On a snowbound Easter Sunday, the Porlocks gather for the final time in their soon-to-be demolished family home. All Porlocks that is, except one. As time and nature close in, the family embarks on a journey of remembrance from ancient Egypt to Victorian England and into its own troubled past, awakening long-repressed voices which refuse to be silenced.
The cigarette smoke formed a light, languid circle in the frigid evening air. Michael learned the technique in his delinquent years, loitering in the alleyway with Tom, Dave and Lennon a few minutes shy of late registration. There was a knack to it. The incremental adjustment back and forth of the tongue, cheek and jaw until, after many attempts, you got it right.
The skill was still gratifying twenty years later. The soothing inhalation, the smoke rising back through the lungs and throat, then sculpted with muscular precision and jettisoned into the air to soar and dissolve. The closest he would get to labour, and not nearly as chafing. Lads’ humour, in the summer of Euro 96, Fantasy Football and hot weather. With hot girls wearing less and less. I wonder what it’s like underneath.
He’d stepped outside just before nine o’clock, his head swooning from two too many glasses of Nepenthe, the sticky aroma of oriental food still pungent in the air. The snowfall had stopped. The bracing wind swept through him, coming from across the river and the chasm created by Clearwater. Power was restored. The kitchen light threw an angular, crosshatched yellow shape onto the dark white lawn.
He always loved cold weather. How the girls wrapped up all warm, leaving more to the imagination than in the clement seasons. How many more layers before you get to the good stuff? Cold sharpened you, knocked you into shape. He hated presenting in stuffy business suites, and once considered a contractual clause to insist on room temperature being thirteen degrees or lower.
If you were skilful and quick enough with your finger, you could depress the top part of a smoke ring to form a love heart, if only for an instant. Maddie asked him to quit smoking many times. You don’t know how much it’s destroying you. She was right, of course, but so wrong. Smoking was the stuff of life. Of inspiration, the rich smell of experience, a tranquilising moment of post-coital calm. A chance to meet beautiful new life outside pubs in shelters as it huddled from the freeze. What’s it like underneath?
Today, his family had inhaled the toxicity of grief, lost themselves in its exhalation, then dissolved into discreet parts of the house. Diffuse, that’s what they’d become. A word that sounded exactly like the sensation it described, urging you to drag the final syllable onwards until it ran out of song. For a brief moment, the family felt whole, at one in the dark. Then they turned profluent, rushing forward on idiosyncratic drives that broke them apart so they could merge with something else.
An old story from an old time. He wanted to tell a new one, without any masks. Michael flicked his cigarette out into the dark and imagined he heard the embers fizzle out in the snow. Come back.Comeback. He turned towards the kitchen door and went back inside, heading upwards to the place where it all began.
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The Devil is a popular character in cinema, but he’s much happier when someone else enjoys the limelight for his evil deeds.
“The biggest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” says Kevin Spacey’s Verbal Kint, the outwardly meek, socially awkward gopher in Bryan Singer’s classic thriller The Usual Suspects. It’s a memorable line that sums up what’s so ingenious about the film’s labyrinthine plot, and why Satan (manifested in criminal mastermind Keyser Soze) is such a compelling character for storytellers.
As Kint implies and the movie demonstrates, true evil is exceptionally good at shaping complex narratives which cover its own tracks. Behind all of humanity’s diabolical acts, the theory goes, is a malevolent creative genius, coolly orchestrating all the action like the world’s most heinous movie-maker, and an artist savvy enough to let someone else take credit for the chaos.
Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)
Conjuring a smokescreen
The devil as director is a theme playfully explored in Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages, a 1922 silent Danish horror movie masquerading as sober documentary. With no characters to identify with, and not much in the way of meaningful academic analysis, Haxan deploys the mock-framework of rational inquiry as an excuse to enjoy lurid historical events and weird, fantastical vignettes with the detached thrill of a voyeur.
A gripping, darkly comic tale about the nature of possession, Rosemary’s Baby shows how people unwittingly become docile vessels for nurturing evil.
Masterminding the spectacle is director Benjamin Christensen, who appears himself as Satan, a sexual predator who ogles women through their bedroom windows and makes off with them during the night, a rather sexist metaphor for female flightiness. Women are passive creatures easily possessed, and their predilection to temptation and hysteria is the reason why so many throughout history have been tried and executed as witches.
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Female neurosis is the smokescreen concocted by the satanists in Rosemary’s Baby too, Roman Polanski’s 1968 masterpiece about a young woman’s home, marriage and body being invaded by the Prince of Darkness. Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes play Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse, a young New York couple under the control of some exceptionally nosy neighbours, who ingratiate themselves with busybody kindness, isolate the lonely Rosemary from her support network and then serve as masters of ceremony during her middle-of-the-night rape by the Devil.
Narcissistic ambition
A gripping, darkly comic tale about the nature of possession, Rosemary’s Baby shows how people unwittingly become docile vessels for nurturing evil. Paranoia and conspiracy hang heavy in the apartment block, as Polanski masterfully combines the mundane, the macabre and the natural anxiety of pregnancy. Chief culprit isn’t the Satanists though, or their sinister, patronising advice that all will be well if Rosemary just takes some pills and rests, but the wimpy and easily-seduced Guy, whose narcissistic ambition to make it big as an actor is the Faustian bargain which invites Lucifer into his wife’s bosom.
Gruesome murders, steamy sex, saxophone solos and animal sacrifice all ensue, as Angel chases his own shadow from Harlem to New Orleans
Another entertainer with dreams of showbiz is crooner Jonny Favourite, the missing person at the centre of Alan Parker’s 1987 neo-noir horror film Angel Heart. On his trail is the mysterious, impeccably manicured Louis Cyphre (Robert DeNiro), who hires clammy private investigator Harold Angel (Mickey Rourke) to track Favourite down. Gruesome murders, steamy sex, saxophone solos and animal sacrifice all ensue, as Angel chases his own shadow from Harlem to New Orleans, oblivious to his participation in a vengeful, satanic killing spree.
Angel Heart (1987)
A moody, Chandleresque take on the Faustian legend, Angel Heart is let down by a plodding narrative, but is still worth seeing for DeNiro’s brilliant cameo. Quietly terrifying and with an air of chilling stillness, Louis Cyphre (get it?) is gravitas incarnate. It may be a two-dimensional role, but it’s one of DeNiro’s nastiest turns – and a reminder of what a sensational screen presence he was before he sacrificed his reputation for dialled-in roles and fat paychecks, a somewhat ironic postscript to a movie all about selling your soul.
Inner demons
There’s no greater example of this than actor Hendrik Hoefgen, the central protagonist in 1981 German-Hungarian film Mephisto, a riveting look at how performance, power and politics can be an intoxicating combination. Set in 1930s Germany during the rise of the Nazis, István Szabó’s movie sees Hendrik (played by Klaus Maria Brandauer) earn a gilded reputation by playing Satan on stage, then feebly compromise his artistic and political values in return for wealth, social status and the chance to remain centre stage, even if it’s under the grim, controlling searchlight of the Third Reich.
Satan really does exist, flourishing if there’s a cause deluded enough to hide behind
Full-blooded, intensely physical and simultaneously pathetic and tragic, Brandauer delivers one of the most astonishing screen performances by any actor: a masterclass in how to portray manic, tortured energy forever on the cusp of insanity. Satan himself may only appear as a fictionalised character with a red and black costume and a painted white face, but his presence throughout the film is palpable: in the fascists’ moronic, jack-booted urge to dominate, and to a greater degree in the way Hoefgen shamefully justifies his own cowardly actions.
Mephisto (1980)
As Verbal Kint suggests, Satan really does exist, flourishing if there’s a cause deluded enough to hide behind – and if ordinary people allow themselves to be possessed by their inner demons of ego, insecurity and self-deception. ‘The devil is everywhere and takes all shapes’ says the narration at one point in Haxan, and as Mephisto shows, he’s much closer to home than you realise.
When stories are shared with impressionable audiences, where does responsibility begin and end?
The fresh-faced young maiden is easily disarmed. Still, the juicy red apple does look very enticing. And the face behind it, creaking with old age, exudes warmth and wisdom.
Little wonder the angelic brunette accepts the gift. She’s been through hell, and has clearly missed the parental lecture about never trusting strangers. Naivety proves an unforgiving mistress though. For the fruit Snow White takes from the old women is laced with poison, and she is trapped in a coma from which she’s not supposed to wake.
Did the world of children’s entertainment fall under a similarly insidious spell back in 1937, when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became a box office smash? In the 77 years since Disney’s first animated feature, the brand has become an insatiable cultural phenomenon. Yet to many it is cinema’s wicked stepmother, a power-hungry, money-making ogre anaesthetising innocent children with its ersatz blend of superficial magic and questionable values.
The contaminated apple?
The case for the prosecution is that Disney has limited children’s imaginations, garnered a formidable track record for stereotyping races and genders, promoted sexualised, passive and impossibly perfect images of females, portrayed marriage as the ultimate end-game in happiness, and followed through on its corrupting agenda with an aggressively sophisticated one-two of make-believe theme parks and merchandise. Truly, it is the contaminated apple which every innocent yearns to bite.
To many this over-simplified view of good and evil is part of the problem: we all know the world doesn’t really work like that. Yet what fairy tale doesn’t polarise its heroes from its villains?
As father to a four-year-old girl, I used to wrestle with the Disney dilemma whenever the iconic castle sparkled onto my TV screen. Was her tender mind being subtly brainwashed into believing in a non-existent world of happily ever afters? A place where heroines can only find truly completeness by landing a man? Where such characters are always hourglass beautiful? And where there’s a Fairy Godmother who’ll magically dissolve your troubles when times are hard?
After much deliberation, I’ve decided such worries are misplaced, more projections of natural parental anxiety than any sinister plot by The Walt Disney Company to repress half the world’s population. Truth be told, the Magic Kingdom is simply doing what grown-ups have done for centuries, taking aeons-old fairy tales and revitalising them for the audiences and appetites of the day.
Concentration of power
To many this over-simplified view of good and evil is part of the problem: we all know the world doesn’t really work like that. Yet what fairy tale doesn’t polarise its heroes from its villains, aware of how young minds aren’t ready to chew over too much moral ambiguity? Narratives like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are allegories more than anything else, bildungsroman alerting children to the world’s viciousness and reminding them they don’t have to succumb to vanity or temptation.
Like many global success stories, Disney is just shrewdly following the logic of modern capitalism which inevitably concentrates power in the hands of those who have the knack of giving consumers what they want.
Such a traditional approach doesn’t make them old-fashioned either. Indeed, you could argue such tales slyly subvert conservative values. If stable families are the source of all wellbeing, it’s truly miraculous children of broken homes like Cinderella and Tangled’s Rapunzel are so well-adjusted.
Equally, to take Disney to task for cultural imperialism is to attack the symptom rather than the cause. Like many global success stories, Disney is just shrewdly following the logic of modern capitalism which inevitably concentrates power in the hands of those who have the knack of giving consumers what they want.
And to its credit, Disney has done that for decades. When I revel in the brilliance and wit of Toy Story 3, I’m reminded how and why I came to love movies in the first place. The Magic Kingdom proved a gateway that’s taken me from Spielberg to Hitchcock to Lang. And what sane film fan would deny their daughter that?
Managed not misunderstood
As parents our job is not to let films educate our children, but to educate our children about films. When you look past the abundant opportunities for subtext in any Disney film (and any fairy tale for that matter), their central message is usually the same. Through loyalty and friendship, you can overcome adversity, take personal responsibility and use it for the collective good.
To denounce the brand is to make it a forbidden fruit, give it more power than it actually deserves and ultimately to forget that the art of parenting is one of moderation rather than control
Besides, things have come a long way since the poisoned apple. Disney’s latest snow queen is Elsa, the socially-withdrawn anti-heroine of Frozen. An independent woman in a land of ineffectual, judgmental men, she learns how to turn her curse into a blessing, taking part in the world rather than running away from it. True to herself (and happily unmarried), she ends the film with a greater sense of duty towards her citizens.
Disney has a similar duty towards its customers, just like parents have a duty towards their children. The lesson of Walt’s world is that magic powers must be managed, not misused or misunderstood. To denounce the brand is to make it a forbidden fruit, to give it more power than it actually deserves and ultimately to forget that the art of parenting is one of moderation rather than control.
So when my daughter twirls across the lounge in full-blown Elsa-mode – confident, empowered, expressing herself, happy in the moment – I remember that good cinema is good cinema no matter who made it. And that as a Dad, sometimes the wisest thing you can do is just Let It Go.
On a snowbound Easter Sunday, the Porlocks gather for the final time in their soon-to-be demolished family home. All Porlocks that is, except one. As time and nature close in, the family embarks on a journey of remembrance from ancient Egypt to Victorian England and into its own troubled past, awakening long-repressed voices which refuse to be silenced.
Life is about ebb and flow, Roger darling. A boat trip off the coast. Her son sunburnt and seasick from too much vanilla fudge. The rising and falling of his guts in sync with the dipping and drifting of the boat. The ancient summer evening light illuminating her face in a sepia glow. You think you’re moving forward and then, one day, you’re swept back. Then things change and you’re moving forward again. Learn to move with the current and, whatever you do, just make sure you stay afloat.
Mother always knew best, didn’t she? And that’s all Roger had tried to do, wasn’t it? Keep his family afloat. Oftentimes her evanescent voice would whisper back to him, leaving its corpse in the corner of a countryside churchyard where he’d said his last goodbye, rising up to the infinite clouds to comfort him as he hovered this way and that over the lonesome ocean.
You’re always going off course in a plane, he explained to his children on a beach in the Costa del Sol as they watched a Boeing 747 fly out over the sea. My job as a pilot is to bring it back and forth onto our flight path. The straight and narrow as it were. You keep bringing it back and bringing it back. Before you know it, you’re home.
Even in his dreams his mother would come, his worried forehead buried in her lap, absorbing the warmth of her blood and flesh through the lace of her nightdress as they both floated to sleep. One day you’re swept back. Maybe that’s what this was. This box. This video. This final icy ripple which would wash over them all, leaving a placid surface across which they could finally swim to shore.
Roger hadn’t touched the box since he handed it to Elisabeth. He knew as soon as he saw it what was to come. From that moment, the discovery was discoloured for him with a sickly seaweed hue, reminiscent of festering mould. He remembered the tape. Filming it, playing it, packing it away. A fragment of a fragment. A narrow perspective on a distant time. A thick pocket of turbulence he would need to ride over. He never liked those woods. Give me horizons any day.
Exhibit one from the Box of Delights. A VHS tape of a camcorder recording shot during Christmas 1999. Bought for Roger by Elisabeth as a sly dig, he surmised, to capture all those unhappy festive moments when he was removing the lint from his uniform in quiet hotel rooms insulated by the parakeet vistas of more exotic climes. The camera had been binned long ago. But its progeny survived, born again and more powerful after its extended period of gestation.
On the 32-inch Samsung television, images of the dead would now move. Black gave way to a tilted downward perspective of frosted scrubland, before an upwards lift of the camera revealed a pretty girl with hair – the colour of which was hard to discern – peeking from under a pink bobble hat. She wore a blue chequered dress underneath a grey raincoat.
“Catch me if you can, daddy.”
With that tease, the 10-year-old Elise Alexandra Porlock blew the lens a kiss and skipped off towards the woods behind her. A few days before the Millennium. A magical time of empty significance, long forgotten, now resurrected as a disjointed visual dream. Hiding here, hiding there. Bet you can’t see little Elise anywhere. Roger tried to catch up, the shaky composition lurching between too much ground and too much sky.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” she crooned back to the camera as she neared the trees.
“Watch out for those wolves,” shouted Roger. “And make sure you leave a trail of breadcrumbs.”
“I need to find my Hansel first.”
A glance back, a wave, a skip and another charge forward. The camera lingered on her as she became slowly absorbed into the oaks, pines and silver birches. For an afternoon nap, perchance to daydream, to chase a white rabbit running late and speak of cabbages and kings. In the natural world, amid the silent majority of the living. Curiouser and curiouser. Onward she would go, into this tiny, secluded pocket of woodland on the outskirts of Tollgate where people would walk the dog, fulfil romantic assignations and enjoy the sound of rushing water.
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When faced with tragedy, it’s human nature to use symbolism and significance to help soothe the pain.
Death came swiftly and savagely in the end, without warning, swansong or elegiac last goodbye. Waves of grief ensued, tempered by a strange undercurrent of inevitability, as if the world should be sad but not surprised that such a precious talent had been swept away. For there was always something transient about this musician, a fragile, doe-eyed fawn forever en route to greater things, yet dazzled by the headlights of his own brilliance and desperate to escape the shroud of his father’s dark shadow.
A romantic description perhaps, but Jeffrey Scott Buckley was a very romantic man. Surrendering exquisitely to the moment was his thing, his calling, both privately when fooling around with friends with playful impishness and when mesmerising thousands of spellbound fans on stage, that place where you suspect he felt most at home. And it was the same muse which saw him wade spontaneously into Memphis’s Wolf River, a tributary of the mighty Mississippi, on the evening of May 29, 1997.
Jeff Buckley (1966-1997)
The 30-year-old singer-songwriter was enjoying an impromptu dip in the city’s downtown harbour to cool off from the stifling Tennessee heat. So impromptu in fact that, with the exception of a coat which he’d dropped nonchalantly into a bush, he was still fully clothed, sporting heavy combat boots and a t-shirt emblazoned with the legend ‘Altamont’, the word synonymous with violent rock and roll death.
The gathering darkness
He swam leisurely that Thursday night, drifting further and further out into the seemingly placid waterway, crooning Led Zeppelin’s thunderous ode to sexual penetration, Whole Lotta Love. A pounding, blues-influenced rocker that sounds like a generator ramping up its voltage, the Page and Plant classic encapsulated the rough, metallic sound Jeff envisioned for his long-awaited second album, My Sweetheart the Drunk.
The record had suffered a protracted genesis for two years now, stymied by Jeff’s creative inertia, trademark procrastination and maddening perfectionist streak which made him so resistant to definitive versions of anything he’d composed. Sony’s Columbia Records label, which had signed Jeff four years earlier in a million dollar recording deal, was getting twitchy. Questions were being asked by impatient New York music executives, and tensions were rising in what had always been a fractious relationship.
Loneliness, injustice and misery are the emotional palette of the blues, draped mournfully across downbeat chords that speak of wasted potential, and further proof that in moments of destitution and hardship, artistic creativity can flourish.
The musician was feeling the strain; a pressure intensified by accumulating financial woes and recent suspicions he was vulnerable to bipolar disorder. This was the emotional climate in which Jeff embarked on one of those reckless, spur-of-the-moment actions for which he had a reputation. Nevertheless, he swam with growing confidence and detachment in the Wolf’s deceptively tranquil waters, ignoring the pleas of his sole companion, roadie Keith Foti, to swim out of the gathering darkness and come back to shore.
Thousands of feet above, his bandmates were descending to Memphis’s airport, revved up to record the mother of all albums in the birthplace of rock and roll. The migration south was a poignant one, as if its creators had made a conscious decision to go back to their roots and strive for a purer, more authentic sound. The Mississippi delta has long exerted a magnetic pull on musicians and music lovers, seduced by a rich cultural folklore which nourishes and sustains its landscape, much like the famous river which drains and waters the region.
Yet it’s a folklore rooted in despair, a poetry nurtured in pain. The scar of slavery was the original sin which inspired the delta blues, the genre that would spawn the demon seed of rock and roll. The word ‘blues’ takes its etymological origin from the indigo plants of the Deep South slavelands, a bitter flower which can be used medicinally.
A cotton plantation in Georgia (courtesy of the US Library of Congress)
And it was in this dark chapter of history that African-Americans composed their own melancholic chants to remedy the soul-crushing labour of the cotton plantations. Loneliness, injustice and misery are the emotional palette of the blues, draped mournfully across downbeat chords that speak of wasted potential, and further proof that in moments of destitution and hardship, artistic creativity can flourish.
Succumbing to impulse
Jeff knew this well. That’s why he’d been living a life of self-imposed solitude and simplicity in a shotgun shack on Memphis’s North Rembert Street. It was a bare, stripped-down existence that must have been a welcome antidote to the pressure cooker lifestyle of New York and the endless distractions and temptations facing one of America’s most fêted young rock stars.
He was in a world of his own, and happy to be so, despite the dark undercurrents gathering below. None more so than in the Wolf River, where he casually backstroked further and further away from Foti, oblivious to warnings about how the animal beneath him could howl. Or the fact that many of his lyrics seem preoccupied with drowning, not least Nightmares by the Sea, a track earmarked for the new album in which the singer ghoulishly invites you to join him under the waves tonight, with all the chilly dread of a damned soul luring you to Hades.
Jeff’s vocals are sublime: swooning, operatic and soulful, part Robert Plant Valhallah wail and part amorous, Billie Holiday nightclub chanteuse
Succumbing to impulse, yielding with meditative abandon to his muse, was a pattern which defined Buckley’s brooding, insular performances. His gigs would often digress into prolonged, meandering renditions of his favourite material seemingly on a whim, driven by instinct, resisting structure and expectation. It was a quality which mimicked the vocal acrobatics of Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (below), Jeff’s all-time hero and a maestro of Qawwali, the devotional music of Sufism.
Qawwali songs are characterised by their deep yearning for spiritual transcendence. Building steadily over sustained periods and interspersed with flashes of improvisation, Qawwali’s architecture symbolises the sacred path of the Sufis themselves, who see life as a journey of intense burning which must be endured so they can be consumed in the inferno of Allah’s love. Until then they must ‘wait in the fire’, as Jeff would sing on Grace, the title track of his first and only studio album.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948-1997)
Sensuous rapture and explosive passion are Grace’s primary hues. Jeff’s vocals are sublime: swooning, operatic and soulful, part Robert Plant Valhallah wail and part amorous, Billie Holiday nightclub chanteuse, gliding from volcanic eruptions of blistering emotion to delicate, precise intonations as light and pure as crystal. The extraordinary five-and-a-half octave vocal range was inherited from his father, singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, who died in 1975 from an accidental drug overdose. Frightening musical talent wasn’t the only gift Tim bequeathed his son. Fey good looks, a penchant for risk-taking, abandonment issues, and so many painful, unanswered questions were also Jeff’s birthright.
He’d been swimming in the Wolf for over half an hour when two boats, a tugboat and a barge, sailed towards him in quick succession. The singer manoeuvred around them both and then away from the second boat’s wake, the size of which sent waves rippling all the way to the riverbank where Foti stood. Jeff’s friend moved his stereo away to stop it getting wet. When he turned back, Jeff had vanished, leaving only unsettled water and the tepid mumblings of a harbour at night.
An anthem for doomed youth
People in the Deep South know more than most how water destroys as well as creates, unmakes and makes. And so it would prove again that Spring evening in Memphis, at the spot where the Wolf River is absorbed by the Mississippi. As Jeff slipped beneath the waves, dragged under by the boats’ ferocious, lethal undertow, fact would surrender to fiction, story would be drowned out by speculation, and a musical legend-in-waiting would turn from man to myth, a blank canvas on which devotees could project their dreams.
When faced with tragedy, it’s human nature to tell ourselves stories like this one, loading them with symbolism and significance to help soothe the pain. That’s why so many l. There’s nothing more darkly poetic than an Anthem for Doomed Youth after all, and it’s so much easier to layer suffering with an aesthetic sheen than grapple with the grimy mundanity of the facts. Rivers are dangerous, young men do stupid things and sometimes, shit just happens.
Yearning for a deeper meaning, searching for a better place, is the essence of Jeff Buckley’s music, and the core of his enduring appeal as the sensitive man’s rock star. Call it striving for a state of grace, or nursing a cold and broken hallelujah, his art is the work of a man who couldn’t quite come to terms with the world around him, just as we struggle to come to terms with his death. Why did he behave so recklessly? What could he have gone on to achieve? How can something so brilliant be so cruelly taken away? Why did my father leave me when I needed him most?
To Jeff, music was an end in itself, both a guiding force and a final destination that would shepherd him through life’s interminably painful landscape.
Such questions never will be answered. Much like we’ll never know whether Jeff quickly resigned to his watery fate that night, or fought stubbornly to the end as the Wolf devoured him from within, flooding the respiratory system that had produced such momentous, exquisite sound. We do know his corpse stayed under the water for six days before it resurfaced near Memphis’s iconic Beale Street, the city’s musical heartbeat.
The handsome, dreamboat face was swollen: he was eventually identified by his stomach piercings. He was cremated and the ashes returned to New York, with no second album to speak of, just a sorrowful legacy reverberating with sadness, speculation and the sense of a life which never quite ran its course.
The songs remain though, and the love and devotion burning within them. To Jeff, music was an end in itself, both a guiding force and a final destination that would shepherd him through life’s interminably painful landscape. He wasn’t alone in his quest. This promise of finding inner peace, of transcending the world’s grim vicissitudes, is what inspired the delta bluesmen of the Great Depression, the slaves in the 19th century cotton fields and the mojo which continues to propel the Qawwali singers of Sufism today.
In its purest form, music is a way of bringing harmony to discord, a means of connecting with the world around us, and an expression of that basic human urge to fill the void with something as powerful and simple as love. The desire is a perennial one, awash with both misery and joy, surging forward like the mightiest of rivers and taking you to a better place, somewhere that’s just beyond the horizon yet forever out of reach.
Where it leads is up to you. But there’s enough space for endless personal interpretations, all existing in chorus under a vast indigo sky that’s open, infinite and which echoes with the loudest and most romantic question of them all.
Surely all this must mean something. Shouldn’t it?
Beguiling yet treacherous, La Serenissima is the most cinematic of cities – and film-makers the world over have fallen for its story-telling power
La Serenissima is the most romantic city in the world, famous for its carnival masks and a fount of inspiration for filmmakers in love with its dazzling, disorientating imagery.
The three are natural bedfellows, of course. Believing in a grander, more alluring version of life is what drives all romantics. While masks suggest such an exalted plane is within reach, disguising as they do the reality underneath and inviting our imaginations to soar.
Cinema is the natural extension of both impulses: the creation of fantasy in the mind of the viewer; the dance of people (the audience) watching other people (actors) wearing masks (characters) play out intricately constructed masquerades.
Death in Venice (1973)
Yet the lesson Venice and cinema teach us is the perils of believing the idyllic, not the actual. This is the fate embalming Gustav Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice. The tale of a holiday romance that never was, we watch as Aschenbach becomes infatuated with the adolescent Tadzio (Bjorn Andresen), photographed by Visconti with all the loving attention of a Botticelli nude.
Aschenbach’s folly is to place the mask of the ideal on Tadzio and to retreat behind his own mask, watching until his perfect vision becomes a kind of apparition. Such is the thrill of movies and masks: you can watch passively, with the obscurity of a voyeur, fulfilment on show yet tantalisingly out of reach
Venice’s decline is continually disguised and deferred, cloaked under a mask of slick marketing, an ostentatious biennale and a grandiose film festival
Happiness is a mirage for James Bond too in Casino Royale. A burnt-out 007 (Daniel Craig) resigns from the secret service and escapes to Venice with Vesper Lynd (Eva Green). The bliss can’t last though (the franchise depends on it). So eventually Vesper removes her mask of treachery, their love crumbling into water like the building in the final action scene.
Imaginary obsession
Venice is sinking after all; year by year it slides deeper into the lagoon. There’s as much entropy in the city as there is beauty; time and the elements are eroding the baroque jewel from within, in the same way the knight’s corpse rots within the church catacombs of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Like Indy, it’s easy to become addicted to the pungent air of romance, which means Venice’s decline is continually disguised and deferred, cloaked under a mask of slick marketing, an ostentatious biennale and a grandiose film festival.
Casino Royale (2006)
In Joseph Losey’s artsy melodrama Eve, Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker) arrives at the film festival trapped by self-delusion. Pretending to have written a best-seller he didn’t (the mask he puts on himself), this swaggering male conquistador is swept away by the deceptive charms of Eve (Jeanne Moreau). But there is only hollowness behind her cold visage; the surface mask through which a fake man pursues an imaginary obsession, losing control until he drifts, haunted and destitute, through a ghostly, washed-out vision of the city.
Like great movies, there’s the thrill of the masquerade about Venice, the temptation to flesh things out with more substance than they can possibly bear
Ghosts await John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) as well in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Escaping to Venice to restore a church, we soon realise their flight is simply a mask for grief, as they yearn to recover something else from the past.
The entire movie is a kind of death mask. The image of the couple’s dead daughter, calcified in time, forever haunts the present. And just as in a masquerade, Don’t Look Now’s suspense teases us with the promise of a reveal, just as Venice entices us into its dizzying labyrinth, the hint of bliss forever round the corner.
Don’t Look Now (1973)
Divinely sad
That’s why the art of Venice is like the art of cinema: a vision of sumptuous unreality luring you away from more honest, grounded shores. Like great movies, there’s the thrill of the masquerade about the place, the temptation to flesh things out with more substance than they can possibly bear.
The city is divine, but divinely sad, suffused with the bittersweet knowledge that all things must end, whether it’s the perfect weekend, the unmasking at the end of the ball, or a paradise slipping into the sea.
Memory and imagination stay afloat, however; the only things we can really cling to. And the mask itself – that personification of emptiness, that facade with open eyes but which never really sees – still floats exquisitely, like the serenest debris, across the romantic waterways of our minds.
On a snowbound Easter Sunday, the Porlocks gather for the final time in their soon-to-be demolished family home. All Porlocks that is, except one. As time and nature close in, the family embarks on a journey of remembrance from ancient Egypt to Victorian England and into its own troubled past, awakening long-repressed voices which refuse to be silenced.
The embrace was sweet, delicate and fragranced with renewal, like a gentle dowsing of fresh spring sunshine. In the mental lens of Elisabeth Elaine Porlock, her daughter reappeared in glorious, pin-sharp clarity, sweeping forwards in her lime green dress towards her outstretched arms on a beaming mythical day in June. The creaking of a vacated playground swing muffled her giggling, which seemed to come from within and outside her four-year-old frame.
Then, the beautiful surge skywards as Elisabeth pushed her child from the grass to the clouds, four eyes squinting in the summer sun. They held their positions for as long as they could at the furthest point possible, before mother, child and imagination dissolved against reality’s abrasive cut. A verdant rhyming couplet terminated by a heavy period of frost-white blank space.
Elisabeth’s reveries never lasted long. Like dreams, they dissipated upon the slightest interruption from the physical world. The break of daylight, the distant trundle of trains, the bedroom light turned on too early by Roger at weekends when Elisabeth’s body told her mind she needed to be a good girl and get moving again.
Which is what she did that Easter Sunday morning just before midday, stepping into the utility room from the garden, not bothering to stamp the snow from her feet on the unwelcoming mat that read ‘Be Our Guest, But Not For Too Long Because It Gets Weird’. The black cat got the message, following her up to the doorway, peeking inside and then slinking back to a vantage point under the hedgerow.
Elisabeth shuffled across the concrete floor, leaving a trail of white to melt into the porous grey stone. She yanked the pullcord next to the doorway, flooding the room in a harsh white interrogative light that intensified the blandness of its egg-shell walls. Above, Elisabeth heard the gentle rhythmic whirl of the exercise bike and her son’s diffident shuffling, a dissonant overture to the full chorus of voices to come.
During that one long summer of 2005, the utility room would become something else. They would only discuss the search with police and journalists in that room. Then it became a warm space. Febrile even. Equipped with a table, telephone and reams of porcelain white posters picturing Elise’s face, it became a makeshift war room and reverse Pandora’s box, a vessel in which they could pour all traumas. Hope was somewhere in there too. The hope of a long, warm embrace that would be so full of love it would lift the entire world off its axis and carry it straight to the heavens.
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Who ultimately owns a work of art: the buyer, the artist, the museum or the person appreciating it?
The Art of Painting by Johannes Vermeer (1666)
This story is about a man and a woman, alone together. The master’s servants had left his private quarters, leaving him to enjoy his beautiful new conquest in solitude. Night was falling across the bedroom, a crepuscular gloom which only served to intensify the rich palette of the canvas. Europe’s most powerful man closed in on his prize, running his fingers across the three-hundred year old pigment, weaving flirtatious circles around the pretty face at the picture’s centre.
She was dressed up as history, and was now in the iron possession of a man making history. Power was his life’s pursuit. He loved to subjugate things, bend them to his will. And this latest trophy was another sure-footed step on his mission to control the world’s finest culture. Together they would reside in a grandiose museum near his hometown, the artistic heartbeat of an empire that would rule the globe for a thousand years.
This is a painting about how audiences participate creatively in the interpretation of art. And it’s also a picture about ownership, about privacy, the role art plays in history and vice versa
Art had always been a cherished project. In his younger days, before he’d stamped arrogantly onto the world stage, he’d yearned to be a painter. And it was in part the cruel rejection of his work by the arbiters of taste in Vienna which had triggered his new career path, one which now saw him bestride Europe like a colossus, the figurehead of a remorseless chariot turned by the wheels of rage and injustice. Painting would play a different role now. No longer a livelihood but more a glorification of his supremacy, a reminder of what he could have been before destiny forced him to seize greater glories.
The date was November 1940. The location was the Berghof, a palatial retreat near Berchtesgarden in the Bavarian Alps. The man was Adolf Hitler. And the picture in his clutches was Johannes Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, which the Führer had purchased for 1.82 million reichmarks. Those are the facts. But it’s worth noting at this point that I’ve completely invented the scene of the dictator caressing the image. The choice is both an aesthetic and symbolic one. Because this is a painting about how audiences participate creatively in the interpretation of art. And it’s also a picture about ownership, about privacy, the role art plays in history and vice versa, and the mysteries of a seductive craft which forever eludes definition and control.
A voyeuristic experience
The first thing to say about this 17th century Dutch masterwork is that it’s classic Vermeer. All his stylistic hallmarks are there: the stillness, the domestic setting, the sense of peeking in on privacy, the milky daylight flooding in from the left. Yet it’s very unique among his work too: the only one in which he turns the lens onto his own livelihood. Complex symbolism and iconography make it more of an intellectual experience than an emotional one like The Lacemaker or Officer and Laughing Girl. And even when facing destitution at the end of his life, it’s the one picture Vermeer steadfastly refused to sell.
From a distance, we see a well-dressed man sitting at his easel painting a young lady’s portrait. Dominating the left side of the canvas is a curtain, pulled back by an unseen hand. The emotional atmosphere is voyeuristic, as if we’re enjoying a privileged eavesdrop of a maestro at work. The curtain has another insinuation too, imbuing the scene with a sense of theatricality, a tone underscored by the contrived positioning of the props.
Yet its true masterstroke lies in Vermeer’s subtle articulation of the limits of making, seeing and understanding works of art. The Art of Painting is true to its title in the way it deliberately draws attention to its own artifice.
The largest of these is the political map on the far wall, which shows the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands as they were thirty years before the picture was painted. The model is dressed in blue, awkwardly bearing a trumpet, laurel wreath and book, the signature accessories of Clio, the muse of history in Greek mythology. On the table is a death mask. But this is a picture that pulsates with life, Vermeer’s exceptionally vivid colours making the image feel more real than real itself.
Despite its painstaking naturalism, we only ever get part of this picture though, and it’s this sense of omission that makes it all the more powerful. On one level, The Art of Painting can be read as a sophisticated celebration of painting itself. Vermeer positions the artist as a well-to-do man (his luxury doublet), political commentator (the map), illustrator of history (Clio) and portrayer of the human condition (death mask).
Yet its true masterstroke lies in Vermeer’s subtle articulation of the limits of making, seeing and understanding works of art. The Art of Painting is true to its title in the way it deliberately draws attention to its own artifice. All the props in the picture are representations, synthetic recreations of actual things. The map, crinkled, worn and already out of date, reminds us power is temporal. The death mask is another variation on the same theme, as is the chandelier which shows the crest of the Habsburg Empire, a political entity in decline at the time the picture was painted.
Crafting your own narrative
The lady is a fiction too: we feel the pretence and discomfort of her unnatural pose. Only part of her will make it on to the artist’s portrait too, a picture within a picture that tells us art is only ever an edited, subjective view of reality, a subtext reinforced by the fact that we only glimpse part of the studio. Both painter and poser are wonderfully inscrutable too. We can’t see their eyes and must guess at what the man may have said to elicit that tantalising, coquettish look from his subject.
No other picture says so much about the open-endedness and dead ends of art, and no other picture quite has that sense of its creator being both present and absent, his back turned so he gives nothing away
In The Art of Painting, as in any painting for that matter, the onus is placed on the viewer to look, interpret and imagine. Absorbing the picture is a quintessential exercise in art appreciation, and a lesson in how we as audiences are coaxed into piecing symbols and images together, filling in the blanks to craft our own satisfying narrative. Maybe that’s why an empty chair is pulled up in the foreground, as Vermeer invites us to sit down and become part of the scene, an offer made all the more poignant by the fact that he kept it in his studio as his own enjoyment. For all its sense of disclosure, the ultimate meaning is remote, the domain of the artist, and we feel on the cusp of something we’ll never truly understand.
So it’s sweetly ironic The Art of Painting was eventually owned by a man who failed at art and tried to compensate by conquering. He would ultimately lose control of both picture and empire, transporting Vermeer’s work to the German salt mines of Altaussee as the net closed in on the Third Reich. There, it was recovered by the Monuments Men of the US Army and returned to the Austrian Government. Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum is its home today.Yet there is still a tussle over its ownership, with members of the Czernin family (which relinquished the picture to the Nazis) issuing legal requests for its return.
Private chemistry
A futile dispute, perhaps. To me, The Art of Painting will only ever be owned by one man. No other picture says so much about the open-endedness and dead ends of art, and no other picture quite has that sense of its creator being both present and absent, his back turned so he gives nothing away. Maybe that’s what Vermeer intended all along. His family may have been forced to sell the property after his death, but he is still the only man in possession of its secrets. And my interpretation is just another subjective and mutable reading that will be displaced by time. As great art gets bigger we get smaller: a lesson every human eventually learns, even Hitler.
In that spirit, let me start where I began, with a retreat into the realm of personal invention. The man and woman are alone together, and always will be. I imagine the artist is sharing a joke with the lady at our expense, subtly mocking all the people who queue up to gawp at their private chemistry. The model lowers her gaze to the floor and can’t look us in the eye, even though she knows we wouldn’t have heard.
This tender exchange is immortalised on the canvas – a singular moment between two people never to be repeated or forgotten – and which serves as a gentle reminder that some secrets are best left unshared. And that we as voyeurs will forever be on the fringes, spellbound witnesses to an unspoken magic that reveals nothing except its own sublime sense of wonder.
Frank, freeing, and fabulously to the point, the f-word is hugely pleasurable when done well. Some movies swear blind by it…
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Saying it may be wrong on occasion, but sometimes it just feels so right. The jaw retracts, the bottom lip curls in, the teeth spring forward, and the fricative consonant gives way to a guttural vowel sound finishing with a firm, resounding ‘ck’. With it can come all manner of emotions, from joy to rage, pleasure to pain, passion to desperation, plus a lacerating blast of good old-fashioned offence.
The F-word blossomed in cinema in the early 1970s. Since then it’s been deployed with gratuity and ingenuity by filmmakers searching for shock, realism, comedy and irony. Coarse it may be, but this four-letter intensifier (and its myriad derivatives) is a wonderfully versatile linguistic tool: a noun, verb, adjective and compound that paints a rich palette of colourful meanings and, if used skilfully, never fails to deliver dramatic bite.
The fog of adolescence
The Exorcist was one of the first films to make hay from the F-word. Four decades on, William Friedkin’s horror show feels like a shallow, preposterous construction as soulless as the evil spirit lurking within Regan. But it’s also one of the great sound films: the taut musical score, grinding sound effects and increasing profanities building a cold, excruciating atmosphere of nastiness.
The Exorcist (1973)
The devil certainly has the best tunes in The Exorcist, which delights in dropping F-bombs on its audience through the cherubic lips of a sweet and innocent 12-year-old. Because although it’s ostensibly about demonic possession, much of the film’s power derives from the way it taps into parental anxiety about losing children to the fog of adolescence, where they’ll soon discover the pleasures of the F-word in all its forms.
Fast forward ten years to 1983 and by then, the F-word was rattling across the movie landscape like machine-gun fire, short-hand for strutting machismo in an era when action cinema was blooming. That was the year of Scarface, in which swaggering Cuban upstart Tony Montana (Al Pacino) swills the word around his mouth with the boundless confidence of a Reaganite capitalist, before spitting it out so you almost feel the hot saliva spraying your face.
The F-word reached blistering new heights in 1990, when Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas broke the record for the number of times it was used in one movie (300 in total)
Movies became ever more creative in their use of the expletive as the decade continued. The Terminator systematically selects it from his programmed drop-down menu to threaten a nosey janitor, mild-mannered executive Steve Martin unleashes it with great comic gusto on an incompetent car hire clerk in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and Die Hard’s Bruce Willis bastardises the famous lyric of singing cowboy Roy Rogers to taunt his adversaries.
Naturalism and menace
The F-word reached blistering new heights in 1990, when Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas broke the record for the number of times it was used in one movie (300 in total). Here, it didn’t so much add spice to the sauce, but become a base ingredient for the meal. For Goodfellas is a feast of a film: the incessant use of the F-word – delivered most memorably and with lip-smacking relish by pint-sized potty mouth Joe Pesci – serving up a sumptuous combo of naturalism and menace.
Goodfellas (1990)
The gangster genre turned postmodern four years later in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, where scripture-reciting assassin Jules Winfield (Samuel L Jackson) strolls through the LA underworld wielding the F-word as poetically as his 9mm handgun.
Preferring to use the prefix ‘mother’ wherever possible (he even has it branded on his wallet), Jackson and partner-in-crime John Travolta curse with an easy gravitas that made the F-word seem profound and effortlessly cool. You’d cross the street to avoid Joe Pesci’s character, whereas you’d probably ask Jackson to join you for a beer.
The word comes out of nowhere, yet feels like a flash of authenticity in a film where the truth feels forever guarded and elusive
More recently (and on the smaller screen), the equally-lovable double act of Bunk and McNulty in HBO’s The Wire decipher a complex crime scene by only ever saying the F-word. It’s a brilliant setpiece, every profanity bringing a fresh nuance as the booze-loving cops methodically uncover the truth. And in many ways, the truth is what really lies behind the F-word’s enduring appeal.
A flash of authenticity
Take Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which sees cult leader and awe-inspiring bullshitter Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) crack under the tenacious grilling of a journalist, exploding the F-word (sublimely prefaced with the word ‘pig’) into the laps of his quaint middle-class companions. The word comes out of nowhere, yet feels like a flash of authenticity in a film where the truth feels forever guarded and elusive.
The Master (2012)
Like a coiled spring, The Master creaks with inner tension as its pent-up protagonists struggle to cope with trauma, emptiness and, above all, carnal desire. In a way, the F-word is omnipresent throughout the story, so much so that when sex-obsessed World War II veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) enjoys a playful tumble with a young lady in the final scenes, it feels like sorely-needed catharsis.
Much like the act it so bluntly describes, the F-word is hugely pleasurable when done well: delivering an explosion of energy, a satisfying emotional release and a mutually beneficial way for human beings to communicate with each other and say what’s in their hearts. Like a good friend (with benefits), the F-word is frank, freeing, and fabulously to the point. So thanks very much F-word – and fuck you too.
Its futuristic predictions didn’t come true, but history hasn’t tarnished the timeless appeal of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
That was the year that was. Apple launched the iPod, scientists published their map of the complete human genome and, in the defining moment of our generation, religious extremists slammed commercial airliners into New York and Washington DC. The world felt smaller, more inward-looking and more interdependent than ever before in 2001, and the playful thrill of space exploration and astral harmony conjured up by the film of the same name seemed light years away.
Sci-fi buffs will tell you the best examples of the genre are not those films which accurately predict the future, but those which reveal most about the times in which they were made. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, at the height of the space race. The first moon landing was a year away, monolithic computers were arriving in corporate America, cult phenomenon Star Trek was entering its third season on NBC and futurology, which in 2001’s case envisioned a world of sexy space hostesses and suit-and-tie stratospheric travel, was definitely in fashion.
Progress is one of 2001’s signature themes. Shifting operatically from apes to astronauts, it’s a hugely ambitious narrative journey, powered by revolutionary special effects and the prodigious talents of a single-minded maverick director who had broken the movie-making mould, acquiring both creative independence and the financial largesse of a major Hollywood studio.
Conventions of time
In many ways, 2001 is a film from the Sixties and for the Sixties. Marketed with the strapline ‘The Ultimate Trip’, its inspired blend of psychedelic light show and philosophical meditation entranced broad-minded hippies seeking a higher plane of consciousness, while those of a more conservative bent will have been chilled to the marrow by computer HAL 9000, a cold, red, authoritarian machine slowly taking over, at a time when Communism was engulfing south-east Asia.
An updated version of Frankenstein’s monster, HAL 9000 turns on its creator with cool, efficient menace, yet remains the film’s most sympathetic character. The panic and fear in its robotic voice during shutdown elicit far more gravitas than those two-dimensional planks of space debris, Bowman and Poole.
Time is both elongated and condensed, or, in the case of the film’s cheeky intermission, ceasing to exist altogether
Add to that the graceful, balletic movements of anthropomorphic spacecraft set to Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube – which provide some of the film’s most stirring moments and a disproportionate amount of screen time – and it’s easy to see why many people think 2001 is the work of someone more fascinated by technology than by the moral quandaries of man.
Cold, clinical and controlling have all been descriptions levelled at Stanley Kubrick. Responsible for helming the longest shoot in cinematic history (Eyes Wide Shut), and notorious for subjecting actors to hundreds of takes for seemingly minor inconsequential scenes, the director’s obsession with minutiae and his blissful disregard for the conventions of time finds full expression in 2001, his first and only science-fiction film. The narrative pace is slowed to near-tedium, technology is fetishized, humans are reduced to banal ciphers and time and perspective are blown apart.
The symphonic shift from prehistory to interplanetary exploration – breathlessly articulated by that jump-cut – coupled with the mirroring micro-dramas of the apes’ territorial face-off and the Bowman-HAL showdown, creates a dramatic tension that sees time both elongated and condensed, or, in the case of the film’s cheeky intermission, ceasing to exist altogether.
Like Bowman surging through the Stargate, we’re passengers rather than explorers in 2001,an ignorant species hurtling into the great unknown.
Spatially, Kubrick pulls us in opposite directions too. He delights in going large (the planets, the spacecraft, the grand historical sweep) and then small (the bone, the floating pen, Bowman’s bedroom), a bold combination of portentous philosophising and light satire which relishes the triviality of man within an inconceivable cosmos. Monumental significance is counterpointed by trite insignificance, and the cumulative emotional effect is one of vulnerability and wonder.
The inscrutable void
Like Bowman surging at interstellar overdrive through the Stargate, we’re passengers rather than explorers in 2001,an ignorant species hurtling into the great unknown. We feel like we’ve come full circle when the film ends, having spent more than two hours orbiting something we never truly understand.
In that sense, 2001 is more about revolution than evolution, a motif underscored by the recurrent circular patterns, from the spaceships and HAL’s Sauron-style eye to the interplanetary alignment and the Starchild himself, who floats serenely within a spherical womb, a not-so-subtle allusion to the continual cycle of existence.
The mystery of that existence, and of the movie itself, is visually embodied in the monolith, that eerie, implacable presence which unites the film’s disparate elements, triggers change (without changing itself) and leaves apes and astronauts equally perplexed. To some it’s the work of extra-terrestrials. To others, it represents the fingerprint of the Almighty. To this writer, this huge slab of black symbolises so much of what fascinates us about the inscrutable void of space.
In 2001’s closing moments, we’re swept along in the monolith’s trajectory for the final time and see that same void spectacularly illuminated by an image of birth. Then the screen fades to black, and we’re left with the exhilarating feeling that things have only just begun, and that we’re in the infancy of a cosmic journey that’s wonderful, baffling and pregnant with limitless possibility.
The Art of Painting by Johannes Vermeer (1666)
PHILIP PARRISH 