Gandhi, Britain, India, USA, South Africa 1982

Gandhi is the central event of Attenborough’s life, not just of his career and creation. He devoted twenty years to the project and risked everything he possessed. Somehow both he and his grand idea survived the years of diappointment, delay, frustration, ridicule and obstruction without becoming stale or sour. By persistence and stubborness which would have seemed quixotic in anyone else, Attenborough finally achieved hisamabition – and more.” [David Robinson on page 66 of Dossier).

This twenty year odyssey by Attenborough started after he was approached in 1962 by Motilal Kothar who asked that he should become involved in making a biopic of the famous Indian leader, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Attenborough, who at the time had not directed a film,  read the biography by Louis Fischer and was immediately taken with the project. His travails in funding and actually producing the film are recounted In Search of Gandhi (1982). Finally the film was made by Goldcrest together with the National Film Corporation of India and support from Columbia Pictures. Over the period there were several versions of a screenplay, the final one used was by John Briley. There were also a number of actors proposed to play the lead role, finally settling on Ben Kingsley, who was Anglo-Indian with roots in the same area of India as Gandhi himself. There had been two previous attempts to make a film about Gandhi, and, less noticed, two documentaries: one made in the USA: and one made in India, the latter running over five hours. Attenborough does mention Nine Hours To Rama (1963), a fictionalised account of Gandhi’s assassin: Attenborough justifiably thought the film poor.

The final film runs 190 minutes, with an intermission. Even then it only covers parts of Gandhi’s life and work: an opening on-screen title makes the point that one movie cannot encompass the life of such a man. The title stemmed from arguments in India about what could justifiably be left out the biopic. The film tends to the episodic, and this is a characteristic of nearly all of Attenborough’s biopic and historical dramas. There are a number of established British actors cast in cameo roles

The film opens with the assassination of Gandhi in 1948 by a Hindu extremist. This is followed by the massive funeral procession with probably the largest actual crowd scenes on film. The film then cuts to 1893 when Gandhi, already a practising lawyer, travelled to South Africa to represent an Indian business man. He is thrown of the train for daring to sit in a first class compartment: addressed as ‘coolie’ and ‘kaffir’. This is a watershed experience and we see Gandhi playing a leading role in organised resistance among Indian population, Hindu, Moslem, Sikh; much of it bought to South Africa as indentured workers [i.e. slaves]. After resistance activities, meetings,  demonstration, and imprisonment, the Government, represented by General Jan Smuts (Athol Fugard), makes concessions on Indian civil rights. The campaigns have made Gandhi an international figure and he is invited to India.

Richard Ayyenborough with Ben Kingsley and extras on South African set

Arriving there in 1915,  Gandhi meets the leaders of Congress including Gopal Krishna Gokhale (Shreeram Lagoo). The latter asks him to put all his time and effort into the Independence Movement and advises him to learn about India. So Gandhi, his wife Kasturba (Rohini Hattangadi), and Charles Freer Andrews, an Anglican priest (Ian Charleston) travel by rail around the sub-continent. This is very much a series of landscapes but at one point we see a train derailed by ‘terrorists’ and Gandhi expresses his disapproval.

We next see him at an Indian National Congress where he espouses a more radical line that the other leaders; in particular there are already hints of the division between him and the leader of the All India Moslem League Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Alyque Padamsee). Gandhi has set up an Ashram (Community) devoted to simple self-sufficiency. Here he is visited by the young but rising Jawaharlal Nehru (Roshan Seth). He is also visited by poor peasants from the Champaran in Bihar region, where they are subjected to particular brutal exploitation by British landlords. Gandhi visits the area and, with help, compiles a dossier of the exploitative practices which force the government to make concessions. This makes Gandhi a national hero; but the film does not show the other mass moments in which he piloted ‘non-cooperation’ tactics. Led by Gandhi the Congress Leadership organise a day of prayer and fasting, [a strike] which takes affect across the sub-continent. The Congress leaders are arrested and Gandhi calls for non-violence. At this point the British General Dyer leads the massacre at the Sikh city of Amritsar, killing some 1500 people, men, women and children. The intermission follows.

Ben Kingsley with Richard Attenborough

Following the Amritsar massacre the new Vice-Roy attempts to placate Congress but Gandhi put that firmly down. Gandhi now initiates a boycott of British imported cloth and advocate all Indians wear ‘homespun’. The campaign results in mass mobilisations. However, a scene in the film shows  a riot that leads to the death of native policemen when their station is set afire; what is missing from the film is that the police first opened fire with live amunition on a demonstration. In the film [and in actuality] Gandhi’s typical response is to call for the end of the boycott and to fast until all violence has stopped. He succeeds but is once again imprisoned by the British.

On his release he is visited at the Ashram by the U.S. journalist Vince Walker (Martin Sheen, a character based on an amalgam of journalists). Walker becomes an important asset, both publicising Gandhi and his actions, but also acting as a confidant; thus Gandhi explains some of his philosophy and actions. The latest is a march to the sea at Dandi from the Sabarmati Ashram, [both in Gujarat), four days covering over 200 miles. The march grows in size and on reaching the sea Gandhi breaks the British salt monopoly by publically holding up a handful of salt. The Congress leaders, including Nehru, go onto sell salt from the beach. They are soon arrested. The next action is a satyagrahi.(non-violent resistance] at a nearby salt works. Despite the absence of Gandhi his followed march on the works’ gates where they are violently repulsed by Indian soldiers. Women administer first aid. Walker then files a graphic report by telephone and the incident creates waves internationally.

There is an Imperial conference on Indian Independence in London in 1930. However, this fails to deliver. The film jumps forward to World War II. Congress refuses to support the war though the Muslim League does cooperate. Many of the Congress leaders, including Gandhi and Kasturba, are arrested. Kasturba dies in prison and Gandhi sits with her at the end.

Now comes the new Labour Government and a willingness to finally leave India. Earl Mountbatten is sent to negotiate with Congress. However, Jinnah and the Muslim League are now committed to  a separate state for Muslims, Pakistan. Despite the opposition of the other Congress leaders, especially Gandhi, partition goes ahead. The film presents briefly the official handing over for both states, with the hoisting of their new flags. A cut shows Gandhi at the Ashram with a bare flag pole.

As predicted, violence breaks out between Hindu and Muslim. Brief scenes show the violence among refugees moving to their new homeland and urban violence, including in Calcutta. Gandhi again fasts in a bid to halt the violence. He goes to stay with Muslim family in Calcutta. The violence carries up but finally comes to a halt; and the news is bought to Gandhi lying bed and showing the ravages of the fast. The film now replays the assassination, shot slightly differently. We then see the funeral byre of Gandhi and his ashes scattered on a river, likely the Ganges with his voice on the soundtrack. Then the end credits.

The film is in many ways a tour de force. Ben Kingsley performance as the titular character is seriously impressive. The supporting cast are really good, and the star cameos are mainly convincing. And the scale of many of the sequences is impressive; down to David Tomblin and his control over extras and onlookers also appearing in the film. Terrence Clegg worked well with the crew who had to cope with the extremes of weather in the sub-continent. The handling of the production by Stuarts Craig looks fine and accurate on screen. There were two cinematographers, first Billy Williams, who suffered an accident, and then Ronnie Taylor. The landscapes look fine: there is some fine work with crane and tracking shots: and there are often cutaways, as in the Salt March, where the column is counterpointed at various points, once with a young boy up a tree, at another with a woman spinning by the side. The editing is controlled by John Bloom, and involves putting together an array of locations and sequences ranging from the vast to the intimate. The film has two types of music, orchestral by George Fenton, and indigenous by Ravi Shankar. Note, two Indian film-makers are included in the credits, working on the second film units. Govind Nihalani had already directed a film himself in India as had John Matthew.

Billy Williams, Simon Kaye, Richard Attenborough and Chic Anstiss

The amount of material included in the screenplay and its time span inevitably lead to an episodic form. And the timescale, whilst some dates are inserted by title for certain events, is not always clear. For example, there is more or less continuous action from the start in 1893. Then Gandhi sets sail for India and it is 1915. Twenty years have passed, a \World War has started, which is something of a surprise. And this only 45 minute into the film.

And the geographic dimension is also not always clear. The salt march from an ashram to the sea takes place in the state of Gujarat, which is on the North West coast of the sub-continent. Later, we encounter a second Ashram, at Porbandar, also in Gujarat but on the coast. Congress leaders have meetings with Gandhi here; this is a day’s drive from Delhi even now, which is where the other leaders apparently lived and worked.

The representation of Congress appears to see Gandhi emerge as a leader, with the main conflict between him and Jinnah. But Congress in the years of the Raj was  a much more complex organisation; it included liberals like Gokhale and members of Indian Communist Party. Gandhi retired from leadership early in the 1930s, which presumably explains why there is little action from that decade.

The portrayal of Jinnah is problematic. There is a tension in his relationship with Gandhi from his first appearance in the film. And following the war and the issue of partition, the dramatic conflict in the film is between Gandhi and Jinnah. This lets the British, including Mountbatten, off the hook. A rather different view of the British machinations can be found in Viceroy’s House (2017), though that film also fails to critically examine Mountbatten’s role. Events missing from the film are the mutinies in the British forces in 1946, by servicemen who wanted to return home; afflicting both an army and a naval base. This presumably was a factor in the British hasty withdrawal, which mean they took no responsibility for the chaos of partition despite it being their project. This is similar to the British evacuation and partition in Palestine only a year later A rather different portrait of Jinnah emerges in the film with his name (1998).

The film also fails to address the contradictions within the liberation movement. We see a couple of instances that show Gandhi’s disapproval of the armed struggle. But this was an important factor in both the 1920s and the 1930s. There were a number of organisations committed to the armed struggle, especially in Bengal. A factor here was the division of historic Bengal in 1905, roughly dividing the people on the basis of religion. This was a real factor in the later conflict which came to be called communalism. And in the late 1930s the Chairman of Congress was one Subhas Chandra Bose, committed to the armed struggle who during World War II became leader of the Indian National Army, which fought alongside the Japanese against the occupying power of the sub-continent. Bose died just at the end of the war, but in 1946 the British tried to try other INA leaders for treason. The resulting uproar forced Congress to take a stand against this. The response was a factor in the increase support for Independence and in convincing the British that India was now ungovernable. There were reports several years ago of a film about the INA Trials but it does not seem to have yet emerged. There is a film that does feature Bose briefly, including in newsreel footage. This is a ‘Bollywood’ production, with a drama based on fictional exploits of a famous Indian film star, ‘Fearless Nadia’. And Shyam Benegal has made, as well as his The Making of the Mahatma, 1996, a biography Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero, 2005 [which unforetunately I have not seen].

It is worth noting that Attenborough likely thought many of the above criticisms were not relevant to a biography and one that is as  much hagiography. The film assumes the values and interests that inform Attenborough’s other film works. And his admiration for Gandhi was based on the Mahatma espousing many of the values and interests that Attenborough himself espoused. Moreover, whilst there were criticisms in India during the lengthy pre-production phase and during the making of the film, the Indian political leadership supported the project and the finished film.There is an irony in a film about a leader of the Indian Indpenedence struglke bing portrayed by  afilm pordcution based in the old colonial exploiter. In fact, unwittingly this sppear sinm the screenplay and finshed film.

Ben Kingsley and Ian Charleson

Charlie Andrews, who first joined Gandhi in South Africa, visits Gandhi in prison at Champaran.

Gandhi – ‘I think Charlie, that you can help us most by taking that assignment you’ve been offered in Fiji.’

Charlie is stunned, and obviously hurt. Gandhi precedes more gently.

Gandhi – ‘ I have to be sure – they have to be sure – that what we have to do can be done by Indians – alone.’

The numerous awards testify to the predominantly positive response to the film, both crititcally and at the box office. In Search of Gandhi records Attenborough’s debt and thanks to numerous people in the film industry and in India. He is meticulous, [as usual], in recording the contributions made to the film’s production, including many of the craft people who contributed to the quality and success of the film.

And in many ways the film is representative of the film industry in advanced capitalist countries; those countries earlier involved in the colonial exploitation and oppression inflicted on the people of the sub-continent. The film was made in a world in which neo-colonialism remained a dominant force.

Whilst the film is mainly in English, with some Hindi and Urdu, it does rely to a great extent on indigenous casting and many of the production personnel; there was a Hindi-language version released in India. One official reason for supporting the film was that it would have a positive effect on indigenous film. There have been several films about Gandhi since 1982, however, as with one Gandhi, My Father (2007), these have not enjoyed mainstream distribution in the west.

In Technicolor with black and white, Panavision 2.35:1, running time 191 minutes; in English and Hindi with some subtitles.

Young Winston, Britain 1972

This film was written and produced by Carl Foreman, a successful Hollywood script writer who then turned to production. There is as distinct change of values from his early writing to his production career. Slightly earlier than this film is the gung-ho The Guns of Navarone (1961). Apparently, at  a meeting, Churchill suggested that his autobiographical ‘My Early Life’ would make a good movie; this fits with the known character of the man. Foreman recruited Attenborough as director. Attenborough liked the idea, writing later,

“whatever you  thought of Churchill politically he was a god-dammed hero. I genuinely did, and do believe he saved Europe and thereby saved Western civilization as we have become accustomed to it.” (Attenborough Dossier, page 49).

Two other leaders might have disagreed; Joseph Stalin regarding Europe and Mahatma Gandhi on the virtues of Western Civilization. Attenborough also disagreed with some of the aspects of the screenplay but he was the person who selected Simon Ward to play the protagonist.

The film opens on  Victory in Europe Day in 1945 with Churchill joining the royal family on the balcony of  Buckingham Palace to cheering crowds. After the credits we see Churchill in action in a British Afghan campaign; [what’s new in British imperial politics]. His reckless behaviour in combat is designed to garner attention, a point made in a voice over; voiced indeed by Simon Ward who gets close to the Churchill voice, one that always struck me as affected. He then writes a book and pesters is mother in particular to get him a place on the expedition to Sudan led by General Kitchener.  His mother is the North American wife (Anne Bancroft) of grandee and politician Lord Randolph Churchill (Robert Shaw).

A this point we go into a flashback within a flashback, chronicling Churchill’s early education and then his military training. His father is a distant figure and comes to suffer from an incurable decease [not identified] but which doctors tell the wife means the couple must avoid ‘physical relations’. Lord Randolph has also become a dissident in the Tory Party and later resigns from the cabinet. He will eventually succumb to the decease and some form of senility.

Churchill now succeeds at the Sandhurst military school passing out as a 2nd Lieutenant. His next major action is when he joins Kitchener’s expedition to the Sudan. There is the brutal battle of Omdurman, where the British use modern technology to massacre the indigenous army. Churchill makes his name at a subsequent skirmish involving troops and the cavalry.

He is also seeking to get elected as an MP. Then he goes to South Africa as a war correspondent, where the British are fighting the Boers. Again he distinguishes himself when the Boers attack a troop train; though captured he manages to escape. He returns to Britain a war hero and soon wins a Parliamentary seat. Elected as a Tory he is soon a maverick like his father. But he makes a successful speech in a key debate and is obviously singled out for a government post. The voice over goes forward for seven years to his marriage. And the film ends once more on the Balcony of Buckingham palace alongside the Royal family.

This is a somewhat episodic narration, and I thought that the use of the voice over was not really effective. The action sequences are well done. The drama is very much about the relationship between Churchill and his mother. Quite a few historical names pass by; Anthony Hopkins plays the young Lloyd George. But the narrative is primarily about Churchill and his developing career. The film did well at the British box office and won a number of nominations at the British  Academy Film Awards. The only success there was for Best Costume Design, Anthony Mendleson. However, there was general praise for Simon Ward’s performance and Anne Bancroft. Attenborough developed a real skill in working with actors; he regarded it as the most important aspect of a directors’ work.

Two craft people from Oh, What a Lovely War worked on the film; Gerry Turpin for cinematography and Don Ashton for Production Design. Attenborough throughout his career preferred working with familiar people. The visual work of both was excellent and the film displayed a characteristic of Attenborough’s film; close attention to historical accuracy. As with the other historical dramas and biographies this was an epic film, running well over two hours, in colour and widescreen. Yet the concentration on biography means that there is not a clear sense of the historical periods though which the story has passed. Both Attenborough and Foreman seem to take the imperial period at its own face value. The next film has a critical stance on the military establishment which is missing for the British establishment as a whole here.

Filmed in 35mm Panavision of 2.35;1 in Colourflex with black and white archival footage: the film was also released in a 70mm blow-up: the British release running time was 157 minutes but several versions, including in the USA, were shorter.

The Radical Film Network ’68’

Formed in 2013 in London this linkage is now fairly widespread across several continents. The objects are to further ‘radical film’ and participants are involved in production, exhibition and associated activities. Radical is defined as

“… first and foremost to a political affiliation to progressive politics and struggles for social justice –  from workers’ rights and environmental sustainability to gender, racial and sexual equality.”

A current and welcome project is ‘RFN 68’,

“Taking the radical uprisings and revolutionary fervour of this rare and volatile year as a source of inspiration, the  RFN68 festival examines the legacy of the events of 1968 through an international programme of films, workshops, discussion and social events, organised by the Radical Film Network.”

Several events have taken place in Leeds and I attended a screening of In the Intense Now / No Intenso Agora (João Moreira Salles, Brazil, 2017 ) at the Hyde Park Picture House.

This is a documentary about 1968 but offering a distinctive approach. A compilation documentary it uses home movies from Salles’ family and found footage from films of the period, amateur film footage and some material from television, radio and printed sources.  Some of the film soundtracks appear in the film but for most of the running time there is a commentative voice of the director. The film is in black and white and colour and in the Academy ratio: it is good to see a film where the makers resists the conventional re-framing of archive footage.

This is a fairly subjective but sympathetic revisiting of Paris in May 1968 and parallel places and events though the parallels are those felt by the director. The film opens with footage from a home movie shot by the director’s mother on a visit to China in 1966 followed by film of events in Prague in 1968 and then some more home movie, this time in a street in Brazil. These signal some of the preoccupations of the film-maker, though they are only clarified as the film progresses. The footage from China was filmed during the Cultural Revolution and features Red Guards who are surprisingly friendly to these bourgeois tourists. The footage from Brazil shows family members but also, as the narrative voice points out, the class situation in which they live.

Then the film is mainly devoted to events in Paris in May 1968. The film  more or less follows the chronology of events but this is not a history of that month but a series of fragments that give a sense of what happened and offer [as one review suggested] ‘radical romanticism’.

Certain characters occupy the centre. Thus we see and hear General de Gaulle at the New Year of 1967; twice towards the end of May 1968; and finally at the New Year 1968. On television he seems a relic from the past but on radio he is the voice of tradition and moderation. The film includes television  coverage of the mass demonstration of conservatives that followed the radio broadcast.

There is also ample coverage of Daniel Cohn-Bandit, mainly on film but also on radio. There is a certain  identification with Daniel but also a strong note of irony as the film  records his rather doubtful co-operation with ‘Paris Match’. And there is much film of the students, the workers and the street clashes that filled the city.

Part 2 includes more material from Paris but also extended coverage of the suppression of ‘The Prague Spring’ by the armies of the Warsaw Pact. Later in the film there is coverage of the funeral of Jan Palach, the student who immolated himself in protest. This leads into a series of films that deal with death and burial. These include a student who died in a protest in Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 1968; a suicide by a student during the protests in Paris; and a policeman killed during a demonstration in Lyon in the same period. In these passages there is none of the earlier irony but a note of quiet mourning. This seems to aim at generating a sense of loss  over the upheavals.

The film ends with more footage from the home movie shot in China and then film of Mao Zedong and one of his poems. Finally we see the famous shot by the Lumière Brothers of workers leaving their factory: why I was unsure.

Whilst the ‘romantic’ does describe much of the treatment there is a continuing tone of irony. Thus at one point the commentary notes the provenance of the famous aphorism,

“Sous les pavés, la plage! (“Under the paving stones, the beach.”)”.

Was this a political slogan or an advertiser’s gimmick. At another point the commentary notes the predominance of short hair among the male protesters and compares this with the USA where the hair was longer and the events [according to the commentator] were more radical. It also notes the dominance of men in Paris 68, [not quite accurate if you watch the footage carefully].

The film offers a fascinating revisiting of these radical events. However it is structured round the personal rather than the analytical. In the end the significance of ’68 seems uncertain. I was struck by the inclusion of ‘The Prague Spring’. The other locations were significant for the director. His family came from Brazil, were living in Paris in May 1968 and his mother did visit China in 1966. But Czechoslovakia has no such relationship. I wondered, as Paris and Rio de Janeiro were protests essentially about capitalism that he felt the need to include a protest against ‘socialism’, in which case he misconstrues the significance of events in Prague.

And I would question the comparison between Paris and the USA. ‘PBS America’ recently broadcast the Ken Burns Vietnam programme, in its entirety, not cut as was the case with the BBC. What is apparent in the film is that while many voices supported the Liberation struggle in Vietnam the mass of the protest was against the effects of the war within the USA. Paris was more radical. One aspect of this was the influence of the radical politics in China’s Cultural Revolution. We do get footage of Mao and we do see some Maoists at work in Paris but the parallels are not really drawn out in this film.

Even so I was fascinated by the film  which is definitely worth seeing. The research and selection of found footage in impressive. The structure of the film brings out interesting aspects and the editing makes both ironic and political comments. Among the footage in this film is some from the work of Chris Marker. His A Grin Without A Cat  / Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977) remains the essential viewing on this period. It would be good if we could have an opportunity to revisit this film as well.

The Radical Film Network has a calendar of events for RFN 68 on its WebPages. And one can sign up to be kept informed and even participate,.

The Happy Prince, Germany, Belgium, Britain 2018

This is the new film about Oscar Wilde, titled from his famous short story. Oscar Wilde’s rise and fall is one of the most well-known and dramatic careers in C19th Britain. A popular writer and journalist, a successful playwright, raconteur and epigrammatist, the revelation of his homosexuality, the repressed and noir looking underground of Victorian society, led to disaster and early death. There have been numerous books about Wilde, and quite a few theatrical plays and television features and programmes. And there have been four English language features films, and French and German features, plus several documentarians. And his plays and his one novel, ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’, have a number of film adaptations.

There is much material for the films. Apart from biographies and treatments in other media, memoirs of Wilde abound. There is his own ‘De Profundis’, though this and the recollections of people who knew him are not always reliable. And the famous trials were recorded in detail and all these film versions utilise the more notable contributions by Wilde. ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ [from an essay] has become a well used phrase in English.

Oscar Wilde (1960) was produced by Vantage Films and distributed by C20th Fox. It garnered an ‘X’ certificate from the British Board of Film Censors, a classification that seems bizarre fifty years on. It was shot in black and white and in the Academy ratio, quite a late example of the use of this ratio. The director was Gregory Ratoff, a Russian émigré who moved first to Paris and then Hollywood. The script was by Jo Eisinger and based on a play that included reminiscences by Wilde’s friend Frank Harris. Eisinger had earlier scripted the notable 1950 Night and the City.

The key members of the cast were Robert Morley as Oscar Wilde; Phyllis Calvert as his wife Constance; and John Neville as Lord Alfred Douglas,[Bosie], Wilde’s lover and the cause of his downfall. Morley is fine presenting Wilde as society wit and epigrammatist; the sexual side is much weaker. But the film itself is weak on this; apparently a scene involving Wilde soliciting a ‘rent boy’ was cut. Neville as Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie) does not generate enough charm to justify the obsession that Wilde developed for him. Calvert’s Constance is under-written and her casting presumably followed from earlier roles where she was a put-upon wife, such as They Were Sisters (1945).

The film opens and closes ion Wilde’s grave in Paris at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. It then revisits Wilde’s infatuation and introduces his nemesis, Bosie ‘s father, The Marquis of Queensbury [spellings vary], played by Edmunds Chapman who never exhibits the manic qualities ascribed to the character. What stands out is the trial and the now famous cross-examination by Sir Edward Carson (Ralph Richardson). Richardson plays the character as steely and pitiless. The film also uses the trial transcripts and offers the fullest dramatisation of the court hearing. Following the trial we briefly see Wilde’s incarceration and then his decline in Paris.

The Monthly Film Bulletin (July 1960]] notes the circumstances of the film’s release.

“The film, by five days, of two neck and neck versions of the Wilde story to reach the screen, Oscar Wilde was still being edited up to a couple of hours before the press show. “

This partly accounts for the lack of life in the film and in the portrayals. Possibly responding to Richardson’s careful demolition Morley does give eloquence to the passage of the ‘Love that dare not speak its name’.

The competing version was The Trials of Oscar Wilde, with executive producers Irving Allan and Albert R. Broccoli. This film also received an ‘X’ certificate, with slightly more justification. The film was both scripted and directed by Ken Hughes,; he went on to direct the fine film version of Oliver Cromwell (1970). The film was based on a novel of the same name by Montgomery Hyde and a theatrical adaptation by John Furnell, ‘The Stringed Lute’. The film was shot in Technirama 70, with fine Technicolor and a ratio of 2.20:1 in the 70mm prints, [2.35:1 in the 35mm prints]. The film had a talented production crew, Ted Moore providing the cinematography : he worked on several Bond films. As also did the designer [along with Bill Constable] Ken Adams. And Ron Goodwin provided the music. The film looks and sounds much better than its rival.

The plot begins at the same point as Oscar Wilde, the opening of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’. However the film fills in the preceding relationship between Wilde and ‘Bosie’. In fact the film portrays this relationship in much greater depth. One gets a sense of the involvement between the two men and their other relationships, wife and father. John Fraser is good as lord Douglas whilst Lionel Jefferies is excellent as the mad, manic and macho Marquis of Queensbury. Yvonne Mitchell plays Wilde’s wife Constance but the part is again underwritten. We meet their children briefly and at one point hear Oscar telling ‘The Happy Prince’ [incomplete]. At the centre of the film is Peter Finch’s portrayal of Wilde. He does not really catch the writer or the notorious public figure but invests great skill in his obsession with ‘Bosie’ and in the way his life collapses.

Given the title of the film the treatment of the criminal libel case is underdeveloped; ‘trials’ in the sense of the personal. James Mason is not as ruthless as the Richardson portrayal. The film does deal with the two subsequent prosecutions, one ending in a dead-locked jury the other in Wilde’s draconian and moralistic punishment. The film ends with Wilde’s release and does not follow him in his exile in Paris. The last shot is as he leaves London by train. This common trope offers the sight of Wilde spurning ‘Bosie’ as his train departs.

This is a pretty good portrait of Wilde but its primary concern is the in famous relationship and his personal suffering. London and theatre-land of the period is well drawn but seems slightly external to the characters. The powerful scenes are those where Wilde’s obsession increases at the same time as Bosie’s demands increasingly sap his artistry and his social position.

Thirty seven years on and with social attitudes to sexual orientation much changed came Wilde (1997). This biopic was produced in a period when films openly and explicitly addressing gay love were frequent. The film was credited as British and to three other territories; there are a number of production companies, including monies from British and European state agencies. The screenplay is by Julian Mitchell from the book ‘Oscar Wilde’ by Richard Ellmann. It is filmed in anamorphic 2.35:1 and in full Metrocolor. Martin Fuhrer cinematography makes good use of the production design by Maria Djurkovic and very fine costumes by Nic Ede. Oscar Wilde is played in the film by Christopher Fry whose personal and sexual orientation are closer to the subject than that of the earlier actors. He does capture the flamboyance of Wilde’s public image and [to a degree] the contradictory nature of his desires and attractions. The film sets this up in an inspired opening sequence. Prior to marriage the young Wilde, already a noted social figure, visits and entertains miners as he makes a trip to the USA and ‘out west’. This nicely sets up the public figure of Wilde and his ambiguous standing.

The film gives us Wilde’s married life and his two children. Jennifer Ehle has a better written part than her predecessors and offers more rounded portrait of the character. Michael Sheen plays Robert Ross, who both introduces Wilde to the pleasures of homosexuality and also remains a steadfast friend through the travails that will follow. But the film’s prime interest is in Wilde’s sexuality and his obsession with Lord Alfred Douglas, (Jude Law). Their sequences are the most extended in the film and the two actors give full rein to the obsession on one side and the self-centred conduct on the other. Some of the scenes, like Wilde’s sojourn in Brighton whilst ill, cross over with the earlier Trials. But this representation is more powerful and complex, thanks in part to the greater latitude allowed the subject in this period. Tom Wilkinson, as the Marquess of Queensbury, is good and allowed a more complex characterisation than the earlier films.

The film was classified ’15’, how times changed. And it contains a certain amount of explicit sexual conduct. However, I do not think there is any frontal nudity, and the film successfully avoided the ’18’ classification in Britain. The film does show us both Wilde and Bosie’s sexual relationship and their indulgence in what then [as more recently] were described as ‘rent boys’. But that focus takes the film away from the most famous aspect of the story, the notorious trials. The treatment of the libel case is fairly perfunctory in relation to the earlier versions. And the two cases of prosecution are past over.

There are some grim sequences of Wilde’s prison term. And we follow him to exile in France. However, the film ends when he and Bosie re-unite, [though in actuality this was a brief reunion].

The film, as in earlier versions, uses much of the recorded dialogue. Some of the stormier scenes are taken from the account Wilde himself gave in ‘De Profundis’. And there are a number of scenes where we hear Wilde’s famous short story, ‘The Selfish Giant’; suggesting a critical line in the narrative,.

Now, twenty years later, we have a new version of Oscar Wilde. ‘A passion project’ for writer and director Rupert Everett. Apparently it took Everett five years to bring the project to completion. It is credited to Belgium, Italy and Britain; the list of Production Companies runs to two columns in S&S, the main sources being the BBC, Tele München and Télevision belge. The film was shot digitally and in colour and 2.35:1. The main location for the project was Bavaria, with other sites in Belgium, France and Italy. The cinematography by John Conroy looks good as does the production design by Brian Morris. Both interiors and exteriors are convincing and full of interest. The locations partly reflect the film’s focus, the last years of Wilde’s life following his imprisonment and exile. The title of the film is taken from the famous short story by Oscar Wilde, which also figured briefly in the earlier Trials. But here the story becomes a metaphor for the downward spiral of Wilde’s life. The last line of that story suggests the posthumous upward spiral of his work and reputation.

The film opens in 1900 with Wilde already in exile. His life there is intercut with flashbacks to the earlier parts of the story. In a couple of places we get a montage of clips summoning up the past but also highlighting the parallels and oppositions in his career. In an early sequence he entertains a crowd in a low Paris bar with a rendition of a music hall favourite, he collapses and this is followed by a montage of clips including his sentencing for ‘immorality’, the vindictive Marquess of Queensbury and the deeply depressing Reading Gaol. In another sequence, that also appeared in Wilde, we see Oscar pursued by homophobic young Englishness in a Normandy town. There follows a montage of clips that present the opposition and parallels in Wilde life, including a grim sequence as he was baited on his way to prison counterposed with his triumph at the opening night of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’. Right through the film Everett and his team counterpose the life in exile with memories and returns to both Wilde success and fame and his degradation after his fall. Nicolas Gaster editing is to be commended.

Everett’s Wilde dominates the film. Philip Kemp notes that

“Rupert Everett, in his magisterial role as writer, director and star, catches the theatricality self-mocking aspect of the flamboyant littérateur almost from the start.” (Sight & Sound July 2018).

Everett also catches the rumbustious vitality which enabled Wilde to entertain people across the Victorian divide, from bourgeois to proletarians. This also brings out his sympathy, [though not very analytical] for the exploited and oppressed.

Everett dominates the screen so that other characters are not that fully developed. Both Edwin Thomas) Robbie Ross) and Colin Morgan (Lord Alfred Douglas are excellent as Oscar’s lovers. Emily Watson is fine but gets only limited screen time. The rest of the cast are those who Wilde encounters in exile with a key British character, like the Marquess of Queensbury’ seen only briefly and not credited.

The film offers a valedictory portrait of the artist, with all his flaws and vices. It also give insight into this destructive urges which explain how his great success was followed by such a precipitous fall. And it addresses directly and fully his homosexual activities. The BBFC gave the film a ’15’ certificate noting that

“very strong language, strong nudity, drug misuse”.

We see Oscar recounting ‘The Happy Prince’ to two young French urchins, one of who he pays for sex. And in another fine transition we cut to the earlier Wilde recounting that story to his two sons. I think this story makes a better metaphor for Wilde himself that that of ‘The Selfish Giant’ used in Wilde. Everett subtly changes some of the tale to suit the film. Thus the ‘young man in as garret’ becomes

“a broken man … He was a writer, but he was too cold to finish his play”.

Here the sentimentality in some of Wilde’s work, though not his famous plays, comes to the fore. And the part of the story [featured elsewhere in the film] where the Mayor decrees the fate of the statue of the ‘Happy Prince,’ cast aside and melted down, draws Wilde’s moral with emphasis to his own fate at the hands of the moralistic Victorian society.

The film has its flaws and the occasional longueur. But Everett’s characterisation, the vivid portrayal of Wilde’s treatment, and the moral valuation offered by the film, make this my favourite of the film adaptations. Given Wilde’s place in the Pantheon, the richness of his artistic work, and the key place he occupies in the history of ‘coming out’, I am sure that we will see more films on this subject in the future.

The Retrieval USA 2013

This film appears to have only had screenings at film festivals. I saw this US Indie at the Leeds International Film Festival in 2013 [a UK première] and it was attended by the director Chris Eska. Since then it has not surfaced anywhere in my range. This is a shame. It is both an excellent film and an interesting variation on a major genre: the US Civil War movie.

The film is set in the later stages of the US Civil War, 1864. The Union armies are into the Confederate territories and we see both a violent skirmish and the aftermath of some battle. However, what makes the film distinctive is that it focuses on black slaves, runaways and freed slaves caught up in this great conflict. For much of the film we are alone with a small trio of black men. There is thirteen year old Negro boy, Will [a fine performance by Ashton Sanders]. His mentor is Marcus (John Keston) who has trained him to work alongside as they assist a gang of white mercenaries who are hunting down runaway slaves for the bounty on their heads.

Marcus with Will is sent north into Union-held territory to bring back fellow Negro Nate (Tishuan Scott). He is not a runaway but a freed slave. However, six years earlier, in resisting an attempt to capture and enslave him, he shot a white gang member. So the journey involves both revenge and a bounty. Marcus and Will use a tale of a sick brother to entice Nate back close enough to the gang’s camp to enable his capture. As readers can imagine, this is the point at which the contradictions of the war and the period come to a climax.

Most of the film is taken up with the journey and the changing relationships between the three men. On the way they encounter both a live battle and the strewn corpses of the aftermath of another. A civil war film that spends most of its time with three black men is distinctive. However the story in which they are embedded is fairly conventional. I could reckon many of the developments before they arrived and the resolution of the film became more clearly predictable over the course of the film’s 92 minutes.

The writer and director Chris Eska also wrote the screenplay and edited the film. He is quoted in the Festival Catalogue:

“I start with the emotions first, then I tend to work backwards to find the setting of the characters that are going to highlight those emotions and themes.”

Using a civil war setting seems to have been the third possibility considered. This explains why there are so many familiar tropes in the film. In fact the emotions are the strongest aspect of the film. The characters interactions and developments are engaging. There is one very fine sequence when Nate and Will visit the homestead Nate left six years earlier. And they meet his former wife and her ‘new man’. It is sensitively filmed and acted.

The visual aspects of the film are also very good. The film was shot by Yasu Tanida in the 4K digital format. And the landscape along the journey looks great. The ratio seems to be 1.78:1. This is not a a cinematic ratio. I wondered if this was down to using digital or the hope that it would get screenings on television.. Whether that happened I am uncertain but it has been available on online streaming. Eska does not seem to have been able to make any subsequent features.

But there is also a serious weakness to the film. This is the music score by Matthew Wiedemann and the Yellow 6 band. Wiedemann seems to have provided the primary input, with ‘sixteen tracks’. The majority of the score accompanies the sequences of the journey. The music accompanies the changing landscape and also signals dramatic development. But at times it did not seem to have a discernible function. I thought the film was over-scored. This is a shame, because the natural sounds on the track when they appear are extremely well done.

I assume the music was worked out with Eska as he remarked that he and Wiedemann had worked together before. Eska participated in a Q&A after the screening. I, unfortunately, had to leave to catch a bus. A friend told me about some of the discussion. Eska remarked that finding funding for an independent film in the USA was hard: harder than a decade ago. I had found the final closing sequence of the film the most conventional. Eska explained that this was added because one of the producers would not accept the original ending. He talked about the editing which he found was essential in creating the structure that he wanted. He also talked about working with the Afro-American actors, for whom these were the first opportunities to play a leading role.

The film clearly failed to find a British distributor or elsewhere, even in the USA. Independent film distribution has decline din recent years but this would also seem to be an example of the neglect of the Afro-American experience in US cinema. At the time that it was exhibited at the Leeds International Film Festival that famous epic Gone With the Wind (193) was enjoying yet another re-release. This film is, among other matters, an eloquent rebuff to that film. I wonder how long I will have to wait to see it again at the cinema?

The Rape of Recy Taylor, USA 2017

The film recounts the rape of a young Afro-American woman and mother in 1944 in Alabama by a gang of white men and her struggle for justice. This was before the period of activism known for ‘The Civil Rights Movement’. Rape of black women, like the lynching of black people, was common in the period dominated by the racist culture called ‘Jim Crow’. Recy’s struggle for justice was supported by National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People [NAACP] and by one of its field officers, Rosa Parks. Parks is famous for her role in the ‘Bus Boycotts’ in the 1950s. But this case was equally important is the development of black resistance to the racism endemic in the USA. The NAACP, committed to constitutional action, was for decades the lead organisation in the struggle for equality for Afro-Americans.

The central event in the film, an assault and rape on the 24 year-old black woman on a Sunday evening as she returned from a church service, is told through the filmed testimony of her family members and audio recordings of Recy herself. The perpetrators were six white teenagers. Though identified the local sheriff contrived to avoid any action. And Recy’s family home was terrorised and there were death threats when she pursued her claim for justice. These testimonies are intercut with contemporary footage, tending to impressionistic, of the settings, in darkness and with travelling shots that suggest a noir, even horror, feel. Alongside this are extracts from documentary film of the period and archive photographs. And as a distinctive addition clips from the ‘race cinema’ of the period and earlier.

The ‘race cinema’ operated from about 1910 to the end of the 1940s. It was a segregated cinema, in its production, distribution and exhibition, not just in the South but across the USA. Whilst it suffered from low production values due the poor economics of the business the films provided a potent experience for black audiences. The films presented black culture in its own estimation, valorised black heroes and heroines, vilified the lumpen proletarian elements in black communities and the racist white communities from which Afro-Americans had suffered. The films dramatised the brutalities and inequalities of US culture in the period, including explicit representation of rapes and lynchings and the real violent face of organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan.

These clips provides a dramatic tapestry into which Recy’s story is implanted. And the film uses virtuoso techniques to increase the drama. There are fine superimpositions of archival footage over the contemporary film. There are montage sequences which interweave, factual and fictionalised renderings. And there is added to this a powerful musical accompaniment of sombre orchestral music and well chosen songs from the Africo-American culture. Some of the characters in the events are now deceased and are voiced by actors. So the film is partly a drama-documentary and shares some formal aspects with the film of Ken Burns and his colleagues.

The film is directed by Nancy Buirski whose previous films include a documentary The Loving Story (2011) and a dramatised treatment Loving (2016) of an inter-racial couple prosecuted for breaking laws against ‘miscegenation’. This new feature falls somewhere in between, a documentary approach but dramatised by particular material and techniques. Buirski scripted the film and skilfully orchestrates the various components. There is excellent contribution in the cinematography by Rex Miller and the film uses drone cinematography to great effect. Also deserving praise is the film editing by Anthony Ripoli; the visual effects by Aaron Hodgins Davis; and the work of the eight crafts-people in the sound department. To this the credits add a long list of researchers who must have combed all sorts of archives and collections as well as tracking down people to be interviewed. The film respects the archive film and materials using their original aspect ratios.

Recy’s family member comment on the issues as well as recounting the events. In the latter stages of the film two contemporary voices add to this analysis: Daniel L. McGuire whose book ‘At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance – a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power’ details the whole violent culture which was inflicted on Afro-American women over decades [Published in 2011 the book’s title is taken from a 1960’s song].. And there is Afro-American historian Crystal Feimster. Their contributions place this story in the wider culture of racist violence and black resistance. In particular the film draws out the role of Rosa Parks, a NAACP field officer who took up Recy’s case and worked to develop a widespread protest that reached beyond the black communities. Rosa Parks is more famous for her role in the Montgomery ‘Bus Boycott’, The commentators emphasise how the campaign of support for Recy was an equally important in the development of resistance by black people. They also emphasise how important was the role of black women in the movement, both in the 1940s and the 1950s despite the sometime over-emphasis on iconic male leaders. This argument is convincing but I would have liked more on the struggle in the 1940s. The film refers to one other campaign by another black women who suffered rape but the film implies more.

One difference between the 1940s and 1950s was, that whilst the bus boycott led on toe increase action and results, in Recy’s case despite widespread campaigning she was not able to get a fair trail of her assailants. The first trial was a mockery and subsequently an all-white jury refused indictments. The film does note that in 2011 the Alabama State Legislature passed the following:

“BE IT RESOLVED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF ALABAMA, BOTH HOUSES THEREOF CONCURRING, That we acknowledge the lack of prosecution for crimes committed against Recy Taylor by the government of the State of Alabama, that we declare such failure to act was, and is, morally abhorrent and repugnant, and that we do hereby express profound regret for the role played by the government of the State of Alabama in failing to prosecute the crimes.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That we express our deepest sympathies and solemn regrets to Recy Taylor and her family and friends.”

Apart from the long and insulting delay the film, at this point, also includes interviews with white residents from Abbeville. They are aware of the events but are not really prepared to condemn them or offer praise for Recy’s struggle for justice. But we do see her, old and infirm, [in a residential home I think}, and she remains as resolute as she must have been in 1944. She died late in 2017. It seems unlikely that she would have seen this film’ tribute to her courage and resilience.

This films uses a complex mixture of personal film and audio testimonies, commentary and archive material. The latter includes a clip from the films of Oscar Micheaux whose work was a central component of the ‘race cinema’, segregated film production and exhibition in the USA from the 1910s to the 1940s.

This promises to be a powerful and stimulating documentary on issues that, as the news constantly reminds us, remains a central problematic in US culture. What would be good would be if we could have a follow-up of a screening of one of Oscar Micheaux’s powerful film dramas: Within Our Gates (1920) is a classic that addresses both rape and lynchings of black people.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on screen

The The Young Karl Marx / Le jeune Karl Marx /  Der junge Karl Marx (France, Belgium, Germany 2017) is a must for genuine communists and recommended for anyone who is a fan of Karl Marx: the 200^th anniversary of his birthday fell on May 5^th 2018.  Now it is the 200th anniversary of the birth of his colleague Frederick/Friedrich Engels, the other key character in this title. 200 years on their ‘spectre’ still haunts the European [and now the world] bourgeoisie. You can celebrate this anniversary on November 28th.

The newly released film by Raoul Peck is centred on the friendship and collaboration between Marx and Friedrich Engels, the two intellectual giants of the modern era. Note, the play ‘Young Marx’ apparently commences where this dramatisation leaves off. The film covers the period from 1841 to 1848 when these youthful rebels were finding their feet and their intellectual ground. We follow Marx from Germany to Paris, to Brussels to London. We see and hear his wife Jenny and watch as he develops a relationship with Engels, already in the throes of an affair with Mary Burns.

Over this period Marx was writing for ‘Rheinische Zeitung’ (‘Rhineland News’); ‘Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher’ (‘German-French Annals’); ‘Vorwärts!’ (‘Forward!’), the last for the League of the Just. Engels had already published his famous ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844’. Marx and Engels jointly published ‘The Holy Family’ (1845). Marx followed up with ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’ (1847). Then early in 1848 he and Engels wrote for The Communist League [previously The League of the Just] ‘The Communist Manifesto’. This was published in February 1848 as a wave of proletarian revolutions swept across Europe. At this point the modern Communist movement was born and Marx and Engels continued their political activities whilst developing the analysis of Capitalism, an analysis that is as accurate today as it was when ‘Das Kapital’ (Volume 1) was first published in 1867.

Marx and Engels dominate the film as do their political discussions. We do see both Jenny and Mary involved in political action and commenting on the political debates. A number of other famous activists and theorists of the period also appear in the film. We have Michael Bakunin briefly. More frequently we see and hear Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Among the people debated with and criticised by Marx is Wilhelm Weitling.

Only Marx and Engels are presented as rounded characters. But they and the supporting cast portray these revolutionaries in a convincing manner as they also do with their political debates and arguments. It is the strength of the acting that makes the film work.

In fact it is a fairly conventional treatment, an example of the modern film biopic which tends to dramatise a character through one aspect of their life and work. Essentially this film charts the friendship and the way that it leads up to the seminal manifesto. The narrative is linear; carefully structured to include action and drama. The basic plot, though using fictional elements, is broadly historically accurate. Where it less typical is in the amount of time that it allows for political statements and debates. Visually it is similar to many other costume dramas.

The film’s running time is 118 minutes. A more daring length, such as in Peter Watkins La Commune (Paris 1871) (2000) which runs for 345 minutes., would enable a fuller treatment of the politics. Whilst an audience will get a sense of the radical ideas and analysis what actually constitutes the contribution of Marx and Engels in this period will only be clear to people familiar with the written works. When we reach ‘The Communist Manifesto’ we hear the opening paragraphs but not the equally famous ending. The complete Manifesto would have been a better choice. Perhaps a more radical film-maker [Jean-Luc Godard?] might have essayed this.

A more serious omission in some ways is the absence of the voice of the proletariat. The film opens with a fine sequence as we watch rural proletarians hunted down as they attempt to gather kindling: and a commentative voice explains the relevance of the different meanings of theft to this situation When we reach the Manifesto there is an evening sequence as Marx, Engels, Jenny and Mary read the opening of the almost complete Manifesto. Then in a montage of stills we see groups of silent proletarians offering a direct gaze to the audience and the bourgeoisie. But their voice is mainly absent. There are some excellent scenes of of factory exploitation; street meetings; and a Communist League meeting where proletarians are present. But they are only supporting where as in the work of Marx and Engels they are both the object and the subject. The Manifesto would make more sense if the proletarian impact on Marx and Engels was made clear. The film does though make clear that these two are not just isolated intellectuals but are involved in practical political action, as are both Jenny and Mary.

Within the limits of the genre the production is well done. The design, editing and use of music is rather conventional but works well. The cinematography is generally well done. However, it does use the modern technique of filming characters standing before or beside windows. This reduces the clarity in the image of the character/s, and I suspect digital formats emphasise this. The DCP I saw was generally good but the contrast was lower than it might have been on 35mm. I think the film was probably shot in a digital format. The British version is in German, French and English with appropriate sub-titles. It uses both colour and black and white in a ratio of 2.35:1.

I enjoyed the film and I was genuinely moved at times. But after the sequence constructed around ‘The Communist Manifesto’ there are two end titles pointing forward to ‘Das Kapital’. Apparently , in an effort to emphasise the continuing relevance of the Manifesto there follows a second montage of well-known events and figures in the succeeding decades. These are not all well-chosen; several of the figures would have been roundly attacked by Marx and Engels if they were still around. Better would have been a montage illustrating the final and ringing declaration of the Manifesto, the working classes still have ‘nothing to lose but their chains!

The Post (USA/India 2017) with a Q&A

This is the new film directed by Steven Spielberg. It recounts that actual events [not completely accurately] around the publication of a set of secret documents that detailed the history of the war by the Unites States against Vietnam up until 1966. These documents revealed that, among other failings, the US administration, including Presidents, had lied to the US people. The film presents the story of how The Washington Post, with limited acknowledgement of The New York Times who actually broke the story, published parts of The Papers and successfully defended this in the Supreme Court of the USA. The film’s focus is primarily on the owner of the publishing company, Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep); a company that owned other media including television stations. The other key character is the then editor of The Washington Post, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks). Less centrally we see Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys), who leaked the documents; Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), then Secretary of Defence, who commission The Papers; various journalists and,. briefly, workers at the paper, opponents of the Vietnam War and, in reverse shots through a window, President Nixon (Curzon Dobell).

On Sunday January 28^th the Hyde Park screened the title followed by a Q&A led by Granville Williams. This rather made up for every screening bar one in that week [Jupiter’s Moon on Tuesday] on the cinema’s single screen was this drama. Granville Williams is an experienced writer and commentator on the Media and the Press. For a long time he was the editor of the FreePress of the Campaign for Freedom in the Press and Media. Over a hundred people turned up for the screening and about half of them stayed for the Q&A.

Granville introduced the discussion with some background on the events depicted in the film. He commented that there were a selection of films that portrayed journalist in an ‘honourable’ light. He mentioned All the President’s Men (1976), Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) and Spotlight (2015). Not in the same class but also recent was State of Play (2009), inferior to the original British television version. Of course, classic Hollywood had a whole cycle of films about conscientious, determined and ‘freedom loving’ journalists: think Frank Capra and Howard Hawks.

Granville made the point that The Post does not offer a proper focus on the role of The New York Times. Moreover, The Washington Post, as the film characters tell us, was not national paper in the same way as The Times at this point. But in addition The Post only joined the criticisms of the US war in Vietnam in 1969.

Granville was not convinced by the characterisation of Katharine Graham in the film. The portrayal shows her as frequently hesitant, which was not his sense of the actual person. When she took over the company after the death of her husband [a nasty-sounding type) and her son, she started to change the paper. It was she that recruited Ben Bradlee as editor. Granville also reckoned that the actual Bradlee was more motivated by competition with The New York Times than the liberal cause; a point only slightly proposed in the film. And Granville lamented that since then both The Times and The Post had sunk to supporting the US military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of the aspects of the film that did impress him was the focus on the actual process of printing the paper. But later shareholder pressure, [the film shows the company going ‘public’ on Wall Street] led to the introduce of new technology. There was a long strike in 1975 through 1976 which Granville compared to the events at Wapping organised by the Murdoch Press. And he noted that late in her life Graham supported Ronald Reagan.

Granville got a well deserved round of applause for this introduction and then we had some questions and comments by members of the audience.

A woman commented on the decline of the US provincial press, papers which are briefly referenced in the film, and noted that critical journalism on the war in Afghanistan tended to be in books rather than the mainstream media.

Granville gave an example of books produced by journalists, remarking that because much of this reportage was not aired on television the journalist had to rely on book publishing to recount their stories. He gave an example of one involving the USA where missiles supposedly supplied to the Mujahidin ended up in other hands. Regarding the provincial press in the USA he noted that this was a pale shadow of it former self.

A man asked about The New York Times’ role and compared the press role then and the seemingly chaotic media coverage in the USA today.

Granville praised the high standards that operated in The Times at this period. He noted that issues like ‘fake news’ were part of the problems in the USA media. But he pointed out there were still alternative press and media.

Another audience member commented that the crisis in journalism was not just in the USA but globally. He opined that there was also a crisis in the recruitment of a new generation of journalists which exacerbated problems. Granville concurred with this and cited the developments in Russia.

An earlier questioner returned to the state of the US press and regretted the demise of what was an array of ‘afternoon papers’ in the USA. She did though, see a ‘ray of light’ in the British Financial Times’ exposé of the events at the Presidents’ Club.

Granville picked up on the issue of ‘good journalism’. He noted a US report which showed that the number of major media corporations in the USA had reduced from 50 in 1953 to only 5 in 2004. He also noted similar problems in Britain and cited the increasing monopoly in the regional press.

Another questioner asked about the issue of ‘fake news’ and how this related to the representation of social groups in the newspaper industry in the USA.

Granville responded that there was a class division in the contemporary readership. The press mainly catered for the rich and affluent classes, exemplified in the type of advertising which catered for the well-off. He felt that a good newspaper should be rooted in communities. He noted how The Washington Post, even in it heyday, catered for the Washington elite. He gave as an example in Britain the Daily Mirror. Though he did not approve of Piers Morgan it should be noted that when he was editor, the paper opposed the military aggression in Iraq. The only other papers to do so were The Independent and The Guardian. He reckoned this was very much to do with The Mirror’s relationship to its readership. It was a paper that addressed work and working people.

I raised three points here. One was the failure of the film to represent the workers at The Post in any meaningful way. There was the almost complete absence of any representation of the Vietnamese People against whom the illegal war was waged. And I also suggested that The Post and The Times did not oppose the war per se but only the misconduct and cover-up by administrations.

Granville broadly agreed. He told a story about a CBS reporter who intervened when US soldiers were threatening to ‘incinerate’ Vietnamese woman and children. His employer, CBS, agonized over whether to run the story or not. When they did run the story, in a telephone call that mirrored scenes in the film, a White House aide rang and complained the network had ‘shit on the American Flag’. Granville went on to point out how the draft was class divided: working class recruits, frequently black, went to die in Vietnam whilst more affluent youngsters were able to avoid this.

The session wrapped up then with an appreciation of Granville’s presentation and responses.

I found this session following the film very helpful in getting to grips with the issues involved. My impression after the screening, including comments by other members of the audience, was that the majority were impressed with the film. I was not. Even as cinema I had lots of reservations. The film struck me as extremely conventional. For example, after the main title there is the whir and thump of a helicopter on the sound track and then it is 1966 and we see ‘grunts’ [US soldiers] forming up at a camp in Vietnam. There follows a night ‘firefight’ with the Viet Cong, merely shadows among the trees firing at the US squad. There is a cut to daytime and there is Daniel Ellsberg siting in the open at a typewriter on a makeshift desk. Where have I seen and heard this before?

There follows a sequence on a US plane flying from Vietnam. Ellsberg is called by Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara to support his claim that the war is going badly. But when the plane lands McNamara tells the assembled Press that the conduct of the war ‘exceeds our expectations’.

By 1969 Ellsberg is working at the RAND Corporation and has access to the report that McNamara commissioned on the history of the war in Vietnam, i.e. ‘The Pentagon Papers’. We see him smuggling out parts of this voluminous report and then, with help, photocopying pages whilst another man cuts off the ‘Top Secret’ titling on each page. This is the point in the film when the audience are given a sense of what is in these papers. This is a typical Hollywood trope; shots of sections of pages and particular paragraphs. It is a sort of montage just giving viewers snippets. It reminded me of a similar sequence in Reds (1981) where a potentially interesting discussion between John Reed (Warren Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) is reduced to a series of snippets devoid of serious political content.

Several people have remarked that one needs a sense of ‘The Pentagon Papers’ to follow the early part of the film, as it fails to give a thorough presentation. This rather glib approach re-appears later in the film. The Washington Post receives copies of those parts of the papers purloined by Ellsberg. The editor and a group of journalist sort through these, under a deadline pressure, sifting out information for a major report. In this scene the papers are all mixed up and the journalists have to try and sort them. I found this odd. Given the type of character Ellsberg was this seems rather unlikely. Moreover it works as a way of producing more snippets from the papers. Individual journalists call out sentences of note from the papers, other journalist respond and add to this. It is melee of quotes that damn different Presidents but do not really give the overall sense, apart from a the recurring sense of administration lies and cover-ups. They do point the finger at all the Presidents, and we see their images at one point on screen: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and, now Nixon.

A major problem in the film follows from the way that the story is scripted. The original script was by Liz Hannah. This was worked over by Josh Singer. Spielberg does not have a script credits but he appears to have had some input here. The story focuses on The Washington Post and in particular the owner at this period [it was a family owned company] Katherine Graham. This choice immediately side-lines the role of The New York Times. Ellsberg initially pass the copies of the papers to a Times journalist, It was the New York Times that broke the story and was taking to court by the administration. The Supreme Court decision in this case involved both The New York Times and The Washington post. In fact, The Times was the paper that won a Pulitzer prize for its reporting of the issue.

So the central character in the film is Katherine Graham, owner of the publishing company. In what seems to be the influence of current gender concerns in the industry the film presents Graham as a woman resisting masculine hegemony in a world dominated by men. So at Board meetings Graham, despite being officially in control, is side-lined and patronised by the suited male members. The characters is written as repressed by this dominance but gradually emerging and exercising authority. Granville used the term ‘hesitant’ to describe the character. He questioned whether this was accurate: characterising her as powerful and decisive. I was unconvinced by the characterisation in the course of the film, it did not seem to fit. Whilst Streep does give a fine performance it also seemed rather mannered; she does have that tendency. In some scenes it reminded me of her performance in Florence Foster Jenkins (2016).

Another point is interesting. Granville commented on her now dead husband. Apparently at one point he had a very public affair with another woman, which was a humiliating experience for Graham in the closed circles of the Washington elite. That seems an aspect that would have fitted current Academe concerns. As it is the film overdoes the issue of gender. After the Supreme Court hearing we see Graham wending her way through a crowd of young, smiling women: no men in sight. That might happen in 2017, it seems much less likely in 1973.The film spends quite a lot of time on the issue of The Post going public, i.e. opening up the company to investors beyond the family and selling these on the Wall Street Stock Exchange. Thus brings an added set of pressures on the paper and on Graham. We see several board meetings where Graham is patronised by the male members and where they also oppose the paper’s reporting of The Pentagon Papers as likely to undermine the business. The film takes this type of capitalist system for granted. There is not really a questioning of either family control of a media business and the question of financial control is not addressed. There is a sort irony here because the film is distributed by Fox Searchlight, part of a prime example of a family controlled media empire. I did wonder if I should boo when the Fox Searchlight logo appeared.

The film also spends time on the family life of Graham and of her editor Bradlee. Graham’s daughter is shown as supportive and there are references to the dead husband and son. In Bradlee’s case we see his young daughter, a budding entrepreneur who makes dollars selling lemonade to the working journalists; a missed opportunity for irony. None of the other characters enjoy this sort of personal background, certainly not Ellsberg, who we learn in dialogue has recently married.

I also had reservations about the characterisation of Ben Bradlee. In the early stages we get sense of how important is the competitive aspect with The New York Times for The Post editor. But in the later stages and by the climax the emphasis is on Press Freedom and the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The role does not effect the sharp edge that Newspaper editors need, brilliantly done by Jason Robards as the same character in All The Presidents’ Men and also well done by John Slattery as Ben Bradlee Jr. in Spotlight. Tom Hanks does a fair job with the role and I think the weakness is in the writing. There is a scene with Graham and Bradlee as they survey set of regional titles now carrying reports on The Papers. This is an example of collective defence but their main response is that it demonstrates that The Post has arrived as a ‘national newspaper’.

In fact the film does not develop journalistic practices as effectively as the other films mentioned. The only journalist/editor whose work we see in some detail is Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk), who was the paper’s staff member who actually received The Papers from Ellsberg. But even here little space is giving to his journalistic work in reporting this. That is an aspect, as with journalist investigation that both All The President’s Men and Spotlight do very well. There is little of this in The Post. The scene that I mentioned earlier where Bradlee and a team sort through The Papers does not have much of a journalistic flavour and is more concerned with presenting notable snippets to viewers.

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The same applies to the print workers at the paper. We get a series of close-ups of the machinery as the reports are printed. However, the shot of the print workers are mainly long-shots and only concerned with their actions, at the machinery or loading the printed papers onto lorries. There is one shot where the workers pick up the printed newspapers as they stream from the machinery, but there is no indication of their responses. A comparable sequence in the British political thriller Defence of the Realm (1986) does offer some characterisation of the print-workers on a British paper.

A similar problem applies to the other ordinary workers we see in the film. We do get a slight cameo from a secretary as Graham attends the Supreme Court for the hearings. But this scene seems mainly designed to reinforce the message re gender, as the secretary complains about her boss, a Senator,.

The ‘grunts’ in the opening sequence do a little better. We hear their dialogue, but this is so that we know that Daniel Ellsberg is going with them into the jungle. Here, in a night scene, we get our single look at the Vietnamese, shadows behind trees and foliage firing at the US soldiers. The peace groupings opposed to the war do little better. We see a protest where just about everyone is dressed like hippies and as a man takes up a microphone: we cut to another scene. I could not see any of the Vietnam veterans, already s significant force by this stage.

And we see only glimpses of the Supreme Court Justices, the event that the whole of the previous film has been leading up to. The decision is actually heard own a telephone as a breathless woman office worker calls out the result. President Nixon does somewhat better than these social groupings. We see and hear him several times, in a reverse shot as he stands by a White House window talking down the telephone; these lines seem some of the most accurate in the film and are presumably taken from the infamous tape recordings.

Individually, many of these decisions in the film could be justified. However, overall it renders the storytelling extremely conventional. The focus of gender is fine, but it denies space to equally important issues such as class and imperial xenophobia. It apparently also denies space to anti-racism. There were some black faces, including among the ‘grunts’. But they were not noticeable on The Post. Yet Granville pointed out that, due to the Civil Rights movement, by this stage the paper had recruited a number of young Afro-Americans. The treatment also undermines generic features,. Several critics describe the films as ‘political thriller’. But I found the story, even in the sequences meant to generate tension, lacking in this. Many of the audience will know from history that The Post [and the New York Times] won the battle. So the lengthy sequences where the editor and his journalists or Graham and her board members debate the issuer lacked tension over the outcome.

This is matter of style. Spotlight was a film where many of us knew the outcome but the film still generated tension in certain sequences. Spotlight also effectively gave voice to the victims of Church abuse. This, as I suggest, is missing in The Post. And it is missing in the treatment of Ellsberg. We only find out in the dialogue that he was recently married when these event occurred. He does not receive the family context awarded to Graham and Bradlee. Much of the film was predictable including the closing shots, the Watergate Building as the staff discover the burglars sent by the White House. This is an unfortunate choice. It reminds viewers of the fine political thriller, All the Presidents’ Men. That is a film that dramatises a parallel story, present journalist practice very effectively, ramps up the tension in many sequences, and is able to give viewers a clear sense of the crimes perpetrated.

The Post was put together when another Spielberg project fell through. Apparently it was made relativity fast. This may account for the main weak aspects of the film. It compares unfavourably with other treatments. A particularly good example is The Most Dangerous Man in America.: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers [the first part of the title is a quote by Henry Kissinger, [another participants never bought to justice]. This is a documentary partially narrated by Ellsberg himself. It was written by Lawrence Lerew & Rick Goldsmith & Judith Ehrlich & Michael Chandler. The film was directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith for Goldsmith’s company Kovno Communications. It premiered in the USA on Public Broadcast Television and has been seen at festivals and on national television networks. It won an Academy Award as Best Documentary.

The film covers a lot of matters left out in The Post. We learn much more about Ellsberg, his career and his motivations. The story of The New York Times is fully presented. And the events that follows between publication in the two papers and the Supreme Court hearings are filled in. Thus it becomes clear that Ellsberg passed The Pentagon Papers to other new outlets who also printed them. And we see a US Senator, Mike Gravel, who read extensive extracts from The Papers into the Congressional record.

Some of the scenes, like that between Ellsberg and McNamara flying back from Vietnam, are extremely similar: both part of the record. But Ellsberg experiences in Vietnam and researching the war is presented in an extensive fashion. Even here it is difficult give a comprehensive sense of the exposure but it is fuller than in the Hollywood version. And in a small but significant scene we see the print-workers at The Post congratulating each other as the newspapers, with the reports, stream off the machines.

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Granville also prepared some notes prior to the screening which include some of the books he mentioned:

The Post in an honourable addition to Hollywood films All The Presidents Men (1976), Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), Spotlight (2015)) which portray journalists and journalism in a positive way, as opposed to grubby hacks chasing squalid, sensational headlines .

When I see films like these I wonder why UK film directors haven’t tackled such subjects. Couldn’t the dogged work of Guardian journalist, Nick Davies, as he probed and finally exposed the industrial scale of phone-hacking at Murdoch’s News of the World, be a suitable subject?

The credits for The Post say it is ‘based on a true story’ and whilst I can quibble with the way the film modifies some of the facts about the way the Washington Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham, finally came to back publication of the Pentagon Papers, I think the film captures perfectly how enmeshed she was in the Washington elite and the political and commercial pressures on her to take an easier route, and not publish the papers.

I will talk more about this in the Q&A session following the 5.00pm showing of the film on Sunday 28 January at the Hyde Park Picture House. Here I just want to develop a couple of points about two aspects of the film.

One is the way that Spielberg focuses on the old hot metal printing press scenes and the workings of the Linotype machines assembling the lines of type for the stories. It’s very evocative.

In 1975 after Watergate there was a ferocious strike by printers which set her and the newspaper on a conservative course. Graham devoted dozens of pages in her autobiography Personal History to vilifying Post press operators who went on strike in 1975. She stressed the damage done to printing equipment as the walkout began and “the unforgivable acts of violence throughout the strike.”

John Hanrahan, a Newspaper Guild member at the Post, wouldn’t cross the picket lines and never went back. He pointed out,

“The Washington Post under Katharine Graham pioneered the union-busting ‘replacement worker’ strategy that Ronald Reagan subsequently used against the air-traffic controllers and that corporate America — in the Caterpillar, Bridgestone/Firestone and other strikes — used to throw thousands of workers out of their jobs in the 1980s and the ’90s.”

The other point is on the role of Ben Bagdikian in the film – he’s the journalist who gets access to Daniel Ellsberg and persuades him to hand over 4000 pages for the Post to use. He was national editor on the Post, a man who the editor, Ben Bradlee, in his autobiography, ‘A Good Life’, describes as ‘thorny’. Bagdikian had a big influence on me, and others interested in media reform. He wrote a key book ‘The Media Monopoly’ (1983) which warned about the chilling effects of corporate ownership and mass advertising on US media. Fifty corporations owned most of the US media when he wrote the first edition. By the time he wrote ‘The New Media Monopoly’ (2004) it had dwindled to five.

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Granville made a mention of Ken Burns documentary series The Vietnam War (2017), which has been screened on BBC 4. However, it should be noted that the original was 18 hours of archive material and comment. The version transmitted by the BBC only ran a little over nine hours. Worse, at no point did the BBC publicity or announcements point out that this was a truncated version.

Hollywood’s ‘Un-American activities committee’.

This committee did not really exist but there were plenty of possible contenders for membership. If it hadexisted, two definite members would have been John Wayne and Hedda Hopper. Both are characters in two recent films that include the infamous Congressional Committee hearings and the studio ‘blacklist’.

First up was Trumbo (2015), directed by Jay Roach and adapted by John McNamara from a book by  Bruce Cook, with a star turn in the title role by Bryan Cranston. The film starts in the late 1940s and follows the development of the HUAC witch-hunt, the craven appeasement by the heads of the studios and then the struggle by the famed Hollywood Ten [mainly writers] to continue working and finally end the blacklisting. The film works as a sort of biopic of Dalton Trumbo and over emphasises his role in the story. To give one example. The film includes the  dramatisation of Trumbo, along with the other nine ‘unfriendly witnesses’, being jailed for contempt of Congress. In a scene in jail he meets ex-Congressman Parnell Thomas, one-time Chair of HUAC, now in prison for misuse of his office payroll. In actual fact it was two other members of the Ten who were at the same prison as Thomas, Ring Lardner and Lester Cole. And it was Cole who exchanged the lines with Thomas [mis] quoted in the film.

But in other ways the film has merits. It seems to be the best treatment of the notorious era coming out of a mainstream US feature film. Early in the film there is space for the radical activities of the members of the Communist Party USA working in Hollywood, including supporting strikes and opposing victimisation of migrant workers. The political tensions between the various writers is also apparent; in a couple of scenes Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.), another writers, draws attention to the contradictions between Trumbo’s radical sympathies and his privileged life style. Moreover the film treats the film footage, or recreations of the same, with proper respect and correct aspect ratios.

Trumbo and Hopper

As you might expect the film has little sense of the actual politics of the Communist Party USA, or indeed of the International Communist Movement of which it was a member. Neither does it delve deeply into the politics that lay behind phenomenon like HUAC; for example the wartime alliance with the USSR and the question of the legacy of F.D. Roosevelt. It does though characterise the Hollywood conservatives, especially the aforesaid John Wayne (David James Elliott) and Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren). The latter piece of casting would seem to continue the Hollywood convention of casting British actors as villains.

There is more British casting in the second film, Hail, Caesar! (USA 2015) with a Hedda Hopper style character played this time by Tilda Swinton. The film was by Ethan and Joel Coen. This is a pastiche of Hollywood at the start of the 1950s, revisiting the Capital Pictures studio of their earlier movie Barton Fink (1991). This is not serious drama like Trumbo. In fact it is pretty over the top. Despite being set in 1951 at one point a film is using Vista Vision, which only arrived in 1954: and the aspect ratios are all over the place. In the filming of a musical sequence Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum)  is aping not just Gene Kelly but also Fred Astaire.

Where HUAC and the blacklist make their entrance is when the Studio chief and fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) finds that his biggest star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) has been kidnapped and he is faced with a ransom demand. What the audience already know is that Whitlock has been kidnapped by a not very secretive group of blacklisted writers. They are assisted by Professor Marcuse (John Bluthall – I wrote that it is over the top). Of course, Trumbo is a political treatise compared with this film. I thought the plotline bizarre. However, on reflection it occurs to me that if you recognise that the paranoia of HUAC and the associated campaigns affected not just it proponents but many ordinary US citizens then the fantasy of the kidnapping might have been believed. In fact we have a sequence where the main communist subversive, Gurney, attempts to decamp to the Soviet Union with the ransom money.

Kidnapped Baird Whitlock

Over the years Hollywood has ventured into the territory of what was popularly termed McCarthyism. During the actual period there were a number of films that supported the investigations, persecutions and reactionary rhetoric. John Wayne persuaded Warner Bros. to produce Big Jim McLain (1952), a supposed police procedural which used actual footage of the hearings edited [fairly obviously] into the studio-based sequences.

But there have also been critical forays into the territory. Trumbo details the way in which its protagonist and his follow writers survived by working under pseudonyms and ‘fronts’. This is the strategy highlighted for comic effect in Woody Allen’s The Front (1976). Howard Prince in  that film is a typical Allen creation. And there is little exploration of the actual HUAC and its activities. The film does also include the effects on the new medium of Television. A writer is also the focus in another film from the same studio, Columbia Pictures, The Way We Were (1973). In fact we have two writers, Katie (Barbra Streisand) and Hubbell (Robert Redford): though it is Hubbell who works as a screenwriter in Hollywood. There is an interesting sequence in which Katie and Hubbell return from the demonstration by Hollywood luminaries in support of the Hollywood Ten. However, the film was actually edited before release with a couple of scenes from this point in the film removed. It seems that the end product was more in line with Hubbell/Redford’s views than Katie/Streisand’s. She was clearly, like Katie, the more  radical. The film also suggests that the apolitical Hubbell has the greater writing talent. This is in line with Hollywood’s convictions that commitment and screenwriting are best separated.

Guilty by Suspicion (1991) from C20th Fox was originally planned from a script by Abraham Polonsky, a writer and director whose best work [e.g. Force of Evil 1948) possibly came closest to a Hollywood critique of capitalism. However, Polonsky’s pitch for a filmmaker who was indeed a communist, was too close to history. The final film has a liberal filmmaker who finally testifies before the HUAC committee.

The Majestic (2001) from Castle Rock Entertainment has Jim Carey as Peter Appleton, a Hollyood writer accused of being a communist. The plot has Peter involved in an accident, suffering amnesia and turning up in a Californian town where he is believed to be missing war hero. Cleary the film sublimates the terrors of HUAC and allows the protagonist to indulge in a dream-like wish fulfilment. This continues when he recovers and appears before a Congressional Committee. An impassioned speech, relayed on television, sways the audience in his favour. Art least the film avoids a completely saccharine resolution as he finds he can no longer work within the required conventions of Hollywood.

Cradle Will Rock (1999) is set in the 1930s, when the HUAC predecessor, the Dies Committee, was investigating the Federal Theatre Programme: part of the New Deal. The film is based on actual events around the production of a theatrical musical The Cradle Will Rock. The film is very political by US mainstream film standards, [produced by Tocustone Pictures and distributed by Buebna Vista]. It uses what are usually described as ‘Brechtian techniques’ to present a radical representation of the events, issues and period..

There are also a number of US documentaries about HUAC and the blacklist. However, the radical screenwriters and other communist members or ‘fellow travellers’ in Hollywood were not greatly interested in the documentary. But after the blacklist at least three, Herbert J Biberman, Michael Wilson and Paul Jarrico, were inspired to work in social realism – that memorable feature based on the real-life struggles of ‘Chicanos’ in New Mexico, Salt of the Earth (1954).

The Assassin/Nie yin niang, France – Taiwan – China – Hong Kong 2015

Nie Yinniang

The film was screened several times in the Official Section at Leeds International Film Festival and is now on release in the UK. The director, Hsiao-hsien Hou won the Best Director Award at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. This is a stunningly beautiful film. Note it opens in black and white and then changes to colour. And whilst the bulk of the film is in Academy ratio 1.37:1], there two sequences [of only one or two shots] in standard widescreen [1.85:1]. Unfortunately not all presentations allow for this, I attended one screening where the widescreen was masked by blacking.

If you know the earlier films of Hsiao-hsien Hou, Three Times (2005) Zui hao de shi guang or The Puppetmaster (1993) Xi meng ren sheng, you will know what to expect. Some of the audience in Leeds were presumably excepting a typical martial arts films: they left early. The UK marketing uses the martial art genre in the publicity, which is a mistake. Apparently similar marketing and responses took place when the film received a mainstream release in China. This is a slow, artful film with a fairly opaque plotline: it has parallels in terms of plot with Hero (Ying xiong 2002). Moreover, for a western audience, I think it takes some time to identify the separate characters, especially when for much of the time they wear the formal clothing of the period. In addition the film moves around in space and time, often without clear indications.

How well you manage depends on the manner in which you view films. One friend managed most of the characters and plot at his first screening: impressive. I managed the basic characters and plot at my first screening but it was only the second time round that I followed the whole coherently. Another friend was a neither informed or impressed: and his complaint was about the paucity of subtitle information in English and the difficulties produced by so many long shots.

Rather than describe the plot, the main point of which is relatively simple, it may help to describe those I believe to be the main characters: [based on the descriptions on Wikipedia].

Shu Qi as Nie Yinniang, the eponymous assassin: she appears in the pre-credit sequence dressed in black . [One release version is titled The Assassin in Black].

Chang Chen as Tian Ji’an, cousin to Nie Yinniang, formerly betrothed to her, and military governor (Jiedushi), ruling Weibo Circuit.

Zhou Yun as Lady Tian, Tian Ji’an’s wife. She belongs to family of a separate Provincial ruler and this was a marriage to cement an alliance.

Satoshi Tsumabuki as the Mirror Polisher. [Unidentified by name, the character’s title action is easy to miss: he appears late in the film, first by a rushing river, then when he comes to the rescue during an ambush in woods.

Ethan Juan as Xia Jing, Tian Ji’an’s bodyguard

Hsieh Hsin-Ying as Huji ( her name means “orchid”), Tian Ji’an’s concubine and a dancer

Ni Dahong as Nie Feng, Nie Yinniang’s father and Tian Ji’an’s provost

Yong Mei as Nie Tian

Fang-Yi Sheu as Princess Jiacheng and her twin sister, the Princess Jiaxin turned Taoist nun. Jiaxin appears in the opening sequence with Yinniang. Jiacheng appears in the widescreen sequences, the only flashback. This sequence offers a metaphor for part if not of the tale.

Lei Zhenyu as Tian Xing, the uncle of Yinniang. First seen ill in bed, he is the centre of an ambush in a forest and is rescued by the Mirror Polisher and Yinniang.

And there is an older whiskered character who I believe is Jacques Picoux as Lady Tian’s teacher: he appears twice sitting in his study.

Tian Ji’an

The opening segment of the film is in black and white and precedes the credits. This is a prelude to the main story and we meet two key characters; Yinniang and Jiaxin. Then the film changes to Academy colour. After a several scenes we move to the main setting in Weibo and the key characters here are carefully introduced. Whilst the plot deals mainly with a series of actions involving these characters, the context is tensions between the Imperial Court and provinces on the periphery, like Weibo, and who will exercise power. But there is also personal conflict, partly motivated by personal experiences from the past, and partly motivated by the power conflicts at the court and, from a distance, Imperial / provincial relations. The two sequences in New Academy seem to be a suggestion on a central metaphor of the film. We see a zither, an instrument that recurs the last time that we see Jiaxin, perhaps a confirmation of this.

For me the film holds ones attention completely: it was a pleasure to watch it twice [and now a third time]. It has an immaculate mise en scène and a distinctive sound track. There are few of the action sequences beloved in martial art films. But the are many formal settings where what is left unsaid seems as potent as what is said. And there are also informal settings of personal interaction, but never really informal. The film uses decor, mirrors, light and shadow, gauzes and even smoke to offer settings with subtle variations. If the interiors tend to the strictly formal, there is something of the same sense in the exteriors, which are also beautifully captured.

One must pay great compliments to the production team working under the director.

Music by Giong Lim

Cinematography by Ping Bin Lee

Film Editing by Chih-Chia Huang and Ching-Song Liao

Production Design by Wen-Ying Huang

Costume Design by Wen-Ying Huang

Sound Department Shih Yi Chu, Duu-Chih Tu and Shu-yao Wu

Special Effects by Ardi Lee

The camera work relies to a degree on long shots and fairly long takes. In both interiors and exteriors there is both deep focus and deep staging: there are lovely moments when an outline or a shadow emerges in deep field. The camera movements are varied but the most common are slow and slight dollies, with slow pans and tilts in interiors. And there are some fine tracking shots in the exteriors.

Lady Tian in mask

The editing is often elliptical, which can make for difficulties in following the developments, but this enables the film to draw the parallels between the complex interactions among characters. The soundtrack is also a treat. The music is sparse but very evocative. There is the frequent slow playing of drums and percussion. There is zither music. And, over the end credits, some exhilarating music from flutes or bagpipes. But for much of the time we enjoy natural sound, including bird songs and cicadas.

And the production design is truly impressive. One review thought the film was ‘too pretty’. In fact, it is ornate, as it would seem were the Chinese courts of the period. The settings, especially the interiors, provide a great canvas for the cinematography.

Hsiao-hsien Hou immersed himself in reading and research for the film. In quotes in the Festival Catalogue he notes the subtlety and complexity of the period.

“For example, there were different ways of taking a bath, depending on whether you were a wealthy merchant, a high official or a peasant. I also looked into the story’s political context in some detail. It was a chaotic period when the omnipotence of the Tang Court was threatened by provincial governors who challenged the authority of the Tang Emperor: some provinces even tried to secede from the Empire by force.”

We actually see the preparations for a royal bath. Reviews have tended to praise the style of the film, but some also express reservations about the plotting of the story and even the sheer physical attraction of the settings right through them film. The film though, focuses on a particular social segment, one with great wealth and privilege. And we only see the peasants mentioned by Hsiao-hsien briefly, though in an important sequence.

The film was shot on Kodak 35mm and has been transferred to DCP via 4K. However, I think most audiences in the UK will only be able to see it in 2K. Even so it does look and sound good. IMDB gives the exhibition ratio as 1.41:1, I have never come across this before? It runs for 107 minutes and crams a lot into that space. There are apparently more than one version. The Japanese release has extra scenes involving the Mirror Polisher, played by a Japanese film star. But reviews of the film also differ on plot detail: this may be confusion or it may be that they enjoyed extra scenes or suffered missing some scenes.

Originally a Festival review