Own work - Life Drawing XIII

   Last Thursday session.  Second drawing a disappointment.  Third drawing incredibly hard, I remember.

Own work - Life Drawing XII

   With the start of the new academic year has come the resumption of Life Drawing classes at the local art centre.  Here are last week's efforts.

Leicester and the British Silent Film Festival Part II

   I just thought I'd share with you some of the pictures I took as I wandered around the city.  I was fortunate that the Film Festival coincided with Heritage Open Days, so I got into places, such as the Great Hall of the Castle that would normally be locked.  There are some remarkable things to see in Leicester from Roman remains at the Jewry Wall to lavish terracotta Victorian factories; one post really cannot do justice to the architectural variety and quality.  Like most cities in the UK it suffered terribly from Modernity in the Post-War period, but don't let that put you off.  There is much to see that is worthwhile.  And I shall be going back to explore further. Here then are my highlights.

 

   I didn't have time to explore the food culture of the city but I did discover the uber cool Almeida café on Guildhall Lane.  There were also a couple of bars/cafe's near The Curve, which I'd like to go back to: The Exchange and Manhattan34.  You can also eat well, as we did, at the Phoenix itself.

Leicester and the British Silent Film Festival

     Friday and I was off to Leicester to join the bf at the 18th British Silent Film Festival which was being held at the Phoenix, Midland Street.  He had already been there for a full day.  In the end I caught five films.  The bf's experience was immersive, not missing a single one.  I spent my time off (for good behaviour!!) discovering Leicester.  This was my first proper visit and it was a delight.  But more of that in my next post.

     My attendance kicked off with the slightly bizarre experience of watching a British film, 'Three Live Ghosts', in a re-edited, and indeed re-written form for Soviet distribution.  We were watching the Soviet version because the original was lost; its interest lay in the fact that Hitchcock had worked on this film (as title designer), not with the quality of the finished article.  It was a dog's dinner.  The plot had been changed beyond recognition, and the editors in the USSR had shown little knowledge of the setting, London.  The original, produced by the 'Famous-Players Lasky British', had been a screen adaptation of Frederick Isham's 1920 play of the same name; a story of men returning from WWI, fitting in, then, with the theme of the festival: the Heroic man.
   Friday night's main feature followed: 'Michel Strogoff' - a sprawling epic of a film lasting just over three hours!  It was based on Jules Verne's novel 'A Courier of the Czar' and starred the smouldering Ivan Mosjourkine as the eponymous hero.  He is also credited, according to 'wiki', with working on the script with Boris de Fast and the director Viktor Tourjansky.  It was, ostensibly. a French production though a cursory glance through the titles shows a massive presence of Russian emigres before and around the camera.  It is a typical nineteenth century tale of action, set, in this case, in the Russian Empire.  It is a straight forward linear narrative telling the exploits of the Czar's secret courier on a perilous journey east to Irkutsk.  Not so far, in retrospect, it seems to me from James Bond.  Except that miracles do not take place on Her Majesty's secret service.  The scale then suitable for this Russian tale, and it was a lavish spectacle too.  Hard to believe at times that this was shot in France.  And although perhaps over long, it was, in fact, a convincing piece of cinema. The performances were very restrained for such a melodramatic story rich with incident.  Appealing too the small details of Russian life.

   Saturday evening and a further two films.  Things kicked off with a piece of Soviet science-fiction: 'Kosmicheskiy reys; Fantasticheskaya novella' or 'The Cosmic Voyage' of 1936.  Family viewing.  It is the story, set in 1946, of the USSR's first sortie in to space - an ambitious one too for the amazing-looking rocket ship is bound for the moon!  The model of the launch facility, and the subsequent launch sequence were fantastic.  They reminded me of Alexander Korda's 'Shape of Things to Come' in particular the city of tomorrow sequence.  Both displayed a belief that the future would be incredibly clean and ordered.  They both thought too that it would be possible to launch a rocket from inside a major conurbation. The fun was brought by a young stow-away aboard the rocket, played by Vassilli Kopenenko.  There was love interest too.  And a missing cat.
   After dinner we decamped to the Cathedral and a showing of the early British historical epic 'Jane Shore', 1915.  Based loosely on real events, and an adaptation of the play 'The Tragedy of Jane Shore' by Nicholas Rowe, it is the story of Jane Shore, played by Blanche Forsyth, who became the mistress of Edward IV. Unlike the other historical epic, 'Michel Strogoff', the acting was at times lacking in restraint.  There was all too often an element of the histrionic to the proceedings.  Although there were some immense crowd scenes; the dramatic flow, unlike that in 'Michel Strogoff', was staccato and at times confusing.  However any flaw in the action was more than made up for a a marvelous new score by Laura Rossi which was performed live by her and three other musicians. It was an incredibly beautiful and utter compelling piece of music making.  It held me spell bound, giving to 'Jane Shore' a deep undertow of sadness and tragedy.  The shot that remained with me was the execution of Lord Hastings - the event viewed (discreetly) through an open window at which sat, gloating, the Duke of Gloucester.

     Sunday evening and the remarkable film 'Arsenal'.  This was not a film for the faint hearted.  It was intense and visceral cinema.  The story of the 1917 Revolution and beyond as seen from the Ukraine, a succession of brilliant, haunting images heightened by a fantastic dark score by 'Bronnt Industries Kapital' - aka Guy Bartell.  Made in 1928 (released in 1929) at the behest of Stalin himself by Alexander Dovzenko it depicts the hero as revolutionary - as in Semyon Frank's analysis 'Sacrificing himself for the sake of this idea, he does not hesitate to sacrifice other people to it.... the great love of mankind of the future gives birth to a great hatred for people; the passion for organizing an earthly paradise becomes a passion for destruction'.  I can't help but see both 'Arsenal' and 'Michel Strogoff' as relevant to our times.  The terror that the Revolution released, like that of the French Revolution, is the progenitor of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Isil.  The hero of this film is just as Frank said of the Revolutionaries in general: 'militant monks of the nihilistic religion of earthly contentment'.  He appears to have no family, certainly no love interest.  Not surprisingly then this film failed in its goal of bringing the Ukraine 'on-side'.  It is imagery, although intensely striking, is ambiguous; what are we to make of the image of peasant women standing around dazed in there grief as a horde of Revolutionaries approach with one of their dead, when we have seen something very similar at the beginning of the film but in a different context?  Seeing this film did help me put Tarkovsky's work in context.  That Russian way with the close-up, surely that derives from the icon? A final thought it would help your understanding of 'Arsenal' if you know a little Ukrainian history as the story is told in a series of emblems or tableaus rather than a conventional narrative.  Characters are cyphers, not individuals in the usual cinematic sense.

Three Live Ghosts

1922

Producer:                     
Director:                  George Fitzmaurice
Cinematographer:  Arthur C Miller


Michel Strogoff 

1926

Producer:                Noe Bloch, Gregor Rabinovitch
Director:                  Viktor Tourjansky
Cinematographer:  Fedote Bourgasoff, Leonce-Henri Burel, Nikolai Toporkoff


The Cosmic Voyage

1936

Producer:                Boris Shumyatskiy
Director:                  Vasili Zhuravlov
Cinematographer:   


Jane Shore 

1915

Producer:               Will Barker
Director:                 Bert Haldane, F Martin Thornton
Cinematographer: Will Barker


Arsenal

1929

Producer:               Alexander Dovzhenko
Director:                 Alexander Dovzhenko
Cinematographer: Danilo Demutsky

Own work: The Rustiche of Sebastiano Serlio IXX

Own work: The Rustiche of Sebastiano Serlio

Living in Vogue

   It was my friend Ben Pentreath's blog that drew my attention to this rather lovely book.  Written in 1984 by Judy Brittain and Patrick Kinmounth, both then writers on British Vogue, it is a compendium of photographs of interiors (with their creators - mostly male and British), which were chronicled in the magazine in the preceding years.  It is not therefore a snap shot of interior design in 1984, just a collection of the supremely beautiful. The delight is, of course, not merely the interiors but the quality of the photography, which is very high.  Here's a small selection - some of my favourites - of the goodies on offer.  In fact the book is so lovely I could quite happily post the whole thing.

Two views of designer John Stephanidis's rather ravishing house in the country.

   Antique dealer and taste maker Christopher Gibbs in Davington Priory

   The Master - David Hicks's chambers in The Albany

   Another master at work - David Milnaric's restoration of the beautiful Baroque Beningbrough Hall in Yorkshire for the National Trust.

   Nicholas Haslam  at The Hunting Lodge, once the home of John Fowler

   The deeply remarkable Angus McBean, the photographer, at Flemings Hall, Suffolk.  McBean bought the hall with the proceeds of selling his house in Islington to cookery writer Robert Carrier.  Flemings Hall was subsequently lived in by Jasper Conran.

Wimpole Hall II The Interior

   It's turned nippy here at night of late.  I have a feeling that Autumn has started that little bit early this year and I've put the heating on.  That said today has turned out to be one of those glorious, slightly melancholy days of late summer/early autumn.  Just the right sort of day to get out into the garden and prepare for winter.  I've dug out one bed and plied it with compost and replanted things in a bit more of a structured way.  I've also been on-line and bought tulips and aliums to plant for next year.  There is still a lot of work to do though.
    The apples and pears have been a disappointment this year, but the blackberries have been in superabundance, so many in fact that for the first time I've made blackberry gin.  It's currently maturing in a cool dark place and will be drinkable in mid November.

   The visit the bf and I made to Wimpole Hall seems an age ago now.  It was a lovely mild summer's day.  And it was good to explore part of the country I've never seen properly.  Here are some of the pictures I took of the interior.  I've been meaning to post them for sometime.  Better late than never. The  first few images are roughly in the order you see them as a visitor; I've left the fireworks I promised on my earlier Wimpole post to last: the Book Room, and the Yellow Drawing Room both by Sir John Soane, and the Baroque chapel by James Gibbs and Sir James Thornhill, who both, incidentally, lived on the Harley estate in West London.

   Unfortunately my attempts to photograph the Gibbs library were unsuccessful - as in the chapel at Belton the blinds were down and it was just too dark.  Many of the fireplaces (fireplaces, again!) are by Flitcroft, and most of the plasterwork on the ceilings is 19th century, where the architects of a previous generation had wisely left plain: the majority of the rooms at Wimpole are relatively low, and the plasterwork makes the ceilings a bit oppressive. The rooms are as left by the last owner Mrs Bainbridge, the daughter of Rudyard Kipling and saviour of the house, who bequeathed the house to the Trust on her death, so that being the work or successive owners and architects the interior is also an example of conservative mid-century British taste.  (Wimpole never stayed in one family for that long, so that there isn't a continuity of contents.)