10 minute read
Art & Culture
ARTIST AT WORK
No:48 Robert Woolner, Flint, 2022
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Painting in mixed media on canvas, 80cm x 80cm, £2,000
Imake paintings that aspire to be both quiet and contemplative. Abstraction provides a place where I am able to explore the layered nature of experience and find meaning in the manner and substance of paint and other materials. Flint is part of a recent series of paintings inspired by the small fossilised spherical sponges that I collect on my walks over the chalkland of Dorset. I am interested in surfaces and texture and ideas are often close at hand on the ground or on a wall. The act of working with mixed media can mirror the process of texture caused by age, wear and corrosion. I usually work in series, fascinated by the process of making and continuous struggle with chance and change, which permit me to think quickly. My media include canvas, board, card and texture paste often incorporating sand, stone and marble dust, oxides and other materials mixed with both oil and acrylic paint. Work accumulates slowly over time and may be worked on for over a year until no further changes can be made in my search for a complete and satisfying whole.
robwoolner.com
ON FILM
Andy Hastie, Yeovil Cinematheque
Petite Maman
Cinematheque started its 41st season at a rush last month with three films, then this month… nothing! The Swan Theatre have two theatrical performances in November, from 14th - 19th there is Let It Be Me, followed by the Civil Players production of Lend Me a Tenor from 30th November - 3rd December. Both will be well worth investigating. As Cinematheque fits in around the Swan’s productions and rehearsals, our next showing is at the beginning of December, on the 7th, when we screen the muchpraised French film Petite Maman (2021).
This haunting, magical film is just the latest success (of so many!) for director and screenwriter Celine Sciamma, who has rightly become an internationally renowned figurehead in contemporary women’s cinema. Her films are intimate, relationship dramas of female experiences at different ages. Her debut Water Lilies (2008) follows three 15-year-old girls in a synchronised swimming team experiencing friendship, coming of age, first love and rivalry in contrasting ways. The follow-up Girlhood (2014) was her breakthrough into the mainstream. It is the story of black teenage girls living in a rough neighbourhood on the Paris outskirts, challenging conceptions of race, gender and class with characters who are generally unrepresented in French cinema. In 2016 she wrote the screenplay for Claude Barras’s animation My Life as a Courgette which won acclaim for its emotional tone, relating the back stories of children in an orphanage. The beautiful (and very well received at Cinematheque) Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) followed, which concerns the affair between an 18th-century aristocrat, and the painter commissioned to paint her portrait.
At which point we arrive at Petite Maman, the story of 8-year-old Nellie, who worries that she didn’t say goodbye properly when her beloved grandmother dies. As her parents spend a few days packing up the woman’s belongings from her strange house in the woods, Nellie wanders off around where her mother played as a child. Here she meets a young girl, the same age as herself and sharing her mother’s name, who lives in a house rather similar to her grandmother’s. This quite profound, time-travelling mix of fairy-tale and a childhood ‘rites of passage’ journey, owes much to the Japanese anime genre, exploring the themes around overcoming barriers that grow between parents and children, memory and loss. ‘Superb...simple, elegant and very moving’ The Guardian. ‘Sublime...a sight to behold’ The Mirror. ‘Utterly spellbinding’ Mark Kermode.
Winning Best Foreign Language Film at the BAFTAs and the London Film Critics Circle Awards in 2022, Petite Maman is the perfect film to experience what Cinematheque has to offer. The Swan Theatre is a great venue for engrossing oneself in magical cinema with other like-minded people. Do come along as a guest, or think of becoming a member, with all details of our programme and dates on the website below. We’d love to see you.
cinematheque.org.uk swan-theatre.co.uk
CONFESSIONS OF A THEATRE ADDICT
Rosie Cunningham
Juliet Stevenson stars in The Doctor, at the Duke of York’s Theatre until 11th December 2022. This is a really powerful story of Ruth Wolff, a doctor in a private hospital, whose patient is a fourteen-year-old girl dying from a botched home-administered abortion. She refuses a priest entry to her patient’s room to administer the last rites. The doctor has a duty of care and wants the patient to die peacefully but the priest has been asked by the girl’s parents to visit their daughter and save her soul. The doctor is white, female, and Jewish. The priest is
Catholic and black. Medicine versus God. It is not for the faint-hearted, and touches on many controversial subjects such as religion, racism, gender, and medical ethics. Embedded opinions are challenged, and sides are taken, demonstrated through naked ambition, politics, and heartfelt experience. The shifting sands of turmoil are exemplified by the slow ever-rotating stage, the pace of actors who enter and leave, and a lone drummer perched high up maintaining the tension with a constant staccato beat. Each actor is cast outside their identity, with women playing men and men as women, black actors play white and vice versa. This play, which was adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s medical drama Professor Bernhardi, and directed by Robert Icke, is brave but also so rewarding. Stevenson demonstrates Wolff’s integrity, frustration but also obduracy in the face of a looming witch hunt and public hanging by social media which, as it gains momentum, is frankly terrifying. The ‘woke culture’ is lampooned by a representative on a talk show panel whose job titles get more and more obscure and ridiculous. When I left the theatre, I felt that I had been put through the wringer, but it was a brilliant experience.
Eureka Day, which had a limited run at the Old Vic and starred Helen Hunt, raised similar issues. Progressive parents of a primary school in California meet to discuss an outbreak of mumps at the school and clash over the MMR jab. Parents end up at loggerheads and accusations start to fly as ‘woke’ positions start to crumble. It was a tightly written gem of a play, written in 2018 by Jonathan Spector, with a sharp sense of the ridiculous.
I caught Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Into the Woods, at the Theatre Royal Bath after the original production was cancelled at London’s Old Vic due to co-director Terry Gilliam’s media bashing. This is a completely over-the-top, whacky retelling of well-known fairy tales, all with an unexpected twist, and the set design by Jon Bausor complements all that quirkiness. The giant is a baby, bits of whom somehow manage to squeeze on stage, Jack’s cow is adorable and cartoonish, Prince Charming has a wandering eye and is slightly too foppish, and the Wolf is rather lovely. There is a rumour that the production is coming to London soon. If so, pounce on it!
thedukeofyorks.com/the-doctor
NICHOLAS HELY HUTCHINSON
“DORSET, DREAM COUNTRY” 11th – 30th November, 2022
THE FADING WINTER LIGHT OIL
St. OSWALD’S BAY, TOWARDS LULWORTH OIL
www.jerramgallery.com
THE JERRAM GALLERY Half Moon Street, Sherborne, 01935 815261 Dorset DT9 3LN info@jerramgallery.com Tuesday – Saturday
COUNTER CULTURE
Paul Maskell, The Beat and Track
Blueee77/Shutterstock
Music, one way or another, creates atmosphere, feeling and emotion within the listener. This is no more evident than within film and television soundtracks where the accompanying music is used to heighten a scene, build tension or increase excitement. The soundtrack and score genres are increasingly popular but what’s the difference between the two? How are they used to best effect and how have they developed?
A film score is music specifically written to accompany a particular scene in a film or television programme to help solidify its impact. Years ago and in some instances even today, it was common practice to use ‘Temp’ tracks to create an eventual score for a film. This involves using an existing piece of music during the editing phase of film-making to use as a guideline for tempo and mood for a particular scene. Once happy with the ‘temp’ score the director will hand the reins over to the composer who will create an ‘original’ score to suit. This process can be very limiting for the composer and not surprisingly the final score can sound very similar to the ‘Temp’ score initially provided. One of the most obvious examples of this would be the Star Wars (main title) music composed by John Barry for the 1977 film of the same name. Performed by the London Symphony Orchestra it takes huge influence from the Erich Wolfgang Korngold penned score for the 1942 film Kings Row and Jupiter from Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets. Combine elements of both and you get the now world-famous theme to one of the most popular film franchises ever.
It was the introduction of computers and synthesisers in music that revolutionised the art of scoring film. Hans Zimmer was one of the first to pioneer this technique and work by actually writing the music while watching the film and following prompt notes by the director. This process made it easier to achieve the director’s goal and also gave the composer more freedom to express the desired emotions in his/her own way. This process was less labour-intensive and gave a lot more flexibility to both composer and director. This way of working paved the way for the likes of AR Rahman, James Horner, Max Richter, Trent Reznor, Angelo Badalamenti and a whole slew of artists recording scores that not only help create a whole body of art in the film world but also stand alone as works of art on an individual scale.
Where a soundtrack will differ from a score will be in the actual composition of the ‘songs’ themselves. Most will have a traditional structure and a majority will have been written well before the film was even a consideration. These songs are pulled from history’s mammoth playlist to fit a scene and help build its emotion be it tension, excitement, melancholy or otherwise. Some great soundtracks have come from the films of Quentin Tarrantino where he used old, familiar, classic soul and funk tunes to create some iconic moments in film. The use of George Baker’s Little Green Bag to accompany the antiheroes of Reservoir Dogs as they walk down a street in slow motion. Also, maybe even more iconic, the use of Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel to accompany the infamous torture scene. Other iconic moments in film accompanied by classic tracks would be Renton running through the Glasgow streets accompanied by Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life in Trainspotting, the use of Mad World by Tears for Fears (performed by Gary Jules) in Donnie Darko, the use of the piano section of Layla by Derek and the Dominos in the pink Cadillac scene in Goodfellas, the Cure and Nine Inch Nails in The Crow and the whole soundtrack to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Lost Highway, Baby Driver and High Fidelity.
There are so many combinations of songs and images which leave an enduring impact on us. Where a score sets the tone of a film and helps to emphasise a feeling or emotion, the job of a soundtrack is to make the film/scene instantly memorable and recognisable. Not unlike life itself, how many moments in your life have been soundtracked by the songs/bands of the time? What’s the soundtrack of your life?
thebeatandtrack.co.uk
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