The New Central Office of Information - Strangers (BF Taylor, 2015)

Hi Everyone
In the spirit of the direction that my research has been taking me recently I am posting the first in a series of re-imagined public information films.

The sights and sounds of the 1970s are very familiar to me as I was growing up during this period. In part, this is informing and shaping my thoughts. But I am also inspired, if that is the right word, by the current political climate in the UK , with its emphasis on distance, difference and distrust. In this way, these sounds and images from then feel very very now.

McManus

My research and thinking have been moving in slightly different directions recently and the following film is the first in a new series of audiovisual reflections on spectacle. I used to watch British wrestling on World of Sport when I was a child and ever since I have been gripped by a enduring fascination with this world of gods and grotesques, heels, faces and tweeners. Of all the wrestlers I saw as a child it was Mick McManus who most beguiled me.

Ident ist Rhythm

Ident ist Rhythm from BF Taylor on Vimeo.

This is a low resolution audiovisual reflection on British television idents from the 1960s and 1970s. The rhythm of blended and blurred animations here echo Hans Richter's great experiment with moving and abstracted images Rhythmus 21 (1921). This reflection was made for educational purposes under the principles of Fair Use.

'Phantasmagorical with an F': Humphrey Jennings meets Ben Wheatley

'Phantasmagorical with an F' - Humphrey Jennings meets Ben Wheatley from BF Taylor on Vimeo.

This is a low resolution response to Ben Wheatley's 2013 A Field in England created for educational purposes.

Taking its cue from the wonderful audiovisual explorations of Humphrey Jennings, most notably Listen to Britain (1942), this essay draws upon personal childhood 'voices' and uses them to create a new soundtrack to one of the key sequences in Wheatley's film. This sequence not only beautifully evokes similar images of English fields captured by Jennings in his films but also necessarily reminds us of the audiovisual relationship between the countryside and the Occult - a very British relationship which this new soundtrack aims to present anew.

This essay's presenting of this relationship is further inspired by Jennings and his desire to 'present' what he called an 'imaginative history'. As Jennings continues:

'I say 'present', not describe or analyze, because the imagination is a function of man whose traces are more delicate to handle than the facts and events and ideas of which history is usually constructed. This function I believe is found active in the areas of the arts, of poetry and of religion - but is not necessarily confined to them or present in all their manifestations. I prefer not to try to define its limits at the moment but to leave the reader to agree or not with the evidence which I shall place before him. I present it by means of what I call images.'

Humphrey Jennings, Introduction to Pandaemonium (c.1948) quoted in The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (ed.) Ian Aitken (Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 231

Short Explorations in British Film

Here are the first few in a series of short audiovisual pieces responding to small and personal thoughts on British cinema. In an early, exploratory and potentially even soon-to-be redacted way,  I view these pieces as the unfolding elements of an ongoing 'exploded' essay on film criticism and British cinema, with each piece, 'paragraph' even, suggesting, hinting, outlining, linking, contradicting, touching on and even gently whispering my thoughts on the relationship between the history of British cinema and the history of writing about it.

These pieces are not meant to be ordered chronologically and their ordering here is purely the result of a mechanical copying and pasting process required to embed them into the post. I did experiment with numbering the pieces but that didn't quite generate the sense of an organic critical flexibility I am looking for. I have also experimented with placing all of the 'paragraphs' together into one long 'essay' but again that didn't truly create the impression I was looking for. 

(A further possible way of considering these pieces is in the same way that nowadays one might use individual PowerPoint slides within a series as the starting-point for discussion and development, returning to and resting on a particular slide; by placing greater emphasis on certain individual slides than others).

One of the key ideas that links these 'paragraphs' together is the idea of juxtaposition; a very common audiovisual impulse, admittedly, but one that is still interesting and relevant enough when it comes to British films and the history of film criticism and one that is also still real enough in my mind to make me wonder what happens when I superimpose a quotation from Stanley Cavell over the ending of John Smith's The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) or when a quotation from Victor Perkins, author of that most wonderfully caustic and profoundly influential piece of British film criticism 'The British Cinema' (Movie, No. 1, 1962) is overlaid onto footage from Pete Walker's wonderful exploitation classic Cool It Carol! (1970). A further juxtaposition from the same source can be found in the layering of Perkins's famous cry for a cinema of 'style, imagination, personality and, because of these, meaning' over the wonderfully imaginative sequence from the truly great Shane Meadows film Twenty Four Seven (1997). The swirling sense of liberation to be found in this moment, aided immeasurably by both Van Morrison and Bob Hoskins, offers the perfect antidote to the strangling dogma of the words in the Movie article.

There is also something wonderfully beguiling about using a couple of lines from something as compellingly idiosyncratic as Raymond Durgnat's A Mirror for England (1970) and seeing how they compliment such a compellingly idiosyncratic film as Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar. The words of Robin Wood also acquire a prominence within this project and as the blog's title suggests 1976's Personal Views was the primary motivation for creating this space in the first place.

As overplayed as it is at this stage, the going backwards to go forwards is still a fascinating critical movement and even today it is impossible not to respond to Wood's delightful notion of 'sympathy and recoil' without experiencing a similar sense of critical movement in my own work, the towards and away at the same time. So, in a small way, this blog, as well as these latest pieces, are further evidence of my attempts to create what Wood calls 'a sort of personal testament out of one's sense of vital contact' with the subject at hand. Admittedly, as I quote in the Morvern Callar piece, Wood's warning against creating our own version of the film in question needs careful handling.

At the time Wood was stating the case for the necessity and accuracy of a close reading, for staying true to the text and not allowing external influences to distort it, amid the seismic and potentially distorting shifts in film writing that were happening all around him but reworking the words today at least offers the opportunity to emphasise once again the fact that film critics should stay true to the film in question itself or, indeed, stay true to the emphasis on the film coming first. Indeed, as Wood concludes elsewhere: 

A critic can only write with a deep sense of responsibility to his readers, towards art, and towards his own feeling of what matters, but his truth will still be about his own personal responses. It follows that this truth must always be provisional, subject to continual questioning both by himself and others.
Robin Wood, ‘Ghostly Paradigm and H.C.F.: An Answer to Alan Lovell’, Screen Vol. 10, No. 3 May/June 1969, p. 34-5

Writing recently in Film Moments, Tom Gunning offers a wonderful way in which we might come to understand our fascination with the 'pieces' of a film, or films, and not only their aggregation and accumulation in our memory but also their re-occurence in our thinking, and teaching, and writing. For Gunning, as for this writer:

Movies are made up of moments, which both accumulate to an end and, in a sense, scatter across our memories. If we think of a movie as something which moves continuously, following the actions of characters and the trajectory of a story, then moments might seem to mark the points along the way. But if we dwell on the sense of a moment in its singularity, it seems less to evoke the momentum of a plot than something that falls outside the story and its pace.
Tom Gunning, 'Shadow Play and Dripping Teat: The Night of the Hunter (1955), Film Moments (eds.) Tom Brown and James Walters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 5-7, p. 5

As for trying to understand any possible effects of this series of juxtapositions we might begin, like Jaimie Baron, by considering the relationship between value and novelty. As Baron writes:

The value of a direct written quotation does not lie simply in its identity as such but also in its “productivity” within its new context, this productivity made no less important by its dependence on a subjective evaluation on the part of the reader. While the identity of the direct written quotation must be maintained, its significance must be transformed through its recontextualization, producing something “new.”
Jaimie Baron, 'The Image as Direct Quotation: Identity, Transformation, and the Case for Fair Use', Frames, Issue 1, July 2012

This idea, in turn, and following the underlying rhythm of this post, returns us to David Bordwell and his discussion of the practical activity of film criticism. For Bordwell, this activity is beset by two problems. The first problem is one of appropriateness - can the critic create a compelling argument for the chosen film to be worthy of critical engagement. Between the time of writing and today, this issue has now become a non-issue but Bordwell's second problem, novelty, is far more relevant here. As Bordwell explains:

the interpreter is expected either to (a) initiate a new critical theory or method; (b) revise or refine an existing theory or method; (c) 'apply' an existing theory or method to a fresh instance; or (d) if the film is familiar, point out significant aspects which previous commentators have ignored or minimized.

David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 29-31

Using Bordwell's framework here would suggest that this series of audiovisual reflections fulfil more than one of these conditions simultaneously or perhaps more interestingly blur the boundaries between them in a useful way. We could easily argue that a new method is being initiated, to whatever degree we understand new in this context. We could also argue that an existing method, film criticism, is being revised and hopefully refined. Certainly, the means by which important quotations can be 'applied' to contexts within which they might not normally find themselves, the juxtapositions here, also fulfills the third condition. Finally, it is perfectly possible that new approaches of this kind will allow the familiar films to be seen in new lights and the significance of their aspects to be reconsidered. 

'My Usual Self is a Very Unusual Self': Love, Loss and Longing in British Film Part IV

With this audiovisual meditation I am returning to a subject close to my heart, the British New Wave. This famous cycle of films brings to the fore many of the issues I am seeking to explore through this series of essays. Films like Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961), the 'subject' of this video essay, and others in the same series, can perhaps be best understood in terms of ideas like love, loss and longing.  In part this is evident in the impulses that led someone like Richardson to make films like this one; a love of cinema, desire for difference, a longing to make a difference, to add a significant landmark to the rapidly-changing landscape of European cinema. Further, these impulses were also evident in the responses of British film critics at the time. Movie, for example,  first published in 1962, loved 'other' cinemas so much that it caused them to view the British New Wave with unbridled scorn.  As Victor Perkins writes in the journal's opening attack on British cinema:

The request is not for a 'correct' approach to the necessary subjects. It is for a cinema which has style, imagination, personality and, because of these, meaning.
V. F Perkins, 'The British Cinema', Movie, No. 1 (June 1962), pp. 2-7, p. 2

Sight and Sound, the other key journal involved in these debates, was longing for British films to be able to take their place alongside other positive developments in European cinema like the nouvelle vague. Such was their desire for this that they initially championed films like A Taste of Honey before ultimately realising that the cycle had run its course. As Penelope Houston, the journal's editor wearily concludes:

[Compared to a cinema] headed by Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Demy, Rivette etc., we are fielding a second eleven and that is all there is to it.
Sight and Sound, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Spring 1962), p. 5

But ideas of love, loss and longing are not the sole preserve of embittered and battle-weary critics and this what makes films like A Taste of Honey so interesting. As I have already begun to explore with my previous video essays,  these ideas can be seen to be at the heart of key areas of  postwar British cinema. The film's central character Jo, played so wonderfully by Rita Tushingham, is the embodiment of these ideas and the film charts her success, or otherwise, in coming to understand how ideas of love, loss and longing relate to her. This helps to explain part of my reasons for making this latest video essay, as I seek to demonstrate that Jo is not where she wants to be and is forced by the day-to-dayness of her life to imagine that she is in fact somewhere else. In this way, I have used two later films starring Rita Tushingham, Richard Lester's The Knack ... And How to Get It (1965) and Desmond Davis's Smashing Time (1967), to develop a new 'reading' of A Taste of Honey.


However, this only explains part of the impulse for creating this video essay. My other concern here was to note the stylistic and thematic trajectory that British films followed during this period. Inevitably, the sights and sounds of the British New Wave  came to be seen repetitive and overused and the tone and tenor of British films changed as audience tastes and society itself changed. As Jeffrey Richards writes:

Sober realism and earnest social comment gave way to fantasy, extravaganza and escapism; black-and-white photography and Northern locations to colour and the lure of the metropolis; Puritanical self-discipline to hedonistic self-indulgence; plain truthful settings to flamboyant, unrealistic decorativeness.
Jeffrey Richards, 'The Revolt of the Young', Best of British (eds.) Antony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards (Blackwell, 1983), p. 159

As Jo sits and dreams at her desk, the colour sequence from Smashing Time has been inserted to not only further develop my 'reading' of A Taste of Honey but to also extend this 'reading' outwards from the film to consider the changing face of British cinema in the 1960s.

For example, the feature of recurring faces across the history of this period and their relationship with geographical shifts in industrial activity is another interesting area for exploration. As Alexander Walker notes:

The British cinema had been moving geographically ever closer to London since the 'social realism' of the early 1960shad obligatorily located nearly every major film hundreds of miles north of the metropolis. It appeared that when Julie Christie had boarded the train south at the end of Billy Liar she had brought the British cinema along with her in the baggage van. A capital city is always a magnet; but it is extraordinary how many of the 'social realist' movie characters do an about-turn and reappear, often played by the same actors and actresses, in films that are more or less built on the dream (sometimes the nightmare) life of the metropolis. Thus Julie Christie, the liberated shop-girl of Billy Liar, turns up as 'Darling', the good-time girl; Rita Tushingham moves out of grimy tenement reality in A Taste of Honey and into the bleached-out limbo-land of The Knack.
Alexander Walker, Hollywood England (Harrap, 1974), pp. 289-290   

These are early days and these are early thoughts...

For Further Reading
John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism (BFI Publishing, 1986)
Film Moments (eds.) Tom Brown and James Walters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (BFI Publishing, 1992)
BF Taylor, The British New Wave (Manchester University Press, 2006)
Alexander Walker, Hollywood England (Harrap, 1974), pp. 289-290  

Re-composing Powell and Pressburger: Love, Loss and Longing in British Film Part III

For the next addition to my series of audiovisual meditations on love, loss and longing in British film, I have taken two so-called 'composed' Powell and Pressburger films, Black Narcissus (1947) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and re-composed them. In this way, I'm using one film to read another or, indeed, each film to read the other.

'I'm Just Confused by Candles and Prayers': Love, Loss and Longing in British Film Part II

For the next in my series of meditations on love, loss and longing in British film, I thought I would return to some earlier thoughts about Two a Penny and Privilege, two films both released in 1967.  I have always been taken with the thought of placing these two films alongside each other and seeing whether or not this produces anything interesting in relation to issues that they may be addressing or, and perhaps more importantly, how these two views of a similar theme diverge.

Love, Loss and Longing in British Film: A Series of Meditations

 

Here is the first in a new series of visual meditations on love, loss and longing in British film. When thinking about where to start, I was taken by the following statement from Robert Murphy's Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939-49. Writing on British melodrama and the position of women in British film from this period, Murphy makes the following observation:

With its dimly-lit interiors, its hysterical heroine, its threateningly expressive shadows, its theme of doomed love, its creation of a hostile and repressive world, it is difficult to understand how [Brief Encounter] fits into an aesthetic of realism at all [...] (p. 111) 

The feeling of 'What if ...' hangs heavy over Brief Encounter, so heavy in fact that it doesn't take much to start speculating about an alternate version of the film, one in which Laura succumbs to the violence of the passion she is trying so very hard to repress. Following this train of thought leads you nicely 'behind' the film, further into the expressive shadows noted by Murphy or, indeed, deeper into the darkness that surrounds the portrayal of the film's central performance. Once here, we might be moving closer to Manny Farber's sense of film performance:

The meat of any movie performance is in the suggestive material that circles the edges of a role: quirks of physiognomy, private thoughts of the actor about himself, misalliances where the body isn't delineating the role, but is running on a tangent to it. (p. 155)

Works Cited
Manny Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, Expanded Edition (New York, Da Capo Press, 1998)
Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939-49 (London, Routledge, 1989)

Argento, Hitchcock, Cavell: Re-flections on the Ontology of Film

1970s British Cinema and Word Clouds: Fragments 1,2

Traditional histories of 1970s British cinema tend to offer linear accounts of industrial fragmentation and economic difficulties. Alternative and avant-garde practices are described as running counter to and separate from the dreary commercialism of a mainstream cinema seeking to survive, while being dominated by external and more popular product from elsewhere. Generating a word cloud from these accounts would result in the following: ‘drab’, ‘dismal’, ‘dull’, ‘defensive’, ‘drained’, ‘desperate’, ‘dross’, ‘disappointing’ and ‘difference’ (Walker 1985). Later accounts would allow words like ‘transition’, ‘marginal’, ‘independent’, ‘quality’, ‘complexity’, and ‘exploitation’ to be added the same cloud (Higson 1994). Moving on, we find further words like ‘shlock’, ‘dross’, and ‘dissatisfaction’ appearing (Sargeant 2005). A recent upsurge in critical interest has sought to place a greater emphasis on the ideas of achievement and diversity. Here, the words ‘fragmentation and transformation’ are also included (Newland et al 2010). Ultimately, however, we are simply left to rely upon a series of words to account for one of the most visually arresting and diverse periods of in the history of British filmmaking.

         As an alternative, we might view this period not as a history of words but as a history of moments, some valuable, others not necessarily so, but all equally significant to our understanding of this period. The fragments of this history can then be transformed, like the many separate particles found in a kaleidoscope, given new shape and significance and seen in a new critical light by a shift in viewpoint. In this way, for example, the wind, weather and water of Chris Welsby Stream Line (1976); the power drills and pathology of Pete Walker Frightmare (1974); the paganism and pyrotechnics of The Wicker Man; even the puerile pantings of Robin Askwith in the Confessions series, to identify just a few moments from this period, all coalesce to form a new vision of a cinematic landscape and hence a new understanding of 1970s British cinema. A view of this kind of would be contrary to accepted visions of an isolated cinema lacking in continuity (Higson, 1994: 216-7).
       To make this movement from words to moments I am guided by the recent reassertion of a long-standing conviction that film can sensibly be understood ‘as a medium made of moments’. The organisation of events and experiences in this way is, as (Brown and Walters 2011: xi) suggest, ‘a means of understanding and shaping much wider culture’ but, ‘for film, the moment has a special resonance’. Furthermore:

An understanding of film can be profoundly shaped by an understanding of the moment and, furthermore, the extent to which a critic may use their understanding of film as a moment-by-moment medium to structure their understanding of the ways that film can challenge, inspire and move us to thought. (Brown and Walters 2011: 4)

BFI | BFI National Archive | BFI Most Wanted

BS Johnson - Fat Man on the Beach

Hi Everyone It has been a while since I have posted so I thought I try and pick up some post-holiday blogging momentum by posting this great TV programme from 1973 starring the late, great BS Johnson. I am only posting Part One but the other parts can easily be found on YouTube. Enjoy ...

The Man in the Denim Jacket

In an alternative version of British cinema history, the year 1976 might have been notable for John Smith making Confessions of a Driving Instructor and not The Girl Chewing Gum.

LUXONLINE - Chris Welsby: The Man and his Work

This afternoon I am posting a link to the great LUXONLINE site dedicated, as the site states, to 'exploring British-based artists' film and video in depth'. In particular, I want to draw your attention to the work of the great Chris Welsby. I have always been very taken with Welsby's films, 1976's Stream Line, in particular, and always look to include them in any module on British cinema I am delivering.  For this part of the course I always programme Stream Line to be screened with Norman Cohen's Confessions of a Driving Instructor, released the same year.

From a personal perspective, I find Welsby's films compelling for many, many reasons - reasons that I am still trying to find the words to explain. That might be something for the future. For the moment I am content to let the man speak for himself:



For further information, here is the link to Welsby's homepage.

The Fiend aka Beware My Brethren (Robert Hartford-Davis, 1972)

Tagline: It's a Sickness of the Soul!

Rachel Roberts and This Sporting Life: Fragments #1 and #2

During an interview with Films and Filming, Lindsay Anderson describes the process of making his 1963 film This Sporting Life. He begins by outlining what he thinks the film is not about. It is not a film about sport, he states. Nor is it ‘to be categorised as a ‘North Country working-class story’. In fact, as he continues:

I suppose that the film is primarily a study of temperament. It is a film about a man. A man of extraordinary power and aggressiveness, both temperamental and physical, but at the same time with a great innate sensitiveness and a need for love of which he is at first hardly aware.

Further, as Anderson continues:

Throughout This Sporting Life we were very aware that we were not making a film about anything representative: we were making a film about something unique. We were not making a film about a ‘worker’, but about an extraordinary (and therefore more deeply significant) man [...] [i]

Richard Harris’s performance of Frank Machin, Anderson’s extraordinary man, has a brutal noise about it, one made even louder and louder by the ‘gruelling’ and ‘claustrophobic’ spaces of the film. [ii] Indeed, the roaring gestures which characterise this performance, the shoves and the shrugs, the punches and the pulling, all work to ensure that Harris’s performance reaches and then nearly exceeds the upper limits of their physical amplitude, threatening, like the man himself, to destroy everything that aims to contain them.

Yet we need to remember here that these gestures would lose their volume and sink into the silence of an empty film were it not for the fact that these same spaces were also occupied by someone equal to this noise; Rachel Roberts as Margaret, the target (which is a far more appropriate word here than the usual object) of Frank’s affections. As Anderson explains:

This is a woman whose feelings, though fierce, are almost continually suppressed: the relationship deepens without self-explanation, without conventional avowals, through incessant conflict, with all the feelings between or under the lines. It called for an actress of exceptional ‘interior’ quality, with a real wildness within, as well as the capacity for an iron restraint. [iii]

Anderson is right. Roberts’s presence in this film does warrant this kind of praise. However, subsequent accounts of this film, tend not to fully explore Roberts’s contribution or capacity. Geoffrey MacNab, for example, notes what he calls a ‘rawness and vulnerability’[iv] but goes no further other than to suggest that her character is also ‘hardbitten and recalcitrant’.[v] Roberts fares no better with Robert Murphy when the best he can suggest is that her character is a ‘brooding, witchlike presence’ within the film. [vi]  Leonard Quart is more descriptive but equally less expansive when he notes that Margaret is ‘perceptive, sour, emotionally and sexually frozen’.[vii]

Perhaps we are falling victim here to the tendency towards summary, a reductive process as described by V. F. Perkins, one where all that is distinctive and interesting about the visual – whatever and all that that might mean – is reduced to simply a verbal statement.[viii] The limiting tendency of this approach – especially when applied to the  matter at hand, Roberts’s presence in This Sporting Life -   is tellingly evident when Manny Farber laments the fact that the criticism of acting ‘has always been quick to cover a performance with a blanket word.’[ix] In addition, as Robert Kolker outlines, a summative approach of this kind is indicative of a further problem. As he continues:

When critical attention is given to character in the particular film, the tendency is to fall into the trap of psychological realism [...] and begin discussing the character as if he or she had an existence rather than a function within the total narrative structure. Between these extremes fall the adjectives: such and such a player gave an ‘edgy’ or ‘nervous’ performance, was ‘brilliant’, was ‘absorbed’ in the role. And, that final refuge of unexamined assumptions, was ‘believable.’[x]

In his account, Stanley Kauffman does come closer to the complexity that I feel is in existence here when he writes:

From the start [Rachel Roberts] strikes notes of fierce resignation: glad she is through with the turmoil of love and sex, fearful of the young man, savagely defensive of her isolation. We see the man progressively affecting her, but this is no waking Sleeping Princess; it is sex that is being stirred, little else, and she doesn’t like it.[xi] 

Yet, when I watch the same film and the same performance I see the same things as the others I have described. However, I feel that I see much more. In fact, I believe that watching Roberts in this film allows me to come to understand how, to quote Andrew Klevan paraphrasing Stanley Cavell, ‘our disposition towards a narrative is not necessarily tied to our identification with character – however elegantly refined – but lies equally with appreciating the performer’s capacities for revealing and withholding aspects of the character’s sensibility.’ [xii] In keeping with Klevan’s project, and extending it beyond the range of his original intentions, I feel that I want to argue that Rachel Roberts ‘inhabits an appropriate place.’[xiii] But what does this mean?

          One possibility is to suggest that the credibility of (her) performance and hence the appropriateness of her place ‘is created out of coherence and harmony with the film’s environment – including the camera and other elements ‘outside’ the visible fictional world’.[xiv] Indeed, as Jean-Luc Godard has suggested elsewhere: ‘If destiny and death are the cinema’s pet themes, then there must be a definition of the human condition within the carefully controlled presentation which is mise en scène.’[xv] As Godard suggests:

Jealousy, contempt, all the doughty deeds of the heart must keep a watchful eye on sudden and nonchalant or slow and passionate gestures. The cinema makes reality specific. It would be useless for it to try to make more of the instant than the instant itself contains.[xvi]

Furthermore, as Klevan continues:

Attending to the moment-by-moment movement of performers [...] enhances our understanding of of film characterisation. It encourages us to attend to a character’s physical and aural detail and reminds us, because we are prone to forget in our literary moods, of their ontological particularity in the medium of film. A living human being embodies a film character.[xvii]

All of which echoes V.F. Perkins’s claim for an understanding of what he calls the ‘invisible effect’. Perkins is discussing the way in which Hitchcock’s Marnie offers an example of how action can be both ‘invisible’ and used to precise effect. Though he is also making claims for the recognition of Hitchcock’s contribution to the sequence he is describing it is the praise he reserves for Marnie’s movement that makes his argument so pertinent. As he explains:

The creation of significant gesture here serves to show what I mean by the ‘invisible’ effect. The spectator can understand the action of the sequence without becoming aware of the device as relevant comment. It does not demand interpretation. But if he does examine the device and relate it to his knowledge of the heroine the significance of the moment is enhanced.[xviii]

And I read Perkins’s use of significance here as meaning the way in which attention to Marnie’s movement allows the action evident on the screen to be imbued with something more than just the simple acknowledgement of motion. Rather than simply saying, ‘Look, she is moving her head.’ Or, ‘Look, she is moving her head again.’ Perkins is asking to us to ask, ‘What does it mean for Marnie to move her head at this particular moment in the film? Or, ‘There, Marnie moved her head again. I wonder what is interesting about about the repetition of the action?’ Perhaps,  Stanley Cavell is useful here for his thoughts on how the significance of a moment might be enhanced by the presence of a performer. As he writes:

One recalls the lists of stars of every magnitude who have provided the movie camera with human subjects – individuals capable of filling its need for individualities, whose individualities in turn, whose inflections of demeanor and disposition were given full play in its projection.[xix]

Indeed, this is exactly the sense that Manny Farber tries to convey when he writes that

The meat of any movie performance is in the suggestive material that circles the edges of a role: quirks of physiognomy, private thoughts of the actor about himself, misalliances where the body isn’t delineating the role, but is running on a tangent to it.[xx]

---

Endnotes

[i] Lindsay Anderson, ‘Sport, Life and Art’, Films and Filming (February 1963), pp. 16-17.

[ii] Anderson, pp. 16- 17.

[iii] Anderson, p. 17.

[iv] Geoffrey MacNab, Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema (London, Cassell, 2000), p. 191.

[v] MacNab, p. 206.

[vi] Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London, BFI Publishing, 1992), p. 28

[vii] Leonard Quart, ‘This Sporting Life’, Cineaste, March 1997, Vol. 22 Issue 4, p60, p. 1

[viii] V. F. Perkins, Film as Film (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972), p. 79.

[ix] Manny Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, Expanded Edition (New York, Da Capo Press, 1998), p. 154.

[x] Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 15.

[xi] Stanley Kauffman, A World on Film (New York, Dell Publishing Co., Inc, 1966), p. 211.

[xii] Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (London, Wallflower Press, 2005), p. 9.

[xiii] Klevan, p 3.

[xiv] Klevan, p. 5.

[xv] Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, Translated and Edited by Tom Milne, (New York, Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 21.

[xvi] Godard, p. 21.

[xvii] Klevan, p. 7.

[xviii] Perkins, p. 77.

[xix] Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 35.

[xx] Farber, p. 155.

Fragment #13: 1967 - Cliff Richard versus Paul Jones

James F. Collier's 1967 film Two a Penny stars Cliff Richard as Jamie, a troubled soul whose experience of his increasingly 'dangerous' world causes him to question the meaning of his own existence. Steven Shorter, the character played by Paul Jones in Privilege, directed by Peter Watkins and released the same year, is another troubled soul living in an equally 'dangerous' but very different world and is someone else finally forced to question the meaning of his own existence. In terms of intellectual intention and directorial desire, the two films are obviously worlds, poles and systems apart but a closer, more detailed viewing of each allows the case to be made for them to be viewed as deliciously inverted versions of each other - two sides of the same cinematic coin. That this may be true is in no small part due to the various ways in which both films present the performance of each crisis as it unfolds, as well as the more obvious questions that both Two a Penny and Privilege raise in relation to ideas (and fears) of organised religion, the cult of celebrity and the various forms of manipulation that inform, design and decide both of these things.

Cool It Carol! (Pete Walker, 1970)

Cool it Carol! contrasts two images of London belonging to two different generic representations – the ‘Swinging’ London of 1960s British cinema (‘This is what I thought it would be like,’ says Carol as they nearly get run over by a London bus) and the vice-ridden London of sexploitation. Carol and Joe (Robin Askwith) travel to London in search of the former and, instead, find the latter.

Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (London, Routledge, 1998), p. 101.

[Cool it Carol!] develops an ambiguous and unsettling moral vision. Aptly described by David McGillivray as ‘a glossy and entertaining morality tale’ and a ‘stylish and attractively witty film of our times,’ the film simultaneously exploits and exposes the commodification of sexuality.

Jim Leach, British Film (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 134.

The final section of Cool it Carol! doesn’t quite know where to go, dissolving in a sea of jokey Keeler/Profumo references and retreating from its extraordinary middle section. […] This lack of a punitive or morally educative ending annoyed the The Daily Mirror’s Dick Richards: ‘Mr Walker, do you really believe that this ‘happy’ ending pays off for all the nudity, sex and trashy innuendo in your film? Who are you trying to kid?’ (19 November 1970).

Leon Hunt, p. 103

On Boots, Suits and Being Bored: Fragments 4 and 5

Fragment 4
As Bronco Bullfrog unfolds Del meets Irene and they begin to go out together. There is a wonderful sequence where Del comes to Irene's block of flats on his motorbike to take her out for the evening. The early steps of this sequence are beautifully lit in a natural way and the frames are filled with sunlight. Del and Irene walk out of the shadows and into this light. Whilst I can make no claims for this very simple movement from darkness to light to be suggesting that something life-changing is about to happen but I do read it in terms of hope and optimism. If nothing else, this simple movement is at least suggestive of something positive. (There is also a connection between this movement and the white coat Irene is wearing, a garment that also hints at something possibly hopeful or hopefully possible. The coat is too plain to be glamorous and in any case glamorous would not be appropriate here. Nevertheless, its angled front pocket, large buttons and v-neck front mark the garment as something more than simply functional. It is a date after all).
Fragment 5
'Where we going?' Irene asks. 'Up the West End', Del replies. 'That your bike?' 'Yeah'. The dialogue here is simple but beautifully balanced, expressing the awkwardness of a first date capably within the limits of the actors' abilities whilst also sounding deliberately underwhelmed. The idea of being underwhelmed is significant here because it plays its part in the remarkable way in which the whole film manages to sustain and somehow celebrate this idea across its entire length. The lives of these characters are extremely underwhelming and as a consequence the film itself can appear to be similar. Yet, a form of cinema that celebrates the notmuchness of life is applauded elsewhere so why shouldn't this film be similarly lauded for exploring the boring and the unexciting. For most of us the world turns just too slowly and tightly and allows only simple glimpses of situations and circumstances instead of providing extended views of our own lives. Bronco Bullfrog is a simple glimpse in a similar way.