Trading In A Name

Except it’s not any more. I hadn’t looked in on the Louise Brooks Society website, pandorasbox.com, for ages, and when I did a couple of days ago found it had been taken down. And this sad fate had befallen not just the website, but the LBS presence on a variety of social media platforms too. Back in 2019, it seems, a gentleman in Florida managed to get the words ‘Louise Brooks’ registered as a trademark and since then has been increasingly active in making sure that nobody else makes any sort of money out of the use of the name of the actress, who died all the way back in 1985. The LBS took subscriptions for its fan club, in operation, as the banner suggests, for quite some time, and that counts, of course, as commercial activity, so down it came.

The story of how the trademark was registered is quite strange. At first the US Patent & Trademark Office apparently turned the application down, as the applicant’s mark ‘shows a false suggestion of a connection with the famous actress, Louise Brooks’, but reversed its decision after the applicant argued that Brooks had not left an estate to assert rights to her name. It obviously wasn’t in the interests of the applicant to mention that, whatever might be the situation with the actual words ‘Louise Brooks’, a company called Louise Brooks Estate did exist at the time in Kansas, founded in 1998 and since 2014 overlapping with Louise Brooks Heirs, which is still going; both entities were run by Brooks’s nephew Daniel, who is 76 and still lives in Wichita. Louise Brooks Heirs has a supportive relationship with the LBS, but unfortunately it never seems to have occurred to Daniel Brooks to do something as weird as copyrighting his aunt’s name.

Craftslaw.com uses this case as a way of talking about how trademarks work generally, especially in the online world. Most of the crafters who might use Brooks’s image, and even her name, aren’t claiming that their goods emanate from any kind of official source, only that a ‘Louise Brooks t-shirt’, for instance, is a t-shirt with Brooks’s face on it. That’s not a trademark, just a descriptor, and the law deems that ‘fair use’; but as Craftslaw points out, most online platforms such as Etsy or eBay (not to mention Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) will just play safe and take down any contributor complained against, leaving it to the parties concerned to sort it out through the law. Who’s got the money for that?

The founder and organiser of the LBS is Thomas Gladysz. A couple of years ago I bought his book Louise Brooks: The Persistent Star, a compilation of many of his LBS blog posts. Like a lot of fans of a lot of celebrities, shows, or activities, Mr Gladysz comes across as amiably obsessive and the book is a work of delightfully loopy scholarship. I really don’t know how he manages to find out the things he does. My favourite example was this post, concerning billboard adverts on various suburban streets in Kansas City for the 1926 comedy A Social Celebrity, in which Louise Brooks took a prestigious second billing to the then major star Adolphe Menjou. This is, of course, nuts, and yet it does tell you interesting things about the way movies were marketed in 1920s America. A lot of the blog is like that: it explores times, places and manners through the medium of this one actor, and she becomes a prism for an entire world. It’s niche, but it’s genuine and even useful work.

This makes it all the more galling that the entity attacking the LBS is embodied in a slick-looking but horrible website whose articles are either weird, general stuff lifted from easily accessible online resources mentioning Louise Brooks from time to time, or personal attacks on Thomas Gladysz; and a ‘shop’ consisting of t-shirts or ‘art prints’ emblazoned with public-domain pictures of the actress run through a Photoshop filter. If you want to spend your money on that, think of it as charity. There is no sign that it will contribute much to what we know about Brooks and her times – to put it as mildly as I can. I'm not going to link to it.

I hope that, if the trademark holder had an intention to remove the LBS blog as well, he would have done so by now. It’s there that the most valuable aspect of the LBS survives, the astonishing corpus of work Mr Gladysz has amassed over the course of 28 years of study, and for that to disappear would be a tragedy indeed. 

Another Nice Mess

Laurel and Hardy were part of the landscape of my childhood, originally via the comics that were bought for me in the early-to-mid-1970s rather than their movies. These were the product of Larry Harmon, an entrepreneurial US entertainer who bought the rights to Bozo the Clown, a character he had helped portray, from his employers Capital Records, and then set up an animation studio to make Bozo cartoons. Now, I relate all this because I’ve only just found out about it. Most accounts say rather reticently that Harmon ‘purchased the rights to the visual image of Laurel & Hardy’ in 1961, which is odd given that they’d very deliberately played themselves precisely to avoid them being sacked and anyone else given their characters. The most likely explanation is the one Stan’s friend and biographer John McCabe seems to have given, that Harmon persuaded Stan to sign what he thought was a temporary licensing agreement for one cartoon show, only to realise afterwards that it in fact covered all further use of the characters. If the press reports at the time were accurate, Stan was rather up for this at first; but as time went on, nothing materialised, and he realised exactly what had happened (‘I think [Harmon] was afraid to let me see the pilot’ he wrote) he went very sour on the idea. After Stan died in 1965, there was indeed a short-lived and not very well-received TV cartoon show followed a few years later by the comics (published in the UK by Thorpe & Porter) and as much merchandise as Larry Harmon could get made. So the mouldering copies still in my parents’ loft and this battered little figurine are all products of the Harmon machine. My main surprise is that the comic apparently stopped being published in 1974 – can I really have been only 5?

A small child doesn’t go to movies for narrative, structure and content, but remembers fragments, gestures, and personalities, and Stan and Ollie’s films offer plenty of those. The pair are childlike presences themselves, moving through a world they don’t completely understand and with which they are very frequently at odds, which may be why small children identify with them, if they encounter them at all these days. They approach impending disaster with boundless optimism, and look back on it with bafflement, each movie setting them up for another twenty minutes or so of catastrophe completely unrelated to the chaos that might have befallen them in the one before.

This means that watching the films as an adult for a bit of nostalgic comfort in hard times is a different experience. Some – The Music Box, Towed in a Hole, Helpmates – remain brilliant examples of visual comedy, and in virtually all of them there is some episode which showcases Stan and Ollie’s superlative skill in timing, gesture, and facial expression. But quite a lot are a bit patchy. It’s true that the very early films were rattled off at breakneck speed: there’s one sequence in 1927-8 where both men have their hair abnormally short across several stories because they’d done one set in a prison for which their heads were shaved, and studio boss Hal Roach couldn’t wait for them to return to normal before starting filming again. By the time Laurel and Hardy were big stars, a bit more care was being expended even on these two- and three-reelers, but that doesn’t make them all great.

Then there are other considerations than the merely technical. The other night I rewatched Them Thar Hills and Tit for Tat, the only two Laurel & Hardy shorts which narratively follow on from one another, and then really only to provide the pretext for an escalating sequence of mutual insult and destruction with grumpy grocer Charlie Hall in the second film. They are both good, but the sour note is the horrible relationship between Charlie, and other longstanding Roach and Laurel & Hardy regular, Mae Busch. They play a married couple who in Them Thar Hills run out of gas on a trip in the mountains and decide Stan and Ollie’s trailer is a good place to ask for help, little anticipating the chaos that will ensue. They are already clearly not the most harmonious of spouses, but when Charlie returns with the car and finds Mae having a decidedly merry (if completely innocent) time with her new chums, courtesy of the well-water into which bootleggers have tipped several barrels of moonshine, he doesn’t take it well at all. We aren't supposed to like him, of course, but his rage-filled manhandling of Mae is likely to have modern audiences baying for his arrest. Unlike Stan and Ollie hitting each other with various household implements to the accompaniment of surreal bongs, this is a bit too nastily real.

A bit less violently, one can also detect in oneself a shift of sympathies. Blotto from 1930 is a nice little film in which Stan and Ollie go for a sneaky night out at a club after fibbing to Mrs Laurel (there is no Mrs Hardy on this occasion), and, to aid celebration in those Prohibition times, pilfer a bottle of liquor she has kept aside. Little do they realise that Mrs Laurel is wise to their risibly transparent plot and has replaced the drink with an unpleasant but entirely unintoxicating liquid. At the club – a stupendously jazzy set worth seeing just for that – they pass an increasingly inebriated and riotous evening, until Mrs L turns up herself and icily informs them that they’ve been drinking cold tea, whereon they sober up very rapidly. I didn’t realise that several minutes of the film were cut from its original release and only survive in the Spanish-language version Roach did for that lucrative market. The scenes – Stan and Ollie’s drunken interaction with a waiter and two dance acts at the club, one of them really quite exotic – fell foul of a later censorship regime, but don’t really add much.

The women in Stan and Ollie’s lives usually represent the dreadful shackles of adult existence and responsibility for which they are simply unfitted, and now we might find ourselves seeing them less as the shrews the writers probably intended and instead sympathising with them for having to deal with these overgrown kids. It helps that in Blotto Mrs Laurel is played by the beautiful Anita Garvin in a fantastic slinky dress (it looks black, but it could of course have been a variety of colours). The interaction between her and Stan is the best bit of the film and in her venomous expressions we are surely not wrong in seeing years of seething resentment at his perpetual idiocy. How did she end up with him, we think, and you can tell that thought isn’t far from her mind, either.

'She's in the kitchen'

Well, yes, she is

The stunning Rainbow Club before Stan & Ollie's big entrance

It's a short step from hilarity ...

... to the moment of sobriety.

Mrs Laurel is in the mood for revenge ...

... and, as the boys attempt to flee in a cab, enacts it.

Anita Garvin was a Hal Roach regular and appeared in several films with Laurel & Hardy. Interestingly, Roach tried to turn the lanky Garvin and diminutive studio-mate Marion Byron into a female comedy double act, but didn’t get very far with it: only one of their movies, the amiable little 1928 comedy A Pair of Tights, survives, one of the very last of the silents. Mrs Laurel in Blotto was the most extensive role she had with Laurel & Hardy, though she turned up again as Mrs Laurel a year or two later, in Be Big. She finishes both movies firing a gun at the pair, assisted the second time by Isabelle Keith as Mrs Hardy. Funny that.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: 'Prix de Beauté' (1930)

According to the film’s director Augusto Genina, star Louise Brooks mostly spent the time making Prix de Beauté drunk. If so, it doesn’t show, and even at the time (he maintained) the crew marvelled at the fact that she could look so good given that her cure for a hangover was three swigs of gin. Brooks moves luminously through an awkward, neither flesh-nor-fowl movie: her character’s name is Lucienne, but the first time she’s addressed she’s called Lulu, the sacrificial victim she played in Pandora’s Box the year before. Genina was enspelled by her smile, and in the finished result we can see why. 

In so far as what we get is the finished result. It’s a strange, transitional film, made in 1930 as the new sound technology was stamping and smashing its way through the movie industry, and was intended to be shown in both a silent and a sound version depending on what equipment any particular theatre had available. I saw the latter, which is – I think it’s not unfair to use the word – disfigured not only by the badly post-synchronised sound but also by a score which is so mismatched to the action it feels as though composer Wilhelm Zeller must have written it without actually watching the movie. In the early 2000s a silent version was reconstructed using an Italian silent print and a French sound one, and that – apparently, it’s only ever been seen at festivals – rearranges the scenes as well as introducing some elements which aren’t there in the relatively accessible sound version. That suggests that perhaps what I saw has been mucked about with a bit.

What remains is intermittently beautiful, and not just because of Brooks’ preternatural loveliness, but because of the use of light, the naturalism, and the still-silent-style supremacy of the visual image. It concludes, famously, with Lucienne dying in a screening room, her profile filling the bottom of the frame while her recorded self carries on singing above, an unforgettable and justly renowned image. But while Brooks fans try to rave about Prix de Beauté, the jealous-husband-kills-runaway-beauty-queen story is quite silly, even if the treatment, however mangled from what it might have been, raises it above the level the narrative warrants. And even then it doesn’t always succeed: close to the beginning Lucienne sings ‘Je n’ai qu’un amour, c’est toi’ on the beach to sullen beau André in a most unlikely fashion, a weird intrusion into a naturalistic scene (there was a tale that Edith Piaf did the voice-over, and one reviewer on imdb.com states ‘I recognised the unmistakable voice of Josephine Baker’; in fact it belonged to a barely-known singer called Hélène Caron, who recorded the song).

But I find the power of the film is something that Brooks’s beauty only heightens. When André murders Lucienne, it’s just the culmination of the misogyny and male violence that swirls around her from the film’s start: as she’s lusted over by André’s colleague Antonin and their friends on the beach; as she parades around at the beauty contest; as her image is passed along a row of newspaper editors; as she’s jostled and manhandled at a fair while men stuff their faces and test their strength, and Antonin wanders off to molest a girl in a skimpy costume advertising a peepshow, who knows she can’t move and whose look of suppressed disgust is perhaps the best performance in the film; as she dies watching herself on a screen, surrounded by rich men who have bought her. Her look of rapture at her own image becomes pitiful, and not just because she doesn't know her murderer is watching too: her only choice in life, it seems, lies between the domestic drudgery and imprisonment André offers her, and the more glamorous captivity, the furs and jewellery paid for by the moguls and aristocrats who, you know full well, will discard her one day. I don’t know how much of this was really in the minds of the movie-makers in 1930, but here in 2021, Prix de Beauté seems to be not only a film for our time, but even for our week.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: A Dog Called Money (2019)

It’s taken a long time for the third and final stage of PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy’s project to reach the public. The Hollow of the Hand, the book of photographs and poetry, came out in 2015; the album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, in 2016; and only at the very end of last year were most of us able to view the film, A Dog Called Money. I’ve finally watched it!

Over ninety minutes, the documentary follows the composition of Hope Six, picking out the experiences which influenced the way the songs developed – though not all of them, and not exhaustively, and not all the songs featured actually ended up on the album (we get versions of the junked ‘Homo Sappy Blues’ and ‘Age of the Dollar’, the latter jettisoned due to John Parish’s disapproval even though everyone else liked it (‘I wish just for once she wouldn’t listen to what he says’, commented one fan on thegardenforum.org). Episodes from Murphy and Harvey’s travels are interspersed with scenes from the studio at Somerset House, and visitors watching the musicians through the one-way glass. Harvey reads excerpts from her notebooks and just occasionally someone else says something – an Artangel employee taking visitors through the passageways of Somerset House, or Paunie, the lesbian gang leader Harvey and Murphy met in Anacostia. A few elements aren’t from their joint travels, but from trips Murphy made separately: an anti-Assad demonstration in Syria, a Trump campaign rally in the US, refugees on the Greek border with Macedonia.

There are lots of fantastic vignettes. Harvey meets an instrument-maker in an upstairs shop in a Kabul backstreet and gives up trying to explain to him where Dorset is. She goes to a museum of mines, also in Afghanistan, and reels off some of the terrible exhibits. She sits attentive at a raucous church service in Anacostia and looks a bit fazed at a very different one in Kosovo, though listening enough to quote the words of Fr Sava Janjic: ‘If you don’t have to break the branch, don’t do it. If you don’t have to kill the animal, don’t do it.’ A young woman is baptised at Union Temple Baptist Church; little girls learn Arabic at an Afghan maktab (at least, that’s my interpretation of what’s happening); tourists mill around the Washington Monument while a chap wees behind a tree to right of shot. Everywhere are mountains, traffic jams, birds in and out of cages, rivers, ruins, children, dust.

The trouble is, it’s all vignettes. Determined, like the book and the album, that observation, witnessing, should be the keynote of the project, the film presents images without context or comment. That this is the point is stressed by the very first shot, a little Afghan boy with his nose pressed against glass, and it’s echoed by Harvey’s wanderings, Murphy’s camera lens, and the faces of the visitors to the recording sessions. Having taken that decision, the film has no choice but to leave us in the same position, without helping us make the connections that would turn the succession of moments into a story. The US observation blimps hover with intent in the Afghan sky, but even the anger and sense of conflict which is shot through the album is absent here, any very political feeling dispersed by the amiable banter of the musicians back in London. It’s like much of Harvey’s poetry, so quiet and spare it’s easy to miss the significance of what she describes.

The reticence means there’s a lot that doesn’t get mentioned. ‘I’m the only woman here,’ Harvey points out at an Albanian village ceremony in Kosovo, leaving us wondering how it was arranged. That’s surprising enough, but surprise is hardly an adequate response to seeing her watching an ecstatic Sufi prayer-session at an Afghan mosque – how did she get to be the only woman there, a place where no woman would ever normally be? What did they say to make that happen? We have the familiar footage of the Union Temple Baptist choir singing lines from ‘The Community of Hope’, but not a word about the church’s own unhappiness at the political firestorm the song raised when it was released early in 2016. This isn’t really ‘the story of the album’ except in a very minimal way.

Of course it’s all delightful for Pollywatchers, but what about anyone else? It seems to me that you have to be signed up for the project: without reading the book and listening to the finished songs, it’s hard to fathom the film, and (notwithstanding a single introductory caption) if you don’t know who PJ Harvey is and who the old codgers playing instruments in the studio are, you may well be left adrift. One viewer on the MUBI website, where you can see the movie, commented concisely and brutally (as others have for twenty years or more), ‘get your head out of your ass’. That’s a nasty dismissal of one of the least self-regarding artists in the world, and Harvey does explicitly acknowledge the ambiguities of her position as observer: crunching through the debris of an abandoned house in Kosovo, she notes ‘a handmade rotting wooden ladder, a corn store. These were country people. And I’m stepping on their things in my expensive leather sandals’. Yet you can still wonder whether the project’s achievements have matched its ambitions. There is only one abiding message: the unity-in-variety of human experience, and human dignity against the emptiness of ideological (especially national) rhetoric. In the silence is the point. And you either take that, or leave it.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: Footprints on the Moon/Le Orme (1975)

It took me a while to discover how I had found out about Footprints on the Moon, a reasonably obscure little Italian thriller sometimes known by its other title, Le Orme. By a process of elimination I worked out it was in Jonathan Rigby's history of Continental horror film, Euro Gothic - not that there is much horrific about the movie, and it's far more psychologically unsettling and inconclusive than most of the other films that tome features. Its Brazilian star, Florinda Bolkan, was apparently so affected by the filming that the weight fell off her, and there are places where she indeed looks worryingly skinny, appropriately for a character undergoing such emotional derangement. It's slow, episodic, and beautifully filmed, the old bits of Istanbul (apparently) and its environs standing in for the fictional island of Garma which Alice, a Portuguese translator working in Italy, is convinced she has never visited and yet where everyone recognises her. The version I saw (via Cinema Paradiso) is distributed by Shameless Films who seem to specialise in mid-1970s horror (I think I will avoid most of the rest of their output including the notorious Flavia the Heretic in which Bolkan also stars). Perhaps that's why the lipsynching seems to be ever-so-slightly awry: at first I switched to watching in Italian with English subtitles until I realised the actors were, in fact, speaking English. There are a couple of short scenes which apparently only exist in a dubbed Italian tape, and which, having been copied back in, appear grainier than the rest of the film. If anything that only adds to the weirdness.

A Would-be Wasted Youth

Watching a variety of underground surrealist short films in a former horse hospital hosted by the one-time PA to Siouxsie & the Banshees is the sort of thing I should have been doing when I was 20, not knocking 50, but back then I wouldn't have been able to have been invited to such an event by my friend Ms DarkMorte who has known all these people for ages. I thought that perhaps the Horse Hospital's name was just macabre whimsy, but no, that's exactly what the late-18th century building was, as revealed by the sluice-channels cut into the gallery floor (not that different from my garage, which used to be a stable). 

I was most taken by the first of the films, Eliott Edge's Hello Sexy Curse which despite its name is very un-sexy indeed. It's an attempt to create a horror movie without narrative or explicit events, using the mere force of sound and vision. For twenty minutes, strange shapes resolve themselves into images you just begin to recognise when they disappear, there are moments when the screen goes dark, and sound or silence move across the visual display in an apparently unconnected progress but one which is in fact carefully composed to unsettle. It works very well. It's also quite exhausting, partly because of the tense worry of what might be coming next (at one point a woman's eye comes into view together with a long, flat object which might be a sword, and you think it's going to go all Un Chien Andalou but are relieved when it doesn't), and partly because the human brain being what it is you are continually straining to make logical sense of what you are seeing even while telling yourself that there is no narrative to be grasped, and your grey cells shouldn't really be bothering themselves unnecessarily. And that was probably a metaphor for my younger days, too.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: Dark River (2017)

Had it not been for PJ Harvey I wouldn't have watched Clio Barnard's latest movie, as she sings the theme, 'An Acre of Land', the arrangement of which she put together with the film's composer Harry Escott. You can find other versions of this old folk song around, treating it as a jaunty little bit of whimsy, with its fairytale imagery of ploughing the field with a ram's horn and reaping it with a tooth-comb; that seems to have been how Ralph Vaughn-Williams regarded it when he put it to music. As we might expect, PJH takes this charming rhyme and turns it into a baleful vision of something approaching madness. If the commission didn't inspire her to begin her planned poem cycle 'about a haunted sheep farm in Dorset' it's yet another instance of the strange synchronicity which marks the singer's life.

The haunted sense is nothing more than appropriate. Clio Barnard's film takes the idea of Rose Tremain's 2010 novel Trespass, transplants it to north Yorkshire, and gives it a title lifted from a Ted Hughes poem so the viewer should have some idea what they're going to get. After years spent sheep-shearing across the world, Alice returns to the farm she believes her father promised her, to rescue it along with a conflicted relationship with her brother Joe who's worn out by looking after both the land and their father. But that father still haunts the run-down farmhouse, commercial sharks are circling, and it's not going to end well. To be fair, though, it's not as bleak as the book.

As many critics have said, the film is very thinly plotted and there's a sense as it draws to an end that even that minimal story is falling over itself to come to a conclusion. Its beauty is that it takes a group of people who live lives on the edge of mainstream modernity (as Clio Barnard did with her previous feature, The Selfish Giant which I confess I also watched on the basis of PJH's involvement with this one) and treats that experience with both great rigour and great tenderness. It argues that the passions surrounding a neglected Yorkshire sheep farm are as worthy of consideration as any others. 

Swanvale Halt Film Club: Hidden Figures (2016)

Of course I enjoyed the film, uplifting, superficial and exceedingly well-made as it is, but my purpose here is less to talk about the movie than to think about the nature of storytelling. In common with many films that take their inspiration from historical events, Hidden Figures manipulates time, personalities and circumstances in order to build a more compelling narrative. The characters in it who voice racial prejudice are, in the main, capable of having their minds changed, which makes us feel better about ourselves, and the problems the main characters faced in professional advancement against the fact of their race worked out completely differently in reality. It is not just that storyline which is bent to fit a more heroic and comforting pattern, but the business of the launching of John Glenn’s rocket, too: it is true, for instance, that Katherine Johnson was called on to recalculate the landing co-ordinates for the flight, but she had three days to do it rather than the tense half-hour or so the film gives her.

There is no sense in complaining about any of this, of course, because storytelling is not life. Film, in particular, is such an exciting medium precisely because the constraints of the form force the messiness of actuality into a shape it doesn’t have in life. Cinematic accounts of the life of an individual are often very unsatisfying, because they must either sacrifice truth or narrative energy; movies that focus on one particular episode in a person’s life have a better chance of producing something memorable. I enjoy reading biographies, but such books, too, often have a strange sense either of anti-climax, or unease as you can see the author interpreting the whole of their subject’s life through the lens of a particular part of it in order to create a coherent narrative structure which isn’t always there. The latest examples were Anthony Holden’s The Wit in the Dungeon (about the writer Leigh Hunt) and Anne Sebba’s The Exiled Collector, an account of Dorset landowner and art connoisseur William Bankes. Leigh Hunt’s life frankly went very quiet after the excitement and drama of his trial and incarceration for seditious libel, and its last few decades were marked by universal respect coupled with gentle and uneventful penury, about which there is very little to say, although Holden has a good go. Ms Sebba’s book is more impressive because she focuses very little on the most dramatic event in her subject’s life – his arrest for gross indecency and consequent flight to the Continent – instead concentrating on his lifelong work of filling the great house of Kingston Lacy with artworks: nevertheless, there’s very little known about what Bankes was up to during his exile, and so verisimilitude demands that the story sort of tails away and concludes in a cloud of unknowing.

Most people’s lives, even those of well-known people, don’t follow the narrative arc that we want from them. Hidden Figures’s story is one of good, quietly heroic human beings achieving things against the odds, and even if the historical truth was blunter and less colourful, that’s a myth we need eternally to tell and re-tell; if we don’t believe goodness and quiet heroism are at least possible we’ll never achieve anything at all beyond bare survival. But conducting funeral services for a great variety of human beings teaches you, if nothing else, that everyone’s life is messy, contradictory, and ends in one of a limited number of variations on the same theme, and that’s not something we very much want to have relayed to us in the narratives we compose.

Why we itch to compose narratives at all is a deeper and stranger matter. I imagine at root it’s an unlooked-for function of the redundantly-developed human brain: the ability to perceive patterns and structures in events confers some evolutionary advantage, and storytelling is a consequence of that ability. Some stories perform the social good of encouraging development and change; some stories, even, may be transfiguring, like that of a God born and dying as human, and that human death being conquered as a tomb is found empty.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: Three Old Horrors: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), The Haunting (1963)

No undiscovered gems this time: these three movies are pretty well known to most people interested in film generally and the Gothic strain within it in particular. 




Of the two creaky silents, we found Caligari (which neither of us had seen before) the rather superior of the two, despite its very deliberate weirdness: so much so that I wondered whether the version of Nosferatu we were watching was some unrestored print. The scene-changing is so choppy it borders on the inept. Although Caligari is determined to be odd and non-realistic, Nosferatu has an awful lot of irrelevance packed in: given the lack of time available to tell the story (such as it is) you have to ask why FW Murnau wasted so much footage showing us Dr Van Helsing playing with carnivorous polyps with his students, Harker making his way ponderously home across streams and slopes, and Nina mooning about the Westernras' house or the beach waiting for him. The action jerks restlessly from shot to shot in a way which is possibly intended to escalate tension and urgency but without a decent score to help, it doesn't work. Music can make or break a silent film, and while the score for the verison of Caligari we saw was excellent, the Nosferatu music was clunkingly inappropriate and at times veered in the direction of 'Charlie Chaplin meets the Vampires'. There are some great shots, however: I like the view Nina sees from her window of a procession of coffins being carried along the street as the vampiric plague ravages Bremen. In Caligari, the sequence of Cesare the somnambulist advancing from a window towards the sleeping Jane is still creepy after nearly a century, and you can see how it feeds into subsequent horror cinema. 

Naturally the more modern The Haunting is a different matter. I've seen this umpteen times before and always enjoy it, while it was new to Ms Formerly Aldgate. Some of the acting is a bit stilted, but the whole thing is so stylish and reticent - you never see anything particularly horrific and the worst manifestations that befall the protagonists are knockings and turning doorknobs - that any small defects are completely overcome. I hadn't realised quite how sophisticated the camerawork is, constantly exciting and unusual without being distracting from what's going on. Not a masterpiece, perhaps, but endlessly entertaining and properly eerie.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: Fall of an Empire (AKA Katherine of Alexandria) (2014)

Oh dearie, dearie me. Apart from a lapse regarding The Turin Horse, I usually operate on the principle that if you can’t say anything nice you shouldn’t say anything at all. It is very, very hard to say anything nice about this film, which comes across like an extended episode of Xena the Warrior Princess without the laughs. You do get to see some extremely elderly ‘name’ actors like Edward Fox, Joss Ackland and Peter O’Toole who were presumably very cheap due to age, and Steven Berkoff who is just cheap anyway, while beautiful Nicole Keniheart as Katherine (Katarina? they can’t decide what to call her) fascinates by her sheer impassivity. It’s as though the director’s told her, ‘You’re a saint, you’re supposed to be serene’, and as a result she delivers her often gnomically incomprehensible lines with barely a flicker in facial expression throughout the whole 106 minutes. Actually, no, she does have two expressions: alive and dead. She really does look the part, but if only that was enough. And there, so far as criticism goes, we will leave matters.

Of course I watched Fall of an Empire because of the treatment of St Catherine, and, if ambition is in itself laudable, the film is to be lauded for that, anyway. It’s an attempt to take the Catherine story out of pseudo-history and insert it into the realities of the early fourth century. Here, Katherine, a strangely and precociously intellectual Egyptian peasant girl, is seized by loopy Emperor Maxentius and grows up in his palace in Alexandria. In adulthood she sends apparently innocent but in fact incendiary poetry out across the Empire inciting the barbarian peoples to throw off the Roman yoke, a sort of Katniss Everdeen of the mind. Tangled with her protest against imperial power is her rebellion against the Roman gods and the decision of insurgent Emperor Constantine – confusingly her childhood friend and anxiously searching for her – to abandon the old ways too. Of course it’s just as much pseudo-history as the legend it’s re-imagining, but you can see how this actually makes for rather a powerful story: it just all goes wrong in the telling in ways it would be hard to enumerate.

But there is one point where the film achieves a genuinely iconic image; and it’s not the execution on the wheel. Katherine sits before a group of senators dragged in to debate with her, the narrative’s parallel for the legend of her converting the fifty pagan philosophers, propped against a crutch after her ankles have been smashed, a crutch which echoes the cross. Battered, filthy and yet luminous, she calls the gods of Rome ‘mists and fallacies’, lies and liars: that was no more than Homer had said, after all, and with its gods goes all the authority of Rome. Here is a glimpse of what might have been, something genuinely radical and grand. All martyrs, in the end, are rebels against power in the name of a power that is deeper, greater, and more ultimate, and that idea is never less than compelling.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: Suffragette (2015)

Apart from Meryl Streep doing her panto turn as Mrs Pankhurst (of which there isn’t very much in the movie), we very much enjoyed the worthy Suffragette. I kept thinking I’d seen Carey Mulligan in something else, but checking her biography I haven’t – it must have been another actress with similar mannerisms, not that it matters much.

What struck me most forcibly – why it had never really done so before I can’t imagine – was the disruptive force of Suffragism and the sense that anyone who got involved with it was pitching themselves against the whole way a society functioned, its assumptions and relationships. Ms Mulligan’s character Maud loses her home and her family as her poor husband, even more trapped within the patriarchal system than she is, sees his wife turn into a terrorist and is jeered at, emasculated, by his workmates for allowing it. He isn’t a bad man: he just can’t see outside that particular box, and is it any wonder? The way Maud’s understanding of reality is loosened and her eyes opened to the oppression of the laundry she works in, and the society that facilitates such petty tyranny, is portrayed with great restraint and all the more effective for it. No wonder the ‘straight’ world thinks the Suffragettes are crazy: they can see something everyone else can’t, and when your reality is so very disturbing to the mainstream’s, mad is very much what you are. Making this clear, resisting the temptation to present Suffragism as an obvious idea whose triumph was inevitable, but as something profoundly dangerous, is one of the film’s main achievements, quite apart from its technical proficiency and the work of the players.  Trying to think of a contemporary parallel, I settled on veganism: but I’m not a vegan, and will leave talking about that for another time.

A Fantasy of the End

As neither I nor Ms Formerly Aldgate had ever seen Cinema Paradiso we watched it over a couple of evenings this week. This post isn't about the movie, but about thoughts provoked by the scene of the demolition of the cinema building, towards the end. 

The film makes clear the emotions embedded in the destruction of the cinema, how it represents a nostalgia for a past world, memory, and experience; things the characters have shared, not all of them positive, but all important, having made them who they are. The loss of the cinema means that those experiences retreat into the internal world of memory, and become even more fragile. So in the real world we often strive to preserve elements of our built environment, less for their utility or attractiveness (though we might justify it in those terms) than because they provide continuity, remind us of who we are, a shared landscape of meaning and understanding - a code for things we don't have to keep explaining to each other. Churches are converted into housing, art galleries, or businesses, in an effort to keep them around, for instance. 

I imagined watching the ruin of Swanvale Halt church, which could indeed happen within my lifetime - who knows? Would it be converted to another use, or simply done away with? Which would be more painful? Because as much as we tell ourselves 'the Church is the people and not the building', the building makes concrete the relationships between those people, it is one of the crucial things they share, the sign of the God they all serve and work for. It suggests the souls that have worshipped before you, and those who might come after. But if there are not going to be any coming after, how would that feel? I imagine I could give thanks for the work the church had done in the past, and the real role it (and we) had played in proclaiming and living in the Kingdom. Those things are not lost no matter what might happen. And the Church always continues, in other forms, because the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. It's the human relationships, including relationships with God, that matter; but we are flesh and blood too, and the death of one way of expressing those relationships, the way we had got used to and understood, could never be less than painful.