peterbirks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
peterbirks) wrote2012-04-09 02:50 pm
peterbirks) wrote2012-04-09 02:50 pm
Essaying a non-essay
I think that a great deal of what I used to put into Live Journal now goes into Facebook and personal e-mails. There are probably several reasons; last August and the amazing negative response that I got to one post led me more in the direction of Facebook, where at least only a designated (albeit reasonably wide) audience can see what you post. Added to that, in the old "the medium is the message" style, I began to feel that the blog now consisted of something completely different from its initial derivation (a web diary) and had become more of a place for essays. This is no bad thing. The world had lost a medium for samizdat, and the blogs that remain often contain well-thought out essays on current events. A far cry from early days of 14-year-old goths joining a 10,000 strong online group entitled "Why am I so different from everyone else and why am I not in any groups?", or 11-year-old girls writing about how she is certain that she was adopted as a baby because her parents are nothing like her and absolutely do not understand her at all and life is so cruel and why won't that nice boy in class look at me?
Essays are all well and good, but more often than not they require a bit of work. Even, shock horror, research. If I'm particularly attracted to a topic, I'm fine with that, but I'm not going to do it for its own sake.
I also have a weekly column now in the Insurance Day trade paper. OK, it has to be about insurance, but apart from that it isn't that different from this blog.
All of that means that occasionally some things fall through the Facebook/LJ gap. One of them was a review of Napoleon and of my last couple of days In San Francisco. There was no real time to do one on the Sunday, and by the time I got back I was straight back into the office on the Tuesday, and was jet-lagged for nearly a week. (On the plus side, going into work does drive you back into proper body time far quicker than if you stay at home for another week).
So, let's go back to the old-style blog, a kind of online diary keeping other people I know, but with whom I do not talk that often, up-to-date with the ongoing travails of the Birks life.
Here's some pictures of my last Saturday in San Francisco (or, rather, Oakland - which, apart from the movie, appeared to be shut).
The Fox in Oakland, on Telegraph. Just my luck that The Magnetic Fields were playing that very night. So near and yet so far.
The weather was crap.
But you have to be impressed by the work they have put into restoring this cinema. Pity about the location!
The foyer
The men's toilets ante-room. Apparently the ladies' loos are even more impressive! Unfortunately there weren't enough of them. The queues at the break were ridiculously long.
The bar
The (small) screen. For the last half an hour, the screen expanded to three times the width.
The ceiling.
The seating.
And what of the film? Well, Carl Davis now has his own web site and blogged on the event. His comments include the obvious fact, but one that wouldn't occur to non-musicians such as myself, that he had to carry the entire score onto the plane -- and that it was so heavy that he did his back in taking it down from the overhead luggage compartment.
Rehearsals were apparently a bit hairy, but one wouldn't have known it come the show. The only minor imperfection was that it sounded as if a workman started a bit of maintenance work near the fire-ext to the front-left at the beginning of the final act (fourth of four). But he was silenced fairly quickly.
Much work has been done to the film in the past 30 years. The intertitles have a font more in tune with the film; some extra scenes have been found. And, perhaps most significantly, the tinting has been (re)introduced. This makes a great difference.
Finally, I am not the same person as I was 30 years ago. In the meantime I have seen many more films. This meant that I brought a new "eye" to the film, and for this I must thank Mark Cousins and his More 4 series on The History of Film. I definitely appreciated the first act more (the snowball fight), which had some technical innovations that I didn't spot or appreciate the first time I saw the film. Also, the actor playing the child Napoleon (Roudenko?) is superb. He's so good that you think of him as a "young" Dieudonné, who plays the adult Napoleon in the film. But in fact he is a better actor than Dieudonné.
The second act, when Napoleon is on Corsica, still drags a bit for me. There are some brilliant shots in it and I think Davis works hardest with the music here, but it's the one act where I lose a bit of my involvement. The political bits in Paris with Danton, Robespierre, Marat (the scene with his assassination is far longer and better restored) and Gance himself superb as Saint-Just are much more interesting.
Brownlow talks in the programme of the restoration and notes that, from having many scenes missing, he now found himself in the situation of having several different shots of the same scene. Does he go with the better performance but the poorer print? Or does he go with the better print? In effect Brownlow is taking on the role of editor here, rather than a mere recoverer of stock.
As for the end. Well, the audience knew it was coming. These were not the innocent watchers of 30 years ago at the Odeon Leicester Sq. Everyone that I heard talking seemed to be a film fanatic. Many were film writers. And yet, as the curtains roll back and the music builds up, and the three screens burst into light, they still all gasped. And one shot, near the end, which I had actually forgotten (my main memory is of the Gance trademark "assault on the senses" where you got about 40 shots a second hitting you from the three different screens) when there is that close-up of the eagle, using all three screens and thus the wing expanse as well as the head, well, that even got me applauding again. It's just a staggering shot.
I've said it before and I'll happily say it again; I consider those final 20 minutes to be the finest cinema I have ever seen, but it has to be seen in this proper format. The only thing that comes even close in terms of impact is that moment when the helicopters appear out of the sky in Apocalypse Now, but it's not really a contest. To watch it with a live orchestra, with Davis conducting his own full score in the US for the first time, made it all the better.
Of course, the audience rose as one at the end, and Davis, trooper that he is (he's 75, for goodness' sake) was beaming as he soaked it in.
I'd idly thought that this might be the start of some "proper" showings again worldwide, but it looks as if it was the San Francisco Silent Film Organization that put this together, rather than an initiative from Davis and Brownlow. And it cost them a lot to put on. If that's the case, this might actually have been the last time I could have seen Davis conducting this film, and the last time that I will have an opportunity to see it in its true format. It's just too expensive to put on.
And for that, I give many thanks that I can say, "I was there".
Essays are all well and good, but more often than not they require a bit of work. Even, shock horror, research. If I'm particularly attracted to a topic, I'm fine with that, but I'm not going to do it for its own sake.
I also have a weekly column now in the Insurance Day trade paper. OK, it has to be about insurance, but apart from that it isn't that different from this blog.
All of that means that occasionally some things fall through the Facebook/LJ gap. One of them was a review of Napoleon and of my last couple of days In San Francisco. There was no real time to do one on the Sunday, and by the time I got back I was straight back into the office on the Tuesday, and was jet-lagged for nearly a week. (On the plus side, going into work does drive you back into proper body time far quicker than if you stay at home for another week).
So, let's go back to the old-style blog, a kind of online diary keeping other people I know, but with whom I do not talk that often, up-to-date with the ongoing travails of the Birks life.
Here's some pictures of my last Saturday in San Francisco (or, rather, Oakland - which, apart from the movie, appeared to be shut).
The Fox in Oakland, on Telegraph. Just my luck that The Magnetic Fields were playing that very night. So near and yet so far.
The weather was crap.
But you have to be impressed by the work they have put into restoring this cinema. Pity about the location!
The foyer
The men's toilets ante-room. Apparently the ladies' loos are even more impressive! Unfortunately there weren't enough of them. The queues at the break were ridiculously long.
The bar
The (small) screen. For the last half an hour, the screen expanded to three times the width.
The ceiling.
The seating.
And what of the film? Well, Carl Davis now has his own web site and blogged on the event. His comments include the obvious fact, but one that wouldn't occur to non-musicians such as myself, that he had to carry the entire score onto the plane -- and that it was so heavy that he did his back in taking it down from the overhead luggage compartment.
Rehearsals were apparently a bit hairy, but one wouldn't have known it come the show. The only minor imperfection was that it sounded as if a workman started a bit of maintenance work near the fire-ext to the front-left at the beginning of the final act (fourth of four). But he was silenced fairly quickly.
Much work has been done to the film in the past 30 years. The intertitles have a font more in tune with the film; some extra scenes have been found. And, perhaps most significantly, the tinting has been (re)introduced. This makes a great difference.
Finally, I am not the same person as I was 30 years ago. In the meantime I have seen many more films. This meant that I brought a new "eye" to the film, and for this I must thank Mark Cousins and his More 4 series on The History of Film. I definitely appreciated the first act more (the snowball fight), which had some technical innovations that I didn't spot or appreciate the first time I saw the film. Also, the actor playing the child Napoleon (Roudenko?) is superb. He's so good that you think of him as a "young" Dieudonné, who plays the adult Napoleon in the film. But in fact he is a better actor than Dieudonné.
The second act, when Napoleon is on Corsica, still drags a bit for me. There are some brilliant shots in it and I think Davis works hardest with the music here, but it's the one act where I lose a bit of my involvement. The political bits in Paris with Danton, Robespierre, Marat (the scene with his assassination is far longer and better restored) and Gance himself superb as Saint-Just are much more interesting.
Brownlow talks in the programme of the restoration and notes that, from having many scenes missing, he now found himself in the situation of having several different shots of the same scene. Does he go with the better performance but the poorer print? Or does he go with the better print? In effect Brownlow is taking on the role of editor here, rather than a mere recoverer of stock.
As for the end. Well, the audience knew it was coming. These were not the innocent watchers of 30 years ago at the Odeon Leicester Sq. Everyone that I heard talking seemed to be a film fanatic. Many were film writers. And yet, as the curtains roll back and the music builds up, and the three screens burst into light, they still all gasped. And one shot, near the end, which I had actually forgotten (my main memory is of the Gance trademark "assault on the senses" where you got about 40 shots a second hitting you from the three different screens) when there is that close-up of the eagle, using all three screens and thus the wing expanse as well as the head, well, that even got me applauding again. It's just a staggering shot.
I've said it before and I'll happily say it again; I consider those final 20 minutes to be the finest cinema I have ever seen, but it has to be seen in this proper format. The only thing that comes even close in terms of impact is that moment when the helicopters appear out of the sky in Apocalypse Now, but it's not really a contest. To watch it with a live orchestra, with Davis conducting his own full score in the US for the first time, made it all the better.
Of course, the audience rose as one at the end, and Davis, trooper that he is (he's 75, for goodness' sake) was beaming as he soaked it in.
I'd idly thought that this might be the start of some "proper" showings again worldwide, but it looks as if it was the San Francisco Silent Film Organization that put this together, rather than an initiative from Davis and Brownlow. And it cost them a lot to put on. If that's the case, this might actually have been the last time I could have seen Davis conducting this film, and the last time that I will have an opportunity to see it in its true format. It's just too expensive to put on.
And for that, I give many thanks that I can say, "I was there".
no subject
As regards the future of the blog, please do whatever seems right to you. I'm sure you will retain that hard core fan club, but never let it become a chore. Keep on keepin on. Cheers for the posting. Richard x
no subject