The news that cinematographer Jack Cardiff has died at the age of 94 triggered a rush of celluloid memories. Mostly Powell and Pressburger moments, it has to be said. The escalator taking the dead airmen up to heaven in A Matter of Life and Death, the redness of the lipstick Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) wears in Black Narcissus, and a leather-clad Marianne Faithfull in Girl on a Motorcycle.
Cardiff was a great director of photography, though his attempts at directing never really hit the bullseye. But he always had an eye for beauty and for colour. And he knew sometimes the best answer was the simplest. This is him talking about A Matter of Life and Death as recorded by the BFI: "The beginning of the picture when David Niven thinks that he's in heaven was taken on the English coast. Of course he's supposed to look and see this long shot of a beach, thinking he's in heaven. In the script is says 'Fade in' and Michael said, 'This sounds corny. I wish I could do something different.' So I said, 'Michael, look through the camera'. He did, and I went to the front and breathed on the lens so that it went foggy. After a few seconds it cleared. Michael was delighted".
Thursday 23 April 2009
Tuesday 21 April 2009
One elephant, two elephants ...
"Well, to put it bluntly, isn’t there a certain incompatibility between the terms 'cinema'
and 'Britain'?"
Francois Truffaut
"Bollocks to Truffaut."
Stephen Frears
Most days, if I drive to work in Glasgow, I think of John Gordon Sinclair. It's at that point on the A80 where the dual carriageway flashes past Abronhill High School in Cumbernauld. At which point I invariably flash on Sinclair's silly, stuttering dash across the playground of said school in Bill Forsyth's sweet 1981 movie Gregory's Girl. I've done it so many times now that the drive and the movie are linked in my head, bound together, the mundane daily routine and the celluloid image burned into my mental hard disc.
It's inevitable, I suppose, this "closeness" of British cinema, of British images to the lives we lead. But not just because of geographical proximity. There must be an element of emotional proximity too, surely? Growing up in Northern Ireland in the seventies my earliest screen memories (both big and small) are all British, essentially. Watching Carry On Screaming on my eighth birthday. Coronation Street and Match of the Day. My dad taking me to see Zulu at the pictures (the reels shown in the wrong order; one moment Jack Hawkins is being driven away from Rourke's Drift, the next he's back behind bars). The latest James Bond.
Of course I grew up and fell in love with Hollywood screwball comedies and film noir and auteurism and L'Atalante and David Lynch, Almodovar and Wong Kar Wai, and American sitcoms and Edward Hopper and abstract expressionism, and ... oh you know, all the usual stuff anyone of my age group fell in love with.
And yet. And yet. I remember reading something the critic Andy Medhurst wrote sometime back in the mid-nineties (while writing, rather too kindly about Peter Chelsom's Blackpool-based comedy Funny Bones). I can't remember the exact quote but if memory serves it was along the lines that he, Medhurst, didn't grow up wanting to watch movies set in New York and LA, he wanted to watch movies set here, in Britain, reflecting a life he understood (if I'm misrepresenting him, I apologise. I will have to look out the quote). And I remember kind of agreeing with him. Because there is something about seeing your own place, your own world reflected back at you that's particularly mesmerising, beguiling, seductive.
Frustrating too, it must be said. Only the other week Anne Billson was writing in The Guardian about the badness of British film (Can British Films Get Any Worse?), and though I haven't seen The Boat That Rocked it's hard to argue with much of what she says about the lameness of Britfilms (mostly because I have seen Love Actually).
It's true that to get a sense of what this nation (or these four nations, if you prefer) it's often better to listen than look (to Jarvis or Damon, or Stephen Patrick or maybe even Lily). Ian Curtis painted a much more vivid picture than Richard ever will. But there are still moments when British image-making gives us a vision of ourselves that either chimes with who we are - or think we are - or, better still, gives us a new, alien vision of ourselves. We're there in the films of Powell-Pressburger and Mike Leigh, in Clement and La Frenais sitcoms (Jones and Corden sitcoms too), and sometimes lurking in the corners of bad movies and ropey TV shows.
I suppose this blog is going to be about those corners. It's about looking for reflections - sometimes distorted - of ourselves in the movies and TV and visual art we make.
A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to be in Venice on holiday during the Biennale. In a palazzo in the centre of town I sat on a hard floor and watched Willie Doherty's video art. Ghost Story it was called. A piece about Northern Ireland. I knew the place Doherty was trying to show us. The physical place and the mental landscape. It wasn't home. Not quite, thankfully. Not my home. But it was in the neighbourhood of home, as I remember it. Or close enough to stir some ghosts.
What follows is about what haunts us. The shiver of recognition we get when we see British images.
and 'Britain'?"
Francois Truffaut
"Bollocks to Truffaut."
Stephen Frears
Most days, if I drive to work in Glasgow, I think of John Gordon Sinclair. It's at that point on the A80 where the dual carriageway flashes past Abronhill High School in Cumbernauld. At which point I invariably flash on Sinclair's silly, stuttering dash across the playground of said school in Bill Forsyth's sweet 1981 movie Gregory's Girl. I've done it so many times now that the drive and the movie are linked in my head, bound together, the mundane daily routine and the celluloid image burned into my mental hard disc.
It's inevitable, I suppose, this "closeness" of British cinema, of British images to the lives we lead. But not just because of geographical proximity. There must be an element of emotional proximity too, surely? Growing up in Northern Ireland in the seventies my earliest screen memories (both big and small) are all British, essentially. Watching Carry On Screaming on my eighth birthday. Coronation Street and Match of the Day. My dad taking me to see Zulu at the pictures (the reels shown in the wrong order; one moment Jack Hawkins is being driven away from Rourke's Drift, the next he's back behind bars). The latest James Bond.
Of course I grew up and fell in love with Hollywood screwball comedies and film noir and auteurism and L'Atalante and David Lynch, Almodovar and Wong Kar Wai, and American sitcoms and Edward Hopper and abstract expressionism, and ... oh you know, all the usual stuff anyone of my age group fell in love with.
And yet. And yet. I remember reading something the critic Andy Medhurst wrote sometime back in the mid-nineties (while writing, rather too kindly about Peter Chelsom's Blackpool-based comedy Funny Bones). I can't remember the exact quote but if memory serves it was along the lines that he, Medhurst, didn't grow up wanting to watch movies set in New York and LA, he wanted to watch movies set here, in Britain, reflecting a life he understood (if I'm misrepresenting him, I apologise. I will have to look out the quote). And I remember kind of agreeing with him. Because there is something about seeing your own place, your own world reflected back at you that's particularly mesmerising, beguiling, seductive.
Frustrating too, it must be said. Only the other week Anne Billson was writing in The Guardian about the badness of British film (Can British Films Get Any Worse?), and though I haven't seen The Boat That Rocked it's hard to argue with much of what she says about the lameness of Britfilms (mostly because I have seen Love Actually).
It's true that to get a sense of what this nation (or these four nations, if you prefer) it's often better to listen than look (to Jarvis or Damon, or Stephen Patrick or maybe even Lily). Ian Curtis painted a much more vivid picture than Richard ever will. But there are still moments when British image-making gives us a vision of ourselves that either chimes with who we are - or think we are - or, better still, gives us a new, alien vision of ourselves. We're there in the films of Powell-Pressburger and Mike Leigh, in Clement and La Frenais sitcoms (Jones and Corden sitcoms too), and sometimes lurking in the corners of bad movies and ropey TV shows.
I suppose this blog is going to be about those corners. It's about looking for reflections - sometimes distorted - of ourselves in the movies and TV and visual art we make.
A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to be in Venice on holiday during the Biennale. In a palazzo in the centre of town I sat on a hard floor and watched Willie Doherty's video art. Ghost Story it was called. A piece about Northern Ireland. I knew the place Doherty was trying to show us. The physical place and the mental landscape. It wasn't home. Not quite, thankfully. Not my home. But it was in the neighbourhood of home, as I remember it. Or close enough to stir some ghosts.
What follows is about what haunts us. The shiver of recognition we get when we see British images.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)