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Monthly Archives: March 2018

Plot 35

31 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Film review

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Eric Caravaca, HOME, Plot 35

Plot 35

Directed by Eric Caravaca

France, 2017

HOME, 29 March 2018Plot 35

The film-maker digs deep into his family history, trying to uncover traces of a sister who died before he was born.

Scant documents bearing her name exist. There are no photographs of the small child, who may have died when three years or four months old.

During an interview, Caravaca’s elder brother is perplexed by his mother’s protean stories. The mother herself is evasive and trustworthy. While the father’s account contradicts hers. That the family, of Spanish and Moroccan origin, had come to France from Casablanca complicates matters somewhat.

At one point there is an attempt to conflate the lacunae in the family’s remembrance with the lacunae in French colonial history – blindspots with regard to violent oppression in Morocco and Algeria – but it falls a bit flat. Yet apart from that, it is a very moving film. A very personal and brave film as well.

 

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A Skeleton Plays Violin

31 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Book review

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A Skeleton Plays Violin, Adolf Loos, Georg Trakl, James Reidel, Karl Kraus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Seagull Books

A Skeleton Plays Violin

By Georg Trakl

Translated by James Reidel

Seagull Books, 2017

ISBN: 9780857424297

A Skeleton Plays Violin

Though sometimes described as a war poet, Georg Trakl (1887-1914) was only coincidentally so: that was where and when he died.

This book, the third and final volume of James Reidel’s rendering of Trakl’s poetry into English, is by far the most revealing of the three. For while volumes one and two gave us Trakl’s completed and published books – Gedichte (1913) and the posthumous Sebastian im Traum (1915) – this wide ranging, astutely chosen selection shows us where Trakl had been, what he was about, how he might have gone forward – or why an early death was not such an unlikely outcome. You get a rounded picture of the man and his work.

There are five sections to A Skeleton Plays Violin and, a big plus for a newcomer to the poet, a critical biographical essay by Reidel that spans the entire volume. The first section, ‘Published Prose and Poetry, 1906-1909’, contains Trakl’s earliest poetry, all of which appeared in various Salzburg newspapers, Salzburg being the city where he grew up and indulged his passion for drugs (notably opium and cocaine) and rambling and moseying about: he was an enthusiastic Spazierganger, we are told.

In 1908 Trakl left Salzburg to study pharmacy in Vienna, a fateful career choice. He took in the literary and artistic scene, getting to know such luminaries as Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos, and was soon joined by his sister Grete. This period of his life finds unified, thematic expression in the poems in ‘Collation of 1909’, which in Reidel’s view ‘can be read as an unpublished early book’. You find passion, eroticism and despair in these poems, many directed towards his sister: in one poem, ‘Blood Guilt’, the language is stark and confessional. His admissions are the red-raw bruises of a desperate tussle. However, it is unclear whether Georg and Grete had an actual, physical relationship. It may be that he, like the Symbolist and Decadent poets he’d been reading, was toying with transgression and sin. Parking his taboo desires in the poems, as it were, out of harm’s way.

As for ‘Poems, 1909-1912’, these were the bedrock out of which Trakl’s first book came. They were written, the last of them, when he was living in Innsbruck, where he worked at a military hospital. He apparently suffered from severe depression and panic attacks during this period. Indeed, ‘Poems, 1912-1914’, the seedbed of his second book burns with a curious intensity as well. The reader is exposed to a profusion of toxic, traumatic images that seem as intimate as memories. There is a compulsion to dwell on what is broken, abandoned and ephemeral. Riedel speaks somewhere of Trakl as a liminal being, a ghost perhaps, and it is in these poems in particular (take the poem beginning ‘O the leaf-stripped beeches, and the blackish snow’ as one instance) that you think of the peopleless landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, which Trakl may have seen in Vienna (a fair few are housed in the Belvedere now). Every scene is haunted, a source of nagging pain. There is no peace, no letting go.

When the Great War broke out, Trakl’s training as a pharmacist meant that he was assigned as a medical officer to an infantry unit. During fierce fighting in Galicia, many of his comrades were wounded and he could do little to alleviate their suffering. He was out of his depth. To function at all, he began to self-medicate. Reidel’s final section, ‘Published Prose and Poetry, 1913-1915’, includes two very fine war poems – ‘In the East’ and ‘Grodek’ – but they transcend the desperate circumstances of the war (or perhaps: they do full justice to it?). Certain of Isaac Rosenberg poems, for example ‘Returning, We Hear Larks’, have something of the transcendent quality of these ‘war poems’ too.

Georg Trakl died of a cocaine overdose on 2 November 1914, the day before he was due to meet his patron, Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was a suspected suicide to start with, but in fact probably an accident. Mind, Trakl’s whole way of life veered, if not toward self-destruction then toward an embrace of reckless risk. Let the final words go to Karl Kraus, who is quoted within the book:

He is surely no victim of war. It was always inconceivable to me that he could live. His madness wrestled with godly things.

The publisher’s description of A Skeleton Plays Violin can be read here.

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The Third Murder

31 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Film review

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Hirokazu Kore-Eda, HOME, The Third Murder

The Third Murder

Directed by Hirokazu Kore-Eda

Japan, 2017

HOME, 29 March 2018

The Third Murder

You cannot help but compare this intriguing crime drama with Rashomon, though it is not really in that league. (Then again, what film is?)

A brutal murder has been committed and the killer has confessed. Later, the motive for the murder is altered, because in Japanese law some motives carry a lighter sentence. Then the confession is withdrawn altogether. Further details come to light, complications proliferate.

In Rashomon, truth is uncertain, but even so it matters. Not so here; rather, truth is an irrelevance. How the accused can get the most lenient verdict, or best escape execution, that becomes the overriding objective. At stake is a man’s life. Self-preservation determines narrative, and then it is trumped by something more noble…

There is a lot to enjoy in this engrossing murder mystery.

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RNCM Big Band and Chamber Orchestra with Markus Stockhausen

29 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Music review

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Felice, Miniatur einer Seelenreise, RNCM, RNCM Big Band and Chamber Orchestra with Markus Stockhausen, Tanzendes Licht

RNCM Big Band and Chamber Orchestra with Markus Stockhausen

RNCM Theatre, 24 March 2018

RNCM Big Band and Chamber Orchestra with Markus Stockhausen

Markus Stockhausen joyfully flung open the floodgates.

That allowed a deluge of fine musical composition and freefall improvisation to engulf the stage, wave following upon viral wave.

We began with Miniatur einer Seelenreise, a stirring work foregrounding trumpet (which Stockhausen played) and strings (the Chamber Orchestra, primarily). This duly segued into a riot of avant-garde improvisation (‘intuitive music’, so-called) that intrigued and somehow kept your attention. ‘Well, you tell me,’ was the perplexed judgement of the man who sat behind me. Being momentarily speechless myself, I instead smiled and left for the interval where I chomped on some Ritter chocolate.

The second half saw Tanzendes Licht, apparently a homage to Paul Klee but, anyway, magnificent and flowing and (come to think of it) as elegant as the artist’s line. Altogether wonderful, a supremely graceful use of time: you didn’t want it to ever end, which is one (defining?) quality of beautiful music.

In the next work (alas, Tanzendes Licht did end), Felice, the jazz musicians got to really kick out and a roaring spate of solos occurred: we heard terrific flights of fancy on guitar, drums, trumpet and trombone, saxophone… you name it. Their playing was phenomenal and rightly garnered applause, not least from the man who was sat behind me. For an encore, the musicians played Felice again – well, not exactly: like all fine jazz players, they could not repeat themselves anymore than Heraclitus’ warrior could step into the same river twice. Anyway, the encore made the man behind me even happier.

I was happy too.

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The Novel of the Century

24 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Book review

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David Bellos, Jean Valjean, Les Miserables, Penguin, The Novel of the Century

The Novel of the Century

The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables

By David Bellos

Penguin, 2018

ISBN: 9780241954478

The Novel of the Century

Best known as the biographer of Georges Perec and translator of his magnum opus Life a User’s Manual, in this book David Bellos writes about another great French novel, Les Misérables, and its creator Victor Hugo.

When Les Misérables came out in 1862, it was panned by the critics but became an instant (and enduring) bestseller nonetheless. Ordinary readers were captivated by the compelling drama of the lives of the poor and the downtrodden, played out against the backdrop of world historic events – and, above all, by the character of Jean Valjean. Valjean is, in the words of Skip James, ‘a poor man but a good man’ and he has a fierce will to live a noble life, whatever the cost and sacrifice.

Bellos puts it well when he says that this is a novel about how damn hard it is to lead a good life. Violence is easy, vice is all around, while virtue is discipline, something you must practice each and every day. You can never take for granted that the struggle has been won, you must always keep up your guard. Do that and maybe, just maybe, you will be OK. Rather than revenge, Valjean is motivated by reconciliation. His duty is to understand and make amends. That is what makes the novel such an unusual and such a mature, moral work; and your curiosity turns naturally towards the author, who also struggled to try to become a good man.

Hugo was undoubtedly that: a social reformer, he railed against the evils of slavery and argued for the abolition of the death penalty. He also lived through the revolutions of 1848 – raging throughout Europe, like the fires of populism in our own day – and his involvement in politics at that time meant that he had to flee France to preserve his liberty. So it transpired that he completed and arranged for the publication of Les Misérables (a book which, as was his habit, he wrote standing up, incidentally: Bellos is very good on the nuts and bolts of Hugo’s writing routine, as on much else) while he was living in exile in Guernsey.

You will find plenty about the novel to inform and entertain you. There are sections on the names given to the characters; the significance of colour (blue, for example, was used to denote what is rare and precious) ; the money used (coinage, denominations); the modes of transport available (this was a France without the railways which Flaubert railed against and the Impressionists loved to depict in paint); the rhetorical devices in evidence: Hugo had a fondness for a few; the sometimes weird and obscure vocabulary (among them, Bellos mentions ‘historical curiosities such as “miquelet”, meaning “a Catalan insurgent”…’ which may soon acquire a new topicality).

In his memoir The Orchard, the late Harry Mathews recalls:

I remember Georges Perec’s unqualified love of novels that embodied a far-reaching vision… He never questioned my reservations about them but only emphasised their scope once again, so eloquently that I wanted to reread them at once.

David Bellos’s book has the same effect on the (or at any rate, this) reader. Erudite and enjoyable, it is an ideal companion to Les Misérables. And it cannot do other than whet your appetite for making an acquaintance, or reacquaintance, with the book itself.

The publisher’s description of The Novel of the Century can be read here.

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The Seventh Seal

24 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Film review

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HOME, Ingmar Bergman, Max von Sydow, The Seventh Seal, Vincent Price

The Seventh Seal

Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Sweden, 1957

HOME, 21 March 2018

The Seventh Seal

A knight plays chess with Death as a bird of prey circles overhead.

He has come back from the Crusades to a land ravaged by plague and in chaotic disarray. There is a troupe of travelling actors who perform carnival plays and sing bawdy songs. A procession of priests and penitents interrupt them, holding a pole with the crucified Christ aloft. Carrion souls steal from the dead. In a tavern, one of the actors is bullied and humiliated and mocked. It is a capricious, xenophobic world full of casual cruelty and enervating foreboding.

Yet it is solemn and mysterious too, where the best bet against oblivion is faith in the legend of the man who said he was the Son of God.

It is clear that Roger Corman took much from this film when he made The Masque of the Red Death. They are very different films, that is true, but there is the same medieval world. Why, even the main actors in each, Max von Sydow and Vincent Price, have a similar screen presence. Both are tall and imposing with wonderful voices.

Anyway, an undisputed masterpiece.

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Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

24 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Film review

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Alexandra Dean, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, George Antheil, HOME

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

Directed by Alexandra Dean

USA, 2017

HOME, 21 March 2018

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

The film, a documentary, looks at the life of Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian actress who, together with composer George Antheil, came up with the idea of frequency hopping.

They invented frequency hopping as a way of stopping U-boats from intercepting torpedos, so making them more vulnerable to attack. Nowadays, it can be found all over the place: for example, it has applications in telecommunications, where it helps to make the exchange of information more secure.

A Viennese, Hedy Lamarr was happiest in Austria, but being Jewish she fled her homeland when the Nazis entered and took over. Her glamour and attitude and smarts soon got her a Hollywood contract, but Mayer, her boss, saw her as cheesecake not talent. It is perhaps fair to say that, while extremely beautiful, she wasn’t the best actress in the world but, equally, it must be conceded that she didn’t get many opportunities to really show her worth. When given a hefty role, as in Samson and Delilah, she delivered. She made it an iconic one.

She had five marriages, but none lasted, and she ended her days alone.

An interesting watch.

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Un voyage des impressions: RNCM Chamber Music Festival

17 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Music review

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Boulanger, Dance Eccentrique, Debussy, Faure, George Enescu, Messiaen, String Octet in C Major, The Rite of Spring, Un voyage des impressions: RNCM Chamber Music Festival

Un voyage des impressions: RNCM Chamber Music Festival

RNCM, 9-11 March 2018

Un voyage des impressions: RNCM Chamber Music Festival

This year’s RNCM Chamber Music Festival, Un voyage des impressions, took its inspiration from French music, though not entirely so.

On Saturday morning, for example, there was a concert entitled Dance Eccentrique, which featured two works by Stravinsky, including The Rite of Spring in a version for four hands (that is, two pianists sat at the same piano). It was one of the highlights of the weekend.

There was a lot of different sorts of French music, anyway: Europop and baroque, French folk song alongside generous dollops of Debussy, Faure and Messiaen. One concert called out Boulanger’s legacy, and not before time.

The final concert by the Aronowitz Ensemble, featuring a princely portion of RNCM students, had a rare and, as it turned out, a very fine performance of George Enescu’s String Octet in C Major. You need eight top-of-their-game miusicians to do it justice, probably the prime reason why it is so seldom seen. Thankfully, top-of their-game musicians were out in abundance over these three festival days. So that wasn’t a problem.

A good ‘un.

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You Were Never Really Here

17 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Film review

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HOME, Joaquin Phoenix, Jonny Greenwood, Lynne Ramsay, You Were Never Really Here

You Were Never Really Here

Directed by Lynne Ramsay

USA, 2017

HOME, 14 March 2018

You Were Never Really Here

Joaquin Phoenix plays a mercenary, a man who is not averse to extreme violence.

He is an army veteran, had apparently been abused as a child and still lives in the family home with his mother. Residual traumas come a-calling as he goes about his grisly trade. You are shown a man who is a powder-keg, possessing an explosive energy that is barely held in check.

The film is stylishly wrought and the violence is often, though not always, off-screen and shown after the act. I have not read Ames’s source novel but it struck me that this is the world of Vachss’s Burke: a fallen America.

All in all, a fine thriller and not the least of its virtues is a stirring, Tangerine Dream-ish soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood.

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Johnny Got His Gun

17 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by P.P.O. Kane in Film review

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Dalton Trumbo, HOME, Johnny Got His Gun

Johnny Got His Gun

Directed by Dalton Trumbo

USA, 1971

HOME, 14 March 2018

Johnny Got His Gun

This is one of those genuinely scary films, at least to me.

Johnny, an all American boy, volunteers for the Great War. He is shot all to hell, ending up as a basket case. That means no arms, no legs, face (which is to say eyes and mouth and tongue) torn off and covered by a mask. Fed through a tube and unable to speak, he is yet conscious. He can feel sunlight from a window and the warmth of a nurse’s hand on his chest.

As Johnny lies in bed, he remembers or dreams about his father, the girl he left at home. While watching you think of A Farewell to Arms (did Hemingway intend his title as an allusion to injury and disability?) and the writings of Mary Borden stories, but this is more horrific than either of those.

A harrowing work of art.

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