It’s the most important relationship on Earth – everything in Nature depends on pollinators and flowers getting together.
Pollination is ‘a love story that feeds the Earth.’ – Louie Schwartzberg.
For a flower to make seeds and fruit, its pollen (male) must move to an egg (female), usually in another flower – and bees do most of the pollen-moving. The result is a cornucopia of foods from cherries to cashews to coffee. Humans’ relationship with pollinators is also crucial, so let’s provide bees with a variety of flowers, clean water, and poison-free gardens.
A Matter of Life and Death is both awesome and intimate, suggesting that a single tear shed for love might stop heaven in its tracks.- Roger Ebert
A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is a wonderful fantasy movie about an English pilot who’s in love with an American (it was made to boost post-war Anglo-American relationships). It begins with their unique ‘falling’ in love scene (that can be seen here) – the dead pilot argues his case in Heaven to be allowed to return to life. The scenes on Earth are in Technicolor while Heaven is in black and white (which makes it more surreal). The last words are from a Walter Scott poem:
The classic sci-fi movie, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1958), was about the atomic angst of the 1950s and it’s themes have not dated. The hero is exposed to a radioactive cloud and begins to shrink. Trapped in his home, he battles his cat, a spider, and a leaking tap (always a threat to the male ego). Finally, he’s reduced to his essential self and ponders his place in the universe. This extract is from the closing monologue (script by Richard Matheson):
So close – the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet—like the closing of a gigantic circle…
I love black and white (b/w) film – the dream-like, yet oddly documentary aura. In her novel Fosterling, Emma Neale observes that the ‘yearning’ feeling of b/w film is ‘The melancholy recognition of how inaccessible and mysterious the past is.’ It’s those deep shadows in b/w movies that charge the atmosphere – watch Night of the Hunter – because it’s the unseen that fires our imagination. Perhaps the effect also applies when we read text (which is black and white) – the brain is encouraged to imagine what the words describe. The early Dr Who had a huge influence on my imagination. The opening theme had me pressed into the sofa in happy terror. Here are the creepiest five seconds of TV ever (electronic music by Delia Derbyshire):
Rear Window (1954) has a superb script and acting, but its underlying strength is the use of set design and viewpoint to carry the theme. We’re trapped in a room for 99% of the movie and ‘forced’ to spy with the main character. Each window he looks into is a window on aspects of relationship: passion, exploitation, bitterness, or loyalty. The film also has humour, suspense and Grace Kelly. Best seen on a big screen to appreciate Hitchcock’s control of detail.
‘For me, it stands alone among his movies for its warmth and humanity.’– Mike Leigh
Following up on my review of Hugo, here’s an excellent interview with the author Brian Selznick. The article describes Hugo as ‘a perpetual motion of correspondence‘ between book and film. Fascinating too that The Artisthas emerged just now as another gorgeous recreation of silent movies (no talking, no colour, no widescreen, and yes, it works!). My favourite silent movies? Metropolis (photo), and anything with Buster Keaton. Read a New Yorker article about the acting style in silent films.
Silent film is another country. They speak another language there—a language of gestures, stares, flapping mouths, halting or skittering walks, and sometimes movements and expressions of infinite intricacy and beauty. David Denby
Scorsese’s Hugo is a beautiful movie complement to Brian Selznick’s brilliant novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret. The book is in the style of a film, using pictures interspersed with tightly-wound prose –and the movie takes the style of a novel, with a leisurely pace and richly detailed scenes. Both movie and book successfully use a children’s character to pay tribute to Georges Melies, pioneer of cinema. And much of the story is true: about his magical movies, his rise and fall, even the automaton and the train crash. (Watch a video about how the special effects were done). This film, The Four Troublesome Heads, made in 1898, shows Melies having fun:
When a City Falls is an extraordinary movie. The opening shots of the intact Christchurch cathedral before the quakes had me in tears. I remembered the excitement of running up the worn steeple steps as child to look down on the Square. Shot mostly by an inner city resident, Gerard Smythe, it is an amazing tribute to the strength of the people and the city.
The world didn’t end yesterday as predicted, but one thing is for sure, we’ll all die one day. Of Gods and Men is a powerful movie about facing death and questioning one’s purpose. This story of monks caught in the Algerian civil war has 2 stunning scenes: the monks facing down the guns of extremists armed only with their convictions about peace; and a meal where they agree to face death together. Peter Bradshaw says this scene ‘is an overwhelming fusion of portraiture and drama, and perhaps one of the most sensational things I have seen on the big screen’ (read review). I agree, it’s a riveting moment of film-making. (I’m biased – the monks were beekeepers).
