An attempt to map some of the features of the cultural landscape while challenging the current orthodoxy that culture and faith inevitably exist in opposition. The Invisible Province seeks to show that modern culture cannot sever itself from questions of transcendence and faith and nor can faith distance itself from culture. In surveying the fault lines between culture and faith, The Invisible Province reimagines this relationship and suggests avenues for mature dialogue.
Last night, I had the privilege of watching two actresses at the height of their powers. Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams mesmerise the audience in Ian Rickson’s pellucid production of Harold Pinter’s Old Times. They play the roles of a wife and stranger with such technical purity and emotional sincerity that their performances acquire a balletic quality. This is acting in its most concentrated and distilled form – these actresses are not play acting imaginary characters, rather, they are embracing the opaque quality of what it is to be alive and to love.
Pinter’s play is interested in how our memory of past events shapes and informs the way we live in the present. We always approach the people we know with a store of memories of who they were at different times in the past. Yet, these memories are plastic and unreliable. We manipulate and edit our memories to suit our psychological needs. We never experience memory in a neutral way. “I remember things that may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place,” writes Pinter. The forty-year old characters in the play look back to the bars, clubs and art galleries of their youth as a way of making sense of their present environment. The memories of youthful flirtation and desire are manipulated to excuse the silent terrors of ageing. In the end, Deeley is defeated by his past. He becomes a sobbing wreck before the knowledge of who he was and what he has become. Old Times exposes how memory and power act as an invisible web to so many of our adult relationships
Kristin Scott Thomas is the perfect Pinter temptress. She captures the potent sensuality that some middle aged women possess. They are charged with an eroticism that comes from experience and an unshakeable self-confidence. Kristin Scott Thomas slinks and smooths and stretches like something feline. Yet, we know she also can also flash her claws. Lia Williams, on the other hand, is a master class in buttoned up, corseted rage. She has all the power in this triangular relationship and knows it. But the power is contained, nuclear, and only leaks as she finally turns on Anna and coldly admits, “I remember you. I remember you dead.”
Two great actresses. One actor, admirably holding his own. 80 minutes of gripping, thought provoking theatre. A mysterious Pinter play. Oh and I’ll be back to see if it was as good as I remember it to be.
Old Times by Harold Pinter at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
Barack Obama, Inauguration Speech 2013
It seemed kind of appropriate that I saw Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Django Unchained, on the day that Barack Obama, the first black President of the United States, gave his inauguration address. There was much to enjoy in Obama’s speech and much to enjoy in Django Unchained. Let me mention a few of those things:
1. Samuel L. Jackson gives the performance of his career. Jackson plays an old slave, Stephen, who is fiercely loyal to his plantation owning master, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Stephen is repaid for his loyalty by having the ear of his master and access to the contents of his drinks cabinet. Jackson plays this attendant as a stereotype Uncle Tom figure, a kind of benign grandpa figure that you might find singing zipeedeedooda in another film genre. However, there is nothing benign about Stephen. He is a malevolent racist - spewing racial hatred and dehumanising his fellow slaves. He has styled himself as a black spokesman for white supremacy and the guardian of a vicious system of oppression. Jackson’s characterisation captures all the self-loathing and moral contradictions within this racist collaborator. It is a performance of psychological daring - one that is bristling with danger and menace. It leaves you open mouthed and deeply uncomfortable.
2. A superb musical soundtrack which exercises more than a background function. The meticulously chosen music provides a referential depth to the screen action. Tarantino has a magpie ear. He lifts music from other films and mixes musical genres with little regard for the historical context of the film - country, rap, soul, love ballads, classical are all to be found in Django Unchained. It’s a kind of postmodern game, mixing high and low culture in musical mash ups, but it works because you believe Tarantino loves the music he chooses. There is nothing philosophically arch about his choices. Tarantino layers musical references in order to arouse an audience’s aural imagination and complement the visual, storytelling experience. So, for example, the opening titles of Django Unchained are accompanied by the Luis Bacalov’s romantic theme song from the 1965 film melodrama, Django. In lyrical and musical terms it positions Tarantino’s contemporary take on the western revenge saga somewhere between the cinematic history of the western and a philosophical reflection on slavery.
3. Tarantino’s dialogue fizzes with energy and irreverence. Westerns usually have very little dialogue. Traditionally, the heroes of these movies are the big, strong, silent types. Characters in westerns talk with their Smith and Wessons. In Django Unchained the characters are wordy and lippy. There is a wonderful scene where a lynch mob on horseback argue about a design failure in the bags they are using to cover their faces – the eyes have been cut in such a way that it makes it impossible for them to see where they are going. Their comical exchange of views unmasks the horrific absurdity of their racist actions and their own moral blindness. Such sharpness and precision of writing is a thing of pleasure.
4. Tarantino's courage. Hollywood’s treatment of slavery can be rather worthy and tentative. For example, think of Stephen Spielberg’s The Color Purple and Amistad. To my mind, only Lars von Trier’s Manderley has succeeded in challenging the stock cinematic responses to slavery. The Guardian film critic, Peter Bradshaw, remarks that “Slavery is a subject on which modern Hollywood is traditionally nervous, a reticence amounting almost to a conspiracy of silence – except, of course, in the explicit context of abolition. As far as Hollywood is concerned, the day-to-day existence of unabolished slavery has been what welfare reformists call the live rail: don’t touch it.” Tarantino’s Django Unchained is not an historical account of American slavery. Django Unchained is a provocative, cinematic essay on the concept of slavery and how human flesh becomes currency. I admired Tarantino’s courage in tackling the issue.
After the duff, over blown, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained is Tarantino striding back into town and shooting from the hip. The geek director offers us a slave trade spaghetti western interbred with a Jacobean revenge drama. There are longeurs, contrived plot moments (including one with the director doing an Alfred Hitchcock – don’t give up the day job, Mr Tarantino) and moments when ideas aren’t pulled off. Yet, Django Unchained remains bravura film making. It’s not for those with weak constitutions, but it is for those who want to see an important film director back on form and with fire in his belly.
In A Light that Never Goes Out, the author Tony Fletcher places the phenomenon of The Smiths in the socio-political history of 1980’s Britain, paying particular attention to the city of Manchester, the birthplace of the pop group. The sifting of contextual details provides Fletcher with new methods with which to evaluate the music of The Smiths and their continuing influence.
Fletcher contends that the unique creative energies that shaped the songs of The Smiths are inextricably bound up with, for example, local geography: Whalley Range, the moors, Rusholme. Figures such as Myra Hindley, Alan Sillitoe and Margaret Thatcher inform the content and textural feel of these songs. Fletcher sets out to show that Morrissey’s magpie appropriation of ideas were as much cultural as they were musical - beside the vinyl of The New York Dolls you would find a copy of A Taste of Honey.
One of these cultural influences was the Irish, working class Catholicism that both Morrissey and Marr were weaned on as “cradle Catholics”. Catholic parish churches and schools had been created in the nineteenth century as the loci of community cohesion and identity. This remained the case into the twentieth century and, indeed, up until the present time. The famous Loreto College, founded by the sisters of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1854, was very much a defining presence in Manchester and could be seen from the Morrissey’s terraced house on Queen’s Square.
It is hard to determine the veracity of Morrissey’s version of his childhood Catholicism and that is, in part, because Tony Fletcher’s own antipathy to Catholicism colours his judgement. It suits Fletcher to accept Morrissey’s sour version of events. Morrissey never lets the truth get in the way of a good turn of phrase - his self portrait of the artist as a young man feels too contrived to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. An example of this is the following account of his disenchantment with the Catholic Faith. It sounds “quite absurdly” partial:
I came from a monstrously large family who were quite absurdly Catholic...when I was six there were two serious tragedies (the death of two grandparents) within the family which caused everybody to turn away from the church, and quite rightly so, and from that period onwards there was just a total disregard for something that was really quite sacrosanct previous to the tragedies.
But, in fact, there was not a total disregard for Catholicism in the Morrissey household - far from it. Morrissey would go on to make his First Holy Communion, Confession and Confirmation. He would attend St Mary’s secondary school, becoming a member of Margaret Clitherow House. His childhood and teenage years were immersed in Catholicism which would later feed his lyrical imagination. The affectionate, music hall song, Vicar in a Tutu, with its monkish monsignor advising, "My man, get your vile soul dry-cleaned" is one of the few compositions which references religion explicitly. Yet, there is a Catholic sensibility that informs these songs of death, martyrdom and immortality.
“Those Catholics, they really nab you when you’re young,” Morrissey admitted to Douglas Coupland in a 2006 interview, “They sear you. They sear you, they do.” This contradicts the simplistic view that Morrissey abandoned his Catholic faith to become the prodigal son of popular music. Far from being a cosmetic addition to his being, Morrissey senses that his Catholic Faith has transformed him ontologically, in ways so profound that he cannot rationalise them away. Morrissey’s relationship to his faith is more complex and subtle than Fletcher would have us believe.
One of Morrissey’s heroes, Oscar Wilde, famously said that “Catholicism is the only religion to die in.” Wilde, of course, did die a Catholic. Given his family background, Catholicism was the only religion that Morrissey could have been born into. At his death, will Morrissey meet Wilde at the cemetery gates? I wouldn't bet against it.
2012 began with a great film and ended with a great film.
In January, Steve McQueen's Shame was released in the UK. I can't begin to describe the impact this film has had on me, months later and it still haunts my imagination. The story of a sex addicted drone (Michael Fassbender) and his mentally unstable sister (Carey Mulligan) was treated with such sensitivity and compassion that it became almost unbearable to watch. For me, one of the greatest pieces of pure cinema occurs in this film: an extended tracking shot of Fassbender jogging through a nocturnal city, desperately trying to sweat out of his system his distorted, contradictory passions. Technically, the most amazing tracking shot since Touch of Evil and Raging Bull. Existentially, the most poetic summary of the contemporary predicament.
In December, I saw Amour - Michael Haneke's penetrating examination of old age, sickness and death. There's not an ounce of sentimental fat on this film. The story of an elderly husband who cares for his wife is told with a fierce tenderness and humanity. Every frame of this film has a painterly quality. Every emotion on the screen is delivered with gamma knife precision. Cinema for adults only.
And so, there is no favourite film this year. For me, Shame and Amour both take the top spot. They share the laurel crown.
And my other favourites:
Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master - Anderson is the new Kubrick. Joaquin Pheonix gave a performace of such feral rawness and strangeness that it tore up the screen.
Leos Carax's Holy Motors - it is demented, punk, exotic and completely mesmerising. People use the word "surreal" about things that are merely strange. But this film is surreal. Holy Motors takes its place alongside Dali and Bunuel as a surrealist work of art.
Sam Mendes' Skyfall - this Bond movie looked a million dollars and that was thanks to the remarkable cinematographer, Roger Deakins. It was tense and exciting, until the anti-climactic final scenes (big Scottish pile in the Highlands blows up...yawn). It also had the campest villain in any multiplex film I can recall. Javier Bardem channelling Kenneth Williams and Augusto Pinochet.
Constellations is seventy minutes long. No interval. Most “scenes” are brief. Blink and you’ll miss some of them. The stage is bare apart from white helium balloons, heavenly spheres or molecular models, that float above the action. Two actors (Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall) are on stage throughout.
Constellations is a boy meets girl love story – a metaphysical romcom with dark metastases. A love story about the infinite, shifting possibilities of love. This is a theatrical chamber piece written with intellectual dexterity and played with inventive commitment.
Marianne, a vivacious quantum physicist at Sussex University, and Roland, a blokeish beekeeper, meet at barbeque. There’s a bit of awkward flirting. She makes a joke that bombs and any possibility of romance ends there. But then the meeting is played out again in a parallel universe. Slight variations in the original meeting – the turn of a phrase, the language of their bodies – result in new outcomes. Another universe. Another meeting. Exponential results. And so on, until we see their love for each other take shape.
The defining moments of their relationship are played out in these parallel universes. The theoretical existence of a multiverse, that our lives and deaths can be played out in any number of ways, is what excites motor mouthed Marianne. For Roland, struggling to keep up with his girlfriend’s lessons in quantum mechanics, the three different kinds of bees, each with their specific purpose in the hive, provide him with a key to understanding the purpose of life. “If only we could understand why it is that we’re here and what it is that we’re meant to spend our lives doing.” The word “God” punctuates the play as a challenge to positivistic ways of thinking.
Constellations is thought provoking and stylish, but it's not as clever as it would like us to believe it is. The playwright, Nick Payne, can’t quite make up his mind whether he wants to engage our hearts or our minds. In the end, he does neither.
What this production does have are the two perfectly pitched, charismatic performances of Hawkins and Spall. Their relationship fizzes on stage with authenticity and tenderness. They remind us that love, in all its complex variations, is the atomic matter that makes us who we are. Love is the driving force of the universe.
Constellations by Nick Payne is currently playing at the Duke of Yorks Theatre, London.
Some music is so exquisitely beautiful that it acts as a healing balm to all that is bruised and hurting within us. Some music embracing the this-ness of life, a never ending happening, swells the chambers of the heart. And then there is music with a radiant clarity, a transfiguring power, that forces you to your knees before the mystery of creation. Bill Fay’s remarkable album, Life is People, possesses all of the above.
In the early 1970’s Fay released two critically acclaimed albums that made little impression on the listening public. He was a voice crying in the wilderness of the music business. Having fallen out of favour with the accountants at Decca, Fay became a lapsed singer-songwriter. He made ends meet by working in parks, shops and by cleaning factories.
However, some of his followers remained faithful to his memory and treasured their vinyl copy of his 1971 masterpiece Time of the Last Persecution. His fans, including Nick Cave, Marc Almond and Julian Cope, never lost faith and waited for his return from exile. This finally happened in 2007 when the US indie band, Wilco (who performed a cover of Fay’s Be not so Fearful), persuaded Fay to step on stage with them.
Now, forty years after his last studio album, Fay has returned from the wilderness of his personal Lent. In his cupped hands he carries a music that is fragile and poetic, birdsong with a broken wing. This music has a prophetic pitch. It sings of the soul of man. It draws tears.
Strings, Gospel choirs, piano, electric guitars combine with Fay’s rich, bass voice to produce an album of musical conviction and integrity. Dense, lush arrangements (Cosmic Concerto) are balanced with a spare, compelling intimacy (Jesus, Etc.). Fay’s unpretentious lyrics have a Blakean quality – adult experience expressed with a childlike innocence and purity.
These songs chart Fay’s search for the voice of the Holy One, a voice that is so often drowned out by the ferocious chatter within us and the white noise of a technologically oversaturated culture where oases of repose are hard to find. Life is People has the feel of a contemporary psalter, a collection of deeply-felt songs recording exile, redemption and thanksgiving: Thank you, Lord, for the love you’ve shown me/ your Son on the Cross is ever before me.
There are miracles in the strangest of places, Fay declares, there are miracles everywhere you go. A couple of weeks ago, I had never heard of Bill Fay. Danny Watson, a father who has a son in the choir at Brentwood Cathedral, recommended this album to me. I know Danny has a great love and knowledge of popular music so I thought it was worth taking his recommendation seriously. I’m glad I did and I’m indebted to him for introducing me to Bill Fay.
Listening to Life is People for the first time was a kind of miraculous cure. It was as if some unexpected, buffeting power caught me unawares and knocked me sideways. I had been deaf for so long, without realising it, and now could hear again. I could hear “the still, sad music of humanity” and had been given a note with which to sing new songs to the Lord. Yes, there are miracles in the strangest places, even in Brentwood Cathedral Clergy House.
Life is People is a masterpiece. Listen all you that have ears!
And my other favourites of 2012:
Channel Orange by Frank Ocean Blunderbuss by Jack White Devotion by Jessie Ware Is your Love Big Enough? by Lianne la Havas An Awesome Wave by Alt-J
Haneke’s interest is the fragility of the human enterprise and an individual’s vulnerability before the demands of living. In the face of violence (Funny Games) or an obsessive relationship (The Piano Teacher), when living under the surveillance camera (Hidden) or the brutality of provincial totalitarianism (The White Ribbon), what moral response is appropriate? His cinematic answers are tenebrous.
Like previous films, Amour is concerned with the vulnerability of the human situation – in this case, the ageing process and the degradations that some of the elderly will face as their bodies and minds begin to fail them. In such circumstances, what does love look like? What does it cost? What, if anything, remains of love?
Haneke places our mortal natures on the dissection table and, using the sharpest visual imaging, picks them clean until the whites of our bones are laid bare. The process of sickness, deterioration and death are recorded with mimetic detail. It is designed to make your skin crawl. “Death subtends life, or underlies life,” the pathologist F Gonzales-Crussi writes, “and the action of time consists in peeling away successive layers so as to render death ever more visible.” The relentless erosion caused by suffering and death appals our Western liberal sensitivities. Our attempts to preserve ourselves from suffering are shown to be futile - no one escapes death. We would prefer decay and corruption to be hidden from public view, behind a hospital ward curtain. But our familiarity with suffering and death also provide us with a brutal clarity about what it is to be alive.
Amour is about an elderly married couple, Georges and Anne (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva). They are classical musicians who live in a chic Parisian apartment, designed around their cultural interests: books, paintings and a grand piano. The passage of time has matured and softened their love for each other. This is expressed in small acts of physical tenderness and a stability found in shared experiences. When Anne has a stroke, leaving her paralysed, George chooses to care for her at home. The film follows the decline of her mental and physical faculties over the weeks and months and George’s response to her deterioration.
In Haneke’s film, Funny Games, two delinquent, violent youths invade the home of a family and torture them with “games” that are anything but funny. The theme of invasion of a home occurs again in Amour, where George and Anne’s home is invaded by sickness and death. It is chilling to watch the mechanical bed being fitted in the bedroom, every bedside table top being annexed by boxes of medication and other medical detritus. Their home is violated by these objects and slowly transformed into a mausoleum. Mortality plays funny games with them.
In all of this, Haneke finds moments of tenderness – the calming experience of a caress, the care with which a lovingly prepared meal is spoon fed, the intimacy of sharing childhood memories that cement their love. Old age and a long marriage are portrayed as beautiful things. But Haneke articulates this without sacrificing the psychological complexity of his characters. We see how generosity of intention and violent energies can coexist in the same nature; the fact that individuals can live lonely, even desperate lives, within otherwise mutually sustaining relationships. “You are a monster sometimes. You are also kind” Anne says to George.
Trintignant and Riva perfectly capture the fundamental splits, dualities and twinnings at the heart of George and Anne’s marriage. Both in their eighties, these actors produce performances that are perfectly pitched. By making themselves completely vulnerable before the camera, they make emotional and physical disintegration, sublime. It is deeply moving to see acting of such depth and honesty.
Amour makes so much other film-making look crass and adolescent. It does what all great art does - it tells us something about the ineffable business of being alive. That may not always be something we want to consider, but when we do, we grow and mature in ways that are beyond our imagining. We leave behind consoling deceptions and illusions – we become adults.
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