Month: May 2024

The garden today

I’ve mown the grass – a lower setting than usual, which means the lawn looks unnaturally neat – and have put up all kinds of defences against invading birdlife. It looks like paranoia on my part . . . but those tiny leek seedlings didn’t pull themselves out of the row to wilt on the bare earth. My particular bêtes noires are wood pigeons, cats and magpies (I was too late in netting one of the pear trees). Even sparrows: I shan’t forget watching them nip off and eat the just-emerging gooseberries a couple of years ago. Gooseberries are now shrouded like phantoms – which does leave them vulnerable to gooseberry sawfly damage, since no birds can pick off the caterpillars. Red- and whitecurrants are similarly defended.

Anyway – to pleasanter thoughts. Everything is growing fast in the usual haphazard way, and the rhododendron is blooming again. (Five years, is it?) I shall be cutting back and pulling up ruthlessly, but at the moment there’s still room for everything. Even better: the weather is finally warm enough to make sitting outside a pleasure.

Next of Kin (1942)

Director Thorold Dickinson with Mervyn Johns, Nova Pilbeam, Jack Hawkins

Originally commissioned by the War Office but released commercially by Ealing Studios. Its message was the familiar “careless talk costs lives” one. Context was important: the knowledge that this was life and death stuff, that some of the actors had been given leave from the forces to make the film, and that it would have been watched by real wives, parents and siblings of people risking their lives in the armed forces. In other respects, it was a film that rattled along to its doomed conclusion (although successful as a destructive mission) and presented its crucial message very effectively. Mervyn Johns was perfectly cast as the unassuming little man who hears everything and passes it on to the Nazis: never overplaying his part but always there as a reminder to the wartime audience to be discreet. Interestingly being a blabbermouth crossed social lines: the upper-class officer and the regular private were each as foolish as each other, and the worst offender was a wing commmander.

Like “Went The Day Well?”, its occasional violence is quite shocking because it seemed so unexpected for a film of its time. It’s as if these films tried to jolt the British public into an acceptance that violence and brutality were a means of defence as well as aggression. I can only be glad that I’ve never been in a position to test that proposition.

Czech New Wave

Like Poland, post-war Czech cinema was state sanctioned and funded. There was a liberalisation in attitude in the early 1960s with the Prague Spring, squashed again after the 1968 Soviet invasion. The FAMU school in Prague, like the Łódź film school, was the training ground for a generation of film-makers. Czech films drew on theatrical and folk traditions like puppetry; the films that we viewed had a much lighter touch than the Polish films from the previous lesson.

Closely Observed Trains, Jiri Menzel, 1966

The sly humour is there from the beginning: martial music as we watch a pigeon strutting its stuff. My fellow students noted sexism and brutality where I saw only a leering male’s point of view (watching the countess ride off) and a comment (the rabbit for the pot) on the ever-present threat of death beneath the “Railway Children” vibe. I guess that makes me analytical rather than sensitive.

The Firemen’s Ball, Milos Forman, 1967

A more obviously comic film, still undermining authority in uniform. (Similarities with Ealing comedies in that regard.) It seems harmless from the short clip we saw, yet it was banned after 1968 and Forman left for the US.

Daisies, Vera Chytilova, 1966

Definitely not mainstream. As surreal as “Last Year in Marienbad” but it looked rather more fun. Two young women, both named Marie, decide to make the most of life in a world gone bad. It looks quirky, with nods to puppetry, robotics, animation. Lots of flowers and girl power, made with non-professional actors.

The Unspeakable Skipton by Pamela Hansford Johnson (1959)

These days I have a Kindle with hundreds of books loaded onto it, and it always comes with me. In my younger days I took whatever books I could find – on youth hostel bookshelves, in small corners of second-hand bookshops where they sold foreign books, or by swapping with others. That’s why I once read a Jeffrey Archer book and why there are/were copies of “The Duchess of Malfi” (Montpellier – probably once a set text for students) and Montaigne’s Essays (Alexandria, I think) on the bookshelves.

Which is a long-winded way of explaining how I once read “Hadrian the Seventh” by Frederick Rolfe, puzzling at its weirdness on each page. I had no idea what to make of its arcane language, waspishness and Roman Catholicism.

That kind of serendipity has long been banished.

And so to my latest read, “a study of an artist’s paranoia”. It’s a clever, satirical novel about literary jousting and artistic skullduggery. Rolfe is partly the updated inspiration for the main character, Daniel Skipton – a repellent, vituperative, dishonest, sleazy, literary Mr Ripley stranded in Bruges, living in squalor and despising the rest of the world for not recognising his genius. He is still polishing his next novel, which he completed a year before, using a black pen for grammar, green for style and red for comment. It’s a slow process:

Daniel counted, the number of lines and the words in each line. Two hundred and forty words, roughly. A day’s work.

The book has plenty of such sly jokes; they keep you reading about such unlikeable characters through the prism of Skipton’s internal discourse. (At least I hope it’s meant to be Skipton’s; if it’s Hansford Johnson’s own style, she’s definitely off my list.)

Skipton turns on almost everyone, including those whose hand he is feeding from. He has a brilliant line in invective, whether written, spoken or thought.

She read to them, in the glutinous accents of self-love, imbecile verses engendered in the tripes and filtered through the clogged sieve of her mind, dropping finally on to the paper with such an irrelevant accretion of stale orts and rotting scraps that the tripes moved at the sight of them, thus bringing, in this meanest work of art as in the noblest, the end into holy fusion with the beginning.

It’s one of the strings that animates him. The other is an acute aesthetic sense which sends him to his window each evening to watch the sunset and anchors him to the beauty and spirit of Bruges. It’s his one sympathetic quality.

Perfect Days

Director Wim Wenders with Koji Yashuko

The repetitive, largely uneventful life of a middle-aged Tokyo man whose job is cleaning public toilets – which he does meticulously. It’s slow (though nippy compared to Jeanne Dielman): waking to the sound of a woman brushing leaves from the path, rolling up the futon, ablutions, coffee from a vending machine outside his home (cultural blink on my part there), then setting off on his regular round in his well-equipped little van. He doesn’t wear his watch on working days: the implication is that he doesn’t need to. It could be a dreary, demeaning life, but his approach to each dawn brings a sense of serenity and restful dreams at the end of the day. His connections to other people are fleeting but meaningful.

He’s an analogue man: a film camera to capture the play of sunlight among trees, books (William Faulkner), cassette tapes of Van Morrison, The Kinks etc. (The director too, perhaps – it’s filmed in the academy frame.) It’s an almost wordless film, so we pay attention to what is said. “Next time is next time; now is now.” When the bookseller comments on how Patricia Highsmith teaches the difference between fear and anxiety. We gradually learn that he is largely estranged from his father and sister, that he may come from a wealthy background. He describes this to his young niece as their lives “not overlapping”. This metaphor surfaces again with a man he’s only just met and who hasn’t long to live – the two of them linked by their affection for a woman and, literally, in the game of shadow tag that they play.

I’m sure there’s cultural baggage that I can’t unpack – about Zen and Japanese society and whether his colleague was intended to be as cartoonish as he appeared – but I found it a very moving film. There were hints that he had needed to work on the pleasure he took in his life – that “kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity” were a continual work-in-progress . The final scene is of him setting out for another day listening to a tape of Nina Simone singing “Feeling Good” while expressions of joy and sadness float across his face.

It seemed that I had picked a perfect day to go to see this film. I’ve just had four days in London. Not only have I been in countless public-access toilets kept spotlessly clean by an army of moppers and wipers but I am also ready for a return to greenery after so many hard pavements, busy roads and soulless office blocks. I understood Hirayama’s delight in the leafy canopy where he stopped to eat his lunch every day, in the river and its reflections, in trying to look and notice. The mental image of plane trees on Millbank is still with me. And then there was the link I made while watching the film to Tuesday’s Saul Leiter exhibition – another man who looked and noticed and made something fleetingly beautiful out of the everyday:

I happen to believe in the beauty of simple things. I believe that the most uninteresting thing can be very interesting.

and

I take photographs in my neighbourhood. I think that mysterious things happen in familiar places. We don’t always need to run to the other end of the world.

German Expressionists: Der Blaue Reiter

It’s bizarre to realise that John Singer Sargent was only ten years older than Wassily Kandinsky, for a whole era seems to divide their styles of painting and their conception of what art is. Sargent continued a certain figurative tradition, enhanced by the influence of the Impressionists. Der Blaue Reiter looked to a new world where art expressed emotion and spiritual feeling; it embraces abstraction, symbolism and “folk art” from around the world. Its members theorised, wrote, experimented and published: it was art with spiritual significance. From their 1912 “Der Blaue Reiter” prospectus:

Blue Rider . . . will be the call that summons all artists of the new era and rouses the laymen to hear… The first volume . . . reveals the subtle connections between Gothic and primitive art, with America and the vast Orient, with the highly expressive, spontaneous folk and children’s art, and especially with the most recent musical movements in Europe and the new ideas for the theatre of our time.

. . . In our case the principle of internationalism is the only one possible . . . The whole work, called art, knows no borders or nations, only humanity.

In brief, the more wholesome, new-agey alternative to Die Brücke expressionism. Incidentally, I was a little surprised how “old” (i.e. 40s) some of the artists were when they formed their movement (already seeded by the earlier Neue Künstlervereinigung München).

This exhibition is largely the Lenbachhaus’s greatest hits dropped into Tate Modern. (Munich got some Turners in a swap.) It’s little more than a year since I visited Munich, so I remembered most of the works well (except for the Bavarian reverse glass painting, which is a good example of the all-inclusive nature of Der Blaue Reiter). This exhibition takes in modern ideas such as the pigeon-holing of women, gender fluidity and animal theory and skips lightly over old ideas such as Theosophy.

It was interesting to compare two portraits of Marianne Werefkin – one a self portrait and one by Gabriele Münter. Each artist had their favoured shades: I prefer the clarity of Münter, Franz Marc and Kandinsky’s colours to the slightly muddy tones of Werefkin and the washed-out pastels of Maria Franck-Marc.

My steal from the exhibition would be Münter’s portrait of Alexej von Jawlensky listening. I’m not sure if she meant it to be comical, but the way the sausages seem to extend all the way from the plate to the top of his head certainly made me smile.