The Ponying the Slovos team were honoured to be able to contribute to the volume, and eagerly grasped the opportunity to compare Burgess’s Nadsat to that which features in Stanley Kubrick’s script (and thereafter, the movie itself.)
Alas, as is so often the case with academic research these days, the purchase price is not so cheap. My suggestion is to ask a friendly academic librarian to consider purchasing it on your behalf. However, I can offer you a flavour of what we discovered, and subsequently wrote about in the volume.
A few people have asked me if I’d seen Branagh’s sepia-tinged movie about Belfast. I haven’t. I also don’t intend to. I’m sure it’s great, but it’s not for me.
Branagh on set.
I grew up literally one street away, the other side of a fence we euphemistically call a peace line. That fence is there today. It wasn’t there in the Seventies.
“Peace” line in North Belfast.
In this Google Maps image you can see where my house was (those ones are new). You can also see KAT (standing for ‘Kill all Taigs (Catholics)’ written on the wall. That’s today, nearly three decades into a peace process. If you can’t imagine what it was like at the height of a civil war, there’s plenty of archival news footage available.
I expect Ken would have made a very different movie had he grown up in the city at that time, as I did. Actually, I expect he’d not be making movies at all. So no, I haven’t seen it and won’t see it. It’s not something I care to revisit, in Ken’s sepia tones or in any other format.
It’s not a tribal thing. I’m proud of Ken and always have been. I’ve loved his work since the ‘Billy’ plays. But Ken’s Belfast and mine, though they almost overlap, are hugely different. When the civil war euphemistically known as the ‘Troubles’ erupted in 1969, Ken’s family quite sensibly emigrated.
What they left behind, and what my family moved into (after being threatened out of their home in a different part of town), was a North Belfast that quickly became a patchwork quilt of paramilitary loyalties, rival tribalisms, brute violence and war.
I really admire Branagh for never shying away from his origins, and also for the sensitivity he has always brought to the topic. But, to use a word in today’s parlance, I find this somewhat triggering. More pertinently, I’m not the intended audience for this.
It is, as Auden wrote of the day Yeats died, “the dead of winter.” On this day, with the brooks frozen, the airports deserted, the statues disfigured by snow and the mercury sinking in the mouth of the day, it is my luck to be (re)reading Samuel Beckett.
It’s the only time of the year to read Beckett, really. You couldn’t take any of it seriously in the heat of a summer piazza. He’s no beach read. But at this time of thin light and monochrome landscapes, huddled around a small fire with only your own treacherous thoughts, he’s ideal.
I don’t understand those who praise Dickens, and especially I don’t understand the love of ‘A Christmas Carol’. Each to their own, but to me it’s mawkish, saccharine and untrue. Give me Beckett any Christmas, that muscular, unremitting prose with its unexpected laughter, the laugh of resignation.
And if you want a proper Christmas movie, there’s no better option than ‘Film’. You can keep ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ or ‘Die Hard’ or whatever. THIS is the real Christmas movie.
Gilles Deleuze called it “the greatest Irish film ever”, but don’t let that put you off. Of course Deleuze is always reliably wrong, but it’s still a great movie. Beckett and Keaton in Manhattan. The eyes have it.
PS I have received a petition claiming that the true movie of Christmas is the Muppets version of A Christmas Carol, a complaint I have had to consider seriously. It resolves the mawkish saccharine quality of the original Dickens admirably, it must be admitted.
Nevertheless, I intend to stick by Sam. I think a muppets Godot would be an ever greater masterpiece. How about Kermit and Fozzy as Vladimir and Estragon, Dr Bunsen and Beaker or else Miss Piggy and Gonzo as Pozzo and Lucky, and Scooter or Crazy Harry as the Boy? Tell me you wouldn’t watch that!
The MOSF Journal of Science Fiction has produced a fascinating special edition volume focused on what they term Middle Eastern SF (though the inclusion of an article on Iranian ‘theory fiction’ writer Reza Negarestani suggests a somewhat expansive understanding of Middle East).
It’s not especially focused on religious futurism, despite the inclusion of a review of Jorg Determann’s book (my own review of which is pending publication in the next edition of Foundation.)
Nevertheless, there is much of interest here for those curious to know more about Arab futurism, Gulf futurism and the interactions between Israeli and Palestinian SF especially. Highly recommended.
Do you remember the time that the manager of the Rolling Stones parodied A Clockwork Orange on their album sleevenotes, and ended up being mentioned in the House of Lords after a complaint from Bournemouth Society for the Blind?
Or the time after that, when the Rolling Stones tried to appear as the droogs in a movie of the novel, and ended up petitioning the screenwriter for the roles? You know, the time when the Beatles signed the petition because they were going to do the soundtrack?
I was watching football yesterday, and chatting with friends remotely during the match, as so many of us do in these pandemic lockdown socially atomised days. It occurred to me that the narrative arc of a particular player, struggling for form, hitting the post, his anguish and despair, then eventually relief and the breakthrough of scoring, would make an interesting visual focus.
I was, in short, reminded of the 2006 documentary Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait,in which some seventeen cameras were directed solely upon the mercurial Real Madrid player during a match against Villareal. It’s an intriguing piece of cinema. On the one hand, it’s hypnotic, with its somnolent score by Scottish band Mogwai. On another, it’s the juxtaposition of Zidane’s concentration, and isolation, against that of the various groups of fans around the world, who appear in the half-time segment of the movie.
Of course, this was too good an experimental film idea to be original. There is nothing new and good under the sun. The original version of this idea was, astonishingly, made in 1970 and released the following year. Entitled Fussball Wie Noch Nie, or Football as Never Before in English, it was directed by the relatively obscure German new wave director, Hellmuth Costard, who is probably best known, or most notorious, nowadays for his early short in which an ejaculating penis recites the German morality law relating to movies.
Hellmuth Costard
Costard’s version follows George Best of Manchester United in his 1970 pomp, playing against Coventry City. Like the Zidane movie which emulates it, it isolates and focuses upon the individual genius in a team sport, generating a flowing image which is simultaneously utterly alienating, because so distanced from how we ordinarily spectate upon sport, and also so utterly familiar, because it is how we live life, as individuals performing our role as part of a greater, more complex whole, of which we only witness our corner.
Football As Never Before (1971)
This both is and is not the George Best we are familiar with, in other words. It is not, obviously, the Miss World dating George, the Carnaby Street fashion George, the drunk George on Wogan’s sofa, the alcoholic George, the wifebeating George. These Georges are real and true and fragments of a larger life, but are not the focus of why Best is an international icon.
This is football George, the subject of the witticism: Maradona good, Pele better, George Best. Allegedly the most talented player ever, or asserted so in some quarters at least. This is George doing what the world loved him for, playing soccer. But it is not how we are used to seeing him play. This is tightly focused on him alone. We see how much he shambles about, turning this way and that, occasionally perplexed, strolling, then breaking into a brief run, then stopping. The game, in other words, is elsewhere, or rather, it mostly takes place beyond our focus. He is only intermittently part of it. Here is a five minute clip, complete with a soundtrack, Football, by Manchester band Arficeden, to give you a sense of Costard’s vision.
It is perhaps too much to extrapolate out from this unusual and now obscure documentary to derive wider conclusions. Yet this is refreshing and familiar. Gone are the implicit negative narratives which always seem to hover in the background like a dropdown menu about George, the drinking, the womanising, the sad squandering of talent and ultimately life. We know they are there, but they are not here.
Instead we are treated to George doing what he did best, if you’ll pardon the pun. George the footballer. George on the pitch. But it’s not what we thought it was. It’s George on the pitch almost from his own point of view, how it feels to BE George on the pitch. And it’s a confusing wander back and forth, seemingly aimless, speeding up and slowing down, mostly a bystander in his own narrative.
In some ways, this is the real experience of George as footballer. But it’s not the one we’re familiar with, and perhaps not one we’re comfortable with either. As I said, it’s too much to extrapolate from this, but it seems a metaphor for life is in there, waiting for us to see it.
At the very least, Costard’s documentary, his way of presenting football as never before, is a reminder that narrative frame underpins all the stories we tell ourselves about reality. And in this era of fake news, alternative facts and ideological echo chambers, it’s good to be reminded of that from time to time.
