Ceci n'est pas une movie?

I have just watched another one of those so-called compilation programmes (Great Movie Mistakes 2: The Sequel, presented by Robert Webb, BBC 3, January 30), and have come to one conclusion: boring. Aside from the (pop) corny name and the disorienting, quick-cut presentation style, what do programmes like GMM2 tell us, except that movie directors are human and do make mistakes. The entire format has raised questions in my mind. Who are these people who have seemingly nothing else to do by scan decades of film footage, and grow orgasmic when they spot a continuity error in the plot? Do they get paid for it, and how much? And are these errors so very deleterious of said movies, great and small, in any case?
So what if Johnny Depp’s dark glasses mirror the camera as he plays Willie Wonka, or Roger Moore is suffering from necktie confusion. Didn’t James Bond have a number of more pressing matters on his mind, like keeping the West secure against the nasty Commies, and the attractive young lady awaiting him in the hotel bedroom?
At one level, the errors will be of use to film historians in centuries to come. At another level, they raise questions about the nature of reality. A movie is a work of art; it is not ‘real’ any more than a book or painting is. The cinema audience knows this, as do the actors and the director. An error in a movie is akin to a pentimento in a painting, those charming blunders that become more apparent on the surface of an oil painting as it ages. But you don’t go into a gallery in search of the perfect painting, any more than a reader seeks the perfect book.
In any work of art, the artist seeks to create an illusion, one that can paradoxically be shattered by the over-earnest search for perfection by the artist. We all know that Leonardo’s grandly-dressed urban lady could not really have stood against a backdrop of fields and mountains, but from all over the world we flock to see the Mona Lisa. In my opinion, the worst thing they ever did during the Renaissance was to tell wannabee artists about Zeuxis and the grapes – but that is a story for another time.

Go compare?

The rumblings of discontent that were soft at first have grown louder and louder until they now reach a crescendo as loud and screechy as the advertisement in question – yes, that one, that dire travesty of an opera singer telling us to go compare. Newspaper columnists, footballers’ wives, my relatives, all, are rising in protest against Go Compare man. Yet, no-one seems to be able to do anything about him. Like the common cold, he just will not go away. My take?
I hate that man. I can’t stand him. I can’t stand his fright wig nor those twirly-twirly fake mustachios. I can’t stand the way they’ve stuffed his paunchy body into that evening suit. I can’t stand those cloying warblings that parody the entire notion of what real opera singing is – come back, Nessun Dorma. All is forgiven.
Just recently, I noticed that they have watered down the original advertisement into a monochrome, flickering, ye olde filme pastiche of its former self. But it is too little, too late. Go Compare man still takes centre stage, and an entire generation has been alienated from the opera. Significantly, in spite of his persistent bleatings, I still didn’t know what he was telling up to go compare, or how, or why. I took courage and paid a visit to the Go Compare website. To my horror I discovered that Go Compare man has an identity. He is named Gio Compario, writes a regular blog and, surprise, surprise, his blogging is just as appealing as his singing. Just recently, new words to his song have floated into my head. Join me now in singing I despair, I despair…

The Tangram...

Most board games leave me well, bored, but there are some delightful exceptions topping the boxed heaps of chaff. One of these is that tantalising Chinese puzzle, the tangram. Its origins are lost in millennia, and it arrived in America in 1815, shipped by a Captain M. Donaldson. It was an instant hit in the parlour-bound society of the West where countless ladies sat, looking for material to manipulate with relentlessly restless fingers. The tangram, also a brain teaser, proved an ideal distraction.
It consists of a square carved into seven definable geometric pieces, five triangles, a parallelogram and a small square, a fraction the area of its larger parent. These shapes can be formed into thousands of patterns that resemble people, animals, birds and so on. Their stylised nature is prescient of suprematism, an artistic philosophy that emerged in the early twentieth century. Kasimir Malevich found abstract, geometrical forms the embodiment of a higher reality. Whatever, there is something eminently soothing about the hours spent focused upon these shapes, forming and reforming them again.
The tangram presents a number of mathematical paradoxes best defined by experts in the many books written about it. The puzzle can be made of materials like plastic, cardboard, and so on. But for a more sensual touch, seek out a set in classy wood. My young niece has a ‘competitive’ version, where two players seek to outwit each other in constructing tangram forms selected at random from a deck of cards. But I would eschew the competitive element and simply get lost in the sheer pleasure got from working with ‘pure’ forms, a reminder that I once dubbed geometry visual poetry.

The shape of things...

For as long as I can remember, I have wondered about those little, stylised representations of ‘men’ and ‘women’, when in search of a public convenience. I always think about the stick figure with the skirt: do the majority of women look like this? Just recently, I was confined to bed and was reading through a bundle of magazines, when I came across a feature by a writer recollecting his maiden aunt who wore a salmon-coloured corset underneath her clothes, for all the days of her life. What puzzled him most was that his aunt, in his opinion, was in no need of such a garment because she was so skinny.
Ah, dearie me! I screamed with laughter as I remembered my Nanna and her attachment to her corset. Like all Victorian ladies, she had been put into ‘stays’ at an early age, then had grown up and old, that way. Size didn’t come into it. In her opinion, a lady was not properly dressed without a corset. Getting into the corset was a coming of age ritual for the Victorian girl, it seems. Sometime in her teens, her hair went up, her waist pulled in and her skirts down, giving her that familiar violin silhouette. It was all blown away in the roaring twenties, of course, but this bypassed Nanna as she lived in remote parts. She also missed out on the decades prior to the swinging sixties and as late as the nineteen seventies, she was worrying our Mum about putting my sister and I into corsets – I need not tell you what we thought of the notion.
Curiously, corsets have been called ‘foundation’ garments, as if the outer garments won’t work without the laced stays underneath. More curious still, while the lady kept her corset underneath her clothes, the Victorian tart is often portrayed with a laced bodice for an outer garment, coyly hinting at what is underneath. Even today, the corset is often used as a fetish, a symbol of femininity. Yet, few contemporary women actually wear one. When Madonna wore one for a stage act, she knew exactly what she was doing. And like the ubiquitous girl symbol outside public bathrooms, few women look like that.

Why it will be different this time...

The building sits serenely on the bank of the Thames, unaware of the consternation that has washed about it in the thirty-five years since its main use was decommissioned. Battersea Power Station is like a fine, old lady, fallen on hard times. She is expensive to maintain, yet too grand to be put to humble albeit lucrative use. Her credentials are impressive. BPS was designed by leading architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, in the ‘brick cathedral’ Art Deco style. The main building was built by John Mowlem & Co, and the total cost of construction was £2,141,550 – billions in today’s money.
It was 1953 before BPS was fully in operation as a coal-fired powered station, and it seems incredible that such thought and care went into a venture that stayed in place for only twenty-two years more. But by 1975, the day of coal as a major provider of electricity was over. In the meantime, the building had become an international icon – hear the word ‘Battersea’ and what do you think of? Witness the prescience of Alfred Hitchcock using the new BPS building as an action backdrop in his (1930s) movie, Sabotage. Since then, it has been used on music album covers, and as an action backdrop setting in numerous TV shows, including Dr Who. Incredible, then, that the site fell into rack and ruin but the problems surrounding it are legion. BPS has both the blessing and the curse to be the largest brick building in Europe. Its expansiveness makes it unsuitable for the type of development of Bankside, its sister building down the river (Tate Modern). Besides, the other end of town has the benefit of City finance, a privilege the Battersea site lacks. Over the years, proposals have come and been banished, one by one for a variety of reasons; among them a dearth of funds, opposition by heritage groups, and of local residents. There was the theme park idea that cost too much, and the various ‘retail and housing’ developments that would surround BPS, and block its view from the river. Now, Real Estate Opportunities, the firm that bought the site in 2006 has just had a £5.5 billion ‘retail and housing’ plan approved, with the proviso that the Northern Line is extended by two stops to facilitate the shoppers and visitors who will certainly want to go there. In short, if the public money is made available, private funds will follow. It all looks very credible, but so have the plans of the past. We can only wait and see.

History of the World

The history of the artefact is the history of all humanity. After all, it is our ability to make things that delineates us from other animals. Sure, birds build nests and beavers build dams, but that is all they will ever do. Man is not stuck in such an evolutional groove but has the capacity to go on creating and building, seemingly forever. Archaeologists and anthropologists work in tandem, trying to pinpoint the time when a rather sophisticated primate became ‘human’.
The answer may never be known, but we do know that the ‘oldest’ cave painting, found at Lascaux in France and dated at c 17,000 BC, is rather recent in the history of mankind. The Greek poet Homer wrote of the Trojan wars, estimated to be about 12 or 13 BC. Whether the story of the wooden horse is truth or fantasy matters not. It says much about the level of skill in woodworking, and the ingenuity of the military strategists of the time.
Indeed, Greek mythology is rich with instances of gods, humans and monsters using made objects to secure their own ends. The hero of the Trojan war, Odysseus, was an Achaean who had left his wife Penelope at home with their son. Suitors that claimed Odysseus was dead, and wanted to marry her – and her lands and money, no doubt, besieged her. The wise woman started work on a tapestry. She laboured at it by day, promising to choose a suitor when it was finished. But she unpicked the stitches by night and held off the marriage brigade for the twenty years or so that it took her husband to fight his wars and return from his travels.
Odysseus had his own material issues. In one instance, he spent seven years marooned upon an island, stranded there after his ship was wrecked in a storm. Then, some passing deity took pity upon him, and bequeathed him that very practical thing, a boat. Odysseus may have been a hero, but he lacked skills in woodworking. Meanwhile, Hermes had his winged sandals to help him deliver, while Poseidon was all powerful with his trident. No matter how invincible the mythical deities seemed, they still needed things to be effective.

Technology into Mythology

Right now, it is the most beautiful, talked-about piece of engineering in the world. It shot towards the centre of the earth and back nearly forty times, like a magic bullet, on a rescue mission that was almost mythical in its intent and eventual success. Whoever named it Phoenix knew exactly what he was doing and this tiny capsule – with the radius of a bicycle wheel – should rank above space rockets and submarines in its importance to humanity. Small is indeed beautiful.
But then, miniaturisation has long been the benchmark of technological progress – just witness the microprocessor! Here, I am not going to calculate how many of these things can sit on the head of a pin. Instead, I marvel at how a piece of metal, two inches by one half, can store all the work I have ever done; manuscripts, articles, photos, drawings, college work, correspondence, in short, everything. And my memory device is far from being the most powerful. Truly, these things are the contemporary equivalent of the magic wand. It is no wonder they are being incorporated into jewellery and carried as talismans. After all, a man’s work is his gold and technology becomes mythology.
With machines that fly and ones that dive, doors that open and shut free of human contact, and gadgets that give us seemingly telepathic powers of communication, it is worth pondering whether our plethora of super-power devices isn’t the contemporary fulfilment of age-old legend. More than one self-help guru has written: what we can conceive and believe, we can truly achieve.
Yea, the Phoenix may have risen but miniaturisation does have a downside. Right now, the entire nation seems to be licking its collective lips at the prospect of that age-old behemoth and public institution, the library, reduced to a trestle table laid with grubby, dog-eared tomes for public borrowing, at the entrance to pubs and supermarkets, and staffed by ‘volunteers’. My library is a grand, purpose-built building containing a comprehensive collection of the literature and learning of our times, presided over by paid librarians and their qualified assistants. Such places truly are mythical – may they not vanish into myth…