The Abstract and Brief Chronicles of the Time

It may have quite understandably escaped your notice (what with all the mishigas going on around us) but 2025 marked the tenth anniversary of these film nights at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

In truth, there have been a few interruptions here and there. We took a brief hiatus for the occasional global pandemic, and then there was the time when the Church roof collapsed... 

...but even allowing for all that, we've covered a lot of territory since 2015.

Now, as we prepare to enter our second decade, I hope you will indulge me if I permit myself a moment of quiet reflection.

What I earnestly hope is obvious by now is that these film nights are not primarily about the films.

Yes, I screen movies (and I fully intend to screen many more) and I hope everyone enjoys the titles I select.

Even the bad films can be important for anthropological reasons...

But this isn't just a film club, and my purpose here is not merely to stick a film in the slot, press "play" and sit down.

I am a Camera... or vice versa...

Many years ago I was having a conversation with a colleague about an upcoming mega-blockbuster Hollywood action film (the latest in a long-running franchise). I mentioned a particular controversy about the film that happened to be tearing the internet apart at the time (the internet is frequently being torn apart by such things, for one reason or another) and he responded with scathing, supercilious derision.

"This is what they're angry about," he said to me, shaking his head, "with everything going on in the world right now?"

He's not wrong to point out that a controversial narrative decision in a beloved movie franchise can feel less urgent than, say, child poverty or human trafficking or environmental disasters, but his condescending dismissal of those angry fans highlights a "perception trap" that the "socially aware" can fall into all too easily.

As I pointed out to him at the time, there is a temptation to make our lives all about suffering and resistance; especially when the outside world is particularly grim. If we're not careful we can come to define ourselves exclusively in terms of all the unspeakable things around us, while neglecting the positive things that make us a society worth preserving.

Art, culture, and even populist entertainment can be a lifeline to our humanity when there are so many forces at work threatening to grind us down. Emotional investment in "entertainment" should not necessarily be a sign of reckless triviality. And it certainly doesn't mean that you can't also care about the starving children.

That, as I say, was my response to him at the time (and I eventually developed a whole series along those lines: Depression/Comedy... when everyday life got really really bad).

But right now I want to make a slightly different argument. Bear with me.

"When Legend Becomes Fact... Print the Legend"

Okay, so there's a particular moment in Hamlet. 

Who decides what is Real?

Hamlet's father has been murdered by his uncle (Hamlet's uncle, that is; his father's brother) and Hamlet knows this with absolute certainty.

He knows this because his dead father literally rose from the grave to tell him about it in excruciating detail; they had an in-depth (and oft re-enacted) conversation on the subject which rather understandably left a lasting impression on poor Hamlet Jr. It would probably leave an impression on you too, had your (recently departed) loved one regaled you with the visceral and harrowing minutiae of his newly-deceased state of being; a tale "whose lightest word/Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood" etc etc. This is the kind of life-changing conversation you don't tend to forget in a hurry.

Admittedly that does rather beg the question of why, a day or so later, Hamlet does in fact apparently forget all about it. He describes death as "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns" (did his father's ghost just slip his mind for a moment??) but that's not important right now.

My point is that Hamlet knows the identity of his father's killer with more certainty than most modern murder juries. If deathbed testimony is considered compelling evidence, then a ghostly spirit rising from its grave would presumably knock it out of the park, prosecution-wise. Claudius killed Hamlet's father, and Hamlet knows this beyond a reasonable doubt.

But this is where things get interesting (actually this is Hamlet we're talking about, so it's all interesting). Because Hamlet doesn't go up to Claudius and accuse him point blank. He doesn't call the cops and he doesn't just take his revenge right there and then. 

What does Hamlet do? He turns the murder of his father into a stage play.

From a narrative point of view, Hamlet tells us the play-within-a-play allows him to gauge his uncle's reaction ("The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king") but really, he could have done that by filing a police report or writing a devastating op-ed piece for the Elsinore Gazette or something (in iambic pentameter of course).

No. He dramatizes the murder. He takes the murder of his own father and turns it into entertainment.

The murder of King Hamlet. Coming soon to a theatre near you.

Hamlet's play-within-a-play is a famous (and fictional) example of a curious paradox in human psychology: if we want to make something feel real, we fictionalise it. Shakespeare knew what he was talking about (he usually does) when he described the theatrical players as "The abstract and brief chronicles of the time." 

World events happen as they happen. But the writers and dramatists are the ones who make it real for everyone else.

Remember the Post Office "Horizon" scandal? It bumped along on the back burner of the public's attention for twenty-five years... until it was turned into a major four-part television drama on ITV starring Toby Jones, and suddenly it was the number one political football. The scripted narrative succeeded where Reality had failed.

"They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round..."

And then there's Christopher Columbus, who famously proved to his contemporaries that the Earth was round... except he did no such thing. No one at the time actually thought the Earth was flat, except in the pages of a highly fictional re-telling of the story written by Washington Irving in 1828. Over time, Irving's version of the events has apparently become more believable than the real thing, to such a degree that generations of school children have been taught the fictional version. As a journalist says to James Stewart's character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

This is a defining characteristic of narrative fiction: writers are drawn to it because it gives them complete control over the Reality they choose to depict. They can structure it as they wish; they can do anything they want with the events or the characters, and they can fill those characters' mouths with exactly the dialogue they choose.

This is Reality, but cultivated and curated.

And audiences frequently come to prefer that cultivation over the Real Thing. We often perceive the world around us, not as it is, but as it is signified by the curated and packaged representation of Reality given to us by writers and film-makers.

Peter Suderman recently published a column in the New York Times about Hollywood's unique power to define and shape our shared cultural experience.

It’s hard to imagine a politician casually referring to even the most famous video game moments. But no one blinks when a governor ranks his favorite “Star Wars” movies. Memes are the slang of the internet, yet many simply remix and recycle frames from old films. Hollywood is unmatched in its capacity to create mass cultural shorthand.

Christopher Isherwood famously said "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."

His words are generally taken to mean he was observing the world around him without judgement: merely documenting objective Reality - like a camera.

The movie camera with the man.

But cameras don't actually do that. The truth is that a camera lens and a human eye observe the world very differently. Take "shallow focus" as an example.

If you have dabbled at all in photography over the last few decades you will almost certainly have encountered the term Bokeh.

Bokeh generally refers to the distinctive "blurry" areas (usually the background) of a photographic image recorded with a wide aperture lens. The phenomenon is certainly not new, but the term (a transliteration of a Japanese word) was only coined about thirty years ago by photographic editors who were beginning to notice that (small lensed) early digital cameras were incapable of producing the effect.

Smaller lenses produce deeper focus, so a shallow-focus image was a hallmark of a bigger (read more expensive) camera. In the 21st Century, bokeh has come to be regarded as a desirable marker of quality in a photographic image (you won't get it from a smartphone camera) and it is now even possible to use computer software to add artificial bokeh to your snapshots - because that makes them look.... better?

In short, bokeh has entered the vocabulary of photography, and its presence is now seen as somehow "professional".

The thing is, the human eye doesn't actually work that way. Shallow focus is a manifestation of lens technology, but human vision is exceptionally good at focussing on multiple planes with minimal effort (try holding your hand in front of your face and you will see a spectacular absence of bokeh in the background). There's a reason why bokeh is not present in any painting that predates the advent of optical lens technology: no one had ever seen it until cameras were around to show it to us.

No bokeh. Not even of any kind...

(Don't even get me started, by the way, on the shaky, hand-held camera techniques that are frequently used to signify realism in movies, but which have zero relation to human visual cues. That's a kettle of fish of a different colour...)

Like Hamlet's fictionalised murder, a photograph is better at reality than Reality. As Groucho Marx once said, "Who are you gonna believe; me, or your own eyes?" (Except it was actually Chico Marx who said that. Don't ask...)

That's not Groucho...

Narrative fiction (whether it's cinema, opera, stage drama or a three-volume novel) is not merely pop culture entertainment (although it is that as well) it's the method by which a society documents itself. Reality is complicated and messy, but writers, film-makers, artists etc can take that Reality and repackage it for us, giving it structure and coherence and even meaning. 

When Claudius murders his brother, it's an event. When Hamlet puts it on stage, it's drama.

The play really is the thing. The abstract and brief chronicles of the time. The uncreated conscience of our race.

Plus, there's often popcorn.

Movies are fun to watch, but they are also a glimpse into a moment in history (even the big, dumb escapist ones). They are the Reality we curate.

As we move into 2026, I want to carry on exploring the idea of language as a "constructed reality". This is going to be "phase II" of our series looking at Large Language Models, and I want to begin with a well-known and oft-retold example of re-shaping reality to suit your own purposes.

I am referring, of course, to the story of Cinderella.

Specifically, I'm going to be showing Prokofiev's 1945 ballet adaptation of Cinderella, as choreographed by the great Rudolf Nureyev in 1986. (Yes, I know; I'm showing another ballet! This is the last one for awhile; I promise...)

Cinderella, needless to say, is (at its core) the story of an unhappy servant girl who successfully "re-packages" herself (with some supernatural assistance) to win the attention and favour of the handsome young prince. 

In a nutshell, she takes her own Reality and "curates" it to create a narrative that achieves the ends she wants. 

In my previous discussions of Large Language Models I have spoken about Signifiers and Signifieds. Cinderella is a character who successfully transforms herself into the signifier of the character she wants to be (a beautiful young princess) - which is of course what actors do all the time when they assume a role, on stage or in film.

It's fitting, therefore, that this production of Cinderella updates the story to 1930s Hollywood, and presents her as a talented young would-be starlet who is "discovered" by a movie mogul.

Hollywood (especially Hollywood of the 1930s) was especially good at manufacturing the Reality of their choosing, and then selling that reality to an eager and voracious public. Of course Cinderella's guardian angel is going to be a movie producer. What else would he be?

Nureyev's production of Cinderella is a glorious piece of choreography (and Prokofiev's score represents the composer at his very best) but it's also a love letter to Hollywood, the Dream Factory: the abstract and brief chronicles of its age.

This is a ballet about signifying Reality.

We will screen Cinderella at 7.30 on Thursday, the 29th of January, at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.