraying tempers of this inner-city area barely controlled by exhausted and demoralized Israeli police.
The bleak future Ajami projects can be hard to bear, but this is an enormously important film, and not just because it’s the result of a collaboration between putative enemies, was partly funded with Israeli money, won Best Picture at the Israeli Ophir Awards, and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. Ajami is notable for its innovative style, its willingness to entertain, its attentiveness to genres other than linear-narrative realism and its departure from the conventional war pictures that have dominated Israeli cinema for decades.
A new generation of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers is measuring the terrible toll of war not only in lost lives but also in the destruction of the very fabric of everyday life. To the extent that its sympathies lie with the occupied and with those who must do the work of enforcing occupation, Ajami brings a warmly generous spirit to its subjects, almost all of whom become gangsters by default. No one is demonized or sanctified. While the movie’s sensibilities are humanistic, a political dimension is inescapable in this fragile web of enmities and allegiances. Still, Ajami keeps its head close to the ground of families and communities eroded by unrelenting stress and danger—among the casualties of war also lie the ashes of intimacy and trust.
At the end of Rana’s Wedding, his 2002 film about a young Palestinian woman frantically evading Israeli checkpoints to get to her wedding on time, director Hany Abu-Assad used an excerpt from the Palestinian activist-poet Mahmud Darwish: “Under siege, life is the moment between remembrance of the first moment and forgetfulness of the last.” In Paradise Now Abu-Assad is still under siege, and this time exploring the circumstances that lead to two Palestinian friends becoming suicide bombers. Whereas his previous work (notably Rana’s Wedding and the same year’s Ford Transit) depicted the daily humiliations of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation with a mischievously upturned eyebrow, Paradise Now provides a discomfortingly intimate view of the conflict: it is an act of remembrance suffused with bitterness.
Given its highly contentious subject matter (some 250 Israeli civilians have died in suicide attacks since January 2001), it is remarkable for emerging as a deeply humanistic and compassionate work that avoids moralising or dogma. Best friends Saïd and Khaled are first shown passing their days working in a local garage, smoking shisha and sipping lukewarm coffee while looking out over their rambling town; the sound of distant gunfire punctuates their conversations. There are no visceral explosions or battles to signify the ongoing conflict, but rather mirage-like wisps of smoke in the background. The approach is indicative of all Abu-Assad’s work, which favours subtlety over didactic bludgeoning.
After this seemingly innocuous beginning, Saïd and Khaled are recruited by an unnamed Palestinian group to carry out a suicide mission in Tel Aviv. When Saïd takes his new and last employer Jamal home for dinner, his mother is quick to don her headscarf: the gesture is a silent yet unmistakable nod to the man’s faith. But Abu-Assad does not invoke religious fervour as the reasons for Saïd’s readiness to die. Whereas Syriana showed vulnerable youths being recruited as suicide bombers by an insidious brand of Muslim fanaticism, in Paradise Now the trigger is more personal: Saïd’s father was killed by his own people for collaborating with the Israelis; fundamentally, however, Saïd holds the Israeli occupation responsible for his father’s death. The personal is made the political in the most emphatic manner.
For all the undoubted gravity of the dramatic situation, the director still allows himself moments of unexpected humour. In one scene, Khaled records his last will and testament, AK-47 and chequered kuffiyah held aloft in iconic revolutionary mode, only to have the gravity of the moment repeatedly interrupted by a malfunctioning video camera, his own desire to tell his mother where to buy cheap water filters and assembled militants noisily eating sandwiches in the background. Messy reality collides with the solemn business of myth-making.
Abu-Assad neither glorifies nor condones suicide bombings. But that didn’t stop Israeli and US critics of Paradise Now from campaigning against its nomination for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film; they accused the film and film-maker of sympathising with terrorism. At the same time, Abu-Assad has found himself criticised in certain Palestinian circles for not portraying his doomed protagonists heroically enough.
Adapted from a review by Ali Jaafar in Sight and Sound More information on the film and its director here.
“Man is steel, the tank is only iron,” reads a sign inside the Israeli tank which is our home for the 93 minutes this film spends disproving that notion. Beginning in a sunflower field, the film ends with a shot of our tank standing in the same field after its journey into the war zone of 1982 Lebanon, as pitiless an intruder as the black crows in a Van Gogh wheat field.
Lebanon, low-budget winner of the Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, was written and directed by Samuel Maoz, who based the script on his own experiences in the Israeli Armored Corps. His intensely personal grasp of the subject-matter is projected through a dark lens of claustrophobia: we never really leave the tank throughout the entire film and are hemmed in with the conscript crew of four, who spend their time either frozen with fear or quarrelling among themselves and especially with their commanding officer.
The soundscape by Alex Claude is what brings the film into focus - the shuddering, greedy roiling of the tank’s engine; the curious champagne-cork popping of its viewfinder zooming in and out on targets and non-targets; the radio crackle, at once soothing and deadly, of the command centre, which seems to know all and reveal nothing. Music, if you can call it that, tends to be a single plucked note of a stringed instrument, repeated and occasionally modulated, melting, at the most nightmarish moments, into a synthesiser mood noise. The moment of maximum danger involves some old-fashioned Arabic waltz music - played as a sinister prelude to attack when the tank is lured inside a building - which is somehow and insidiously connected to the threat of torture issued by the Christian-Arab Phalangist the crew encounter along the way.
This Phalangist, initially presented as the man who will help the Israeli unit out of the war zone they have strayed into, is one of just a few people who enter the Stygian world of the tank and interact with the crew. The audience becomes complicit with him when his Arabic speech is subtitled - he will extract one of the Syrian’s eyes with a spoon, he says, he will cut off his genitals, he will tear him to pieces by tying him to two cars. He smiles and nods at the tank crew, who have no idea what he is saying: “Take good care of him,” he grins, “he is a prisoner of war.”
Inside the tank it’s sometimes hard to tell the men apart but what is clear is that these four very ordinary 20-year-olds don’t want to be there and are being brutalised and damaged by the experience. The director paints a portrait of an utterly hopeless, chaotic and morally compromised scenario in which nobody wins. The tank is a character in itself - it breathes fumes, rattles and leaks oil everywhere like the acid drool from the jaws of Ridley Scott’s alien.
The tank may be made of iron, but man, in this film, is certainly not made of steel. Central command, that crackling, all-knowing voice that fills the small vehicle, describes Israeli soldiers in code. Alive they are “flowers” and dead they are “angels”. Central Command, you see, is the voice of God, and men are either blooms or brightly transcendent in their martyrdom, already eaten by the beast and enduring, like Jonah, a test from their pitiless deity.
Adapted from a review by Roger Clarke in Sight and Sound.
The Time That Remains (2009)
Saturday April 16th 2011
Eight years have passed since Elia Suleiman’s wonderful Divine Intervention, a rambunctious series of dark comedic encounters, sight gags and vaudeville two-steps set in Nazareth and Jerusalem, opened in New York and the time that has passed has seemingly turned Suleiman even more inward. Though no one would dare refute that the brilliantly batty scenarios that comprised the Palestinian director’s last film were anything less than deeply personal, Suleiman’s moving and beautiful new film, The Time That Remains, unfolds with events that could be tracked to particles swirling in his very marrow.
Like his two previous efforts, Suleiman appears as a Keatonesque version of himself early on in the film’s gloomy overture, sitting out of focus in the backseat of a cab in the middle of a freak thunderstorm. “Elie, Elie, where are you?” calls his cabdriver to the dispatcher, echoing Jesus’ final words to God as he perished on the cross. Matters of Suleiman’s homeland and family continuously reappear in Suleiman’s films. His first narrative feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance, dealt with his own feelings of displacement upon returning to Nazareth after living for over a decade in New York City while the death of his father was something of a focal point in Intervention.
This film begins in Nazareth, 1948, where Suleiman’s father, Fuad, lives and works as a gun maker and resistance fighter traversing his neighbourhood on the day Nazareth surrendered to the State of Israel. Following the mayor of Nazareth signing power over to the Israeli Army, Suleiman chronicles the brutalization of his father by the newly instated Israeli stronghold. The segment, based largely on his father’s diary, is tinged with the director’s requisite bleak humor (a buffoonish soldier searches for a city in need of liberation) and film references (a ludicrous ode to North by Northwest) but it nevertheless shows off a more subdued Suleiman and even skirts familiarity in its treatment of the resistance.
Suleiman subsequently leaps to 1970, wherein Fuad has married Nadia and is suspected of running guns at the coastline. He has also sired young Elia who is scolded at school for calling America “colonialist” and “imperialist”. At the very same time, the school uses Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus as a Zionist text and inadvertently condones incest. There is a clear progression in tone, from the more frantic first segment to the more sombre and disillusioned second, a segment typified equally by Fuad’s neighbor spouting absurd tirades on how to get rid of Israel and a local drunk consistently attempting and failing to light himself on fire.
The bridging of the second and third segment basically skips over the glut of Sadat’s regime and lands in 1980, where teenage Suleiman most come to grips both with increased violent protests, his father’s chronic illness and, ultimately, his own exile. In the final modern-day segment, he returns home to visit his aged mother and comes to confront the new levels of near-hallucinatory chaos that his home has devolved into.
Suleiman’s parents, like many other figures in his world, do nothing to curtail the warning signs they are given. His father smokes incessantly against his doctor’s advice and his diabetic mother sneaks in ice cream bars before bed. For Suleiman, one of a scant few filmmakers transmitting from Palestine, his film is less about the arch of the great struggle over the disputed territories than the crestfallen, manic, desperate and furious people who have haunted these pieces of land for innumerable years and have existed in a state of continuous bedlam and confusion for just about as long.
After many months of darkness, I'm delighted to announce a Spring Season of superb cinema. The films are all on Blu-Ray DVDs so the fine quality of the sound and images will match that of the films we are showing.
Saturday April 17th: The Hurt Locker
(Kathryn Bigelow 2008)
The Hurt Locker employs the codes and conventions of the Hollywood Western to provide an exciting account of a tour of duty of an American bomb disposal unit in post-invasion Iraq. It then uses the genre to undermine the unit's success.
A key to understanding the film's method is provided in an early scene in which we watch the defusing of an improvised explosive device. We see the arrival of the specialist unit with all the paraphernalia of modern warfare - complex protective clothing, powerful weaponry with telescopic aiming devices, tactical and practiced deployment of several personnel etc - and how it is rendered helpless by the sudden and unpredictable appearance of a mysterious, obscurely motivated and unarmed taxicab. The constantly moving camera doesn't manage - actually doesn't try - to get a view of the driver and the closest we get to him at the stage of the stand-off is an extreme close up of his eye. The driver doesn't flinch (he barely blinks) as shots are fired into the ground and he hardly moves when his windscreen is shot out. In reality he would, of course, be cut and blinded by the shattered glass, so the decision to leave him there unmoved by the assault is a directorial decision that carries important meaning.
The confrontation set up in this scene is between a modern occidental efficient and effective war machine, in which are embedded all the advances of western industrialism, and the mysterious and incomprehensible behaviour of the Orient. It is a confrontation of America with its Other. The use of the Western genre reminds one of the numerous confrontations in Hollywood cinema of the 'White Man' with Native or Mexican Americans, equally Other, equally not understood and equally filmed to be personally invisible. But in this film there is a loss of confidence in the triumphalist American exceptionalism that characterises the classic Western. I think the film, and this scene in particular, recognises that the heroism of the squad, and by implication, of the whole Iraq adventure, is fruitless. One of the soldiers remarks that their efforts have created yet another insurgent. Occupying forces sow only dragons' teeth. It was ever thus.
Saturday May 22nd: Let the Right One In
(Tomas Alfredson 2008)
Something of a first for CinemaXanadu, a vampire film. Here are extracts from two reviews taken from the IMDB:
'From Sweden comes "Let the Right One In," a film of extraordinary mood and wildly inventive directorial potency. It's a hushed, gentle story of provisional friendship, the ordeal of adolescence, and the curse of vampiric immortality. A hypnotic motion picture from beginning to end, "Right One" is a marvel: an ingenious genre film that manages to terrify and endear in the same instant, deftly erecting one of the most persuasive, haunting film experiences of the year.'
And:
'As a vampire film, Let the Right One In seems to owe little to previous cinematic representations of the nosferatu. There's little attempt made at presenting a mythology, no trendy Eurotrash vamps, or appeals to the long tradition of disfigured counts. Instead, through its mix of short, brutal violence and atmospheric cinematography, the film most reminds me of the vampiric oeuvre of Jean Rollin, with his dreamy atmospheric and taste for blood. This might be a somewhat problematic comparison because of all the sensuality dripping from Rollin's movies, but I think the tentative adolescent attraction between Oskar and Eli holds the seeds of sexuality. Naturally, Let the Right One In is quite a bit less sleazy than your average Rollin flick, but I think its dreamy atmosphere is one of its chief strengths.
Leaving aside the vampire aspects of the film, we're left with a young boy coming to terms with his growing masculinity. He's attracted to a girl, trying to stand up to the local bullies, and obviously trying to improve himself physically. However, Let the Right One In seems to be about so much more. Ultimately, there's very little plot to the film, which gives the entire film a feeling of allegory. This feeling is aided by the fact that the film drops Eli's back story from the novel. Instead, both she and Oskar are like specters, only really alive once they've met each other. It's also hard not to read into the casting of the two leads (both of whom, by the way, give performances that would make actors three times their age jealous). Oskar is all blond hair and fine features, while Eli is the darker of the two, with broader features and an "ethnic" air about her. Their troubled friendship takes on historically relevant overtones, and parallels to twentieth century history are not hard to draw.
The film is stunning for its fearless attention to cinematography. Let the Right One In is replete with extended shots, often long and medium length views of scenery and people which lend to the atmosphere. When the camera does come in for a close up, shallow depth of field is often used, throwing large parts of the screen out of focus, reinforcing some of the dreaminess of the narrative.'
Saturday 12th June: The White Ribbon
(Michael Haneke 2009)
Another masterpiece from Michael Haneke. The action of the film, beautifully shot in black and white, takes place in a German village in the fifteen months that precede World War I. An apparently placid rural life is interrupted by a series of unpleasant events, which are narrated by the village school teacher who tells us that he believes that what transpired that year may help us to understand subsequent developments in Germany.
The story focuses on the teacher's tale of the children's repressive and abusive upbringing and the children's response to that upbringing. It is the immediate response that we are shown, it is the later response, that is how these children will behave when they become adults, that we are to deduce. In a series of books, but most notably in For Your Own Good (1980), Alice Miller developed the idea of a 'poisonous pedagogy,' which is to say, of how abusive parenting and schooling results in the development of unloving, unlovable, cruel, dispassionate adults who welcome demagogic leaders to replace missing parental figures. The central idea is that that it is real abuse, physical, psychological and sexual - all of which we see enacted in this unnamed German village - rather than the fantasised abuse of psychoanalytic theory, that causes mental breakdown and predisposes people to seduction by fascism.
It is intriguing to find one of the many powerful scenes in the film comes straight out of a nineteenth century treatise on bringing up children that Miller extracts in For Your Own Good (1980). Another such treatise advises affixing black ribbons to girls' hair as a punishment. The film has Haneke's characteristic flourishes, puzzles and tableaux. In some ways, you might say that it is like a Bergman film but historically placed and with a purpose that extends well beyond the extremes of psychological understanding.
Traditionally what we were taught about history at school amounted to little more than a celebration of our nation’s glorious past. We learnt, for example, about the myths of the origin of our country, the lives and loves of our glorious kings and queens, the battles and wars we had won and lost, the rise of Empire and the gradual enfranchisement of our citizenry. Quite another view of history, however, is that it is our attempt to illuminate rather than celebrate the past. In this case, the information we call history is usually based either on testimony (“I was there and this is what I saw”) or on documents whose authenticity can be independently verified. Both sources of information may be open to dispute.
This Autumn we present three fiction films that address the interplay of memory and history in the attempt their protagonists make to describe or discover what took place in the past.
3 October 2009 - A Self Made Hero (Un héros très discret, 1996, Audiard, France)
Mathieu Kassoviz is the younger and Jean-Louis Trintignant the older version of Albert, our hero who, from humble beginnings in Occupied France, rises to find himself an officer in the army and eventually a member of the government. A very funny story but one that has a serious warning about what can happen when history finds itself in a tussle with memory.
Carlos Saura’s exquisite Cria cuervos heralded a turning point in Spain: shot while General Franco was on his deathbed, the film melds the personal and the political in a portrait of the legacy of fascism and its effects on a middle-class family (the title derives from the Spanish proverb: “Raise ravens and they’ll peck out your eyes”). Ana Torrent (the dark-eyed beauty from The Spirit of the Beehive) portrays the disturbed eight-year-old Ana, living in Madrid with her two sisters and mourning the death of her mother, whom she conjures as a ghost (an ethereal Geraldine Chaplin).
14 November 2009 - Waltz with Bashir (2008, Folman, Israel)
The film opens with a dream (an invitation to interpretation?) and moves to Folman’s attempt to overcome his amnesia of his part in the 1982 Israeli incursion into Lebanon. The first 88 minutes of the film are animated in a very particular way; they include a discussion with a psychiatrist who warns about the unreliability of the very testimony we are about to witness. The last 2 minutes of the film are live action contemporary film. If we understand Folman to be standing in for the State, we have a profound meditation on national amnesia and that nations as well as individuals can repress unwelcome memories.
