Jig

Jig
Directed by Sue Bourne
UK, 2010
Cornerhouse, 30 May 2011

This documentary casts a sympathetic, smiling eye towards the little-known world of Irish dancing.

Following the fortunes of a handful of dancers (well , about two handfuls, now I come to count them), each with their own story to tell, the film climaxes at the Irish Dancing World Championships in Glasgow, where there are tears of joy and disappointment.

It’s an engaging film: the children are charming and surprisingly mature, the parents are supportive and not at all pushy, and there’s an inspirational teacher in John Carey.

Sure this one will set your Irish eyes a-smiling.

Antigone & Lorca is Dead

Antigone & Lorca is Dead
Belt Up Theatre
The Lowry, 26 May 2011

It is perhaps a little unfair to consider both plays together, rather than devoting a separate review to each one, but the company are touring both and it should be possible to see them on the same night, as I have done.

You could say that the plays share the same theme – response to the death of a beloved - but they are different in style.

Sophocles’ play has been freely adapted by Alexander Wright and inventively staged, but the story is pretty much told straight.  The last of the Theban plays, it has the moral common to all Greek tragedy: suffering leads to wisdom eventually.  Oh, and don’t fuck your mother: it never turns out well.

Lorca is Dead, written by Dominic J. Allen,  was a riot by contrast, and the audience were cordially invited to participate in it.  Here the set-up was that a bunch of surrealists were meeting to consider the demise of the great Spanish poet.  Unfortunately Leonora Carrington, the one surrealist who could have injected a little Lancashire common sense to the proceedings, was absent.  So there were squabbles, disputes and digressions, some elegiac moments though no mention of duende, which was surprising.  Matters were always in danger of collapsing into chaos, though they never did.

This was a terrific evening’s entertainment and if you can see both plays on the same night I’d recommend you do so.  Tour dates of Antigone & Lorca is Dead can be seen here.

Two in the Wave

Two in the Wave
(Deux de la vague)
Directed by Emmanuel Laurent
France, 2010
Cornerhouse, 25 May 2011

‘I hardly have the impression that I’m exaggerating when I say that cinema saved my life.’

Truffaut’s words express his passion for cinema, a passion that drew him towards and then later apart from Godard.

This documentary examines the relationship between the two men, both key figures in the Nouvelle Vague.  They began as allies, Truffaut even writing the screenplay (ostensibly, at any rate) to Godard’s first feature A bout de soufflé.  It seems something of a cliché, or perhaps a smokescreen, to say that artistic differences was the cause of their falling out, but here it seems to have been true.

At some point, and especially following the events of protest in 1968, cinema became a political tool for Godard.  His work became much more engaged, radical, politically committed.  Whereas for Truffaut, cinema was always a lyrical art form.  That, above all.  He never lost a naive cinephilie.

Watch to the very end of this superb documentary and you’ll see a touching interview / screen test with a very young Jean-Pierre Leaud, for the role of the schoolboy in Les quatre cents coups.  There are many other riches here too, in a film that is pretty much essential viewing for all lovers of French cinema.

Here are two related postings, both book reviews:

The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks

Unraveling French Cinema

A View from the Bridge

A View from fhe Bridge
By Arthur Miller
Royal Exchange Theatre, 23 May 2011

Con O'Neill as Eddie Carbone. Photo - Jonathan Keenan.

Miller’s play has all the lineaments of classical tragedy, including its peculiarly ineluctable logic, the sense that these people cannot act other than as they do.

Even when the play opens it is clear that a moment of crisis is at hand: Catherine (Leila Mimmack) takes a job of work, against her uncle Eddie’s wishes.  Sure Eddie (Con O’Neill) cannot see that she’s no longer a young girl and he has difficulty in acknowledging the full extent of his feelings for her.

The device of having the lawyer Alfieri (Ian Redford) partly narrate and comment on the action works well, mainly because he doesn’t directly tell us what these people are feeling.  All the actors are still free to act, without constraint.  Show, don’t tell.

Very many performances stood out in this fine production, and certainly all the principal actors pulled their weight.

A View from the Bridge is at the Royal Exchange until 25 June.  Details are here.

How I Ended This Summer

How I Ended This Summer
(Kak ya provyol etim letom)
Directed by Aleksei Popogrebsky
Russia, 2010
Cornerhouse, 22 May 2011

At this film’s heart you have a relationship between two very different men, Sergei and Pavel, which breaks down with disastrous consequences for both.

The two men are by themselves at some Arctic outpost, there to take readings of the radioactivity levels and other such like environmental measures.  Their only contact with the outside world is via radio and when one man (Pavel) receives some bad news to pass along to the other, senior man it is an unwanted obligation, a hot potato, something he doesn’t know what to do with.

Most of the time, the film is a stark portrayal of how two men can get along, despite differences in character and outlook: one man is serious and conscientious, with a family and responsibilities; the younger one, while lazy and with a liking for computer games, is nonetheless sensitive.  For some of the time, though, it is two guys all alone in the icy wastes, fighting each other with guns and whatever weapons malice can conjure.

Both actors, Sergei Puskepalis and Grigory Dobrygin, are splendid.  There’s an anxious, tremulous feeling to the film, deriving in part from the icy environment of stark solitude where nature is king.  These men could almost be on the moon, they are so alone and so dependent on each other… and trust is a fragile commodity.

A fine film.

Derrida, An Egyptian

Derrida, An Egyptian
By Peter Sloterdijk
Polity Press, July 2009
ISBN: 9780745646398

The title itself is an allusion to the first part of Moses and Monotheism, where Freud puts forward the thesis that Moses was indeed an Egyptian: by culture, nationality, religion… by all that matters.

What Peter Sloterdijk does in this rather short book (a mere 80 pages) is to look at the relationship between Derrida and another thinker or writer; he describes this as de- and re-contextualising the great man, naturally enough.

Who are these thinkers and writers?  Well, the talent on show includes Hegel, Freud, Thomas Mann… and four less well-known men (all are men, as it happens).  All seven chapters are quite sketchy and impressionistic; and sometimes the connection (or contextualisation) of Derrida to the thinker in question seems somewhat tenuous.  Still, Sloterdijk has an interesting mind (as readers of Terror from the Air will know) and a large part of the fun to be had from the book lies in the author’s own performance, in seeing his mind in action.

He also has an interesting diction.  Do any of you know what ‘introscendent’ might mean?  No?  Then how about ‘onto-semiological materialism’, do I have any takers?  Now ‘chora’, I know what that is all about, it’s a kind of carnivorous Turing machine; and Sloterdijk touches upon the notion here, albeit briefly.

As an example of what lies in store for the blessed reader, let us consider the chapter on Thomas Mann.  You might think that Derrida and Mann have little in common; however, Sloterdijk finds a fruitful connection in the figure of Joseph, the subject of Mann’s novel tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (and of particular relevance here is the third volume).  Just as Joseph found a position of influence and power as a reader of signs (in interpreting dreams down Egypt way) so too did Derrida.  They – both men – are exemplars, according to Sloterdijk, of the Jewish outsider, the one who comes from nowhere – from the very edge of empire – to a position of pre-eminence.  Not much of a relationship between Mann himself, you might say, and I’d be forced to agree.  Still, it is an opportunity for Sloterdijk to write about Derrida and his work, especially as it relates to exodus, slavery, the rewards and perils of immigration, and of course the pyramid and why ‘it is built to look as it would after its own collapse’.

In its own humble way, Sloterdijk’s book resembles a pyramid, a construct  that represents a mesmerising feat of intelligence and imagination.

Julia’s Eyes

Julia’s Eyes
(Los ojos de Julia)
Directed by Guillem Morales
Spain, 2010
Cornerhouse, 22 May 2011

One of the best horror/crime films you are likely to see this year, and an intriguing meditation on the act of seeing itself (& invisibility also, come to that).

Here we follow Julia, a woman who is gradually losing her sight, as she investigates the death of her twin sister, who suffered also from the same degenerative eye condition.  Just about everyone accepts that she killed herself, but Julia doesn’t believe it; the special bond between twins tells her that her sister was murdered.

You will be gripped and scared by this film, and you’ll also be subject to several gruesome incidents, one involving a needle approaching an eye… it was excruciating to see, truly.  For cinematic storytelling, the film could hardly have been bettered: there was suspense throughout and the momentum never slackened.  It is clear that the film as a whole owes a big debt to Peeping Tom and one key scene at the end was probably derived from Wait Until Dark; but no matter, those are good films to be influenced by.

Some wild ride is in prospect when you go to see this one.

Exterminating Angel – An Improvisation

Exterminating Angel – An Improvisation
Future Ruins
The Lowry, 20 May 2011

What we have is a dinner party going ever so slightly wrong.

It is an improvisation and so will be performed differently each time, but I expect it will stick to the same basic template: five friends around a dinner table.  Here are some thoughts on the performance I saw.

There’s a ludic quality to it, as you might imagine: the characters play with each other and with the audience’s expectations.  Another way of saying this: it’s a mind-fuck for all (but pleasant with it).

If you like Sleuth, the Anthony Schaffer play, or the films of Michael Haneke or Dogtooth, a weird Greek film released last year, you’ll love this play, or significant elements of it anyway.  In fact, you might wish they’d gone for darker, edgier themes.  Perhaps these will be forthcoming in future performances.

An interesting play, superbly performed, entertaining and a wee bit perturbing.  Go and see it for… (Ray Winstone’s tones) the experience.

It goes to Ipswich for the Pulse Fringe Festival on 9 June.  Details here.

Opera North’s From the House of the Dead

From the House of the Dead
Music by Leoš Janáček
Opera North
The Lowry, 19 May 2011

Like Fidelio, this opera is set in a prison and, while it is based on Dostoyevsky’s great nineteenth century novel, the action has been fast forwarded a fair few years.

Here we are in a Soviet labour camp, judging by the attire of the convicts and the guards.  What we have in essence is a series of monologues: each convict tells their tale, the story of how they came to be sent to such a Godforsaken place.

Besides these parables of the soul’s degradation, which are very much Dostoyevsky’s own, there’s a fair amount of brutality, the currency of commerce in prison life.  Again (as with the production of Fidelio), the set (a vast prison yard) and the costumes, as well as here the convicts’ tattoos, added to and even created the tenebrous atmosphere.  It was a place of torment, purgatory or a circle of hell, one of Dante’s choice resorts.

By far the greatest contribution was made though, as you might imagine, by Leoš Janáček’s score: it was anxious, nerve-jangling, fear-inducing music; and it set you on edge throughout, preparing and priming you for the dramas as they unfolded.

Not a happy, sunlit romance, then; in fact, quite the reverse.  All of it – and not only the malicious game of Russian roulette at the beginning – proclaimed: here, in this place, human life doesn’t mean very much.

This is a must-see production of a great opera, excoriating in its power to move you to pity.

The 39 Steps

The 39 Steps
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
UK, 1935
Cornerhouse, 15 May 2011

You could make a fairly good case for saying that Alfred Hitchcock’s film is superior to John Buchan’s source novel.

For a start, there are a goodly number of women in the film: the agent who first makes contact with Richard Hannay is a woman, as is the Scottish farmer’s wife who comes to his aid (and there’s a genuine compassionate feeling to these scenes, quite rare in Hitchcock’s later films), as too is the woman who ends up on the run with him (a relationship which set the template for a number of later films, notably North by Northwest).  Looking at the matter clearly, the presence of women introduces romance, humour, flirtatious banter… it makes for a whole different feel and it’s more enjoyable as a spectacle.  In Buchan’s novel, there are no women at all: it is a boy’s adventure story.

Thank goodness, also, for a second difference, this time an omission:  Hitchcock has dropped the anti-Semitic vibe that was a part, though admittedly not a large part, of Buchan’s novel.  Buchan floats the idea, through his character Scudder, that the bankers and arms dealers, many of them Jewish, were seeking to provoke war in order to make a fast buck.

I think the film also scores highly on atmosphere and suspense, and is overall a complete cinematic creation, but Buchan is a terrific storyteller as well, of course.

This is a wonderful film, and the book is well worth a read too.  After reading it a few years ago, I reviewed it here.