'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)

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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.