The Illusion of Depth

In the world of Early Music, playing something on "original instruments" means to play it using instruments appropriate to the historical era in which the music was written. But beyond that, it also means attempting to re-create the performance style of an era.  In other words, don't try to play Bach like it's Bruckner. The trouble is that no matter how authentic the performance might be, the audience is never going to be authentic. The musicians can be as historically accurate as they want to be; they can perform on instruments of the period, they can re-create the tuning, the phrasing, the interpretation; all of that mishegas . They can (hypothetically) give a performance that exactly re-creates the music as it sounded the first time it was ever performed. But this new, hyper-authentic performance is going to reach the ears of an audience that is completely different from the audience of the time. When an audience listens to Bach today, they are hearing Bach in the ...

 Raging Riders, and Lots of Bull Depending on who you ask, the ten-year period of 1965-1975 was either one of the best eras in American cinema, or one of the worst. While it was certainly a Golden Age if you were a straight white male who loved extreme violence, casual sexism, xenophobia and homophobia, it was far less enjoyable if such things tended to make you uncomfortable. (Three guesses how I feel about this era.) To some extent, Cinema was merely reflecting the tone of Society itself during that decade. After living through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of  President Kennedy (and, two years later, Malcolm X; and a few years after that , Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King) there were the almost daily news reports of  violent suppression of  Civil Rights campaigners and (if you wanted some relief from the vicious and bloody domestic news) there was the ongoing horror show of the Vietnam War. Eventually of course the 1960s came to an end, and Ame...

 If anyone cares to cast their mind back to the beginning of 2020 (back before we started to fill our lives with words like "Lockdown" and "Self-Isolation" and the ever-popular "COVID") they might recall that we were in the middle of a film series at the Victoria Park Baptist Church - a film series we never actually got to finish, thanks to the Armageddon. I am pleased to announce that this Thursday (exactly twenty months later) we will be screening Pleasantville ; the film that was to have concluded that pre-Pandemic film series. Pleasantville centres around a (fictional) 1950s television series about a "perfect" All-American community full of happy home-makers, preppy kids and white picket fences. This is the fondly remembered past that many American Conservatives like to invoke when they talk about "traditional values" (basically, this is the again in "Make America Great Again"). Unfortunately (or not, depending on your per...

 Last week's film (Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three ) took place in Berlin, a city that was completely cut off from the rest of Western Europe by a strange and unique set of circumstances. This week's film imagines what might have happened had those circumstances occurred in London rather than Germany. The result is a film that is quintessentially, joyously British : In Passport to Pimlico , a chance discovery of long-buried historical documents (and a considerable quantity of treasure) reveals that a neighbourhood in Pimlico, South London, is actually foreign soil - and its residents are not subjects of the Crown. The screenplay then proceeds from that basic premise to hypothesise (in completely rational, logical stages) about what might happen following such a discovery. Some writers have been tempted to read Passport to Pimlico as a metaphor for Brexit, but I personally think that entirely misses the point of the film. The residents of  Pimlico don't want to be separa...

 Last week we saw a film about the Cold War as seen by a director who experienced it as a young teenager. The International situation may have been apocalyptic and grim, but none of that mattered as much as the newest monster movie. This week is going to be another film about the Cold War, but viewed through the very different lens of a director in his mid-fifties who had lived through the eras of World War Two and The Holocaust. Billy Wilder may be (quite rightly) remembered for films like Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Some Like it Hot etc. but One, Two, Three is one of his most cynical, savage and unforgiving comedies. Berlin in 1961 was a divided city. The East and West were controlled by the Russians and Americans respectively, but travel between the two regions was still possible. It was in fact during the making of this film that the infamous wall went up, sealing East Berlin off from the West for almost thirty years. I'm not going to attempt to expl...

 When is a Scary Monster Movie not Scary? We have reached that time of year when tradition demands the scary and the spooky. While there is certainly no shortage of horror films to consider for a Halloween film evening, I have decided to go for a slightly different option this year. Matinee (1993) is director Joe Dante's love letter to his own childhood, and specifically the monster movies of the 1950s and 60s that made such an impression on him during his formative years. John Goodman plays (fictional) film-maker Laurence Woolsey, a director of extremely schlocky and gimmick-laden "scary" movies, who has arrived in Key West Florida to promote his latest opus; an exploitational B-picture about a half-man-half-ant (called-inevitably- Mant ). As fate would have it, the premiere of his new film coincides with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; a moment in 20th Century history when the world came as close as it ever came to actual, full-scale Nuclear War. Matinee cheerfully co...