I went to see Michelangelo Frammartino’s new film last night, Le Quattro Volte. This is a very difficult film to do justice to on the page, but I will simply say: try to go and see it. Do all you can to get to see it at the cinema. This is cinema. Not plasma TV or night in with a video.

The film is set in the mountains round Serra San Bruno in the south of Italy and is basically documentary drama – in other words, this is everyday rural life, but with some elements of staging. It is almost entirely silent (there are far more words in the slightly annoying trailer above than in the whole film), but more than that, it is a quite extraordinary meditation on humanity’s place within the world. Frammartino himself says this:

I want to put mans role into perspective and turn my gaze away from him. I want to know: can cinema free itself from the dogma that says human beings should play the central role?

I don’t want to give too much away – though it would be hard to say anything that was a ‘spoiler’ here – but his vision is enacted here as the film as it begins appears to be about an old goat-herder, but then becomes about the goats themselves, then the trees in which the goats shelter, and then the charcoal that is made from these trees. In other words, the ‘four turns’ of the film are human, animal, vegetable and mineral – a cycle of life and death from ashes to ashes.

None of this is to do justice to the incredible cinematography, which has some stunning shots and elevates the camera to an instrument of deep perception. There is not only fabulous humour, but a very subtle and beautiful theology woven into the film too, and being almost silent and only 88 mins long the piece could literally stand as an act of meditative worship on its own. It carries a gentle critique of the power of the church, the old goat-herd drinking an infusion made from dust sweepings from the church floor, which he seems to believe will cure his respiratory problems… Yet it is outside of the stone walls in the community rituals of Easter and Christmas, the dressing up, the parading, the erecting of a huge tree in the town square, that the most healing moments seem to be found.

But don’t take my word for it. Just do all you can and go and see it. Mark Kermode’s review below:

I’ve enjoyed seeing Avatar – most recently at a very late night showing at the BFI Imax cinema. It’s not brilliantly plotted or scripted, but a great spectacle nonetheless.

However, I found myself focusing on a problem that 3D cinema has compounded – especially in the immersive environment of Imax. Because the screen is so large, and the 3D presentation gives the impression of depth, the temptation is to actually ‘look around’ the scene, rather than simply focus on the lead element in the shot. Trouble is, you can’t do this. There’s a fundamental depth of field problem when shooting through any lens: only one thing can be in focus at any one time.

I’m not really sure if there is any technological solution to this. But it struck me as an interesting limitation. No matter how immersive the experience, life through a lens has limited depth. The ability to change focus quickly, to draw in close and reach out wide, and for people to do this differently in the same vista, is uniquely real life.

The setup he uses is that of a tragic and troubled theatre director who wins an award that allows him an unlimited budget to create a meaningful work of art. Taking over a vast stadium-like space, he begins over the course of many years, to try to create one final piece of truthful theatre: a play which will show every minute of his life. This of course means he needs to cast someone to play himself, and someone to play each person around him, leading to some wonderful, confusing, plane weird and thought-provoking scenes.

Interestingly, his failure reflects the thoughts I’ve been posting about Satre: no matter how many notes he gives his actors, nor how detailed the sets (he ends up re-creating a vast copy of New York, hence the Synecdoche of the title) he simply cannot get across the ‘abyss that is his person.’ And tragically, the abyss is centered around the pain of losing his child and being unable to resurrect their relationship.

In this sense, it’s proper tragedy rather than comedy, and leaves one aching for a rupture, for the play and players, frustrated by their total inability to communicate effectively and understand one another or themselves, to be inter-rupted and experience true Love.

Oil, Crude and Spiritual, are the two things two men are drilling for. Boring down into dangerous fissures within themselves and their communities, risking explosion and hurt to those around them. Daniel Day Lewis’ extraordinary performance as Daniel Plainview, and Paul Dano’s equally good one as revivalist revelation cult leader Eli Sunday are full of gutteral, primordial sounds, helped along by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood’s score.

No matter how deep they dig, and what riches they bring themselves – crude or spiritual – it’s real blood that they both know are absent. Plainview’s ‘son’ is simply an orphan he took on, the brother that finds him a fraud, and the blood of Jesus that Sunday screams for never materialises into grace. There may be oil and wealth, but there is no blood, no family blood to root one of them, none of God’s blood to save either. And so they fight and drill deeper into darker places.

This is, of course, a film about the American identity: a country built on escape from back-slidden families, a new puritan world with opportunities for all. A country built on, and sustained by, oil. Yet, it seems, a country at sea in its own quest for identity, for real history. As an outsider it seems the US is, more than elsewhere, a country in search of blood. Family blood – desperately trying to cling on to Scottish, Irish, African, Spanish heritage – and God’s blood – desperately trying to divine Christ’s blood to purify all the soiled ground beneath everyone’s feet.

And, in the final instance, as in the film, there is blood. There always will be. In the madness of the consuming search for God’s blood and our family’s blood, we strike out and wound the other. If we get blood-fever, like Gold or Oil Fever, then blood we will find. Violent, painful and destructive. The same blood lust that wounded Christ.

Grace needs no drilling, no violence to the earth or the body. Instead, it seeps into us if we will seek the peace and silence to simply wait for it. Only then will it, in the mystery of the elements, become blood, binding us to God and our brother, allowing a gentle security of identity to take root.

Technorati: American | Grace | There Will Be Blood | Violence

The other weekend my dad asked me my response to the same question – he’d had a very strong email from an Australian campaigner saying Christians should be actively boycotting the movie and protesting about it.

I totally disagree.

The books are a ‘rich casket of treasures’ – for children and adults alike. And, while one reading might be a strongly atheistic view, I think that Pullman is more interested in critiquing the ‘power religion’ exemplified by historic Catholicism and institutional Anglicanism. The villains of the book – though this is apparently watered down in the film – are the members of the ‘Magisterium’, the paranoid and power-mad government of religion, who fight to close down free thought and cut off children’s souls to gain power for themselves.

And I have to agree with him. It’s clearly powerful stuff, but no more cutting than Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees as ‘white-washed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inside are full of shit.’ I heard Pullman in conversation with Rowan Williams, and was struck how both were egged on by ‘fundies’ on their own side… but both resisted their encouragements to slam the other. Indeed, Pullman admitted to being struck by the character of Christ, and said he was writing about him.

If we try to protect our faith from criticism like this, we seal it from the tricksters, and prevent it from being refined. If we truly believe it, we should allow our children to see the film, and trust that the truth will out. If we begin protests on things like this, don’t we risk end up jailing people who let kids name their teddies Jesus? I hope the God believe in is more robust than that.

As I quote in the book, the trilogy ends with the hero Lyra, having ‘killed God’ urging people to ‘work hard, all of us, to build the republic of heaven.’ I think this is a fabulous metaphor: heaven as republic takes the power away from the high-and-mighty pompous white men who try to keep the gates closely guarded for only their own pure few. And that’s something I can definitely cheer for.

Technorati: Golden Compass | Pullman | Northern Lights

We were down in Bristol, seeing some good friends. In one of those marvellous moments, I found myself taking the complimentary tickets of a multi-Oscar-winning animator to see the World Premier of the new score to the 1920′s classic He Who Gets Slapped.

Will Gregory, of Goldfrapp fame, had written the score, which was performed to a projection of the film by the BBC Concert Orchestra, with a little help from Adrian Utley of Portishead and others.

It was brilliant. The emotional depth that music added to the silent film was stunning. And the film is simply brilliant too. Produced in 1924 – MGM’s first production, and thus the first ever use of the lion in the intro – it had some wonderful ‘special effects’, and a rich and complex story about a cheated scientist who becomes a clown. I highly recommend catching it if you get the chance.

A friend and I turned our phones back on afterwards to be greeted with a whole host of missed calls and texts. My daughter had broken her leg. Slap.

And, strangely, I wrote a poem about Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation a few weeks ago. Which it seems timely to put here, and add to the probably already huge canon of poetic works on the subject

Perhaps I Prefer The Inefficiencies of This Universe

To The Cold Efficiency of Your Myriad Others

Relativity,

Two clocks moving apart

At light speed never separate

And, in time, are forever together.

Yes, Albert,

As soon as you Equalled the product of m and c-squared,

You locked us in:

No information shall travel faster than light,

Yes, our infinity, given a limit:

46.5 billion light years

To the edge

Of us.

But you are there, and I here,

And strangely, from each centre elsewhere,

A new spacetime arcs out,

Socking the eye with an infinite number of

Observable universes.

And thus, inevitably, an infinite number of you.

Some mother said I was unique, but now

A father’s physics wants me to believe in

Another me,

Beginning 10 to the 10

to the 29 metres far away.

Too far, and yet too close,

For my comfort.

Quantum physicist,

Hugh Everett III, what have you done?

“The existence of other universes

is inevitable”

Said your Many Worlds Interpretation,

Which denied too the objective reality

Of wavefunction collapse.

And I’m like, WTF?

You go on:

“Between 0 and 1:

A single random number

With all its infinite decimals,

Is expressed, computationally,

Longer

Than

The computational expression

Of the whole set of numbers

That exist there.”

Meaning?

Apparently this:

A universe of infinite parallels

May be more economic

Than a straight, linear,

Singular

One.

Meaning?

Somewhere you and I are together,

Though, in this universe, we are apart,

And somewhere else there are more in betweens

Than we could ever fathom.

And that may be more efficient

Than this.

And now my gourd is swirling,

Thinking,

What is love, and life and us,

Other than to trust in this membrane-thin world,

And chose to forego

In the infinite possibility

Of the efficient multiverse,

And dig long

And deep

For life,

And love,

In this

One?

Technorati: Eels | Parallel Universe | Everett

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a magnificent movie. No voice-over. No animation. No mock-ups. Just archive footage, and interviews with the Apollo astronauts. It’s stunning as a film, stunning to be reminded of perhaps the single greatest technological feat of mankind, and stunning to be reminded – in a way Gore never quite achieves in AIT – that the earth really is immensely precious. Armstrong’s continued absence from any documentary – literary or on film – only serves to add mystery to an already ethereal and epiphanic event. He was the first to step out onto another world; what God whispered to him before leaving for someplace else he will continue to keep to himself.

If, you’re in London, you’ll have to catch it soon, as it’s been on a scandalously limited release. If you miss it, buy the DVD, with the largest screen you can lay your hands on. Or, better still, read Andrew Smith’s ‘Moondust‘ – which very likely inspired the film.

Technorati: Al Gore | Andrew Smith | In The Shadow of The Moon | Moondust | Neil Armstrong

Go see now.

Technorati: Once | Dublin

Anyone up for a pilgrimage?

Technorati: Helvetica | ICA