The new film adaptation of Ian McEwan's "Atonement" is without a doubt an accomplishment, but not exactly a perfect one. The grand sweep a narrative like this seems to ask for is missing; the film has to change tone half-way through. Perhaps this was in the nature of the book (I'm afraid I haven't read it, so am entirely unqualified to be the film's reviewer, on that score); or of its plot: one expects that the atmosphere of the pre-war scenes should not be without frivolity, which in the nature of things sets them apart from the tragic mood of the later sections. (Then again perhaps this itself is a historical cliche - why should we automatically assume the interbellum years didn't contain their own share of personal misfortunes? or vice versa, that some people didn't have a "good war"? was the reaction of the friend I saw the film with last night.)
This break is enforced by a quite decided gap in cinematic quality (and consistency) between the first hour and the rest of the film. The later sections have their glories: one is the already notorious tracking shot around Dunkirk beach, which must have tested the film crew to their limits (as well as the composer, who had to fit several verses of "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" as seamlessly as possible into counterpoint with the full orchestral score). There were several fine bits of acting too I thought: the confrontation scene between Briony and the couple she wronged, and more subtly the television interview with Vanessa Redgrave playing Briony as an ageing novelist. But there were also some fairly stale parts - sentimental scenes like the dream encounter between Robbie and his mother, or Briony's conversation with a dying French soldier (- the sentiment inadequately disguised by playing the whole scene in French).
The first half of the film on the other hand felt extraordinarily fresh, beautifully judged in emotional tone and balance, and handled with startling fluidity and skill. The intercutting between the protagonists, obviously an essential feature in a drama of romantic separation, was superb: Cecilia, disgusted with the conversation, dives into the garden pool, and in answering motion Robbie surfaces from a duck in his bathtub, gazing upward meditatively - the camera follows - through the skylight to the bomber humming overhead in the blue summer sky. Or more ecstatically as both prepare for dinner, Cecilia dressing in blurred mirror reflection, Robbie typing the fateful note of apology to the strains of Puccini (if it was) on his gramophone, both somehow woven together in a sequence almost the equal in tenderness of Julie Christie's and Donald Sutherland's in Don't Look Now. (There was nothing correspondingly inspired in the later scenes - Keira Knightley looking sad on a beach cuts to James McAvoy looking sad in a field of poppies - both beautiful shots; but their editing the depths of banality.) The psychological transitions were just as acute. A hilarious satire of childish precociousness cunningly highlights the very trigger which sets off catastrophe - Lola's rape and Briony's misaccusation both appear as consequences of their "acting above their age". And in its early days, Robbie and Cecilia's romance is a fine mixture of comedy and passion.
What prompts the title of this post is the very end of the film. To be exact, the ends - plural: although not as even-handedly as the book (I am told), we are still given two conclusions for Robbie and Cecilia's story. One is more tragic, but at the same time less realistically played, so that the emotional power is for me undercut by ambiguity. It isn't that I can't handle ambiguity, or want everything cut-and-dried; but I am really quite uncertain what it is supposed to achieve here. I felt the same way about Yann Martel's "Life of Pi": what exactly is the motivation for two mutually-excluding stories? What is the interference pattern (if you'll pardon the gratuitous use of analogies from quantum physics) that is supposed to emerge from this strange narrative "double-slit experiment"? Because it seems to me that the introduction of this level of self-consciousness is signally inappropriate to the tragic themes of both books. Self-reference works in the comic or the ironic mode, but for genuinely tragic material, fate should appear (as it did for the Greeks) as the horribly inexorable, unshakeable structure and ultimate author of reality. We humans - whether characters or authors - cannot change it; we only come to terms with it. One kind of coming to terms is indicated by the title of the film. The word "atonement" has one of the plainest and yet profoundest etymologies I know: like many a German word, all you need to do is split it, and you have "at-one-ment"; to "make/set (at) one", to unify, to make whole. Can it really be right to create bifurcating stories, Borges' "garden of forking paths", in the service of an act whose whole significance is one of unification?
Thursday, 13 September 2007
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
A tale of two conferences
As an aspiring academic of sorts, concern for the health of my CV drives me to attend conferences both in Britain and abroad - even when this begins (as it occasionally does in the wake of such occasions) to raise concern for my sanity. "Conference-land" is a peculiar place indeed - as you can discover at second-hand, without the pain and with extra entertainment, from the academic satires of David Lodge ("Changing Places" and "Small World"). I would recommend them to anyone either as a preparation or (better) a replacement for full exposure to an international confederation of those strange beings, bluntly yet so justly referred to by the Germans as Fachidioten (Fach meaning specialism or pigeonhole - you can work out the rest!).
But I'm not going to use this post simply as an outlet for railings against academia, even if I were to include myself among the satirical targets (as would only be fair, since I don't just go to these conferences to listen with an amused smile playing about my lips, but sometimes have to open them too). What provides the opportunity for writing this is my having recently attended two very different "conferences" or academic events, one under and one very much outside the auspices of the university system, which has prompted me to think about what these events can actually achieve.
The most recent was an international congress held in Zurich, the first of its kind I had been to. The programme lasted from Tuesday to Sunday, with up to twenty parallel sessions of talks to choose between on a typical morning. This necessitated a conference guide that was less of a "booklet" than a dauntingly thick book. If the to-be-published proceedings actually included everything, one would quickly have an encyclopedia. (The sheer horror of the notion makes me positively glad that my paper is very unlikely to be published.) A small army of Swiss students were on hand to press buttons, fill glasses, give directions and so forth. In the main hall of the conference building the confident meeting-and-greeting and the chink of espresso cups never ceased.
Here and in the seminar rooms around the edge of the central hall, alliances are constantly being negotiated - every word of encouragement or gesture of impatience a tacit reference to a position one shares or does not share with others, and behind that position ever-circulating anxieties about status, money, patronage and the ultimate worth of what one is engaged in. Teamwork is a key element of strategy, and the Americans know particularly well how to exploit it. The chair of a talk can use their introduction to put a speaker in a certain light, boost their morale and lay the tactical groundwork for what they are going to say; a questioner can bounce their question off an ally in the audience ("I know that X would like to ask a question on/speak to this issue"), or ask a speaker to expand on some mutually gratifying opinion, like an "assist" play in basketball; and few techniques are more cultivated than a skilful defence, protecting the speaker like a well-shielded quarterback from aggressive lines of questioning. Above all, however, one employs references, which means: names authorities, drops buzzwords, cites opinions, tells entertaining anecdotes (that may be self-deprecating on the surface, but invariably involve a glimpse into some high circle of academia one wishes to suggest one is privy to).
Where does the "pursuit of knowledge" come into all this, then? Well, partly by the same route general financial welfare is promoted by the capitalist regime of competition. If knowledge is the currency here, it may get a little torn and grubby through being passed around or fought over, but at least its ultimate increase thereby will work for the common good. The more professional risks and incentives are involved, the greater the need to master the material (sources, languages, facts, theories); and this mastery becomes like capital. One does not just give it away, or hide it under the floorboards, but invests it carefully in publications that are calculated to bring the dividends of professional advancement for their author, even as their knowledge is being put at the disposition of other scholars.
In this world, then, I felt a bit like a pauper, tramping past the loaded shop-windows of a swanky city mall, without any platinum cards to flash, my purseful of change already spent and no rich friends or bright ideas to help me out. Rather than just being a metaphor, that actually does describe how I felt sitting on the terrace at the after-conference party. I nursed a glass of wine, looking out over the roofs of the city in the late afternoon sun (the squeal of tramwheels rising faintly from the Limmatquai far below, the Ferris wheel on the fairground by the lake turning slowly), having heard the band exhaust their repertoire, and flirted desultorily with a Korean girl, the one person I could find who felt more out of place than I did.
The second "conference" was quite differently organised (so much so that I advisedly place it between inverted commas). It took place in a hamlet in Lower Saxony, north Germany, and was occasioned and preceded by a most unusual modern dance performance. This took place in a barn before an audience of (at most) forty, the majority curious villagers from the surrounding area, the rest specially-invited friends of the organiser (shown below - in the blue shirt - acting as usher/compere):
But I'm not going to use this post simply as an outlet for railings against academia, even if I were to include myself among the satirical targets (as would only be fair, since I don't just go to these conferences to listen with an amused smile playing about my lips, but sometimes have to open them too). What provides the opportunity for writing this is my having recently attended two very different "conferences" or academic events, one under and one very much outside the auspices of the university system, which has prompted me to think about what these events can actually achieve.
The most recent was an international congress held in Zurich, the first of its kind I had been to. The programme lasted from Tuesday to Sunday, with up to twenty parallel sessions of talks to choose between on a typical morning. This necessitated a conference guide that was less of a "booklet" than a dauntingly thick book. If the to-be-published proceedings actually included everything, one would quickly have an encyclopedia. (The sheer horror of the notion makes me positively glad that my paper is very unlikely to be published.) A small army of Swiss students were on hand to press buttons, fill glasses, give directions and so forth. In the main hall of the conference building the confident meeting-and-greeting and the chink of espresso cups never ceased.
Here and in the seminar rooms around the edge of the central hall, alliances are constantly being negotiated - every word of encouragement or gesture of impatience a tacit reference to a position one shares or does not share with others, and behind that position ever-circulating anxieties about status, money, patronage and the ultimate worth of what one is engaged in. Teamwork is a key element of strategy, and the Americans know particularly well how to exploit it. The chair of a talk can use their introduction to put a speaker in a certain light, boost their morale and lay the tactical groundwork for what they are going to say; a questioner can bounce their question off an ally in the audience ("I know that X would like to ask a question on/speak to this issue"), or ask a speaker to expand on some mutually gratifying opinion, like an "assist" play in basketball; and few techniques are more cultivated than a skilful defence, protecting the speaker like a well-shielded quarterback from aggressive lines of questioning. Above all, however, one employs references, which means: names authorities, drops buzzwords, cites opinions, tells entertaining anecdotes (that may be self-deprecating on the surface, but invariably involve a glimpse into some high circle of academia one wishes to suggest one is privy to).
Where does the "pursuit of knowledge" come into all this, then? Well, partly by the same route general financial welfare is promoted by the capitalist regime of competition. If knowledge is the currency here, it may get a little torn and grubby through being passed around or fought over, but at least its ultimate increase thereby will work for the common good. The more professional risks and incentives are involved, the greater the need to master the material (sources, languages, facts, theories); and this mastery becomes like capital. One does not just give it away, or hide it under the floorboards, but invests it carefully in publications that are calculated to bring the dividends of professional advancement for their author, even as their knowledge is being put at the disposition of other scholars.
In this world, then, I felt a bit like a pauper, tramping past the loaded shop-windows of a swanky city mall, without any platinum cards to flash, my purseful of change already spent and no rich friends or bright ideas to help me out. Rather than just being a metaphor, that actually does describe how I felt sitting on the terrace at the after-conference party. I nursed a glass of wine, looking out over the roofs of the city in the late afternoon sun (the squeal of tramwheels rising faintly from the Limmatquai far below, the Ferris wheel on the fairground by the lake turning slowly), having heard the band exhaust their repertoire, and flirted desultorily with a Korean girl, the one person I could find who felt more out of place than I did.
The second "conference" was quite differently organised (so much so that I advisedly place it between inverted commas). It took place in a hamlet in Lower Saxony, north Germany, and was occasioned and preceded by a most unusual modern dance performance. This took place in a barn before an audience of (at most) forty, the majority curious villagers from the surrounding area, the rest specially-invited friends of the organiser (shown below - in the blue shirt - acting as usher/compere):
After an unexpected and mysterious prelude in which someone (we could not yet see who) moved around slowly, spider-fashion, directly over the heads of the audience on a translucent sheet of perspex, we scaled ladders and hay-bales to reach the main performance space, a stage constructed as it were on the second "floor" of the barn. At the back was the musical half of the duo - the drummer Fritz Hauser - and tiptoeing and circling backward and forward over the stage was the dancer Anna Huber, now more fully visible. (The photo below is from her publicity.)
Both artists are Swiss, internationally recognised and highly professional, and doubtless more used to performing to well-heeled audiences of modern dance aficionados in Zurich, but having let themselves in for this peculiar one-off event, they had to accept that the atmosphere was going to be rather different (not least in the literal sense of being quite dusty).
And it was different - not only during the performance, which the numerous children present, as well as most of the adults, obviously found entirely new (it was for me as well), and by turns athletic, hypnotically rhythmic and playfully abrupt. But in the theoretical discussion devoted to it the day afterward, too, some of the spirit of encounter and exploration persisted. In beginning our "conference" with the themes of the body and performance one could scarcely say that we were breaking with present academic fashion; but in the way we were able to approach them - with a real, physical example still fresh in our memories, as well as having the performers there to give their own perspective and contrast with those coming from philosophy, literature, music, pedagogy, and even neuroscience - there were undoubtedly some unique advantages. And there was an atmosphere infinitely more congenial than that of the conference-hall in sitting around an old wooden table in a country-house conservatory with glasses of wine, a chaise-longue in the corner to recline on, a beautiful panelled library next door, and only the occasional tractor puttering down the lane outside to disturb the peace.
What is achieved through such events, though, when, through their informality and eccentricity, they fall below a certain level of professionalism? That would be the obvious critical response here. But in fact I would propose that the danger is still of being too "professional" - in one's attitudes and anxieties, not in the level of argument. Even in such an independent setting as this, one finds oneself casting around for impressive-sounding references, seeking to prove favourite points, harbouring half-conscious ambitions or resentments in the back of one's mind.
The moral one is tempted to draw is - you can take the man out of the university, but it's not so easy to take the university out of the man. And that is what limits the scope of any such forum, whether in the university or out, independent of the more superficial issues of who its participants are, how its results are publicised, or how specialised or difficult its themes are imagined to be. One needs always to be mindful of this if one is searching for genuine independence and universality - qualities which are after all attainable within the present university system too (just as capitalism does not abolish charity!), and are above all tested, I think, through teaching.
Here one has to proceed as one does in everyday life, and as one really ought to at a conference or any other event. That means - through sharing and patient narration of knowledge, and through appeal, not to privileged texts or arcane "discourses", but simply to reason and common experience. Such enforced modesty is what makes teaching - and I don't mean to Master's or PhD students who are already climbing the career ladder, but to undergraduates - so important. It shouldn't be seen as an arduous duty tied to economic needs; rather it is just the point where the academic economy of knowledge cedes to a more utopian possibility - knowledge as a gift.
And it was different - not only during the performance, which the numerous children present, as well as most of the adults, obviously found entirely new (it was for me as well), and by turns athletic, hypnotically rhythmic and playfully abrupt. But in the theoretical discussion devoted to it the day afterward, too, some of the spirit of encounter and exploration persisted. In beginning our "conference" with the themes of the body and performance one could scarcely say that we were breaking with present academic fashion; but in the way we were able to approach them - with a real, physical example still fresh in our memories, as well as having the performers there to give their own perspective and contrast with those coming from philosophy, literature, music, pedagogy, and even neuroscience - there were undoubtedly some unique advantages. And there was an atmosphere infinitely more congenial than that of the conference-hall in sitting around an old wooden table in a country-house conservatory with glasses of wine, a chaise-longue in the corner to recline on, a beautiful panelled library next door, and only the occasional tractor puttering down the lane outside to disturb the peace.
What is achieved through such events, though, when, through their informality and eccentricity, they fall below a certain level of professionalism? That would be the obvious critical response here. But in fact I would propose that the danger is still of being too "professional" - in one's attitudes and anxieties, not in the level of argument. Even in such an independent setting as this, one finds oneself casting around for impressive-sounding references, seeking to prove favourite points, harbouring half-conscious ambitions or resentments in the back of one's mind.
The moral one is tempted to draw is - you can take the man out of the university, but it's not so easy to take the university out of the man. And that is what limits the scope of any such forum, whether in the university or out, independent of the more superficial issues of who its participants are, how its results are publicised, or how specialised or difficult its themes are imagined to be. One needs always to be mindful of this if one is searching for genuine independence and universality - qualities which are after all attainable within the present university system too (just as capitalism does not abolish charity!), and are above all tested, I think, through teaching.
Here one has to proceed as one does in everyday life, and as one really ought to at a conference or any other event. That means - through sharing and patient narration of knowledge, and through appeal, not to privileged texts or arcane "discourses", but simply to reason and common experience. Such enforced modesty is what makes teaching - and I don't mean to Master's or PhD students who are already climbing the career ladder, but to undergraduates - so important. It shouldn't be seen as an arduous duty tied to economic needs; rather it is just the point where the academic economy of knowledge cedes to a more utopian possibility - knowledge as a gift.
Tuesday, 5 June 2007
Bananas!
I watched Woody Allen's Bananas for the first time all the way through last night. A fan loaned my flatmate Allen's complete films a while ago; we've now seen most (but by no means all) of them, and Bananas has got to be the funniest. The premise, which is "nerdy student (Allen) ends up by mistake as dictator of Central American republic", isn't that original or even that comic (compare Chaplin's The Great Dictator, where it's exploited properly); it's the stream of killer gags that doesn't let up for a single scene. God, even the credit sequence is funny! (It's just graphics and silly music, like the start of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but it's brilliant.) Maybe it's because the humour is more random and surreal than the other films that it succeeds so well; a lot of it feels a bit like Python. For instance, the interpreter who "translates" from English to English for Allen the dictator when he steps off the plane, and who is chased off by two men in white coats wielding butterfly nets; or the black female witness in the court case who claims to be J. Edgar Hoover; or the guy on the jury who's drinking through a straw from a fishbowl. Don't ask why...but it works.
I would love to know when and why surreal humour works. I have a friend whose conversation functions for hours at a time entirely by surreal logic, but he won't tell me how, and I've never been successful in imitating him. You can't just say anything random and make it humorously random, even if you want to. I don't think an idea of "incongruity" or an intention to deflate seriousness would cover it, although a whole lot of Woody Allen does work by shoving together a serious theme (revolution! death! metaphysics! tragedy!) with references to his own, fairly easy-going, frivolous Manhattan lifestyle. (The Greek tragic chorus shimmying around singing musical numbers in Mighty Aphrodite is one of my favourites, but there are lots more jokes like this in his short stories. Some of the best involve philosophical interpretations of food...I won't spoil them; instead you should go out and get a copy of his Collected Prose as it'll probably be the funniest thing you've ever bought.) I hope the specific references he puts in don't mean that the comedy will date. It hasn't lost much over the last two or three decades, but maybe all that means is that our (Anglo-American) cultural reference points haven't changed much in that time. Judging by Plautus and Aristophanes I'm not sure any comedy is eternal anyway; but as Allen might say, neither is a Caesar salad.
I would love to know when and why surreal humour works. I have a friend whose conversation functions for hours at a time entirely by surreal logic, but he won't tell me how, and I've never been successful in imitating him. You can't just say anything random and make it humorously random, even if you want to. I don't think an idea of "incongruity" or an intention to deflate seriousness would cover it, although a whole lot of Woody Allen does work by shoving together a serious theme (revolution! death! metaphysics! tragedy!) with references to his own, fairly easy-going, frivolous Manhattan lifestyle. (The Greek tragic chorus shimmying around singing musical numbers in Mighty Aphrodite is one of my favourites, but there are lots more jokes like this in his short stories. Some of the best involve philosophical interpretations of food...I won't spoil them; instead you should go out and get a copy of his Collected Prose as it'll probably be the funniest thing you've ever bought.) I hope the specific references he puts in don't mean that the comedy will date. It hasn't lost much over the last two or three decades, but maybe all that means is that our (Anglo-American) cultural reference points haven't changed much in that time. Judging by Plautus and Aristophanes I'm not sure any comedy is eternal anyway; but as Allen might say, neither is a Caesar salad.
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