Bobby Fischer Against the World

Bobby Fischer Against the World
Directed by Liz Garbus
USA, 2010
Cornerhouse, 29 July 2011

‘Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy…’

This excellent documentary, focusing on the troubled life and fractured chess career of Bobby Fischer, shows once again the truth of Fitzgerald’s words.  The contributors include Kasparov, Susan Polgar, Krogius (one of Spassky’s seconds in 1972) and various American players who knew Fischer, such as Larry Evans and Anthony Saidy.

The emphasis is very much on the 1972 World Championship match with Boris Spassky, and it’s a story that people will seemingly never tire of: Bobby Fischer, lone American genius, battling against the might of the Soviet Empire and his own inner demons, and emerging victorious.  Only, unexpectedly, he found a friend in Spassky.  It was Spassky’s sportsmanship, his discretion, his moral courage even, that saved the match and gave Fischer an opportunity to fulfil his destiny.  Spassky was a mensch.

There is one notable blunder with regard to the chess, so let’s get it out of the way.  Saidy says at one point that the Modern Benoni was first played by Fischer in the third game of the 1972 match, while in fact Fischer had played it several times before.  He played it twice at Havana 1966, for example, against Pomar and Najdorf, and thrice at Palma de Mallorca 1970, his opponents there being Portisch, Uhlmann and Gligoric.  And, yes, the sixth game was beautiful, as was the tenth, but the thirteenth game was in another league entirely.  It was an extraordinary drama.

Becoming world chess champion didn’t save Fischer, but then again perhaps nothing could.  His problems in living seem to have driven him towards chess, and the fame brought on by the victory against Spassky exposed them starkly.  Anyway, he never fulfilled his talent.  When Fischer’s powers were at their peak he never so much as raised a pawn in anger.  He messed up big-time.   The 1972 match was Fischer’s moment; there are no second acts in American lives, as Fitzgerald also said.

Certain questions remain unanswered, but they’re not really essential.  According to a couple of voices in the documentary, Fischer’s anti-Semitism developed after 1972 (during his s0-called ‘wilderness years’), whereas Donner has asserted that he was expressing such views much earlier, at a tournament held at Bled in 1961.  Also, the label ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ is bandied about a little too often for my liking.  Why not just say that, away from the chessboard, Fischer was a crashing bore, someone you wouldn’t want to be around?

Evans made what’s probably the best and the fairest summation: Fischer’s games will be his monument.  No one asks whether Euclid was a nice person.  We might wish there were more games, of course, but maybe we should just be grateful for those we have.

Pretty much all else – Fischer’s utterances in later life, for example - should be classed as simply nonsense or as wounded, damaged screams.  The poor son of a bitch.

Winstone, Gesing & Venier

Winstone, Gesing & Venier
RNCM Concert Hall, 28 July 2011

This trio make marvellous music, complementing each other perfectly.

Norma Winstone’s voice is one of the treasures of modern jazz and her intelligent, highly literate lyrics (the song ‘The Mermaid’ took its inspiration from a poem by Neruda) range from the melancholy to the playful.  You’d place the ‘ladies in Mercedes’ song among the latter, and you’d have to be a stone not to take delight in it.

The clarinet and saxophone of Klaus Gesing gave propulsion and drive to the music, while Glauco Venier on piano was inventive and boyishly impish in his playing.  Listening to these three consummate musicians on a balmy summer’s evening was like sipping a drink that was cool and copacetic but with a definite kick.  It was a pleasure, but not a light or an innocuous one.

Oh, and the lady’s summer dress was stunning, about as vibrantly colourful and effortlessly elegant as her voice.

Exchanges on Light

Exchanges on Light
By Jacques Roubaud
Translated by Eleni Sikelianos
La Presse, 2009
ISBN-13: 9781934200025

It has an obscure and convoluted history, does light.

As the first form that God turned His Hand to – we all surely recall the injunction, ‘Let there be light’ – it is one of the building blocks, perhaps even the essential ingredient, of the physical universe.  And the human eye has been structured to make sense of light and its gradients; light has formed our nature and continues to create our experience.

In Jacques Roubaud’s exhilarating work, which is perhaps closer to one of Thomas Love Peacock’s novels rather than being a poem as such, six people discuss light over some six nights, and they pretty much go at it from all directions.  Some take the scientific route, while others are by turns poetic, theological, mystical, down to earth, cosmological… the drive swerves and the roads are many and varied.  Within each night these people’s voices are nested, as the end-words in a sestina are nested.  In other words, the last of the six to speak, will speak once more; just as, in a sestina, the end-word in the last line of a stanza will appear as the end-word in the first line of the following stanza, etc.  So there is some kind of sestina-like constraint going on, and a few other constraints as well, most likely.

What I love most about Roubaud’s book is the beauty of the language and its power to provoke thought and wonder.  Here is one short passage which does it for me:

These trees, this grass, these hills, like us, visible in the dying light, aren’t they all as elusive as the inaccessible light, of which lights are but a shadow?  (14)

Or how about another one, even shorter:

Let us not be poor in light, sunless. We are the Sun’s debtors.  (11)

On a certain point of fact I would take issue with one of Roubaud’s personages, mind, and that is the bloke who opines on the fourth night: ‘By nature, angels are not visible to humans, not even to those who try to see them.’  Now if this fellow had been familiar with Spiritual Encounters with Unusual Light Phenomena: Lightforms by Mark Fox, published in 2008, he’d realise that angels actually do appear to human beings, indeed to quite ordinary people, and more often than not they are clothed in light.  So there you go.

When a voice says: ‘Infinite light is, precisely, black’ – well, that leads us back towards another of Roubaud’s works, Some Thing Black, the series of poems written on the death of his wife.  Clearly Exchanges on Light, by its very nature a different kind of work, cannot touch any of those poems – above all, the great, sublime, heart-rending majesty of ‘Inside Me’ – when it comes to their power to move.  But Exchanges on Light is one with Some Thing Black in that they are both part of the same mosaic, the same body of work.

Let me say, straight out, that the translation by Eleni Sikelianos is excellent.  At first, I thought I’d spotted one (just one) small oversight.  Roubaud seems to have quoted in the text, and in his own translation, two poems by Edward Herbert (George Herbert’s older brother, as a matter of fact, and he also has another moniker: Lord Cherbury) and Sikelianos seems to have translated them from Roubaud’s French into English, rather than using the original English poems.  Compare the poems on pages 24 and 58 of this book with the two poems as they appear in Bifurcation 192 in The Great Fire of London. 

I’ve since learned that this is essentially what happened, but it was done consciously.  Eleni Sikelianos did know of the Edward Herbert poems, and she and Roubaud discussed at length whether to simply reprint them or whether she should retranslate them.  They decided for retranslation as giving a more homogeneous surface between the poems and the rest of Roubaud’s text.

Anyway, Exchanges on Light is a wonderful work: illuminating and inspiring, light-giving and life-giving.

Carlos Acosta’s Premieres Plus

Carlos Acosta’s Premieres Plus
The Lowry, 25 July 2011

In this show Carlos Acosta performed works by several choreographers; and with consummate technique he showed his class.

His performance of Russell Maliphant’s ‘Two’ in the first part was spellbinding; it seemed to be of eternal duration.

It should be emphasised that Zenaida Yanowsky played an approximately equal part in proceedings, and her interpretation of Kim Brandstrup’s ‘Footnote to Ashton’ came close to perfection.  Rarely can a dance have been realised as fully, as completely.  Her rhythmic imperiosity created dynamic fact.

Looking at Premieres Plus as a whole, the show had an elegiac/commemorative/remembrance flavour to it.  It was all about bringing someone to mind, paying tribute to who and what they were, expressing gratitude for all they’ve given and been.  This was especially apparent in the final candle-lit work, as too in Miguel Altunaga’s ‘Memoria’ performed earlier in the show.

Premieres Plus is touring at the minute, further details here.

Burlesque!

Burlesque!
The Lowry, 23 July 2011

Very variegated, that’s how I’d describe this particular burlesque show.

The compere, a certain Miss Crimson Skye, looked and acted for all the world as though she’d just stepped from the cover of an American true crime magazine.  Or from a Jim Thompson paperback original, the blurb on the cover reading something like ‘They desired her but she destroyed them, as she clawed her way to the top… man by man.’  Her demeanour vibed Pulp Princess.

Among the other acts there was a magician who was also a dab hand at shadow play, a juggler/knife-catcher/acrobat and a torch singer from Preston, of all places.  She’d been blessed with a voice from heaven as some kind of celestial compensation, you fancied.  There were also a couple of fancy dancers who did two routines a piece.  Of the quartet, I much preferred Miss Bon-Bon’s monkey business routine.  More attitude, less tease.

That leaves Des O’Connor, to my mind one of the classiest burlesque acts around.  His act is a kind of dark music hall, traditional but with a twist.  He plays the ukulele and sings songs about necrophilia, now how English is that?  You might characterise him as a very cheeky chappie indeed.

Beginners

Beginners
Directed by Mike Mills
USA, 2010
Cornerhouse, 24 July 2011

For all the fact that it is complicated, multi-layered and full of many delights, this film has a simple subject: the search for love.

Shortly after the death of his father Hal (played by the great Christopher Plummer, here giving another consummate performance), Oliver (Ewan McGregor) meets Anna (Melanie Laurent) and, in wooing her, Oliver gains strength from remembering his father’s faltering yet ever-forward steps towards intimacy in later life.  Hal had declared himself gay on the passing of Oliver’s mother.

Imagine a superior romantic comedy, or rather two romances for the price of one, and you’ll have a fair idea of the rewards that this film has to offer.  It is funny, sad, poignant and joyful.  Just stay in the game, keep searching for love, is the take-home message.  In the words of the song, People who need people are the luckiest people in the world…

We are all amateurs when it comes to life, as Charlie Chaplin pointed out once.  Beginners is a film with its heart in the right place.

The Big Picture

The Big Picture
L’Homme qui voulait vivre sa vie
Directed by Eric Lartigau
France, 2010
Cornerhouse, 24 July 2011

Roman Duris’s strong central performance is what holds this film together and makes it a compelling watch.

If you take away the emotion that he brings to the role of Paul Exben, a lawyer who’d never allowed his passion for photography to blossom fully into life, then you’re left with a sequence of improbable events.  Now add that emotion once more – add all the anxiety, the despair at the demise of his marriage, the hopeless love for his children, the need for companionship which leads to vulnerability and the threat of exposure, and finally add an almost constant impulse toward flight and escape – and you have an impeccable thriller.

There’s an interesting notion at work here: it is only through a terrible event, wholly unexpected and undesired, that Paul is able at last to express himself fully as an artist.

Let me come clean and say that I’ve not read Douglas Kennedy’s source novel.  However, the film has however something of the excitement, nervous tension and amorality of Patricia Highsmith’s work.  This is a good thing.

Cell 211

Cell 211
(Celda 211)
Directed by Daniel Monzón
Spain, 2009
Cornerhouse, 17 July 2011

Not too difficult at all to see how, in Spain, this film has been such a strong critical and commercial success.

It is a good, old-fashioned, tough as rivets, made with girders, prison drama.

The set-up is that a guy, Juan (Alberto Ammann), who’s shortly to start work as a prison guard, is being shown around the place beforehand when a riot breaks out.  Once the dust settles, he finds himself on the wrong side of the bars and must pretend to be a prisoner to survive.  There then follows a game of cat and mouse – compromises, apparent bonding and uncertain alliances – in order to allay suspicion.  Can Juan get out of the maelstrom alive?  What if he ‘goes native’ and switches sides?

What’s terrific about the film is the way the tension is relentlessly ratcheted up; it never slackens at all.  That and the fact that it is so believable, both psychologically (in the relationship between Juan and Malamadre, the leader of the rioters, played by the brilliant Luis Tosar) and socially (though I confess that I don’t know all there is to know about the conditions in Spanish prisons).

This is a riveting film, soldered with a slue of fine performances.

An Evening with Dom Joly

An Evening with Dom Joly
The Lowry, 16 July 2011

In this show Dom Joly traipses through the highs and lows of his comedy career.

He covers the silliness of Trigger-Happy TV and the wry perspective evident in his travel shows, an indulgence toward various kinds of Johnny Foreigner.  His comedy could best be described as wry, silly, fantastical, in some way curiously English.

The best thing about Trigger-Happy TV, to my mind, was when Joly pretended to be a foreigner, a stranger lost in a strange land.  Just seeing people go out of their way to help him was fun: an English comedy that somehow elicits Englishness in others.

It was an enjoyable and entertaining evening, anyway; Dom Joly is a congenial host.  However, he should not swear quite so much, I’ve been advised, and he should also think of a more civilised way to end the show.  In the ensuing commotion I misplaced a biro, which disgruntles me still.

Honey

Honey
(Bal)
Directed by Semih Kaplanoglu
Turkey, 2010
Cornerhouse, 17 July 2011

This gentle, beautiful film completes Kaplanoglu’s Yusuf trilogy, as it has been called.  The two previous films were Milk and Egg – so there’s a bit of a food theme going on here.

As with any great film-maker, to say exactly what Honey is about is a difficult matter, a matter of translating a masterly language of images into words that somehow approximate a cinematic experience.  On the surface it is concerned with Yusuf’s relationship with his father, who is a bee keeper.  Yusuf (Bora Altas) is a quiet boy who rarely speaks and has difficulties at school, though whether he has a speech impediment or is (to use the ugly epithet) ‘an elective mute’ is uncertain. 

The Turkish countryside and woods are vividly rendered and the school scenes are touching also.  Yusuf is like a ghost looking in on life, nose pressed against the proverbial window.  In a sense, Honey is about the environment, natural and human, that sustains the boy.

It is one of the strangest, most tender films about childhood you are ever likely to see.