The boys in the NYPD choir...

Enjoy...

Mel Torme

A weekend in my hometown. Wonderful aerial pictures (the old ones, at least) over at Portsmouth College's "Portsmouth From The Air" galleries. I have to say tht I adore the saturation of colours on 1950's-1980's films, before cameras and film became electronic, digitised and manageable. The colours that frequent not only Soviet postcards of towns (I have a wonderful set from Kazan, as well as Petrozavodsk and Kizhi, and, I think, another from Moscow), but also British films, postcards and brochures from my childhood. It may be that many of the photos in these were taken in the 1970's, a period not renowned, in the UK at least, for a fear of garish colour(s), but, as you can see from the sample, this may have had something to do with colour processing as well as the decade-long temporary national colourblindness. I am 99% sure that the Solent has never looked quite so blue (except possibly millions of years ago when much of the South Cost was part of a tropical sea).

In fact, having perused the site further, this picture, from the early 60's actually has my family home in it - now, I have a romanticised view of childhood summer holidays that seemed to be six weeks of permanently sunny freedom, but even through my rose-tinted spectacles, my patch never looks like this. And an entire housing estate is missing in the bottom left-hand corner, as well as two sizeable naval estates to the top left and bottom right (both of these have now been handed over to housing associations as the naval influence in Portsmouth diminishes). Bizarre, like GoogleEarth with a time machine.

Building up

very slowly to watching 'Satantango' by Bela Tarr (please excuse the lack of accents in both the titles and the director's name, but my knowledge of the Hungarian keyboard and/or the html codes for these characters is somewhat non-existent).

Almost eight hours of Tarkovskii/Antonioni- influenced Central European gloom. This is the most readily available (in the UK at least) of the 24 most important films listed in The Cinema of Central Europe. It is seemingly a film composed of very long, static shots, a film in which very little happens.

How does one cope with this? I saw the Star Wars trilogy in a single 8-hour sitting as a six-year old (with breaks between each film), but that was about the single most exciting thing to have happened in my life up to that point. Andrei Rublev was intolerable in Petrozavodsk, yet I have watched it several times since with no overwhelming urge to either kill myself or to dig my way out of the room with my bare hands.

I suppose that watching it at home frees me somewhat from the necessity to watch it all in one sitting. I can get a drink, I can go to the loo. But will this impact on my perception of the film as a whole. If one leaves a shot of a muddy road in the rain and returns some 15 minutes later to what you believe to be the same shot, will my understanding of the film be compromised? Or simply any feelings of empathy I may feel to wards the protagonists' predicament?

In certain ways, the same question(s) are raised when watching Sokurov, especially Days of Eclipse or his documentaries about Russians living on the peripheries of the former Soviet Union - his use of filters, long static shots and so on draw one into the tedium and apparent lengthening of even the shortest periods of time that the characters experience, as well as the oppressive nature their surroundings, be it the Central Asian desert, mountains, or even the confines of a submarine.