Desert island discs

We’re allowed to choose our own desert island discs, says the BBC. Well, what else do you think I’ve been doing with all my time since I was 10, Auntie? But I suppose it’s nice to feel that my nerdile behaviour has been sanctioned.

If you want to submit your own choices to the BBC, you can do so here. I won’t be joining you, as I don’t subscribe to their silly rules. I’m sure Kirsty Young is not so stringent on the programme. But if I were to be invited on, my eight records, luxury item and book would look something like this.

1. Johann Sebastian Bach Der Geist hilft unsrer Schwachheit auf, BWV 226 (1729)

I can’t not choose something by Bach, and there are very few pieces I have happier memories of singing than this motet. It’s one thing to listen to music and another to make it, but I can always sing along to a recording, and if I try very hard I can almost convince myself I’m inside the music again. If you play the video and are able to read music you can follow Bach’s manuscript.

Spotify (Monteverdi Choir / English Baroque Soloists / John Eliot Gardiner)

2. Ludwig van Beethoven Piano Sonata no. 30 in E major, op. 109 (1820)

I might have chosen one of the late quartets, but I think that the final movement of this sonata probably moves me more than anything else Beethoven wrote. Utterly sublime.

YouTube (Claudio Arrau) | Spotify (Solomon)

3. Richard Wagner Parsifal (completed 1882)

All of it. I will need something big to get my teeth into while I’m stranded, and this will have to be it. Maybe the most celestial music Wagner wrote.

YouTube (Met / Levine, 1992) | Spotify (Bayreuth / Knappertsbusch, 1962)

4. Johannes Brahms Sonata for Clarinet (or Viola) and Piano in F minor, op. 120 no. 1 (1894)

I think that of all composers Brahms may be the one of whom I would least readily dispose, and it was a difficult decision to choose this over one of the symphonies, but then I have orchestral music elsewhere in my selections. Gorgeous, and perhaps I may be permitted to take the clarinet and viola versions, each of which has quite a different character from the other.

Spotify (Paul Silverthorne, viola / Julian Jacobson, piano)

5. Fats Waller I’m Crazy ‘Bout My Baby (1931)

Probably the first jazz record I heard. There are several different recordings Waller made of this song, but this I think is the best, or at any rate the funniest. It can be taken as read that he was one of the most ludicrously brilliant pianists who ever drew breath (though his virtuosity doesn’t get much of a workout here), but he also overflowed with personality. If only I could have seen him perform live.

YouTube | Spotify

6. Alban Berg Violin Concerto, ‘Dem Andenken eines Engels’ (1935)

I’ve decided to make one of my choices a piece that moves me deeply though I don’t know it particularly well. Probably a good idea to turn this exile to my advantage by spending some of those long and lonely hours becoming properly acquainted with it.

YouTube (Frederieke Saeijs, violin / Orchestre National de France / Jonathan Darlington) | Spotify (Itzhak Perlman, violin / Boston Symphony Orchestra / Seiji Ozawa)

7. Herbert Howells Gloucester Service (1946)

Something else I have sung. I can’t explain exactly why it is that Howells’ church music does such strange things to my brain. His harmonic imagination is enormously exciting. If I were a proper composer and not just a Sunday one, I would choose to be able to write like this. I don’t have a preferred recording, but the ones from Hereford Cathedral and St John’s College, Cambridge that came out last year are both excellent.

YouTube | Spotify (both Collegiate Singers / Andrew Millinger / Richard Moorhouse, organ)

8. Miami Sound Machine Bad Boy (1985)

I know, I know. Just as every politician has to choose some [insert safe classical composer here, preferably British and/or straight] to suggest they may have a brain, I have to have something that may come across as tacky in the hope that it will persuade readers I’m not the complete square I so patently am. But it’s extraordinary how potent cheap music is, and this would be perfect for running around and exercising and keeping my spirits up. It is a song of which I do not tire. Brilliant, I am tempted to say.

Spotify

Rather Teutonic, all told. No French music, which is a shame. A bit of Rameau would have been nice. But it is done. If I had to pick one it would be the Howells. Not something I would want to listen to frequently, but to keep aside for special occasions.

I take it that if, as an enormous number of castaways before me, I were to name a piano as my luxury, I would not be restricted to playing the music I’ve chosen? It seems a cheat, but everyone else presumably does it. So there we are. I’ve never played a Bechstein to my knowledge, so let’s have one of those.

Book? Well, first I’d like to swap the Bible for the Book of Common Prayer, if I may, and since there’s an awful lot of stuff to read in Shakespeare, I would probably ask in addition not for a work of literature but for the A-Z of London. I could do the knowledge on my return to civilisation, after learning how to drive.

I would be fascinated to read the choices of others. The Argumentative Old Git has posted his. What about you? Ah, go on.

50 films: #2. The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1970)

It all begins with what may be the most famous opening line in twentieth-century literature.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

If you want your novel to be remembered, start it with a memorable aphorism. But after nearly sixty years of being quoted, it can’t help coming across as hackneyed, especially when stripped of its context. This is the paragraph that follows:

When I came upon the diary, it was lying at the bottom of a rather battered red cardboard collar-box, in which as a small boy I kept my Eton collars. Someone, probably my mother, had filled it with treasures dating from those days. There were two dry, empty sea-urchins; two rusty magnets, a large one and a small one, which had almost lost their magnetism; some negatives rolled up in a tight coil; some stumps of sealing-wax; a small combination lock with three rows of letters; a twist of very fine whipcord; and one or two ambiguous objects, pieces of things, of which the use was not at once apparent: I could not even tell what they had belonged to. The relics were not exactly dirty nor were they quite clean, they had the patina of age; and as I handled them, for the first time for over fifty years, a recollection of what each had meant to me came back, faint as the magnets’ power to draw, but as perceptible. Something came and went between us: the intimate pleasure of recognition, the almost mystical thrill of early ownership—feelings of which, at sixty-odd, I felt ashamed.

It seems appropriate to document my own discovery of The Go-Between, which began in a not dissimilar way, with the reawakening of the dead. My uncle William died in May 1998, and I ended up inheriting (i.e. taking) a number of his possessions. Among those books of his I took was a copy of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley (with his name written inside, I think – it was a book he had studied at school, but the edition was a more modern one, a light green Penguin Modern Classic). I also took a couple of boxes of unlabelled tapes, some of them blank, some not, which I scoured for items of interest. One of them, a chrome cassette dating probably from the 1970s and possessing a card insert that looked like one of these, had some extracts from what I identified immediately as the film of The Go-Between recorded on it. Listening to it was a curious experience, like William’s hand reaching out and taking mine. We didn’t have a video recorder until about 1990, and I remember recording the soundtracks of television programmes on my tape recorder when I was very young. How old must he have been when he recorded this? Fourteen, perhaps? That would have been around 1979. Before I was born, anyway.

I was sixteen when I eventually read it. I remember sitting at the front of a German classroom dipping in and out of it while I was supposed to be invigilating GCSE pupils waiting to sit their oral exams. It automatically became a favourite book of mine, partly, I suspect, because of the extra meaning it had already been invested with because of the associations detailed above.

The film of The Go-Between was the third screen collaboration of Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey, following two excellent films made in the years before, The Servant and Accident. Pinter had been asked by Losey to write a screenplay of the novel as soon as The Servant was completed in 1963:

[The novel] had such a tremendous impact on me that I actually broke down. Nothing less than tears. So I couldn’t see how, feeling as I did, I could write a screenplay. Then a month or so later, Joe talked me into it.

But wrangling over rights delayed production for several years, and it was not until 1970 that filming began.

The prologue to the novel shows Leo Colston, a man on the verge of old age, discovering a diary that reawakens memories of the long, hot summer of 1900, which he spent at Brandham Hall in Norfolk, the country home of his schoolfriend Marcus Maudsley. With Marcus incapacitated by measles, the 12-year-old Leo finds himself employed by Marcus’ older sister, Marian, to take letters between her and a local farmer, Ted Burgess. But Marian is engaged to Lord Trimingham. The traumatic end of the affair is something that echoes throughout Leo’s later life, and an epilogue, returning to the present, shows the adult Leo returning to Brandham to lay his ghosts to rest.

The point of chief interest in the film as opposed to the book is its structure. Whereas the novel is told in flashback, bookended by two chapters set in the present, the first setting up Leo’s story and the second resolving it, the film intersperses the past and the present. That famous opening line is spoken as a voiceover by Michael Redgrave, who appears later in the film portraying the adult Leo, over an image of a Norfolk field, followed by the child Leo (Dominic Guard) travelling with Marcus towards Brandham. As the film progresses, the older Leo becomes more prominent. We see him visiting graves at Brandham, taking a room, meeting Marian once more, all of these scenes intercut with the events of that childhood summer. Losey:

… what interested me primarily was the possibility of representing 1900 using shots from the present, not in a chronological, but in an almost subliminal sequence, superimposing voices from the present, so that threads which started off parallel gradually intertwine, and in the end past and present are one and the same. As you know, I am fascinated by the concept of time, and by the power the cinema has suddenly to reveal the meaning of a whole life from the age of 12 to 60, and by the effect that those few weeks lived at the age of 12 are to have on the grown man.

I imagine that this may be the effect that these juxtapositions have on the first-time viewer. Some critics have suggested that the appearance of the adult Leo throughout the film rather than at the end serves to undercut the tension of the narrative. The sight of the man that Leo has become may be too strongly suggestive of how his childhood summer ends. I think it’s just another way of telling the story. Pinter:

You can’t simply transfer a book to the screen. It doesn’t work, for reasons which should be obvious. In a film, you have to go for the essence of the story, to give the film its focus, with the other elements contributing to that focus.

The ending is altered from that of the book, though there is a similar sense of catharsis for Leo. In the book this is achieved by the south-west prospect of Brandham Hall returning to his memory; in the film it is done by the implication that he has defied Marian. I find the generosity of the book’s conclusion more pleasing, but the film’s ending at least does not amount to a desecration of the novel.

I suspect most of these essays will dwell for a while on the music, and Michel Legrand’s memorable score for this film is worthy of discussion. He is in many ways the ideal composer for such a film, a watercolourist rather than an oil painter. His scoring here recalls composers who must have influenced him, most obviously Poulenc (shades of the Aubade and other piano concertante works) – the forces he employs are two pianos and twenty-five accompanying instruments, most of them strings. His melody grows from nothing more than a four-note contour, which he manipulates in various directions while the harmony shifts underneath. (Beethoven did something similar in his fifth symphony.) It is the perfect accompaniment to the rain-spattered window we see while the credits roll, the sound of greyness.

Costume and art direction are exemplary, and contribute greatly at the start to the feeling of Leo as an outsider, a middle-class boy in an upper-class world. I have barely written of the actors yet, but they are in every way as one would wish them. Alan Bates’ portrayal of Ted Burgess entirely fails to dispel the growing feeling that he may be my favourite person in the history of the universe, while Julie Christie is radiant as Marian, and I cannot conceive of a better Leo than Dominic Guard.

Accounts describe the process of making the film as a joyous one. Losey fostered a close-knit family atmosphere, which must have been comforting to Dominic Guard. Guard was a shy boy, somewhat in the shadow, thought Alan Bates, of his older brother Christopher, also an actor; but he struck up close friendships with the other boys in the cast, Richard Gibson (later Herr Flick in ‘Allo ‘Allo) and Simon Hume-Kendall (whose turn as the pompous Denys is one of the film’s great joys; he later became one of the men behind the Sport newspapers). They used to play games and listen to records when not filming. Edith de Rham’s biography of Losey contains a delightful photograph of a cricket match being played by cast members on location at Melton Constable. The very glamorous Margaret Leighton stands at the crease in sunglasses and headscarf while Edward Fox squats bare-chested behind her, keeping wicket.

It is not surprising that such a sensitive and successful adaptation of the novel should have been showered with awards on its release. These included BAFTAs for Pinter, Fox, Leighton and Guard, and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which left Luchino Visconti miffed at the snub to Death in Venice. Maria Callas wrote to say how much she adored the film. But Pinter and Losey did not work together again. A planned adaptation of Proust did not come to fruition, and remains one of the more tantalising films never to be made. We should be grateful for their legacy.

Those of a sensitive disposition may not wish to sample this kitschy easy-listening version of the Legrand theme, which my fluctuating levels of discernment permit me to enjoy wildly.

Sources
Michael Ciment, Conversations with Losey. London: Methuen, 1985.
Edith de Rham, Joseph Losey. London: André Deutsch, 1991.
James Palmer and Michael Riley, The films of Joseph Losey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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50 films: #1. Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)

My cinematic survey begins here, somewhere in the middle.

Like other directors who feature in my list, Nicolas Roeg started out as a cameraman. That a director has a background in cinematography may be little more than a piece of trivia in most cases, but Roeg’s apprenticeship behind the camera is plainly obvious in his films from the early ’70s, not least in Walkabout, his solo directorial debut, which he also photographed. It opens with the following title card:

In Australia, when an Aborigine man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months he must live from it. Sleep on it. Eat of its fruit and flesh. Stay alive. Even if it means killing his fellow creatures. The Aborigines call it the WALKABOUT.

This is the story of a “WALKABOUT”.

A brother and sister (Jenny Agutter and Lucien John, Roeg’s own son) – the principal characters are not given names, and are only identified as ‘girl’, ‘white boy’ and ‘black boy’ – are taken from their suburban home into the outback by their father, ostensibly for a picnic. The father then produces a pistol and starts taking potshots at them. The children take cover. The father then commits suicide. With their car a burnt-out wreck and no idea of their location, the children are forced to go on their own walkabout, meeting on their travels an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil, credited as Gumpilil) who shows them how to live off the land.

I don’t think Walkabout should necessarily be viewed as a didactic film, although its frequent juxtapositions of modern industrial life and the life of the indigenous people of Australia may seem to invite moral analyses. The divide is illustrated in the very first shots of the film, where the pairings of image and sound are jarring. Over the cracked earth of the outback is heard the sound of a radio being tuned. (The radio is the one vestige of civilisation that stays with the children until almost the end of their walkabout, and is used on one occasion by the black boy who finds a radio station broadcasting in his own language.) Then we see the streets of Sydney (referred to as Adelaide in the film) bustling with businessmen and women, accompanied by the drone of the didgeridoo.

There are other films that approach it, but I can think of none that surpasses Walkabout in terms of sheer intoxication of image and sound. The score, by John Barry, is surely his most sensuous. The period of the walkabout incorporates a number of idyllic musical montages, most famously the one where Jenny Agutter goes swimming. These sequences often have a narrative purpose – the one just mentioned shows the boys establishing a relationship and learning to communicate despite the language barrier – but they are also paeans to the landscape and indigenous wildlife of Australia. Roeg’s photography of animals draws parallels between the two children, cut off from everything they know, and the creatures themselves, small and vulnerable. It recalls the fantasy sequence in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter where two children drift downriver in a boat, while the nocturnal creatures by the bank appear to watch over them.

Although the animals are photographed with great tenderness, their existence is not sentimentalised. We see animals killed, first by the black boy with a spear of his own making, and later by armed hunters. The boy’s chopping up of a kangaroo is cross-cut with a butcher hacking up meat and disembowelling poultry, again inviting comparisons between the two cultures. At the same time as the three children play innocently in the trees, a group of Aborigines is shown finding the gutted car and appropriating it for play of their own.

The brother and sister are led to the road, and so their walkabout ends, but not before a tragic occurrence which arises directly from the impossibility of reconciling the two cultures, one which would not have come about but for the white children’s entry into the outback.

A flash-forward: the girl is older now, and married. Her husband returns home to tell her of his latest promotion, but her thoughts are far away. She remembers this episode from her youth, the innocence of her play with her brother and the boy they met. A Housman poem is read before the credits roll:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

What are we meant to feel about this sudden burst of nostalgia? The girl now lives once again the comfortable life she had before her walkabout, but laments the loss of something she found when she was temporarily dispossessed. Rewatching this, it feels like an oversimplistic romanticisation of the ‘uncivilised’, and an inaccurate memory of an experience that was harrowing when she underwent it. So the girl feels nostalgia, but should the viewer? Is there a bitter irony in the use of the poem? Like the film as a whole, it is open to interpretation and reinterpretation.

I recommend the excellent Roger Ebert’s ‘Great Movies’ essay on the film, and also this beautifully assembled montage from YouTube. The viewer should be warned that it reveals aspects of the plot I have skirted around.

IMDb | Buy from Amazon.co.uk

50 films

I was going to make another list. But it’s easy to make a list. It requires only the most superficial of thought, and once it’s written then it’s written and one simply moves on to the next one. And I realised that if something is worthy of being put in a list of good things then it is worthy of deeper discussion. So here I am, embarking on a foolhardy series of fifty posts about films I like that will take me well into the next year and in all probability until the end of my life.

I’m adding a touch of variety to the series by not choosing the order of the films myself. I have arranged them chronologically for my own reference, but will decide which one to write about next by means of a random number generator. Maybe the element of the unexpected will help me to approach these films as if anew.

What’s in the list? Well, we’ll find out as we go along. I don’t want to give everything away in this first post. OK, fair enough, but what are my rules for inclusion? Is there anything I have had reluctantly to omit? My, you’re full of questions today.

By no means can every one of my choices be described as a great film – some are merely very good – but I love them without exception. If I were a true cineaste the list would of course include names like Fellini, Bergman, Ray, Kurosawa, Welles, Ford and Renoir. You will find none of them here. It’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that my knowledge in certain areas is lacking (as may be my taste). There are a number of films I would tentatively claim to love but which I have omitted because of feeling my acquaintance of them is too slight. These include Sunset Blvd., Casablanca, Brief Encounter, The Godfather, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chinatown. The list goes on. To express it succinctly, of all the great films that have failed to make the list, the ones I know enough I don’t love enough and the ones I love enough I don’t know enough.

Forget it, Jake

Some statistical observations. There are three directors who get two films in the list. No director has three. The films I have chosen, I think, show a tendency towards lightness rather than darkness and levity rather than earnestness. Truffaut makes the list, for example, while Godard doesn’t (Le Mépris just missed the cut). My preoccupation with childhood and childishness is probably reflected quite heavily, though none of the films I have chosen was made with a predominantly child audience in mind. Twelve of the films are in a foreign language, more than half of these French. Three fifths of my choices come from the period 1955-1975, while only four of the films were made in the last twenty years. My passion for the British Character Actor is likely to become quite apparent.

This could be fun, and I may get something useful out of looking at these films more closely myself. I’m very much a layman at the moment. I hope to emerge from the project wiser, a little sadder perhaps, but ultimately older.