Showing posts with label Orson Welles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Orson Welles. Show all posts

Monday 30 September 2019

Musings after re-watching The Third Man (1949)

Musings after re-watching The Third Man (1949)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


29 September

Musings after re-watching The Third Man (1949)








Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 10 October 2015

For World Mental Health Day 2015 : Where, in me, is Kafka’s Josef K. ?

More views of or before Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


10 October, World Mental Health Day

A personal vision of trying to relate to the experience of breakdown / psychiatric challenge in the form of ongoing existential / spiritual self-examination

This is not [meant to be], on #WMHD2015, @THEAGENTAPSLEY talking about others as if about the self (or vice versa)*.

Rather, it is more in the nature of a confession, of trying to be honest and open about what breakdown, and admission under section (circa 21 April 1996), deep down meant and felt like, and still does, just now when the feeling of how I act, and have acted, hypocritically can be keen, as here :






If needed, here is a paragraph from Wikipedia®'s summary of the plot of The Trial**, by way of partial context for those Tweets :

K. is visited by his uncle, who was K.'s guardian. The uncle seems distressed by K.'s predicament. At first sympathetic, he becomes concerned that K. is underestimating the seriousness of the case. The uncle introduces K. to a lawyer, who is attended by Leni, a nurse, who K.'s uncle suspects is the advocate's mistress. During the discussion it becomes clear how different this process is from regular legal proceedings: guilt is assumed, the bureaucracy running it is vast with many levels, and everything is secret, from the charge, to the rules of the court, to the authority behind the courts – even the identity of the judges at the higher levels. The attorney tells him that he can prepare a brief for K., but since the charge is unknown and the rules are unknown, it is difficult work. It also never may be read, but is still very important. The lawyer says that his most important task is to deal with powerful court officials behind the scenes. As they talk, the lawyer reveals that the Chief Clerk of the Court has been sitting hidden in the darkness of a corner. The Chief Clerk emerges to join the conversation, but K. is called away by Leni, who takes him to the next room, where she offers to help him and seduces him. They have a sexual encounter. Afterwards K. meets his uncle outside, who is angry, claiming that K.'s lack of respect has hurt K.'s case.


NB Looking back, in that way, to sectioning in 1996 (and again in January 1997), there is no intention to suggest that anyone else does feel, or ought to feel, twinges of conscience that are tied up with their experience of mental-health issues or services.

However, for me, conscience / awareness of feeling a fraud seem in the midst of what happened then, now, and everywhere in between.

If I see a spiritual or existential dimension in my own issues of mental health, it is for me to see or, more likely, pretend to myself that I am aware of it, when largely I keep it well hidden (at least from myself) : it is all in relation to wanting to work out my paranoia, and why I can, so easily, find accusation in comments, words and texts (mainly from memory, though also in recollected things that people said or wrote, and what they meant / whether they really meant xyz)…


Coda :

And remembering may be, for some, to do with learning not to forget... ? :




End-notes

* As one of Beckettt’s authorial voices says somewhere (in The Unnamable, or is it Company ?), When I say ‘I’, and having addressed the question whatever / whoever ‘I’ is (and he digresses, as I do, in the fashion of Laurence Sterne’s principal narrator, Tristram Shandy) he goes on to say just that : when saying ‘I’, he does not intend to talk about someone else (as if it were he).

(Molloy, too, certainly mentions that he may lapse into talking of himself as if of another.)

** Kafka wrote the (incomplete) novel in German, entitled Der Prozeß.



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Sunday 10 August 2014

Raskolnikov sojourns in Shanghai

This is a review that couples The Lady from Shanghai (1948) with
Norte, the End of History (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


10 August

This is a review that couples The Lady from Shanghai (1948) with
Norte, the End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan) (2013)

* Contains spoilers *



Compared with Norte, the End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan) (2013), ‘slow burning’ is not a phrase by which one could still describe The Lady from Shanghai (1948)*. Certainly not as to overall plot or pace, though it does fall into three distinct parts of unequal length (set-up, court-scene, and symbolic hall of mirrors), the second of which is established by the purposeful, if leisurely, unfolding of the first – hence there is a smouldering sense, as if of a fuse.

A fuse implies (such is its purpose, although it may go out) that there will be a detonation, an explosion, which is delivered by the events that close on Michael (Mike) O’Hara at the end of the first part. This is the moment that we were (being temptingly) kept waiting to get back to, after what Mike (director and co-writer Orson Welles himself) told us at the opening, when a darkly lit craft had been coming in under the Golden Gate Bridge (in a film that plays with light and dark, not just in clothes).

Arguably, Norte never does more than burn through at a deliberately steady and slow rate, and, towards the end, balances fairly cowardly actions of restitution (because they risk nothing, even if they are done out of seeming guilt), with those that seem to make past actors guilty as a basis for wreaking vengeance on them (the equivalent of Fabian's earlier acts).



Someone may very well behave in this way, but, until this point, the screenplay retains enough of the story of Crime and Punishment, complete with its unsympathetic and grasping money-lender, to tease us into believing that it wishes to engage with re-telling Dostoveksy’s novel. Yet, forgetting that the figure of Porphyry (the detective in the novel) has been omitted, the closest person to Sonya that we see is when Fabian has gone to Manila, and reluctantly (because of the affiliations of his group of friends) has something to do with the church : alone as a way of understanding him, beyond his contentious arguments and justifications, his struggle to say what he has done in La Paz before a group at the church is one of the few expressive moments in the whole film that is not characterized by flatness of affect.

In its way, Michael O’Hara’s tripping brogue, sometimes more convincing than at other times (perhaps to remind us that all cinema is a piece of blarney, a tale being told), is staggeringly cool in its tone, however hot his driving feelings for Elsa Bannister (Welles’ wife, Rita Haywood) may be. With sangfroid, he has us credit (because we see it) that Elsa’s husband Arthur, a trial lawyer on crutches, searches him out as he works (on his novel !) at the hiring hall for seafaring men, and, after begging him to serve on his yacht for a cruise, gets so drunk that Mike and his friends have to see him home – whereupon it is a fait accompli that Mike join the crew.

Noir, which the first part of the film unquestionably is, embraces such plot-styles with relish, asking us to place trust in unreliable narratives and in devices and developments that are more Gothic than Gothic** – although we do go along with what we see, to further the purpose of following the film, we know simultaneously that the logic and reality of the dream is behind all of this, and that we are not to press too hard on its fabric. The veneer of veracity is never more than thin, and amounts to carrying off absurdity with poise (or, if you will, gravitas).

Who knows how much of what has already been outlined is owed to Sherwood King’s novel, but the film has all the trappings of a shaggy-dog story ! Coupled with Mike’s pithy poetic monologue about sharks off the coast of Brazil, the grotesquery of both Bannister and his unexpectedly arriving grinning business partner George Grisby (Glenn Anders), and the corny demeanour of both men towards Bannister’s wife, and one can see Mike smiling his way through an evening of drinks as he tells it.

Superficially, Norte simply asks us to place our trust in it for no other reason than it appears a naturalistic account (which it is not) of the consequences of an injustice – when Fabian’s lawyer friends eventually discuss, at his instigation, the merits of an appeal against JR’s conviction, it is clear that weight has been given to a confession (whose reasons for being made we know), and an incident that connects him with the victim, over such factors as JR having the alibi that, at the time, he was at the place where he was (somehow) found and arrested.

In Mike’s case, Arthur Bannister – although the screenplay has been quietly laughing throughout at what Bannister’s status as a celebrated criminal lawyer means – is presented to us as his only option for being acquitted, but the patent tomfoolery in the court-room suggests otherwise. (Meanwhile, no one stops to ask on whose typewriter Mike's ‘confession’ was supposed to have been written, not least in relation to the particular question - in relation to what we see happen (even if partly as set up by Grisby) - of when and where Mike could have had access to one to do so…)



In common with The Lady, we have murder, a judicial process (though, in Norte, we do not see any more than its artefacts and officers), and the question of innocence (in a conviction for acts that we know that the accused did not commit). Forgetting the question of justice per se, or of redemption (for which there is precious little evidence – in either film), we have in Fabian (as in Mike) a man who is jaundiced with life, but open to idealism. At any rate, we see the philosophizing with which his friends and he seem to entertain themselves, but which he – although they end up in laughter – seems to hold more dear, and (without such intellectualization) there are aspects of this make-up to Mike.

Both directors (Welles was uncredited at the time), in their ways, challenge us to look at the artefacts that they have brought into existence by the process of film-making, and towards the end not insignificantly so, with Welles’ mirror-scene and with the scenes that Lav Diaz gives us of the wreckage of a seeming coach-crash, followed by JR’s supine body levitating.

Yet, before then, the Gothic nature of Welles’ edifice was saying this all along. In Norte, we see this in the artfulness with which elements such as recurrent Christmas-lights, dogs and chickens, vegetables on a cart, and (returning to Christmas) JR’s inexhaustible production of three-dimensional five-pointed stars (which he not only brings when allowed out on release, but which litter the crash-scene) have been assembled.

Where Diaz may make a minor departure from Welles here (if not a new one) is in his disjunctive use of audio…





That apart, with two palpable fictions, one has to ask what function there is in following the form of Fabian's interactions, or even Michael O'Hara's wayward narration (though he enchants us more) :


Welles and his writing team seem to be trying to be too clever for their own good, with incrimination that does not stand up to examination (except with the dazzle of mirrors and reflections, though not intellectual reflection), and Diaz, if he assumes that we know the Dostoyevsky (maybe he does not care), only seems to want to play with our expectations of what he will do with the novel's bare bones.





End-notes

* Not to be mistaken for The Lady from Shanghai (1947), whose title-character seems to have kleptomania (and whose IMDb entry persists on coming out at the top of a search on Google, with no placing for Welles in the first ten hits)…



Apparently, not our film’s original title, but, before it, Take This Woman and Black Irish.

** Here, Mike making eyes at the lady in the carriage and then happening to rescue her : she has no reason to be in the carriage, even, for where it stops under his control is where her car is garaged. Or a screenwriter in debt, pulling off the road to stop his car being repossessed, and, discovering a slumbering villa, entering the place, as Prince Charming, that will enslave him (Sunset Boulevard (1950)).






Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 27 October 2012

Your name is what ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


28 October




By which I mean - if I could find the answer (as there is somehow no Wikipedia® page for her yet) - was the name with which, for example, the new award-holder for jazz (in the Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme) was registered at birth Trish Clowes - does that name 'Trish' appear on her birth-certificate, or was she given a longer name, which she never uses?

Yes, there's ample, and even Shakespearean, precedent in, say, the name Jack for one's real name not being what one uses - he, just as much Prince Hal is really Henry, should be Sir John Falstaff*, and, on appropriate occasions, is. But, if he had a business card (or a web-site), since when, as a matter of general custom, would his proper name not have appeared formally on it?

So someone whose name might have appeared on what everyone else calls headed paper (and lawyers 'notepaper') as Peter Graham, M. Phil, or P. D. Graham, has - at some point - almost universally become identified as Pete Graham. That undoubtedly is what happens now, but I cannot say when it became the norm - it just is.


End-notes

* Both men, then, which reinforces their matey-ness, have a familiar form of name, by which they call each other. In the famous scene from Henry IV, Part II, when Hal - as he has planned - banishes Falstaff, whose embarrassing interruption Welles catches in direction and playing so well in Chimes at Midnight (1967), severe attention is called to him, what he calls himself, and what he is.