FILM Do all those film links still work?
After ages on social media – clearly far too many hours – using them as mostly as news and interest feeds, a bit of discussion, disputation and the odd feeble joke – the shift away from The Dead Parrot has made me think a bit. Have I been sucked into a daily morning check of my feed, and then trawled down and down and down looking for something arresting? Yes and for far too much time to admit to freely.
A friend down the road was interested in a remark I was doing a Proust post/essay which she said she’d like to read. She’d like to read Proust too. I have got all the Moncrieff translation eBooks in the side link in Moleskine which I’ve pointed her to. They all seem to work. But randomly testing links generally across many old posts has prove disappointing as so many links are broken, so the only way to find the article or film site is to copy and past the title and do another search. It would be a thankless task to go through every old post, altering the URLs to get working links back.
Working with the recent updates of WordPress has proved to be a pain as they have made it harder to use not easier. Another learning curve just to get text and graphics where you want them. In the early days, it was possible to use the HTML version [still is but a struggle to override the visual version] of a post entry and be happy with that. The few bits of HTML you needed to write posts, add a head pic, was quite small. A pic could be re-sized by fiddling with the dimension numbers.
So while away my friend plans to read a bit of Proust. I hadn’t the heart to say I hadn’t read it from cover to cover, but have dipped in over the years as the mood took me. Of course as she’s going to set to, I felt saying I hadn’t tackled A la researche head-on, might put her off. So felt the impetus to say like Proust, <And so I was ready to write> (here read..). Though it would takes me many months, a year, because I’m mainly a bedtime reader. By reading some during the day and more at bedtime on the phone, I might make some progress. The advantage I have is to have read so much around, over, through Proust over the years, that it’s such familiar territory, as is his life and the milieu he lived in. particularly La Belle Époque leading up to the First World War. I know all about his interest in Ruskin and even that his dear mother had to help him out when he decided he wanted to translate Ruskin’s, Sesame and Lilies.
Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies at Project Gutenberg
SLOW CINEMA
Exciting to find the person in the form of Nadin Mai, through a butchers of the Mastodon Fediverse, who writes The Art(s) of Slow Cinema blog, which I am pretty sure I put up on the side panel a while back. When I was regular visitor there, more years ago that I should really admit to, I didn’t much bother about who wrote it, but what the posts had to say.
For blogging, film (Cutting on the Action) and the previous lit blog (Moleskine Modality) seems to have taken second place to The Dead Parrot, a quaint old pub where we all used to meet on a Friday evening for a pint and a chat at that large table at the window. Even though almost certainly disreputable characters started to come to drink there, and we shot knowing looks at each other, we always went back hoping things would calm down a bit and that sanity would somehow prevail. Until of course The Dead Parrot was no longer the place to be to retain the sort of calm and contentment we obviously much valued, and everyone moved on to The Trumping Elephant in the next village to get the peace and quiet and convivial chit-chat we were used to.
Bill of course came too. He had always had the bar stool near the wall which no one dare sit on. Unless, that is, it was someone who was new to the place. We’d sit there just to see what Bill’s reaction when he turned up. He was like clockwork. At the stroke of eight of the old clock carriage in the corner, Bill would make his entrance. Not noisily of course. Just a sidling up and and a sitting down and the ordering of his pint. He didn’t talk a lot. But when we went up to the bar for another round, we all without failed, uttered a cheery, Back again Bill?, or something more strident like, How the world treating you then Bill? No one expected an answer, it was the greeting in the from of a question. Simple as that.
Now we’re all pretty much drinking at The Trumping Elephant and slowly picking up the threads of our former connections and friendships from our days at The Dead Parrot. I decided to avoid the dizziness of former ways and search assiduously on topics I was interested in, to see who was out there and what was being said, rather let the Fediverse spew out a constant stream of new Toots! as they call them, many of which were little concerned with my own core interests. That’s film, photography, science, a smidge of the arts and philosophy and a few more.
So up pops the author of The Art of Slow Cinema on Mastodon and looking over at the blog, read about its author, who explains that Bela Tarr was a lot to do with her conversion (if that was what it might be called) to Slow Cinema. Since writing those I feel now almost embarrassingly long student notes TL:DR-like posts about Tarr, particularly Satantango, this was good news. I would always look out for anything Tarr and see what was what was what. Had anyone written on the Cow Scene in Satantango? Not many, except disparagingly.
For now in the middle, dithering about, a return to Proust and Pinter’s adaptation that never came to fruition. Film adaptation has always called out to me as a way of understanding film, what it does, can and can’t do. Many great film writers and not a few directors have said pretty much the same thing. First that if you fancy writing scripts, then you should watch a lot of films and read a lot of screenplays. Seem to recollect Spielberg said pretty much that.
For some reason the process of adapting a book to film was so intriguing I couldn’t get it out of my head. And so it turned out to be with Proust and Pinter. Along the way a succession of film watching with adaptation themes, like you’ve guessed it, Kaufman’s, Adaptation. Film within film seems to be a kind of natural progression for this.
But it is the movies that many thought couldn’t be made into movies that is of particular interest. Hence Pinter. There’s even a Pinter and The French Lieutenants’ Woman up there in one or other of those blogs, for good luck. Can’t even remember what sort of a fist I made of that one, but do still feel the sense of engagement a project that fully takes one’s imagination can give. French Lieutenant was made into a successful film directly by the late Karel Reisz, despite there being much debate about the old-new scenes. That one’s certainly worth a re-visit to see who thinks what about it now.
But stop. where has slow cinema gone? I started on that and as night follows day we’re back onto adaptation. A script was written for Anthony Burgess’ Earthly Powers and could absolutely not interest anyone. A few years ago writing to it’s author, scriptwriter Hugh Stoddart, I decided to go through the whole book looking at which sections could be left out. I just wrote to him to ask if he’ll let anyone read his. It’s a messy business adapting massive, complex novels. But would love to see which bits he left out and if any corresponded to mine. Too many things; too little time.
Back to Proust. And if anything is slow, then A la researche du temp perdu is it’s apogee. Let’s face it too slow for many to find a way to write a film script for. This year is the centenary of his death. Missed the day itself, the 18th., which I’d hope to have a post ready for. Never mind there’s today and tomorrow left in November. This should encourage effort and application dispel dithering and prevarication. And looking up what others are writing! It is said the process of writing is the enjoyable bit. Concur with that. In the zone. Oh yes. But not all the time. Often doubts set in to dispel this notion one can get that if you’ve seen it all as a movie in your head, it should be easy to transcribe it back to text. It’s only when you realise you seem to have watched a Cinema Paradiso-like splicing of the outtakes not than the film you thought was entire in you mind…..
Proust Centenary – Harold Pinter’s Drafts of The Proust Screenplay
Pinter’s screenplay was never made into a film.
cutting on the action 
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