Betrayal and Kristin Scott Thomas

I read Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in forty five minutes as prep for the new production at London’s Comedy Theatre. On the page, the dialogue looks like mental scratchings. Language pared down to the bare essentials, operating at the outskirts of anything we might commonly recognise as human discourse. Pinter’s tics and pauses carrying the terrifying freight of unspoken meaning. It is in all that is left unsaid or suggested that we complete the picture of ourselves. As Wittgenstein famously put it, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

In Betrayal, communication has been eroded by the failure of human beings to act personally and love faithfully. Infidelity, lies and unspoken knowledge have damaged the channels of human relationships, leaving the participants of this ménage a trois tongue tied by their actions:

Jerry
You’re looking very pretty.
Emma
Really? Thank you. I’m glad to see you.
Jerry
So am I. I mean to see you.
Emma
You think of me sometimes?
Jerry
I think of you sometimes.
Pause
I saw Charlotte the other day.
Emma
No? Where? She didn’t mention it.
Jerry
She didn’t see me. In the street.
Emma
But you haven’t seen her for years.
Jerry
I recognised her.

Betrayal is the perfect play for an actress such as Kristin Scott Thomas. It shows the full range of her remarkable acting ability. She can act below the surface of the words, every subterranean emotion visible in the tiniest vocal inflection or hesitation. Every facial detail or physical gesture signifiers of some pathos at the heart of what it is to be human.

This is not method acting where an actor attempts to psychologically inhabit a character. Instead, this is acting that feels more like a form of possession. Here it is the character that appears to inhabit the soul of the actress. Such acting, bypasses the familiar ways of understanding performance, that is, the action of people pretending to be other people in order to tell a story. The pretence element appears to have almost entirely dissolved, leaving a performance with a crystalline transparency and honesty. Kristin Scott Thomas is a very special actress and acting at the very height of her abilities.

Part of what makes us human is that we are creatures who must communicate. It is not an optional exercise. Discussing the nature of communication, Adam Philips in Monogomy writes, “you cannot be for it or against. You can only do it more or less well – by your own standards or by other people’s – but you can’t not do it.”

In Betrayal, Kristin Scott Thomas’s finely calibrated performance shows how words can mask what we really want or need to say. We are given a real sense that the lies, spoken and unspoken, that surround marital infidelity exist as a cover for our destructive actions. Yet, what we cannot escape, whether it comes to light or not, is the truth about ourselves and our actions.

Senna

The verdict that so-and-so is “a legend” is passed too frequently and glibly these days. Once probed, there is often scant evidence to prove the case. But, after watching Asif Kapadia’s engrossing (if ten minutes too long) documentary, Senna, it is clear that there is an abundance of evidence to justify Ayrton Senna’s place in the pantheon of sporting legends.

Kapadia presents a chronological biography of Senna using dramatic footage not only of Senna racing, but of the politics and arguments behind the Formula 1 scenes. As the film unfolds, the Tamburello corner that took his life comes into view. With little commentary or talking heads to colour one’s opinion of the man, the footage is allowed to speak for itself and the audience (especially people like myself who know little about F1) are allowed to come to their own conclusions about Ayrton Senna. There is something uncomplicated and refreshing about this approach.

There is all the drama of Senna’s rivalry with the taciturn Frenchman, Alain Prost. There is remarkable footage of Senna racing and when racing in the rain, doing so with an inspiring fearlessness. There is Senna speaking his mind and standing up for what he believes in. There’s Senna the playboy and symbol of hope for the people of Brazil. But, as Simon Barnes, points out:

Senna’s response to the separation imposed on him by his gifts was humility. It was not he who was great, it was God. His talent was both burden and gift. His great rival, Alain Prost, openly scoffed that Senna’s problem was that he believed he was immortal, but that was not the case.

Senna never saw himself in messianic terms. He saw himself as a vehicle, a strange thing for a driver, but he was a vehicle for God’s power on earth. After one particularly brilliant drive, he said in wonder: “I saw God.” For him, there was far more to sport than victory. Such things are just stations on the way to a greater revelation. Sport reveals truths – about humans and their relationship with the world, about God too, if you will – that are far greater than two-nil or three sets to love.

It is clear that Senna was no mystic in a yellow racing helmet. The film makes clear he enjoyed too much the sensual pleasures of life. However, Senna does appear to have had a sense that he was set apart, that his remarkable talent was pure gift from something that transcended his own abilities and finiteness. For him, that something was God.

His was a talent that pushed him beyond ordinary human limits, to levels unimaginable and previously unseen. He could see the gap that no one else could see and take the risks (often with his own life and sometimes with others lives) that no one else would. It wasn’t just his expertise in a car, pushing it to the outer edge of its limits, that people admired but his mental stamina in achieving this. Senna manages to capture this – the flair of an incredible sportsman and the inner world, with its own chiaroscuro, that can turn a man into a legend.

Apocalypse Now - a flawed masterpiece?

The making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now has passed into cinema history. A catalogue of disasters threatened to railroad the film. These have been documented in his wife, Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 film, Hearts of Darkness: a filmmaker’s apocalypse. Shot on location in the Philippines (a scheduled 17 week shoot ended up being 34 weeks and the budget spiraled from $12-13 million to $31), a rain drenching typhoon destroyed huge sets and stopped the production. The star, Martin Sheen (who had replaced Harvey Keitel), suffered a near-fatal heart attack. Marlon Brando (then being paid the enormous fee of $3.5 million for a month’s location work) turned up so overweight that he could not perform his scenes in the script and his performance was reduced to the famous talking head in shadow. There were extra marital affairs on set, drug taking and Coppola became suicidal as he shot hundreds of hours of material in the face of adversity. When he finally presented a cut to the studio it ran for over six hours and he was sent back to the editing suite.

He returned to the studio bosses with a 153 minute version of the film and it is this that has just been re-released in this country. It is a remarkable cinematic experience. Without the aid of CGI engineering, there are scenes that are so technically complex, emotionally evocative and visually dense that it is a small miracle that they ever made it from one man’s imagination on to celluloid. These supercharged moments, choreographed with fearless audacity, take your breath away. Mixing symbolic, Bunuel-like sequences with straight war-genre action, Coppola scrambles our expectations and creates a disorientating space where the confusion, violence and madness of war and human hubris can be viewed from multiple perspectives. A film of such scale and artistic ambition, a film that defies facile categorization, cries out to be seen on the big screen. Don’t watch it on DVD.

The general orthodoxy is that Apocalypse Now is a masterpiece but a flawed one. That in the final analysis, Coppola was not in control of his material and that the last twenty minutes of the film (those where Marlon Brando appears as the demented Kurtz) lack cohesion and sap the film of its explosive energy. I disagree. Apocalypse Now is a masterpiece and all the kinetic expansiveness of the earlier parts of the film find a proper resting place in the dreamy, meditative quality found in those final eerie scenes in Kurtz’s lair. Coppola’s brave decision not to conclude the film with another bravura set piece, but to steer the audience towards quotations from T.S.Eliot’s Hollow Men and Joseph Conrad’s novella, The Heart of Darkness is correct. Coppola understood that he wasn’t making an action movie, but a literary movie that could move an audience to deeper consideration of human failure and moral contradiction.

Apocalypse Now is a masterpiece. Go and make your own mind up, but go.

Apocalypse Now: why we love violence and war

A new print of the 1979 version of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is in selected cinemas now. It is a masterpiece. In a future post, I’ll challenge the common consensus that argues it is a “flawed masterpiece” and the flaw is Marlon Brando. Until then, have a look at my fellow blogger, Fr Stephen Wang’s great piece on the film on his blog, Bridges and Tangents. Apocalypse Now visualises many of the ideas that Barbara Ehrenreich considers in her fascinating book, Blood Rites: The Origins and History of the Passions of the War.

Why is it that human beings are so keen to wage war? Is war primarily a male pursuit? Fully aware of the horrors of war, why do we continue to inflict suffering and death on other human beings? Why are we so attracted to violence? Why do we think aggression is an acceptable way to resolve our problems and disputes? What turned Cain against Abel and initiated the tragic cycle of internecine violence? Ehrenreich quotes Tolstoy on the question of what “causes” war or any particular war:

The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more we discover, and each single cause or series of causes appears to be equally valid in itself, and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event.

Blood Rites is an attempt to untangle these causes and isolate those fundamental causes that stimulate the pathological desire for war. One fundamental cause, Ehrenreich proposes, is man’s primitive need for sacrifice, where the sacrifice (human or animal) restores order and promotes some form of reconciliation. She points out that these sacrifices were often enacted in ritual form – involving hymns, uniform gestures, sacred sites, costumes and a priestly caste. Such ritual form, she argues, has passed over to military activity where warfare is sacralised. This idea reminds me very much of the thought of René Girard as found in his influential book, Violence and the Sacred. I am a huge fan of Girard and admire his speculative energy.

Girard claims that war and sacrifice were, from the earliest times, integrally related to each other and had a common goal. They reigned in the aggressive forces within a community that had the potential to tear it apart and, instead, channelled those forces towards an enemy (in the case of war) or a sacrificial victim (in the case of religion). So, Girard argues:

Religion in its broadest sense...must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds man’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative means from his own violence.

The god to whom the sacrifice is offered is only of secondary interest, according to Girard. What matters is that the victim must be seen as a scapegoat and endure a violent and public death. Girard points to the ancient Greek ritual in which a pauper who had been cared for at public expense becomes the cure (the pharmakos) for the community’s evils, actual or potential. He would be driven outside the city’s walls and possibly be killed. In time, an animal would serve as the designated victim, the scapegoat, upon whom the sins of the people would be heaped. The slaughtering of the scapegoat had the symbolic force of taking away their sins and restoring social cohesion.

War, according to Girard, is “merely another form of sacrificial violence”. Apocalypse Now ends with both a ritual act of sacrifice and the sacrifice of a military hero. In the film, these sacrifices lead to the laying down of arms. A Girardian would read these scenes as the preservation of communal identity by transferring internal conflict outward and onto a scapegoat. As Girard himself writes:

We see here the principle behind all “foreign” wars: aggressive tendencies that are potentially fatal to the cohesion of the group are redirected from within the community to outside it.

Blood Rites: The Origins and History of the Passions of War, Barbara Ehrenreich, Granta, 2011

Violence and the Sacred, René Girard, Continuum, 2005

And the winner of the Cannes Film Festival Best Picture is ....

Since writing my blog post this morning it has been announced that Terence Malick's The Tree of Life has, in fact, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival 2011.

The greatest film director of all time?

A new Terence Malick film is a cinematic event. And they are events that don't happen very often - Malick's last film, The New World, was released six years ago. But, in the past week, The Tree of Life previewed at the Cannes film festival. For those who love movies the excitement around this film - a family drama spanning multiple time periods including the creation of the universe - is palpable. The critic, Chris Wisniewski, sums up why Malick is such a significant director:

Those rambling philosophical voice overs; the placid images of nature, offering quiet contrast to the evil deeds of men; the stunning cinematography, often achieved with natural light; the striking use of music - here is a filmmaker with a clear sensibility and aesthetic who makes narrative films that are neither literary nor theatrical, in the sense of foregrounding dialogue, event, or character, but are instead principally cinematic, movies that suggest narrative, emotion and idea through image and sound.

One thing Wisniewski overlooks is Malick's intelligence. There are not many directors that studied for a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford. Malick's thesis, under the direction of Gilbert Ryle, was on the concept of world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. These philosophical interests underpin his cinematic work. So, for example, The Thin Red Line, uses the visual medium of cinema to discuss the nature of original sin. In this way, Malick takes cinema to an intellectual level that is rarely explored by other directors.

Peter Bradshaw awarding The Tree of Life five stars in The Guardian, writes that "This is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison."

Time Out's Dave Calhoun said: "The Tree of Life offers breathtaking imagery and even manages to survive an epic detour to the dawn of time, featuring the Big Bang, dinosaurs, meteors and all.

"It's so ambitious and full of inquiring ideas and questions about our place in the world that, perhaps inevitably, it feels like a grand folly - albeit a heartfelt and stimulating one."

What Sport Tells Us About Life

I have just read What Sport Tells Us About Life by the cricketer, Ed Smith. It is not only stylishly written, but also keeps in the air all sorts of eclectic ideas that provide much intellectual enjoyment and stimulation. I was particularly struck by the chapter on amateurism and the way Ed Smith draws convincing parallels between sporting and artistic creativity.

In sport (and elsewhere), amateurism is a derogatory term. As the literary critic D.J.Taylor put it, “The amateur, formerly the symbol of fair play and a stout heart, became the watchword for terminal second-rateness and lower-rung incompetence.”

Ed Smith is concerned that the relentless pursuit of “professionalism” has discouraged “an instinctiveness and individuality that is well suited to producing success in sport”. The thing that most of us enjoy about sport and art are those moments of creativity and inspiration, when an individual or team are not playing safe, but transgress regulations, planning and over organization to produce something innovative and beautiful.

In his autobiography, Chronicles, Bob Dylan writes, “Creativity is not like a freight train going down the tracks. It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect. If your mind is intellectually in the way, it will stop you. You’ve got to programme your brain not to think too much.”

In other words, creativity – whether in the arts or sport or elsewhere – lies beyond easy analysis. Indeed, over analysis impedes the creative spirit, makes it tense and sclerotic. In this regard, the sports writer, Simon Barnes, comments:

If you look at your own talent too searchingly, it might cease to be what it is. If you bring these highly trained but deeply instinctual matters to the level of conscious thought, the magic stuff might never happen again...Ian Botham would only describe his outbursts of brilliance with the phrase “it sort of clicks”.

The literary critic, Christopher Ricks, sees the link between artistic and sporting creativity in these terms:

An artist is someone more than usually blessed with a cooperative subconscious, more than usually able to effect things with the help of instincts and intuitions of which he or she is not necessarily conscious. Like the great athlete, the great artist is at once highly trained and deeply instinctual.

Great artists and sportsmen have a freedom and instinctiveness about what they do. A sort of childlike joy infuses the hours of practice and training and stops sport and art becoming a matter of mere professional concern. “Playing with joy,” writes Ed Smith, “without concern about the money you might earn or the criticism you may provoke, often makes sportsmen play better. An unburdened sportsman is more likely to play at his best.”

If all that is true of sport and art, then might living with joy, being unburdened and having a lightness of being, also help us to live in a more complete, creative and inspiring manner?

What Sport Tells Us About Life, Ed Smith, Penguin Books, 2008