15/5/2011

Notes

1) Finally saw Lagaan yesterday afternoon. I can remember when it was released in Britain; a film which seemed to capture its moment and reach an audience that wouldn't normally be attracted to Bollywood cinema. It's a really enjoyable movie, in that cartoonish way that in my admittedly limited experience seems to be characteristic of a lot of Bollywood cinema. And it had an interesting subtext beyond the obvious (the Eevil British Empire!), although I'm not sure you'd be able to see that without an Indian explaining the references as you watched. What I found really interesting was a comparison I saw with a film made about 5 years later, Rang De Basanti, which would have been the very first Bollywood film I saw if only the DVD hadn't screwed up 15 minutes before the end. Both films star Aamir Khan, and in different ways draw upon colonial Indian history to try and say something to India's present. And both films contain the trope of a white English women educating young Indian men, which is...interesting.

2) Whilst hunting for Spearhead from Space photographs I found a really interesting blog post about the serial, which contextualised the story in terms of its production history and contemporary culture. It's interesting to hear that the BBC were considering cancelling the show in 1969 after Patrick Troughton finished his run. Not the first time that would occur. The decision to exile the Doctor to earth was also part of an overall aim to bring a stronger element of realism to the show, an element which was replaced in the following season with a more 'comic book' approach. I was particularly taken with this section which grounds the shows themes in the late 60s/early 70s:

"Gradually, as Season 7 progresses, it offers a reflection and commentary on the legacy of Wilson’s ‘white heat’ and on Tony Benn's then role as Minister of Technology (arguably symbolised throughout Season 7 in all the various factories, installations and special projects used for good or ill).

"With this theme also comes an acknowledgement of the rise of new social movements such as feminism and environmentalism, the impact of economic and industrial recession with their resulting strikes and blackouts, the rise of corporate culture and the loss of Empire. This is all seen through the refractive mirror of an alternative, future Britain with its own space programme, research into nuclear power and drilling projects as emblematic of a still thriving world power.

"That view also coincides with the publication of Alvin Toffler’s best-seller of 1970, Future Shock. He suggested society was being so rapidly restructured, emerging as it was from the industrial revolution and hurtling towards, and transforming into, a ‘super-industrial’ society, that it would leave major casualties in its wake. People would be overwhelmed by such progress, and this technological, biological and social acceleration would leave them disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" – the 'future shock' of the book’s title. Holmes's use of plastic as a symbol of this feeling of being overwhelmed by modernisation, of the synthetic in contrast to the real, the obsession with inanimate objects given life, is expressed in both Auton stories through the mass production and commodification of plastic goods and the use of 'new techniques' in manufacturing.

"The new realism ushered in by Holmes's story and Sherwin's vision for the series also see a number of characters, usually the victims of attack, enter a realm of hysteria where their states of mind become subjected to unmanageable fear or emotional excesses. We can correlate Toffler’s ‘future shock’ and the symptoms of "shattering disorientation" in Spearhead From Space with the much revered high street attack from the Autons, the hunting down of Ransom and the Auton attack on Seeley’s cottage as the best examples of how the theme of ‘domestic terror’ operates in the programme, creating unease, dislocation and stress in an everyday location and thus making it extraordinary. 

"The fear of invasion, possession and death is not only more firmly embedded into an earthbound setting but also mines the inner fears, troubles and preoccupations of the British citizens of the Seventies. At the time there was much concern about the rapid changes to society, science and technologies out of control, mistrust of politicians and bureaucrats, worries about industry, jobs and the environment as well as class and gender divisions. Spearhead offers an overt representation of the ‘other’ in the physical form of monsters from outer space walking down the high street and through their appropriation of familiar materials, objects and their control of people."

(from cathoderaytube)

3) Kundera's nostalgia is interesting because his disdain for much of present day culture has a far more clear eyed and rational feel to his arguments than any simple reactionary. Yet, take the quote I put up the other week. Try a thought experiment. Imagine someone born in Britain in 1800, who may have lived 65 years and died in 1865. In that stretch of time such an individual would have lived through rapidly increasing industrialisation, the crowning of Victoria, the death of the Queen's consort, the year of revolutions in 1848, and goodness knows what else that I can't remember of the history of the first half of the 19th century. In other words, such a person would indeed have lived through more than one historical period. Dickens, who lived a very similar stretch of time, from 1812 to 1870 can certainly be said to have done. His later novels bear considerable witness to that. George Eliot's later novels demonstrate a similar change in their depiction of provincial England coming into contact with the wider national stage. So I wonder, is it only our nostalgia which assumes the past to have been far more static than it was? Our nostalgia which compresses the differences between different periods which would have been so much more apparent to those people who were living then.

4)

"Walk and talk, talk and walk; that was his new job. As he went along the street, he put his hand on anything it could reach. A fore hydrant, a railing, a kid's head became so many markers along his route"

Francois Truffaut, "A Portrait of Humphrey Bogart" (1958)

" One of the fine moments in 1940's film is no longer than a blink: Bogart, as he crosses the street from one bookstore to another, looks up at a sign"

Manny Farber, "Introduction", Negative Space (1971)

5) I'm fascinated by this review by John Clute of a new collection of uncollected, mostly early stories by Joan Aiken:

"Almost all the stories assembled in The Monkey's Wedding...flow with a porcelain lucidity and gaiety that manifests the high energy of Aiken's early prime, and also because they are not only about Ago, but were written then: deep in the world of England just before the Beeching cuts began to poison the wells of community. The crystal-clear but flowing joie de vivre of the book—eight of the tales included here empolder courtships, most ending in marriages—comprises an epithalamium to wells of doing and saying and living not yet half-dead with drought. Some are fantasy; some are comedic within narrower frames. None seem specifically written for children: but almost nothing she ever wrote barred any reader from entering. A bit like A. E. Coppard or H. E. Bates but immensely faster, Joan Aiken caught and coiled the land of her birth into tales told: tales that fabulated England into a Matter that seemed unkillable.

"To read these stories now is to see that something happened."

He articulates, far more succinctly than I could manage, my own sense of what has been lost. Something is always happening.