A Head For Business

Somebody tells me “ ‘Til December 20^th we’re in the fall business.” Really? No-one bothered to inform me and now it’s almost too late! What investment opportunities have I failed to realize and actuate to their full extent or, any extent at all if it comes to that? What fortunes have escaped my grasp?

Never mind! forewarned is forearmed which is twice the usual number for humans, though an octopus would feel deprived to the tune of fifty percent. Never mind! it’s my understanding they can grow them back. Useful if people could, even more useful if I knew the trick of it and could help people grow them back for a fee. It wouldn’t be an excessive fee.

What was I saying? oh yes! mustn’t grumble, what if the fall business is almost done? Winter figures to have the same and this time I can get in on the ground floor. People say I have no head for business but I’ll show them you bet I will!

I & Q

Have you noticed how many inexplicable quips turn up in journalism these days? Lines without any air of being uttered in jest or with humorous intent, which are nevertheless designated quips?

Probably they don't come up as often as icons. I once abandoned an article in the Entertainment section of the Star because, not even half a sentence in, some stolid and durable pillar of the entertainment community was referred to as an icon. I decided to apply the same test to the rest of the Entertainment section, which in consequence took me less than two minutes to read; I think the deepest any of these stories got before dropping an 'icon' or 'iconic' was paragraph 2--unusual restraint I'm sure you'll agree.

To be fair, this was a little above the common degree of usage--most days I'd have had to read through at least one story, maybe two, if my only test for skipping was whether they dropped the 'i' bomb.

Coming back to quipping, a piece on Kevin Pillar's outstanding April work on defence and even offence (Friday April 17 the story came out, so there's a full half month's play for sample) includes this: " 'The way he's played the first week and a half, you should give him the Gold Glove right now,' pitcher Mark Beuhrle quipped."

This isn't a perfect example, as there plainly is some humorous intent behind the remark. More typically someone 'quips' "He's been hitting over .300 for the last half year--surprising given that his lifetime average over several years in the majors is .217." If they'd said Beuhrle 'joked' or 'kidded'--nothing implied about how good a joke it was or how noticeable a kid--I suppose I'd let it go--but quips, surely, are a little more rare and should be held to a higher standard. When Dizzy Dean said, "If Satchel Paige were pitching with me for St Louis, we could win the pennant by June and take July and August off to go fishing," that was a quip, not to mention a good sized chunk from the hide of a shaggy dog. On the other hand, a line that good can just be quoted--you don't need to dress it up with inflatable speech tags.

Views on an Election Win That Wasn't

Rob   Ford’s back on the airways, saying on a talk radio show that if he’d run for Mayor in the most recent election, he’d have won. 

If I were the citizens of Toronto (and as it happens I’m one of them), I’d be offended. A putatively reformed crack head and alcoholic with a monotonous ongoing spiel about fiscal responsibility to accompany as fiscally irresponsible a term as any of us have seen in our lifetimes, a man in whom you never knew where the mendacity left off and the hyperbolic braggadocio began, a man who claimed a billion dollars saved by his administration by the interesting expedient of counting losses and gains indiscriminately on the credit side, would have won a second term as mayor after serving a first term which was, first to last, a campaign against Rob Ford as Mayor? I don’t think so. The numbers of Ford nation had shrunk appreciably, and Ford was elected originally (by a little over a third of the electorate because of the number of candidates and the first-past-the-post rule in our elections) largely as a gesture of protest. He’d given the protest vote plenty of reason to come out in favour of any candidate, very nearly, so long as that candidate wasn’t a Ford. He might have done marginally better than his brother (who’d been parachuted into the race by means many considered irregular), because he’s more likeable and personable, but he wouldn’t have pulled a single vote away from any of the other candidates, and his deflating hard core of supporters wouldn’t have been enough. Since he would only have continued to contest the election if he were cancer-free, it’s very likely he would have had a relapse of his other condition, binging on booze or free-base cocaine very loudly and publicly in the few weeks remaining before the election. (The first stages of recovery are the most delicate, and require calm and some degree of isolation from stress—not easy to come by in the heat of a mayoral race.) There would still be a hard core of support this wouldn’t have lost him, but it would shrink a touch more. It might have won him some sympathy (as the cancer diagnosis certainly did) among voters like me who favoured other candidates in the last election, but it wouldn’t have won him any of our votes. I felt sympathy, in spite of his belligerence (who knew how long and hungry a day he’d put in?), for the man begging at the Grenview exit to the Royal York Subway last night, and if I’d been a little more flush myself would have helped him more than I did. I wouldn’t have given him my vote for any elective office.

A Vacation from Cigarettes

I should've started smoking years ago. According to an ad posted in the washroom of my favourite pub, if I quit smoking now I can visit Thailand. Not necessarily my first choice, but if you can visit Thailand, practically speaking you should be able to visit any place that's the same distance or less. I could go for that, but unfortunately I've never smoked so I'm unable to quit. Why didn't somebody tell me about this years ago? Now if I start, who knows how long it'll take to earn travel reward points by quitting. Hey! What's to stop somebody from taking the habit up again and again, like Mark Twain: "It's easy to give up smoking. I've done it a hundred times." Surely there can't be many easier ways to become a traveler to faraway places on a regular basis, if this ad is to be believed.

Rob Ford; math skills

Rob Ford has pointed out that neither of his most recently declared rivals in the upcoming mayoral race “has the record of Rob Ford”, an unusually generous endorsement of two opponents, but surely this could be fine tuned further. One of them must have a record less like Rob Ford than the other, and if somebody could perform the necessary differential analysis we’d have one reasonably efficient measure of who might make the best mayor. (Should we want an anti-Ford who’s also a better saxophonist than Bill Clinton, we should get behind Richard Underhill.) John Tory and Karen Stintz both differ from Ford in possessing basic math skills---neither imagines a loss or break even on city revenues accompanied by steep cuts in basic services is a saving in the neighbourhood of a billion dollars, and I doubt either one even imagines such a thing as a city being “ten times better off than it was” after three years of a mayoral term distinguished mainly by chaotic governance, bullying and mendacity—or for that matter after three years of sober, industrious, socially and fiscally responsible leadership, things simply don’t change that radically and dramatically, over so short a time span, in a sprawling metropolis with over two million citizens—some of whom, incidentally, are getting tired of being referred to all the time as customers. On a related subject, how do you stop a rhino from charging? Take away its credit card.

Speaking of math skills, a settlement in a class action abuse case brought by inmates judged to have suffered abuse, physical, sexual or both, at Rideau and Southwest regional centres (David McKillop recalls being beaten and sexually abused at the age of 4 ½) yielded a collective settlement of $32 million, which, doled out amongst 4,300 plaintiffs, works out to a little under $7,450 apiece. One’s obliged to say, I suppose, that it’s better than nothing. 

                                                            Notes on a Glib List

http://listverse.com/2012/11/04/top-10-things-people-believe-without-proof/>

(Unfortunately, this link takes you to the current page, but if you go into the Archive you can find the list, "10 Things People Believe Without Proof", in the entry for Nov 4)


My reply, which they haven't let me post yet at Listverse (said they'd send me an email with a password, but haven't yet.) Aliens strike me as remarkably plausible, not necessarily walking among us, but there's a lot of room in the universe for extraterrestrial life. (As for whether they're walking among us, I recall reading once that the one 'hard fact' we had was that they weren't; but that's as difficult to prove as any negative--how would we know for sure?) Cryptids--I don't know, we're discovering new species all the time, many of them passing strange, with very solid empirical evidence--do they count? I don't believe in Astrology, but then I wouldn't--I'm a Taurus on the cusp of Gemini. Ghosts? Psychic mediums? Never seen any persuasive evidence. (Apparently the traces ghosthunters find in spooky mansions that turn up in photographs are traces of their own activity.) I'm pretty sure if you don't believe in Karma something bad's liable to happen to you. Intuition doesn't strike me as even controversial unless you spook up its definition the way this piece does. To some extent it's the subconscious sorting through evidence too rapidly for verbal reasoning to process. It has a few other acceptable meanings, none of which is hard to verify in action. Fate's a commonplace belief of scientists these days, but it's called determinism and opposed to free will. A man named Harris wrote a book expounding the idea recently--that what people do is absolutely determined by the conditions of their lives and the actions of the universe around them. It isn't a scientific idea because it's embraced by science, and so far as there's evidence, it leans both ways. It makes more sense, if you intend to do anything, to hold out some realistic hope that you're not going through motions that are totally determined by genetics and environment--the modern dress of fate--but allow for the wiggle room of some effective input from within yourself. There are so many nuances to religious belief--whether in a God gods, God in nature or the agnostic faith of the Buddha--that it's ludicrous to sum it up as belief in a Holy book whose words are regarded as true and sacrosanct. That level of Fundamentalism is relatively commmon in Christianity and Islam, less so in Judaism, much less so in poly- or pan-theistic faiths.

Movie Quiz Who Do You Like As the Killer?

{Match the line quoted to the movie it's from. (The clips are clues, though the passages don't include these quotes.) Lines 12, 15 and 18 are subtitled translations, from the German and twice from the French, respectively. Line 11 is a dialogue subtitle from a silent film. Post your guesses in the comment thread below, in fact feel free to post comments on any of the live or archived film discussions on this site.)





1.“The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”

2.“There’s a high speed pursuit, we got a shooting and then this execution type deal.”

3.“I’m the only thing that stands between you and darkness and night, son. The other side of me is chaos.”

4. “There’s always room at the top for brains, money or a good pair of titties.”

5. “Shoot then, if it pleasures you.”

6. “A pity he exists.”




7. “So these faked suicides of yours are for your mother’s benefit?”
“No. . . . I would not say benefit.”

8. “Kit’s the most trigger happy person I ever met.”

9. “And what magazines sell best?”

“The ones with ladies on the front covers and no front covers on the ladies.”

10. “Try to break into my house—I ought to blow you away. I got to tell you the truth—the only reason I don’t is ‘cause someone might hear me.”

11. “Can you lend me a rope so I can swing a fellow out where I can get a better shot at him?”

12. “What are they saying?”

“Meat, meat, fresh meat, coming up the river.”





13. “Mister Hickok, that man’s really dead.”

“Got him through the lungs and heart both.”

14. “Success to crime.”

15. “So now white people wait ‘til they’re dead to talk to black folks? Well it’s too late!”

16. “Hospital hallucination scene, take two.”






17. “Mister President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I am saying ten to twenty million dead, tops. Depending on the breaks.”

18. “If we don’t eat. . . we won’t die.”

19. “There’s nothing urgent here. Redundant.”

20. “All right then, who do you like as the killer?”

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus/Nine: "The Eye Altering Alters All"

This week's review on The Moving Picture Writes is

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus/Nine

Also Up this week on About Us ("The Eye Altering Alters All" is a clip from

Enchanted April

(These will change once a week, as will the reviews.)

The Ruling Class/The Eye Altering Alters All

New this week at The Moving Picture Writes
http://themovingpicturewrites.com/index.php?stn=96433&pageno=17

I don't often feel huge enthusiasm for the film that wins best picture at the Oscars.They seem to me mostly such timid and compromised choices.

I'm rarely quite so pissed at them as I was in 1972, when I thought it scandolous that The Ruling Class didn't sweep every major category.

Best adapted screenplay? There certainly wasn't one that year--few any year--so brilliant and incisive as Peter Barnes' adaptation of his own stage play--just as there've been few plays in English that come close to the wit intelligence emotional-philosophical range of The Ruling Class--and five at least of those that did were written by Peter Barnes.

(A couple were even written by Shakespeare.)

Best lead actress? Coral Browne, hands down. Lead actor? Peter O'Toole. Supporting actress? Carolyn Seymour. Supporting actor--Alastair Sim and Arthur Lowe would have to duke that one out.

(Nigel Greene as the Electric Messiah, Harry Andrews as the 13th Earl and Graham Crowden as the Master in Lunacy were each brilliant in their turn, but in a single scene only. And while you could also make a case for William Merwin as Uncle Charles, Michael Bryant as Dr. Herder and James Villiers as Dinsdale, even if all five best support actor noms had come from the same film, which would be somewhat unusual, only one could win.)

Direction? Editing? Soundtrack? Cinematrography? Set design, costume design?

Nothing else that year came anywhere near The Ruling Class in any of these categories and I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. But I was angry at a larger injustice than an Academy snub: the loss to a wide popular audience of a genuinely great popular classic.



Also new this week, in the Video thread of About Us ("The Eye Altering Alters All"

About Us/Little Big Man

I wondered whether I should let people know I've added a new feature to About Us on The Moving Picture Writes or let them gradually discover for themselves the film clip I've added below the bio (which will change roughly once a week. Decided I'd compromise and limit my disclosure to facebook and my blog.
http://www.themovingpicturewri...tes.com/?stn=96433&pageno=4



While I'm at it, since I didn't post this week's new page yet:

http://www.themovingpicturewrites.com/?stn=96433&pageno=6

Robert Boyle

I only became aware of Robert Boyle--one of those names that tends to disappear in the scroll of final credits however many films of note he might be associated with--when I was looking for YouTube clips to link to for a Linnet's Wings essay, Death House Comedy.

I particularly wanted a clip for Winter Kills, which I continue to think one of the finest and most underrated movies in the history of cinema (for reasons I'll go into in another piece at a later date).

Sorting the possibilities I discovered this gem, the perfect quick introduction--a conversation, with illustrative clips, between production designer (or art director--the titles are interchangeable) Robert Boyle and screenwriter/director William Richert:





Read on here:

Robert Boyle

The Moving Picture Writes

With this column I inaugurate a movie/tv appreciation website. Under the above title I'll be offering, from time to time, memoirs of my encounters over the years with film and, increasingly, tv.

Under other headings I'll be doing film reviews, background studies, film commentary reviews (the first of these for The Ruling Class, since I planned when I was writing the review to comment on the Criterion Edition Extras, but discovered that, besides making the piece of unwieldy length (particularly for an online essay), it combined two pieces that might best be considered in tandem (independently of each other).

I took the same approach with Performance, discussing the principals' reactions to the film and its place in their careers under the heading 'Background', tackling the film in the mimetic, synergistic style I hope soon to be famous for in a second short essay, 'All the Way'.)


(Read on here:

http://www.themovingpicturewrites.com/?stn=96433&pageno=16&sdb=

"Cheer up you old bugger! Worse things happen at sea!"

Firewatcher's Wages

MWH Projects Act I

Flames Leap Mountains From Troy to Argos

Scene i Heraclitus Firewatcher Brilliant Noses
...
[the first light onstage is a tiny glow like a candle flame, but fixed, above a wigwam shape with sticks protruding, on the backstage wall left further points of light over stylized bonfire images will appear at intervals throughout, until they form a complete row stage lights begin to come up slowly]

HERACLITUS FIREWATCHER

Awake! stay awake, a year awake! you tell me that's not excessive
A dog's life? not by a long shot, dogs sleep all the time
Wake at the slightest unexpected sound or flicker of light
Wake up and yap like a Barbarian on cue

[stage lights fully up on an otherwise bare stage heraclitus firewatcher, with a few possessions gathered about him, stands by a wigwam-shaped bonfire just waiting to be lit another light flickers up on the wall behind]

Brilliant nose a dog has! might even sniff the blaze
Starting up on a miles-distant hill but that's never been tested
My damn luck, I'm not a dog, I have hands not paws
Opposable thumbs, you need that to hold a torch
Set a fire going to match the fire in the distance
Not to mention how few dogs speak excellent Greek
See what I mean? as you hear me speaking it now
The better to bring the news to our faithful Queen ho ho
What she has in mind for Agamemnon I've heard the rumours
I wouldn't wish on a dog but shh! (fingers to lips)
I might on a King

Scene ii Heraclitus Philosopher beneath skin, above bone

[a man enters wings left, in tattered once-white toga not unfamiliar with holes, and begins to speak out aggressively at the apron
of the stage]

HERACLITUS PHILOSOPHER

intelligence damped and sickened by green paper colour of mould midas it seems is your epitome of earthly success because his touch was instant death to the daughter he loved above all human creatures? i'll grant you, she made an impressive statue had he been a sculptor, known a few friends who resembled the gods, his curse might have served some function statues of gold, colour of mead-darkened piss, more godlike than the gods because he starved, every bit of food he tried to eat turning to useless gold? donkeys are brighter than that, they know garbage at least is edible, gold is just too tough a chew

haven't heard medusa celebrated the same way women had it rough in my time as well

do you imagine croesus diverted the river to right and left so the stream in the middle would no longer be impossible for his soldiers to ford? his money, his implements, many slaves of his purchase and some few skilled workmen in his hire, carried out the work of hands but the work of mind, without which the rest, bold solid streams of mead-darkened piss, would have had no effect, was thales' money is not mind, it has no power apart from the skill deployed in its use (and we thought we were overloaded with gods of our own election, no earthly function in 'em) no value at all if hoarded and stockaded, then it chokes and kills

name a shoe for running after a goddess of swift intelligence, confusing the fiery rapidity of thought more than humanly supple with the gangly fleetness of sweat-reeking ankle, instep and heel (what a lovely libation to offer the goddess that caps their toes!)

claim to know the river you step in is not the river you stand in (any phrase can be turned to gabble it seems) but don't know you who step there are a river coursing vertically beneath skin, above bone, ceaselessly changing, well? (some that only half learned this found a sudden panic as they stepped into the river dissolved their skin carried them rushing away on the current, one with the current, one with the undertow and gone to the grief and astonishment of loved ones and strangers watching from shore

[darts off wings left, pops his head back]

if their bones were ever found i never heard of it)

[exits completely]

Scene iii Heraclitus Firewatcher A Fixed Reliable Commodity

HERACLITUS FIREWATCHER

Don't mind him, we get philosophers all the time coming by to harangue the populace, it's a fulltime occupation among us Greeks Not always that well-paying as you can see, though there are those do all right by teaching Diction, vocabulary, sneaky ways to fool people in an argument mostly This one has the same name as me, Heraclitus and I quite like him Not very social, I'll grant you that, says his piece and then off, not nearly as personable as Diogenes but between the aggression in his voice and the challenge trying to riddle out what his speeches mean, he's useful for keeping a body awake Some of the others could put you to sleep so fast and do I need that? Like I need to forfeit my life on the gibbet or the chopping block (Shivers) Our local chief axeman? gives me the creeping willies I'm sorry but if you've just severed permanently the relationship between a man's head and body, you don't say to the mob of drools and leers panting looking on "It's been a slice" Hemlock you say? That's for a higher class of gent

A knife in a dark corner, extrajudicial? that'll happen
Bold to speak out as these fellows do when you think
How permanent a silence the wrong word can buy you
I do find the more I hear this one speak
The more sense I discover in his words
Some I can't make hide nor hair I'm told these philosophers in their trance states
Sometimes look deep into the future, you'd lose your present day audience there
As if the past and present aren't more than enough mess to deal with!
I tried once you know, stepping in a river?
Sure seemed like the same river when I was standing in it
Even when I stepped out, rivers are a fixed reliable commodity
Compared to human life as it flows out its course
My son among the fallen at Troy? we had messages at irregular intervals
Until three years ago or a little more, since when dead silence
Not a word from him, no other messengers will tell us anything
Sparing our feelings I expect, prize method of accomplishing that!
Confirm our worst fears almost and yet leave hanging
Above our heads on a thin string like Damocles' sword
The fraying hope that if he's far less a hero than Achilles
His prospects of survival at least are better
Not so it seems though perhaps. . . I can't sleep thinking about it
That was a joke, though a bitter one I admit

Death House Comedy

This is another project I'll be developing further on The Moving Picture Writes and, I hope, eventually as a booklength study.
DEATH HOUSE COMEDY
FELLAS, IM DYING OUT THERE!: DEATH HOUSE COMEDY by Martin Heavisides
Fellas I'm Dying Out There!
http://www.ddwebsites.com/runit/?stn=96412&pageno=16&sdb

The Death of M. Hulot

In the latter part of his career Jacques Tati increasingly found his most famous creation a burden he’d prefer to be free of. He described how he might kill off the bemused pipe smoker with the gangly frame and the fore...-tilted walk, without violating the form and logic that animated his films. (I’d hoped to quote this directly from Tati in a critical biography I read some years ago, but I don’t own it any longer, can’t find it in Toronto’s excellent library system, and find no trace of the passage through the magic of Google, so I’m obliged to reproduce the gist from memory and leave its full elaboration to readers luckier or more patient than I: M. Hulot is in the back kitchen of a restaurant where an incident of gunfire occurs in the dining room. A bullet passes through into the back and strikes Hulot, instantly killing him. The first concern of the restaurauteurs is to make certain this death doesn’t cast a shadow on the reputation of the restaurant, so they arrange to have him transported in a box disguised as goods being shipped out. He passes by the guests of the establishment unnoticed, and the story continues on.)

The instrumental point of this would have been to remove the Hulot millstone from around Tati’s neck, but the significance of the scene should he ever have filmed it—even of that bare description of the scene as here given—would have been much the same as Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus (as Auden described it):

how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W H Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts

But even people watching the never-to-be-realized film in which, as it happens, this tragicomic death did not occur, would have had another and sharper reaction. Hulot might well be easily dispensable to the people who hustle his body out of view, and of no account to the people who don’t even notice, in either sense, his passing, but he’s been the fulcrum of the film to this point—assuming Tati has followed the strategy of Les Vacances de M. Hulot, Mon Oncle, Playtime and Trafic—he has anchored the story in some sense and his sudden death must cast the narrative adrift. Therefore his death may impact little on the busy, personally preoccupied lives of the other characters, but it’s a powerful, deranging event for anyone who’s been taken up with the hilarious action to that point.

Astute reviewers—which is to say nobody—would have pointed out how this resembled Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Illich—equally profound, funnier of course, and with the added frisson that Tati hadn’t given away the shock of the ending in the title, and in fact hadn’t ended the film there—as in Breughel, death’s an episode, almost invisible—unless made prominently visible for an instant—in a movie whose tidal flow carries on for another full hour of hilarity, minutely observed, crowding every frame. What a moment, and what a film that would have been!

That film would certainly have had a place of honour in a festival of death house comedies. None of those Tati actually did make could—not because they never concerned themselves with death (what self-respecting comic artist could ignore it altogether?) but because they tend to concern themselves with everything, and death is never emphasized as it necessarily would be if Hulot died on camera.

This isn’t a criticism of Tati, merely an attempt to establish boundaries. Death house comedy is by no means the only style of film, or even of comedy, that is serious and engaged at the highest level—but if we’re going to talk about it as a viable category parameters (and other high sounding words) are going to be required. A film needn’t be exclusively about death, or funny all the time (neither of which is even possible) to be a death house comedy. But I think it can reasonably be required to be at least as much preoccupied with death as any subject, and at least as funny as it is anything else.

(I’ve discovered through online filmographies that this was intended as the opening scene of his last, unrealized project, Confusion. It would have taken place behind the scenes on a film set apparently—nice metacinematic touch. According to these commentators it would have been his first non-comedy, but I’m not so sure. I recall Tati’s description of it in an interview I read in the mid seventies—savage satire was what he envisioned, and that was certainly within his range—all his films have passages of that, never as the single dominating mood. And satire is a comic form, even if in the way described by Peter Barnes: “I’ve laughed a lot when I haven’t felt a lot like laughing.” Easy sell? I can imagine the typical response of the money men (les personnes d’argent):

“Let me get this straight Monsieur Hu—Monsieur Tati. You’ve made a number of highly successful comedies, one hugely expensive flop, and one film since that gave a modest return on a very modest budget. You want to reconnect with the huge international audience you once enjoyed how? By killing off one of the most beloved characters in the history of cinema while the virtual impression of the opening credits is still fading from your viewers’ eyeballs? With the promise that things can only get worse from there? I foresee rows and rows of bumless seats. Now a remake in colour of Les Vacances de M. Hulot—that I could slap together a finance package over half a lunch, everone says you’re a master of colour, a true impressionist. Maybe with a younger comic in the role of Hulot.”)


Oozing Life

I never got very far in my one shot at a career in standup. I don't project well and I'm not good at memorizing lines--too lazy really--or at improvising in high pressure situations. I do all right with a few friends in a bar--k...eep my end of the conversation up at least. Onstage I'd clam up, the pipes would shut tight as bivalves and even with the mike at maximum amp I couldn't always guarantee I'd be heard by the back tables--God help me if I'd ever played a hall. I've often wondered how my career might have progressed if I'd taken Idi Amin up on his friendly offer to lend me his bodyguards when I went out to do my five minutes. "I guarantee you'll soon be doing 15 minutes, 30 minutes, even whole nights to yourself."

"Myself and two burly men with loaded Uzis flanking me on either side. Wouldn't it be better to get ahead on my own natural talent?" I don't know why he laughed at that, but he laughed loud and long. Many others, not just me, have attested to how often he'd burst out laughing for no apparent reason at things nobody else could see the humour in.

It's not that none of my lines ever got laughs, and if you want to know the truth, to this very day I still resent that. Time and again I'd be sitting in the crowd watching a comic kill with lines I'd tossed off the night before in my cups. We were working for beer or beer money at best in those days so I could hardly ask 'em to pay for my material, but a word or two of acknowledgment would not have gone amiss. Some have gone on to greater success and throw me the odd buck out of shame, but regrettably the richest and most famous of them are completely shameless, my standard of living and position in the industry would be very different today if it were otherwise. What I wouldn't give for a second chance to take up Idi's offer of lead weighted muscle. I can't recall a single instance of any comic lifting one of his gags.

If you were unaware of Idi Amin's brief stab at making it in show biz, you're not alone. You could fill arenas with people who don't know that about the iconic figurehead who went on to become Uganda's strongman/funnyman/absolute leader. I couldn't tell you for certain when it was--around the time of the first village massacre? maybe as late as the expulsion of Uganda's entire Asian immigrant population?--but somewhere in there he quietly deleted those couple of years from his resume.

He didn't exactly fail as a standup, matter of fact he was steadily building a following before he abandoned it for greater, more terrible ambitions. The click of the safeties was easily as effective as a drum roll for punch line punctuation, particularly if you as an audience member knew or suspected these were not prop weapons clutched in those huge mitts. The laughs may have been nervous but they were plentiful and if by chance they weren't? "It's a sure fire thing with me," he'd chuckle. "One way or another, when I do a show, I kill."

Ceci n'est pas un livre du cinema

Ceci n’est pas un livre du cinema
At present ceci n’est pas un essai seulement—in ten sections, nine thousand three hundred fifty words, mostly taken up with analyses of films like F for Fake, Vanya on 42nd St, Fellini’s Clowns, which I characterize as ‘documentary fictions’. Also a couple of self-written examples:
One of the two children I’d invited to join me across the street was hanging out the back of a helicopter taxi giving grid coordinates to where they were meeting us—must have seemed strange to the driver, but t...he crosswalks are intricate up here by this last subway stop before open water and people lose their way easily. I was more nervous about the boy hanging out the back, but he scampered back in as the ‘copter began its sweep round a tower in the middle of the harbour to look back on the city beyond. What had surprised me was the country coordinate (which you always have to give a helicab driver, it’s a formal requirement even for intra-city travel: pilots have intricate guidelines and restrictions concerning flight to certain countries and better safe than sorry, also sometimes they can hook you up with a helicopter at another destination that is allowed into that country and perhaps has regulation armour and defensive weaponry as the situation might require, not that you’d need that in Wales but it did surprise me—knew the call I was taking was well outside my usual boundaries but Wales!? maybe unbeknownst to myself I was part of a courier exchange) now the helicopter rounds back on a slow circle to its near destination—first look I’ve had at the skyline though ‘I’ am not technically on board the helicopter—ever shifting multi-perspective view, don’t get a lot of that in real life. Distant skyline dominated by a row of smoke belching industrial behemoths, don’t see that in a lot of cities anymore, suspect it’s not at all typical of Wales. Shaped a little like a sooty, flame-shooting pipe organ. When the helicopter arcs toward the dockside where my friends and I are waiting it’s completely changed from my first view of it when I walked over from the subway just moments before. Then the complex of buildings behind it were square-edged and mainly of pink brick, now they’re round-edged—interwoven half globes ten storeys high—and mainly of white marble. Not every city can house two completely different building complexes in the same space depending on what? time of day, fall of light, angle of approach from which they’re viewed? At least the floating dock the helicab touches down on hasn’t changed, except I half remember it was a fixed dock before.

A woman who’s held on in the street vending trade long after the rest of us abandoned it is here, having packed up a little while ago. I asked her how business was and she said not too bad. She could use an easily portable tent for the rough weather days, a friend was improvising something light and flexible until she could afford a proper one, maybe at the next economic turnaround she wasn’t holding her breath. I know it’s not a sustainable life anymore, what with the harassing regulations and the drying up of business, even at Christmas, to virtually nothing. Still when I see one of us pioneers at it yet, I feel a twinge of nostalgia. Maybe the regulations are more vendor-friendly this corner of Wales. Wonder what the distance charge on the envelope I just delivered is going to be?

A writer friend I’ve never met personally, just know through an online workshop is among the dozen or so of us assembled now the two children have landed. She’s in a wheelchair which I think is only temporary, and is asking directions to a stop I already know—it’s where I started from on my trip to make this delivery. She’s prepared to wheel the ten blocks I walked from the last connecting bus, but now I know there’s a subway so near I can direct her there—even accompany her, it’s on my way and the 100 interconnecting subway and lrt lines are confusing for a newcomer. We’ll soon discover that seven of them interconnect with the stop she wants to go to.
Meanwhile the whole group of us has a lottery ticket we bought by assembling every nickel, dime and occasional quarter we had in our pockets, and are trying to check it in a newspaper whose format’s a little baffling. Strange to see so many visitors to our fair city gathered on one dock, says the kiosk vendor, especially as it’s not at all the high tourist season. What’s kiosk business like? I ask, still pining for the old days in micro-scale street level retail.

What’ll we do when we win the lottery? someone asks and I notice there’s a high level of confidence that we will. It won’t do us much good, I say, as this is all happening in a dream. Hey! everyone shouts back in unison, don’t rain on our parade! Last time we had serious flooding, says the kiosk vendor, it washed away the entire city which had to be hastily reassembled for an international conference. Terrible sudden deficit expense, but a boon for the construction trade. That’s neither here nor there but thinking it over I decide to go with group consensus and look on the positive side. Stranger things have happened than that a lottery ticket in a dream . . . but what I’m really wishing is that I could have gotten a movie camera in for the duration of this and gotten it out after.

The project began, and grew from, a study of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil where:

Tokyo is mostly a night or interior city in Sans Soleil, seen under a wide range of artificial lights that grow progressively more distorted. The simplest level i...s familiar to every city dweller: street lamps, neon (fixed and firm or lightly sputtering), the grey –white pallor cast by tube lighting in pachinko parlours, the dancing light show on pachinko boards (roughly analogous to pinball consoles) and video terminal screens. (There’s a brief passage on the historical significance of Pac-Man.) At another remove are passages drawn from television screens (one of many sorts of incorporated ‘found’ footage in the film): Marker makes no effort to soften the distortion that normally occurs when televised images are filmed direct from the screen. There’s even the suspicion he may be in some way enhancing it, but I think that’s more the effect of the images themselves, supersaturated with vivid colours that sometimes clash violently enough you might almost say they’re at war with each other. A degree of harmony is restored, paradoxically, by the thoroughly jiggered images of the computer programmer Hayao Yamenake (according to Wikipedia, another of Marker’s inventions—he created these manipulated images himself), deranging naturalistic images partly by pixilation, partly by altering their colour fields, into something whose pattern is still discernible—at least if you’re familiar before hand with the image being altered, and he largely transforms images previously seen in travelogue or documentary footage—but considerably abstracted, kaleidoscoped, taking on an other-worldly glow. He calls the region of virtual space these images occupy The Zone, after that region in Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Stalker.

But there are sunlit exterior scenes in Tokyo as well, and daytime exteriors predominate in footage from other locations—Iceland, the Ile de France, Guinea Bissau. Odd in a film called Sans Soleil, but sunlight (bonsoir Magritte) is absent in its presence here, since it’s captured on film, not by the eye (ceci n’est pas la lumiere de la soleil). On the other hand the ultimate source of all light on earth (it would be different in another solar system) is our sun; in that sense, no matter how processed, distorted, artificially extruded, the source of all light in Sans Soleil remains the sun. (It’s curious incidentally how readily we think of sunlight and rain in the same language: I had to throw away earlier drafts in which I persisted in talking of light ‘streaming’ or scenes ‘drenched’ in light.)
Like the sun, the film’s two narrators are omnipresent yet absent. The author of the letters that describe its various scenes and actions, Sandor Krasna, is neither heard nor seen: the reader of them, played by Florence Delay in French, Alexandra Stewart in English, Riyoko Ikeda in Japanese, Charlotte Kerr in German, is heard almost constantly but never seen. The words she speaks are written in another’s voice but spoken in her own, which must be assumed to inflect and alter their significance in subtle ways—there’s a sense of constantly listening for the voice behind the voice, reinforced by ritual repetitions of “He wrote to me”. (Besides which she acts as editor, selecting from a presumably large body of letters the comments that will represent them over particular scenes.) More present in absence than either of these is the true author, not only of Krasna’s letters but of Krasna and the narrator, the film’s maker Chris Marker. (This being the pseudonym of a director whose given name is something completely different, Chris Marker too is one of the film maker’s inventions. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, a large section of the film is given over to a meditation on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.)

Fiction or documentary? Yes, and a subtly powerful inquiry into the porous borderland between the two, frequently thought of as having no point of contact, let alone impermeation. The fascinating sequence on Vertigo—clearly a fictional film—plays off against passages sampled from purely documentary works like The Death of a Giraffe—one of the few passages left entirely without commentary—for a reason that’s self evident, watching: the horrific sequence as it unfolds is its own commentary, words of any kind would be superfluous. The commentary on Vertigo may be more nearly documentary than the samplings from other documentaries, since these are assimilated to the musings of the fictional Sandor Krasna. (This brings to mind other mixed form experiments: Fellini’s I Clowns, Herzog’s Fata Morgana, Moretti’s Caro Diario. This being a ‘genre’ unusually free of established rules—for purists even a genre that perhaps shouldn’t exist, though I think it’s only problematic if the elements of fictional contrivance are perfidiously concealed—it’s unsurprising that each has a peculiar signature of its own, unique as a fingerprint.

In keeping with its theme of presence-in absence, the fingerprint of Sans Soleil is perhaps invisible to some viewers altogether, and keeps appearing and vanishing once you become aware of it. Many viewers I’m sure glance over the final credits perfunctorily or make for the exits while they’re playing, and that’s the only place in the film where the fictional letter writer Sandor Krasna is mentioned: so it’s easy enough to assume these are simply Chris Marker’s own comments on materials from a video diary of his travels into several remote regions of the world. (In fact they wouldn’t be entirely mistaken in thinking so.) It’s even likely there fare fans of Chris Marker who are unaware that’s not his real name—I know because I’ve been a fan for decades, since I saw La Jetee (which makes a cameo appearance in Sans Soleil), and only discovered this myself a few years ago, reading it in the notes on a Chris Marker retrospective at Cinematheque.

The voice of Sandor Krasna is persuasively mundane yet conversational, with an eye for the telling image, an ear for the telling image, a natural bent for elaborate theorising—it requires a real effort of concentration to remember that this is a narrator, perhaps not at all times a reliable one. That concentration may open the mind to wider speculations: is sunlight natural or artificial? Is the image I see on the screen present? In a sense yes, for there it is; in a sense no, because with rare exceptions every image we see on film was recorded in the past. (Sandor Krasna speculates, or appears to, at one point that images might be sent back from the future as well—but this has little relevance at our present state of comparatively primitive technology: we don’t even know yet how to send a camera into the dream.) Ultimately we might be driven back to Heraclitus’s question: is the river I step in the river I stand in? the film I began watching the one I see through to its end. And then perhaps to wonder. . . )

The Moving Picture Writes

As soon as I've familiarized myself with the system enough so that I can set up new content steadily and reliably, I'll be inaugurating a movie/tv appreciation website. Under the above title I'll be offering, from time to time, memoirs of m...y encounters over the years with film and, increasingly, tv. Under other headings I'll be doing film reviews, background studies, film commentary reviews (the first of these for The Ruling Class, since I planned when I was writing the review to comment on the Criterion Edition Extras, but discovered that, besides making the piece of unwieldy length (particularly for an online essay), it combined two pieces that might best be considered in tandem (independently of each other). I took the same approach with Performance, discussing the principals' reactions to the film and its place in their careers under the heading 'Background', tackling the film in the mimetic, synergistic style I hope soon to be famous for in a second short essay, 'All the Way'.)

I won't be attempting to keep au courant with new movies, still less with the daily, hourly, minutely stream of movie gossip. I was advised by the woman who originally suggested developing this website that a number of others failed simply because of the need to keep up to date. There are two excellent reasons to take the desultory approach I have, filling in patches from the history of film here and there as it may be, not necessarily ignoring current releases but not trying to deal with them exhaustively. The first is that I'm at a disadvantage, compared to the days when I used to see four films in a slow week, having neither the time, energy nor money to keep up a comparable pace while working at a physically demanding full time job that pays broken bits of peanuts. I have to be selective even when it comes to seeing historically important films I've missed or would like to see again, when they play at Cinematheque or the new TIFF facility. If I were seeing films at the old pace--and I'm hopeful the website might prove a means of enabling me to--I still wouldn't want to chain myself to the routine of a daily, weekly or monthly reviewer making consumer reports instead of studies and evaluations, obliged to find something to say aout a slew of films the great majority of which (especially when they're hugely popular) would best be passed over in silence. Not long ago at the opening of TIFF's lightbox I looked over their list of the 100 essential films. Apart from violently disagreeing with some of their choices (goes without saying, de gustibus furio disputandam), I knew I could easily come up with a rival list of a hundred films as important as the (85 or so) choices they'd made that I didn't dispute, and that wouldn't begin to exhaust the number worth writing about. Why waste time, with no hint from the cosmos that I'll violate the norms of existence and prove imortal, writing about the inessentials?

Independently of its worth (I hope) as an artistic venture, there's a commercial motive to developing this website--to generate a steady stream of income that will (at least) replace what I can make as a courier, so that I can make this and other writing projects (of which more later) my fulltime occupation in future. That'll depend on income from advertising, revenue streaming, generating interest in a book project perhaps, essays and lectures? perhaps, but that'll depend on building a solid readership. For which reason once the site's up, I'd appreciate if any of you who like my weekly offerings not only visit regularly but spread the word to friends you think might be interested. With any luck it'll be awesome. We'll talk.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/MWH-Projects/156487567714135?ref=ts

Twelve Angry Men

"In 12 Angry Men (1957) [Henry Fonda] was the only voice of reason when an innocent boy is being railroaded on a murder case."
--Robert Fulford, Aug 31, 2010, National Post

It's pleasant to see how somethings don't change; Bob Fulford, for example, after all these years still rigorously eschewing nuance and subtlety in his analysis of film. About the only way he could improve on this travesty of a capsule review would be by remembering Henry Fonda pulling a Perry Mason with a last minute reveal of the guilty criminal.

I don't know how you'd find any evidence of railroading on the part of the prosecution; what they do is put together a neat tidy case based partly on circumstantial evidence, partly on an eyewitness identification nobody seems to know is suspect. (If the prosecution is aware the eyewitness is nearsighted and wasn't wearing her glasses when she made the ID, they can be accused of railroading even if they believe the circumstantial evidence and think the witness ties it up with a ribbon, but isn't crucial in itself. But I don't recall there being any suggestion of that. Surely the possibility of an apparently unbeatable case being made, in good faith, out of a succession of such imperfectly linked pieces of evidence is unsettling enough without any assumption of police or prosecutorial malice.)

If it's the jury who are railroading the accused, they don't do much of a job of it, slidng over one by one to a not guilty verdict over a single afternoon of deliberations--and if Fonda's character is the sole voice of reason how does that happen? Not only are they won over by his arguments, they are won over by their own--Fonda's character only starts the ball rolling. If he were the unique voice of reason the most he could have achieved would be a hung jury, eleven for conviction v. one for acquittal.

As for 'an innocent boy'--that's the plot pivot for a much more straightforward melodrama than Twelve Angry Men. When Fonda's character says "We may never know what happened that night," he means precisely that; they don't vote acquittal because they're certain he's innocent but because what looked like a rock solid case against him has revealed cracks and fissures which crumble it to bits. On the presumption of innocence he's innocent, and the odds are that he actually is--but high odds are not a certainty, and what's most interesting about Reginald Rose's play in all its incarnations--on television, film and the legitimate stage--is its creative integration of uncertainty, normally an element vigorously excised from courtroom/trial drama.

Death House Comedy

New essay up at The Linnet's Wings (www.thelinnetswings.net) Comes with its own screening room by way of informal footnotes.

Armstrong in The Linnets Wings

Facebook | Martin Heavisides Elvis Presley didn’t break down racial barriers in the music industry, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington did. . . Fats Waller was a one of the world’s biggest radio stars when Presley was in short pants, and if he’d been alive still in 1957 maybe he’d have had a big hit with Hound Dog and we’d know at last how that song should be done. http://www.thelinnetswings.net/?stn=96409&pageno=16

Armstrong in The Linnets Wings

http://www.thelinnetswings.net/?stn=96409&pageno=16&sdb=