Theatre v cinema

What a contrast! A theatre production earlier in the week that left me cross and dissatisfied and the pictures last night. At the BFI (British Film Institute) I saw The Powder Keg, dir. Goran Paskaljevic, 1998, five countries listed but I imagine the director is Macedonian or Serbian: the film takes place in Belgrade, after the Bosnian War and before the Kosovo War. I never thought, 'Look at those stupid actors' – they all seemed like real people to me. The structure of the film was episodic and loosely linked but felt entirely coherent. Visually it was magnificent and I was glad I'd seen it there and not on what now counts as a small tv at home. Just a terrific experience and one that goes on resonating as the Brecht play didn't. I resolved (again) to go to the cinema more often.

The BFI has a great programme of films that I wouldn't see anywhere else and that never make it to DVD. I've really enjoyed films from Greece, former Yugoslavia and Slovakia; I'd love to see some of them again but can't.

The frustrating thing with the BFI is that many of their films, like the Powder Keg, are shown only once or twice so it's hard to catch them on a free evening. Someone who works there told me that's all they're allowed: the film hiring contract limits the showings, the reason being that running a film is 'like scratching it with razor blades'. The material has a limited life, something I sort of knew but hadn't considered the implications of. I wish some global outfit would digitise all films and make them available. The viewing experience would be second-best but better than none at all.

Beyond 'first-order' reading

In an exchange we've been having about ‘literacies’ in language and other media/modes, Mark Reid, who works in film education, writes

I think you can similarly go beyond basic, automatic decoding of moving image, into higher, more sophisticated shapings in film. We see it so rarely though - it's to do with style, - i think style in film is as intrinsically important as it is in prose, but just as hard to capture - and making the 'film sentence' (the phrase is Anthony Minghella's) speak with the voices of other films, heteroglossia-style. I watched a film called Birth over xmas, twice (this is rare for me!). Every frame is freighted with resonances from other films, and way beyond a crude 'postmodern collage' sense; it speaks with the voices snatched from other films. 'Reading' Birth is richer if one has seen films like Rosemary's Baby, The Shining, not arcane stuff, just cineliterate work. (And also richer if you've read Henry James and Edith Wharton - or seen the two or three very good film 'versions'.)

Right, I'm sure – I don’t have the cineliteracy to check it for myself. And it offers another way into one of my interests, what’s involved in education in literature.

Up to a point, people who can read (in the usual sense etc) can follow a story, just as at one level we can all follow a film (we can see what this frame is an image of, we know without working it out that there’s a lapse of time between these two). So what is there beyond that point? what is education in these things at a more advanced level? Mark indicates two things (they overlap but I think they’re separable in theory): style and intertextual allusion (frames that are already partly familiar from other works).

In written prose and poetry, the style is working on us, presumably, whether we’re aware of it or not, and intertextual allusion probably the same if we’ve read the other works (or examples of the other genres). Literary education – as opposed to just reading -- works to make us consciously aware: not for its own sake – because analysis is good, or because that sort of exercise is scholarly or rigorous or ‘proper academic study’; but to enhance our experience of the work. Admittedly some sorts of analysis can ‘kill a work’, as they say, but the idea is that the student notices more of what’s there.

What’s happening is that an aspect of the novel or poem (say) starts to present itself to us even though it isn’t there: no amount of looking at what is there -- this sentence or scene – will find the similar sentence or scene from Pride and Prejudice. Only the recall of Austen will do that, the bringing to mind of something that isn’t there, another book that’s not on the desk in front of me but is still on the shelf or in the library or given to Oxfam years ago.

When we start being aware of texts as the visible parts of vast webs, our experience stops being simply of the immediate words and sentence, and starts to be something abstract, a set of relations that aren’t available to direct inspection. The concrete presence of what’s before us gets less substantial and takes on the character of a shadow or echo or the presented front of something big behind it that’s not visible. What immediately presents itself ceases to be all the reality there is.

But then, if the process is going well, the opposite phase of the oscillation kicks in and we snap back to what’s in front us, which now appears both more concrete or tangible and ‘freighted’ with a sense of the abstract network of relations it’s enmeshed in. And then back again, and so on.

Style of course is partly a matter of which resonances get activated. But it’s also characteristic lexical choices, sentence shapes, types of transition from sentence to sentence and prosodic patterns (sound and rhythm). Again, the patterns those things form aren’t there in the immediate way that a particular sentence is in a spontaneous reading; we construct them unconsciously and, if education is doing its stuff, perhaps consciously as well.

Cultural update

Back in business -- thanks to those who encouraged me -- and lots of ideas for more blogs. In my absence I see Jim Medway’s blog has been steaming ahead: he’s even got a shop on it for his arty products.

The bathroom’s in. Attended with Anton an evening celebrating the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, who’s terrific even in translation. The panel included Al Alvarez -- he of Suicide and Sylvia Plath fame -- good to see him in the flesh -- and an Irish poet, Nick Laird, whose comments I liked and whose book On Purpose I then bought from the stand outside but didn’t like as much.

Also saw four films in the London Film Festival. Spike Lee’s new one, Miracle at Santa Anna, about a black regiment in the US Army in Italy in World War II, was powerful -- best small battle scenes ever -- and I certainly want to see it again. May have been too long -- not sure.

There was an interesting French entry, Entre les Murs (The Class), based on a book by François Bégaudeau, a teacher who plays himself in the film: the acting, especially by the 14-year-old students in their Français class, was good and the situation seemed real enough, but the teacher could have done with going on one of our better PGCE (teacher training) courses because his lessons were boring.


Finally, here’s ‘Pebble’ by Zbigniew Herbert LINK

The pebble
is a perfect creature

equal to itself
mindful of its limits

filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth

- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye

Translated by Peter Dale Scott and Czeslaw Milosz

Pathetic British film

I go to the pictures quite seldom and when I do am usually disappointed. Why I am is illustrated by one of the last films I saw (actually on DVD at home), Atonement. Two young people who have just consummated their love are separated when he is wrongly arrested, convicted of rape (of another girl) and imprisoned. He is released into the army, goes to France with the British Expeditionary Force, is separated from the force but finds them again at Dunkirk waiting to be ferried home and dies of septicaemia before he can board. She, now a nurse, dies when a bomb hits a water main and drowns the occupants of the tube station where she is sheltering. But what we’re shown is not the two deaths but the couple’s happy reunion in London, and then we’re told by the girl who had falsely accused him, now a writer advanced in years and torn by guilt, that she’d made the happy scenes up to repay them. So that’s supposed to be moving, or what?

I'm just not interested. A novelist falsifies a history out of guilt: who cares? A couple realise they’re in love: they’re alone in the library; they make love. What does seeing a bit of tame close-up add to that information? Constantly in this film (and in many others) I get the sense that the plot says ‘they realise they’re in love’, ‘they make love’, ‘he and a couple of fellow soldiers wander lost in France’, ‘he lies sick in a basement in Dunkirk’ etc., and the director just fills out those brief labels, illustrating them, as it were, with an appropriate scene, from which we get little more than the label would have communicated yet have to sit through every tedious minute of it, knowing exactly what it’s doing. Spicy bits are thrown in to liven up the experience: they come across the odd atrocity, the woman (now a nurse) unwraps the bandage of a wounded soldier and discovers the horror of the wound of which he is unaware. The little scenes like that may hold the attention briefly, then we move on the next one, and it doesn’t add up to anything.

There’s also one big scene on which most of the budget must have been blown: the Dunkirk beach with the army, at a loose end and apparently somewhat out of control, waiting for the boats. It’s a fine spectacle, but what’s it there for except to be that?

But then the only recent McEwan book I read also had this painting-by-numbers quality (Saturday--he’d evidently been on work experience in a brain surgery theatre so as to be able to include descriptions which seem similarly unmotivated or unintegrated).

It was relief the next night to watch a decent French police thriller, 36, in which almost no scene felt as if it was there just to pad out a phrase in the plot.