Veterans’ Day 2019
Peter Jackson's They Shall not Grow Old- extraordinary dedication to the filmed image and it's future survival.
And Jean-Pierre Melville's first feature: Le Silence de la Mer.
very underrated film Angel:
[I steal form mine own 2007 London Film Festival review]
"François (Under the Sand, 8 Women) Ozon's Angel (LFF, released by Lionsgate) is the English language debut for this uniquely stylish French director. Adapted from Elizabeth Taylor's (no relation) novel, it's a fascinating take on Romance novelist Angel Deverell (superbly subtle Romola Garai), and inspired by Marie Corelli, an Edwardian (1905) star novelist (a kind of Barbara Cartland) and Queen Victoria's favourite writer. The script adaptation is by one of England's most interesting dramatists Martin Crimp. "I'm not interested in what's real but what's beneath," says Angel. She marries a bohemian 'socialist' painter of grey canvases Esmé (Michael Fassbender) totally at odds with the lavish, flower-filled Paradise House she has bought in the country. "Angel is a prisoner of the character she's created for herself to play, " says Ozon. When a dissolute Esmé returns from the trenches of World War I, Angel's writing reflects this in a new-found pacifism and she begins losing her readership. Denis Lenoir's cinematography is highly stylised in the manner of Hollywood melodramatists Minnelli, Powell and Sirk and is totally breathtaking. Exterior carriage scenes etc are purposely shot with outdated, old-fashioned back projection with swelling music by Philippe Rombi." Still vivid in my memory that film after seeing dozens and dozens of others since.
maybe some more to come...
The Armadillo
For Robert Lowell
This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,
rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.
Once up against the sky it's hard
to tell them from the stars--
planets, that is--the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,
or the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,
receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.
Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair
of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.
The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,
and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!--a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.
Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic,
and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky!
Elizabeth Bishop
A film that few have ever seen, Helma Sanders-Brahms Germany, Pale Mother . The final 10 minutes is as moving an experience ever could be had by a human.
Ausgezeichnet danke, Chancellor Merkel for such oratory on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Could think of some great film music over and over for….but on this occasion one needs the sublime to allow even the scent of an animals’ trust.
"It was a long time before Lene opened the door, and sometimes I think she is still behind it, and I am still standing in front of it, and that she will never come out again, and I have to be grown up and alone. But she is still here. Lene is still here."
