Cocktails and Records

I’ve always liked film soundtracks - they do afterall, combine two of my very favourite things together. I have a mental list of favourite soundtrack moments which has been pretty fixed for quite some time. It isn’t very original and contains all the predictable films you might expect:

- Mean Streets
- Saturday Night Fever
- Trainspotting
- Vertigo
- Scorpio Rising
- Manhattan
- Shadows
- Reservoir Dogs
- The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

etc. etc. etc.

However, just this past week I’ve been taken by surprise at the cinema and have been forced to add two more to the list:

Lift to the Scaffold /Ascenseur pour l’échafaud
(Louise Malle, 1958)

An excellent and stylish B&W 50s thriller best known for low-key naturalistic lighting and a make-up less Jeanne Moreau moodily wandering the wet Parisian streets. This was pretty good admittedly, but I was most pleased by Louis Malles decision to fully embrace 50s cool with an improvised Miles Davis score. Not that any of the reviews I’ve been able to find have bothered to mention this.

Killer of Sheep
(Charles Burnett, 1977)

Tagged the ‘greatest unknown film’ this brilliant depiction of ordinary Black American life from the 70s was in film purgatory for 30 years because the director never cleared the music rights. And it’s the music which makes this film for me - Dinah Washington, Earth Wind and Fire, Scott Joplin, Paul Robeson, Etta James and Rachmaninoff really lift those beautifully composed images off the screen. Typically, not one review I’ve read of the film has discussed the impact of the soundtrack.

Don’t any film critics listen to the music?

What with being snowed under with work, it being miserable hayfever season and having bought way too much new music recently, I’ve been rather lax on the blogging front compared to usual.

But last night I saw ‘classic British film’ Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) and it has completely inspired me. I’d never seen Brief Encounter before and what a fantastic film it is! I was completely transfixed throughout.

The trusty film notes provided by BFI Southbank where I saw the film, tell me that Brief Encounter is ‘quintessentially British’ in its depiction of restraint. I really don’t understand this in the slightest. I know that the cliche says that ‘the British’ are the very epitome of restraint and are reserved and polite, stiff upper lip and all that (except on a hot day after a few pints of Stella), but really…?

I read the film, where two married people meet, fall in love and have a 4 week affair, as the classic struggle between individual desire and family obligation. Showing emotional restraint area in this area is hardly unique and particularly not in 1945. I was actually suprised that the couple were so unrestrained in seeing each other in public places - I’d constantly be terrified of being seen (as they indeed were).

No for me, the most moving (and British) thing about Brief Encounter was its combination of realism and romanticism. Two ordinary people, in ordinary relationships, doing ordinary things in an ordinary town suddenly find each other and fall in passionately in love. So I wasn’t struck by the infamous British ‘restraint’ but by the crushing reality of their boring lives and the fact that thousands and thousands of people have sat there watching this film since 1945 wishing to God that it could happen to them.

When I’m not reading children’s books and listening to jazz-funk, I like to go to the cinema…

This week I’ve been to see This Sceptred Isle, a package of holiday memories from the British Film Institute archives. The screening allowed me to wallow in nostalgia for long lost holidays I never had - coach tours around the B roads of Britain (c.1958), hop picking in Kent (c.1933), being blown along the Cornish Riviera with my long skirts and fancy parasol (c.1904) etc. etc.

But the place that I really want to be is Blackpool in 1957. Well, the Blackpool depicted in this fabulous film called Holiday made by British Transport Films. With its Chris Barber soundtrack, saturated colour and sheer gleefulness, Holiday is summer perfection. And they’ve got champagne on draught.

Excerpt from Holiday, 1957, BFI National Archive

One thing I particularly like about winter is that I can go to the movies guilt-free. Not that I ever feel particularly bad about spending so much time at the cinema, but when the sun is shining I always feel that I should be outside enjoying it rather than sitting in a darkened room.

So to make the most of this winter, I’ve managed to get to the cinema at least 8 times in the past two months. And out of those films I’ve seen, two have particularly managed to stick in my head: Oscar winning Daniel Day Lewis showcase, There will be Blood, and Chinese director Zhang Ke Jia’s Still Life. 

Set in the early part of the 20th century, There will be Blood is essentially the story of one man - Daniel Day Lewis’s character, Daniel Plainview – a ruthless, single minded oil prospector who transforms a loose collection of houses and a church into a makeshift town focused on liberating the lucrative oil beneath their feet. The real impact of the film comes from its focused, relentless examination of a power driven loon dealing with life’s quintessential issues – family, relationships, community, faith, death etc., but I was also taken by the casual daily risks that people took in the oil drilling work that often resulted in disability and death. Wow, I found myself thinking despite myself and my cynicism, I just can’t ever believe that people actually lived like that – isolated, alone, in the middle of nowhere, doing such tough, dirty high risk work. Then I saw Still Life.

Still Life is two different stories about a nurse and a coal miner both going to Fengjie, the site of the infamous Three Gorges Dam project in China, to find lost loved ones. The film is beautifully shot, almost documentary style, and the story is so-so, but what really strikes is the absolutely believable depiction of everyday life for people in this rapidly changing part of China. People are being forced to leave places they have lived all their lives because of the dam construction, others have travelled hundreds and hundreds of miles across the country to find work there (usually bloody hard, unrelenting manual type work). Everyone is living amidst either half demolished buildings or rapidly thrown up new ones. It’s a masculine society full of people isolated from their families trying to make do. And like in There will be Blood, there is absolutely no concept of health and safety – people die at work and accept this as par for the course.

And this is today, not 100 years ago. I know that Still Life is a film and that Zhang Ke Jia is political film maker, but there is a point where you have to trust what he is saying. Still Life suggests that China at the moment is like the West was during the industrial revolution – rapid change, no workers rights, the individual slave to rampant capitalism at the expense of all else. This is a daily reality for millions of people. And here I am at work having to have training on how to pick up a box.

It was only the other week that I was writing about my music format crisis, but it seems there is a wider technological crisis going on that I hadn’t even thought about. This time it’s in my other love, cinema.

This article in the New York Times explores the impact of digital technology on our filmed heritage. In a nutshell, film stock keeps well and is cheap to store, and digital isn’t. It costs about US$12,514 a year to store a digital master compared to US$1,059 to keep a conventional film master.

The article suggests that the heady combination of cost and inevitable technology shifts (basically not being able to easily upgrade digital film back-ups) could mean that in the future it might be easier to access easily preserved pre-digital films than current ones.

Obviously there is an upside to this (we’ll always have Jimmy Stewart but not neccessarily Tom Hanks) but it means that huge swathes of our current culture could one day be ‘digitally extinct’. Pity really.

We went to see Alfred Hitchcock’s last British film The Lady Vanishes over the weekend. It was great, quite possibly the funniest Hitchcock film I’ve ever seen. I particularly liked the way it gently poked fun at the English abroad, as well as at traditional ‘English reserve’.

Ironically, in the packed cinema where I saw it, one man in our row showed no sign of any reserve whatsoever. He was a proud father taking his young daughter to the cinema to share with her what was clearly a favourite film. It started off well. Briefly. Then about 10 seconds into the opening credits his excitement at the occasion started to overwhelm him:

‘Alfred Hitchcock!! See, he’s the director. I love Alfred Hitchcock!’
‘I know Dad….’

This set him off for the next 90 minutes, meaning that the rest of the film was punctuated by his exclamations and her writhing in her seat, trying to ignore him.

‘The next scene has the lady who vanishes… that’s her!’
‘Don’t worry, she vanishes soon.’
‘She vanishes in this sequence, I think…’
‘Yes, it’s this one.’
‘Ooooh, this bit’s good.’
‘No, this scene’s better. This one’s my favourite.’
‘He doesn’t actually kill the lady you know…’
‘Isn’t this bit just great?!’
‘Did you see that? Genius!’
etc. etc. etc.

Unfortunately, I was overcome by my reserve and didn’t tell him to shut up. Let’s hope it was all worth it in the end though, and father and daughter successfully bonded. At least she’ll have some memories (fond or otherwise) of going to the movies with her Dad, and she’ll probably always remember his love of The Lady Vanishes. As will I.

I spent last night at one of my very favourite London cinemas, the NFT, watching one of their archive screenings. Last night’s offering was on sex education and how it has been presented on screen this past century.

This can be summed in two ways:

1. It is your moral duty to your country to control yourself (or else you’ll bring everyone else down with your nasty diseases)

My favourite example of this was a 1938 film called The Road of Health. This is essentially an animated warning of what happens when you stray off the Road of Health onto the paths of Prostitution and Immorality. Yes, you end up in the hell of Veneral Disease where flames of misery lap at your feet and make your life a continuous nightmare of torture and statistics on syphilius. But don’t worry, help is at hand - you can drag yourself out of the cesspit by crossing the Government services and treatment centres bridge back to the Road of Health. Hooray!

2. The human sexual act is best explained by reference to flowers, birds, rabbits, cows chickens, spiders and even mould; anything but humans.

Did you know that mould is looking for a perfect partner too? Well, it is and it likes to find the right mould, get married and then um… do whatever mould does. Anyway, it’s similar to what people do and we can all learn from it.

Despite most films being impenetrably euphemistic, we did see one brave exception - A New Approach to Sex Education: Growing Up, a very progressive film from 1971. When you think of sex education films from the 70s and 80s you think of carefully discreet diagrams of fallopian tubes etc. Not this one though - not only did you get to see a couple actually at it, but graphic depictions of erect penises and hairy 70s people wanking. You could feel the audience’s collective jaw dropping. Much to the disappointment of the film makers, Growing Up was promptly attacked by Mary Whitehouse and banned under the Obscene Publications Act before making it into classrooms. I wonder why…

Whilst sitting outside eating my sandwiches this lunchtime, I started thinking that I should make a personal commitment to never eating crappy supermarket cheese ever again. This inevitably led to me thinking about other ethical decisions I could also make if I had any moral fibre/will power whatsoever.

What I would really like to do is to swear that I will never step foot in another Odeon, Vue or similar chain cinema in my life. We saw the new Harry Potter movie a few weeks back and whilst the movie was good, it certainly had its work cut out to lift the misery of seeing it at Islington Vue. What a completely soul destroying dump that place is – hidden, almost embarrassed like in a shopping centre, a machine selling you tickets rather than a person, harsh strip lighting illuminating heavy duty flooring, all roads leading to the overpriced crappy junk food.

It’s hard to believe that once upon a time movie theatres were built as fantastic temples to escapism where the whole experience of going out was special and exciting. Somewhile ago we went to see Sunset Boulevard at Finsbury Park Astoria (ironically once an Odeon, now an evangelical church run by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God) and even the hideous rows of bibles and religious scaremongering paraphernalia in the foyer couldn’t detract from the excitement and thrill engendered by the building. Now most cinemas don’t even try to pretend that screening films is anything more than a way of fleecing as much cash out of you as possible.

Sadly, I’ve got to hand it to religion on this one - they understand the importance of good design and how architecture can raise your spirits and change your perceptions – in a way that the real palaces of our dreams do not.