Margarethe von Trotta | Vision Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen (2009)

Margarethe von Trotta’s Vision Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen (2009) is inspired by the intriguing Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). The exemplary subject, costuming, lighting, architecture and photography combine to produce a good film. However, it is the integrity of the music that makes the film exceptional. Hildegard’s numerous gifts include composition and singing and Barbara Sukowa’s (Hildegard) fine voice (familiar through Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lola (1981)) is heard. I am not able speedily to identify obsolete medieval stringed instruments, but something that certainly ought to be a ten-stringed psaltery appears under the deft fingers of a recumbent nun and it takes my breath away. 

She appears to have command of the instrument. On the evening I saw the film, a journalist provided a succinct introduction to the film, observing that comparison had been drawn between it and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928) no doubt to Von Trotter’s disadvantage, as she would herself doubtless be the first to concede.  Notwithstanding, Vision does allude to Dreyer, in particular as Hildegard is examined by a dour throng of skeptical monks, questioning her claim to have divine visions. Further, Von Trotter does not shy from the devote self scourging and pure masochism of these brides (in His corporeal absence). After the death of the abbess, beneath the habit, I was expecting to witness a hair shirt perhaps seething with lice; but no. In a blissful Hammer moment, Von Trotter pulls all stops to discover a grisly delicate wire corslet that must be tugged from its pious host into whom it has stickily grown. Lately, I have frequently thought of this scene; though whilst listening to O frondens virga from Hildegarde’s Ordo Virtutum, one occasionally forgets.

Maximilian Erlenwein | Schwerkraft [Gravity] (2009)

The Audi German film festival is good. Maximilian Erlenwein’s Schwerkraft (2009) allows Frederick Feinermann (Fabian Hinrich) and Vince Holland (Jürgen Vogel) to explore the possibilities of existence in desultory contemporary Germany. There is much delicious anarchic vim and black humour, familiar to anglos from David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Guy Ritchie’s Snatch (2000). There are many fine scenes. I enjoyed the sadly romantic scene set in a crepuscular aquarium.  Plump fish can clearly be seen waggling past the lovers. While Mr Feinermann tries awkwardly to woo Nadine Joris (Nora von Waldstätten), the dissonant clamour of excited school girls can faintly be discerned. As the scene progresses the screaming increases until the large ecstatic party burst in upon the shy couple and surge about them like a blue shoal of pink hungry salmon.

Dalrymple | Gillray's Ungloomy Morality (2002)

(Theodore Dalrymple, Gillray’s Ungloomy Morality, 2002) “…. As soon as you entered the Tate's rooms whose walls were covered with Gillray's astonishing output of work, you realized - however much you thought you already knew about Gillray - that he did not so much depict or satirize as create and people a world. It is the same kind of achievement as Dickens's, fecund, imaginative,  and throbbing with life. Gillray's work, like that of Dickens,  uplifts even as it pours scorn on what it criticizes or derides. It is the expression of an uninhibited and fearless freedom of spirit such as one rarely encounters anywhere today and that is possible only in a free society that contests neither individuality nor individualism. You left the exhibition thinking not that human weakness, folly, and vice were any the less weakness, folly, and vice-on the contrary, you left with a heightened awareness of them all around you-but that life is a rich and splendid experience, if only you viewed it aright. You can have both fun and a moral standpoint: they are not mutually exclusive. Gillray, like Swift before him and Dickens after him, saw everything through a lens that clarified even as it distorted. It highlighted and distilled the salient moral characteristics of everyone and everything upon whom and upon which he turned it, and left the inessential out. This way of seeing is a mark (not the mark, of course) of original genius. It became second nature to Gillray, just as it was to Dickens, who, answering the accusation that his characters were mere caricatures, wrote in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit that what were caricatures to his critics were to him straightforward representations of people who were easily to be found by those with eyes to see and ears to hear: the fault was not in his writing but in his critics' restricted and unimaginative powers of perception. ....” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture What’s Left of it: The Mandarins & The Masses, Ivan R D, 2005)

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009)

Jan Kounen’s Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009) includes a clever reconstruction of the notorious premier of Rite of Spring. On the 29^th of May 1913 the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées erupts as the disgruntled or very far from gruntled bourgeoisie begins loudly expressing its chagrin. Vaslav Nijinsky’s spastic choreography does not mollify. The fertility rites, bellicosely choreographed, suck catcalls and whistles; whilst Stravinsky’s beautiful bassoon solo, deliciously played and tastefully repeated throughout the film, is rewarded with rhythmic and muscular booing. The assertively respectable and the aesthetically disreputable join in fisticuffs and an unimaginative exchange of invective, though alas only the later is depicted. Awfully clever moment occurs during the Sacrificial Dance when what appears to be the Chosen One, played by a charming pretty dancer, looking sincere and vulnerable, appears to be the entirely undeserving object of the swelling crescendo of audience hatred. I have been searching for her name, but can locate only an inclusive list of the Danseur 'Le Sacre du printemps'

Waugh | An Act of Homage & Reparation (1961)

(Waugh | An Act of Homage and Reparation Sunday Times 16/7/1961) “.... There was a cocky young reviewer a year or two ago who publicly debased himself by stating that Mr Wodehouse was out of date. In that young man’s sense, he has never been out of date. He inhabits a world as timeless as that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland; a world inhabited by strange transmogrifications. ….” (Gallagher D, The Essays Articles & Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, Methuen, 1983, p567) Aunts Aren’t Gentleman is published in 1975

Waugh | Carroll & Dodgson (1939)

[Waugh, Carroll & Dodgson Review of the Complete Works of Lewis Carroll Spectator 13/10/1939] “…. The peculiarity of the book lies in the fact that the narrator of this simple tale is intermittently haunted by two dream-children named Sylvie and Bruno. Sylvie has some undefined affinity to Lady Muriel, but Bruno, her junior, is a creation of unique horror, who babbles throughout in baby-talk, like the ‘control’ of a ‘medium’. These children first appear as characters in a dream and are part of a Ruritanian state named Outland. Soon, however, Outland and its intrigues disappear, and the children pop up during narrator’s waking hours. They come to tea with the earl and puzzle him with a bunch of exotic flowers; Bruno becomes so concrete that only the rival lover’s gallantry saves him from being run down by a railway train. Except for this single occasion, however, they play no part in the main story; they are not supernatural visitants of the type of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who appear in order to solve or complicate the affairs of the world, but aberrations of the narrator’s mind which, one cannot help guessing, correspond to some psychological peculiarity of Dodgson’s. ….” (Gallagher D, The Essays Articles & Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, Methuen, 1983, p261)

Waugh | Civilisation & Culture (1937)

[‘Waugh’s ‘Civilization & Culture’. Review of Stranger Wonders by Christopher Sykes, and The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron, Spectator 2/7/1937] “…. It is perhaps invidious to compare Mr Sykes and Mr Byron. Each appears in the other's book. They have travelled together and shared many appalling experiences; they once collaborated on an unreadable novel. Mr Sykes is a new writer and to that extent an amateur; Mr Byron is an inveterate and indefatigable professional; he began writing before most of his generation and will, I hope, long flourish when the rest of them have given up. They have an almost identical sense of humour, but there is an essential difference between them which must be noted and can best be stated by saying that Mr Sykes is civilized and Mr Byron is cultured. Mr Sykes is at home in Europe. He sees England as an outlying province of a wide civilization; he is by education a member of Christendom. Mr Byron suffers from insularity run amok; he sees his home as a narrowly circumscribed, blessed plot beyond which lie vast tracts of alien territory, full of things for which he has no responsibility, to which he acknowledges no traditional tie; things to be visited and described and confidently judged. So he admits no limits to his insatiable aesthetic curiosity and no standards of judgment but his personal reactions. It is a grave handicap, but Mr Byron’s gusto is so powerful that the reader can only applaud” (Gallagher D, The Essays Articles & Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, Methuen, 1983 p196f)

Kevin Lindsay | Jingo Linx (1973) Major Styre (1975)

Kevin Lindsay continues to delight me as the redoubtable Lieutenant Jingo Linx (1973), or is it Field Major Styre (1975)? Both are irresistibly, though ill-advisedly, teasable sontarans

François Desprez | Illustrations Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel (1565)

These extraordinary woodcuts of François Desprez are brought to my eye by BibliOdyssey. The deceptive simplicity of the draughtsmanship, the paucity of online information, and the fact that they are so droll, almost leads me to believe that in a delirious moment of divine creative inspiration, he has himself scribbled them. Reassuringly, online information upon the Woodcut provides 

“From the 1520s onwards, Venetian influence is obvious on Parisian outline book illustrations; at Lyons the miniaturist style of Hans Holbein II was more popular. Around 1550 six young woodcut artists—Germain Hoyau (c. 1515–83), Alain de Mathonière (c. 1533–75), Clément Boussy ( fl c. 1547–50), François de Gourmont (c. 1537–before 1598), Bonnemère (?Marin Bonnemer, fl c. 1568–71), and Fauler ( fl c. 1550)—established themselves in the Rue de Montorgueil, Paris. They and their descendants were joined by numerous other woodcutters, including Mathurin Nicolas, Nicolas Lefèvre and François Desprez, who were active in the 1560s.” (MoMA.org Art Terms Woodcut 3. C16 century) 

Tantalising, is it not, in its brevity?