Today my mother would have been 98. We’ll raise a glass (or several glasses) to her. She died on March 28th.
An extraordinary life, from her medical training at the Sorbonne in occupied Paris (she was one of the first women doctors) to her travels with my father on his postings in Philadelphia, Ecuador, Madrid, Vienna, Innsbruck.
10 weeks in Kent
Just finished teaching a course on the audiovisual in cinema, at the University of Kent’s School of Arts, an extension of my course at the BFI last year.
Invited by Professor Murray Smith, this was a wonderful opportunity to develop an exploration of the audiovisual, in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Kubrick’s ‘space odyssey’ 2001, David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew.
And lots of material for the seminars: Chris Marker’s La jetée, extracts from Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, Herzog’s Heart of Glass, with his hypnotised actors; some extracts from Eisenstein, including the Coronation Scene from Ivan the Terrible, with another form of hypnotic acting.
I also had the chance to show Paradjanov’s Legend of the Surami Fortress (as this great director’s work is so rarely seen here in the UK), a section of Sokurov’s Mother and Son, extracts from Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, and Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba. Herzog’s documentary on the Antarctic, Encounters at the End of the World was also a hit with the students.
I finished with Derek Jarman’s very moving last film, Blue. It worked perfectly on the large screen in the lecture theatre with an excellent sound system, the ideal work to end a course on the audiovisual.
I chose this film as the School of Arts is in the Jarman Building, a hyper-modern structure with massive windows at the front. Inside these windows are blinds, which on the outside diffuse the sunlight in a mobile silver glow, which accompanies you as you walk by.
Inside there are vermilion coloured sofas, a little like in the space station in 2001, with rows of cubicles for the staff, reminiscent of the monasteries at the origin of universities in Europe. These traditions are deeply anchored - I’ve seen these rows at Columbia, at Princeton, USC in LA, and Texas SMU in Dallas. And of course in the older colleges at Oxbridge, which really were monasteries.
The campus at Kent is most attractive. It spreads out spaciously on the hill and overlooks Canterbury with its medieval inns, the famous cathedral, and the ancient gate through which the double decker buses inch, slightly erotically, each day.