Category: Culture

By Edward Bayliss

Val Moreno-Alvarado, a second year student, is president of the Durham Film Festival 2025. I caught up with her to discuss all things filmmaking, and to talk about the film festival itself, which in its fourth year, looks ready and set to champion the efforts of student filmmakers around the world.

 
What is the state of student filmmaking at Durham University?

‘When I first came to Durham, it seemed as though student filmmaking was very niche. But this year, at the first session that we had [at DU Filmmaking Society], there were around sixty people, and I realised how much people care about filmmaking, and in so many different fields –  people are into soundtracking, people want to act, to direct. There are film courses available at the university, but they are very theoretical – there’s no field experience – and that’s why the filmmaking society exists. We’ve had a number of films produced by Durham students who are aware of DFF through the filmmaking society.’

Tell me about the character of the film festival itself – what does it involve?

‘It’s a week of events. The main event is the screening on 14^th June – we have a panel of judges coming up to Durham, two of whom are lecturers at the university. One is called Santiago, he has a lot of expertise in film festivals – he sat on the board at the Berlin Short Film Festival. We also have someone coming from the British Film Institute, who is the co-president of the London Short Film Festival and has been really helpful in assisting us with our own festival. We will screen around eight films, with an awards ceremony, a Q&A, and a drinks reception afterwards at the school foundation near the viaduct. Leading up to this, we have two events, the first of which is an open air cinema on 10^th June at Aidan’s beer garden, with the next event on 12^th June at Bar 33, with live music and an old Hollywood atmosphere. The final event is on 15^th June, after the short film screening, with a live orchestra soundtracking films at the Masonic Hall.’ 

In unashamed Letterboxd fashion, what are your four favourite films?

‘I’ve been dying for someone to ask me this! I’ll try not to sound too pretentious, but also like I know something about cinema. The first one I have a very emotional connection with, it’s called Güeros, and it’s just perfect – the production and story are both very sentimental, and beautiful, I think. It also comes from Mexico, which lends a further familiarity. My next would be Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Red which was amazing, the ending was perfect, and overall, the storytelling is perfect. Then I would say Lovers on the Bridge, by Leos Carax. It’s a love story, but very real and not cheesy or hyper-romantic. And number four, I’m between Dead Poets Society, which I was really shaken by the first time I saw it, or La Haine which has a similar vibe to Güeros, black and white, artsy but unpretentious.’

Is there a particular film set or production you’d have liked to have been around?

‘I think Babylon, by Damien Chazelle. There is this one scene where there’s a party, it’s so chaotic, there’s an elephant, and dancing, the music is perfect. But overall, the whole film is about making films, and how much he appreciates the actual production of films. I think it would be crazy to have seen a production try to capture a production!’

And, a director whose brains you’d like to pick? 

‘I think, maybe Kieślowski. He also has a series of religious films called The Decalogue based on the Ten Commandments, though I hear he is not particularly religious. I’d like to ask him about his motivations there, where that inspiration came from. I also feel as though a lot of his films are characterised by mundanity, and I’d like to know if that came from personal experience. I think in general, filmmakers always put a part of themselves in their films, but I’d like to know to what extent this is the case with him.’ 

Check the Durham Film Festival Instagram account for events and updates, @durham_filmfest

By Dan Xiberras

Hauntology is a term originally coined by Jacques Derrida. It concerns the notion that the present is haunted by both the past and ‘lost futures’. This concept was developed by Mark Fisher in relation to art, who employed the idea to argue that culture in the 21^st century is characterised by a sterile, recycled tonality on account of neoliberalism – ‘What it is to live in the 21st century is living 20th century culture on higher definition screens.’ This, he posits, has resulted in ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ and an endemic depression among young people. In this essay I intend to apply Fisher’s analysis of a modern hauntological culture to the lyrics of Isaac Wood, former frontman of the British band Black Country, New Road (BCNR). Wood’s bleak yet witty lyricism takes the shape of an abstracted, cryptic life writing. It is at once deeply personal, even confessional, and at the same time, entirely indecipherable – its imagery able to wholly absorb the projections of any listener / reader. Nonetheless, within Wood’s lyrics the centrality of Mark Fisher’s conception of hauntology (and its relation to their depressive tone / a national endemic depression) is evident. 

Isaac Wood is a hauntological figure himself. Following the release of BCNR’s second, most critically acclaimed, album Ants From up There (AFUT), he took a permanent step back from the band stating, ‘Hello everyone, I have bad news which is that I have been feeling sad and afraid too…it is the kind of sad and afraid feeling that makes it hard to play guitar and sing at the same time.’ His departure would plague BCNR’s subsequent releases, with many fans mourning the band’s ‘lost future’ in Wood’s absence. AFUT is an album characterised by the notion of lost futures, its cover featuring an ‘airfix’ style Concorde sealed inside a plastic bag. The Concorde itself features as an extended metaphor in the album’s lyrical content, solely written by Wood. The aircraft, once considered the future of civil aviation and now defunct, acts as the centermost hauntological object in Wood’s writing here – itself pertaining metaphorically to a former relationship of Wood’s characterised by the idea of the ‘Concorde / sunk cost fallacy’. Fisher’s analysis of Burial’s album ‘Untrue’ can also be applied here – AFUT‘s lyrical content similarly ‘seems to have less to do with a near future than with the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach.’ This evident in the album’s eighth track ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’:

So, clean your soup maker and breathe in
Your chicken, broccoli, and everything
The tug that’s between us
That long string
Concorde, Bound 2
And my evening
The good hunter’s guide to a bad night
Darling, I’ll spoil it myself
Thanks, you’re leaving
Well, I tried just to stroke your dreams better
But darling, I see that you’re not really sleeping

Here we see a slow disintegration of Wood’s fractured relationship induce a depression which is presented in an entirely hauntological light. The lyricist depicts, in Fisher’s words, not ‘apathy’ nor ‘cynicism’, but ‘reflexive impotence’:

‘They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it. But that ‘knowledge’, that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reflexive impotence amounts to an unstated worldview amongst the British young, and it has its correlation in widespread pathologies.’

Wood’s deterministic spoiling of an evening which he introduces not as a shared moment but as his own, ‘my evening’, is an entirely reflexive action, and one which seems to be in response to a similarly disparate, distant and oppositional relationship – ‘The tug that’s between us / That long string’. The observation that his partner is ‘not really sleeping’, furthers this, and touches on the centrality of depression, the bed and libido in Wood’s lyrical life writing, wherein ‘reflexive impotence’ takes on a newfound sexual capacity. For instance, in the track ‘Athens, France’ Wood writes the lines, ‘She flies to Paris, France / I come down in her childhood bed / And write the words I’ll one day wish that I had never said’. We may observe here a similarly sexual ‘reflexive impotence’- it is with a climax in his partner’s ‘childhood bed’ where the seemingly inescapable ill-fated future relationship is conceived. The song ends ‘Won’t give up / Too soft to touch / And how hard could it really be?’, the humorous opposition of ‘too soft’ and ‘how hard’ implying a painful awareness of the ‘reflexive impotence’ at play. This awareness is foregrounded crudely in ‘Sunglasses’, where Wood’s partner is granted a voice rife with impatient distain ordering him to ‘Leave your Sertraline in the cabinet / And fuck me like you mean it this time, Isaac’. Here, the SSRI ‘Sertraline’ is depicted as an early material token of his impotence.

The relationship’s inevitable terminus is outlined on the very last track of AFUT, ‘Basketball Shoes’, in the lines ‘In my bed sheets now wet / Of Charlie I pray to forget / All I’ve been forms the drone / We sing the rest’. They detail a wet dream, the stain of which serves as the final lasting symbol of this sexual ‘reflexive impotence’, a liminal metaphorical emblem of the space between mourning and melancholia, terms which Fisher describes as such:

‘Both mourning and melancholia are about loss. But whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawal of libido from the lost object, in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared.’

In understanding Wood’s impotence as both mournful and melancholic, we may observe the hauntological undertones of this lyrical depiction of a sexual relationship defined by depression. Following the tradition of literary associations between food and sexuality, ‘Bread Song’ outlines a libido which is simultaneously withdrawn ‘from the lost object’ and ‘attached to what has disappeared’:

So show me the land you acquire
And slip into something beside
The holes you tried to hide
And lay out your rules for the night
Oh, don’t eat your toast in my bed
Oh darling, I
I never felt the crumbs until you said
“This place is not for any man
Nor particles of bread” 

Yet again, the bed forms the stage for another ‘passive observation of an already existing state of affairs’, and the crumbs on it induce another deterministic profession of the relationship’s trajectory. The bed is not the place for ‘any man’ and the crumbs of toast, analogous to Wood’s inconsumable sexual appetite, amount to an uncomfortable reminder of this. We see this device elsewhere in Wood’s lyrics such as in the line ‘darling I’m starving myself’ and ‘every time I try to make lunch / For anyone else, in my head / I end up dreaming of you’. The extended metaphor echoes ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’, where Wood’s retrospectivity of ‘I tried just to’ enhances the seemingly unavoidable ‘slow cancellation’ of the relationship’s ‘future’- it’s future at once being an ‘already existing’ declination of ‘affairs’, a mourned potential (idealistic) ‘lost future’ and a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. These three manifestations of ‘future’ are evident in the album’s fifth track ‘Good Will Hunting’:

It’s just been a weekend
But in my mind
We summer in France
With our genius daughters now
And you teach me to play the piano

You call
I’ll be there
Once more
I’m scared of
The phone
Don’t ring it
Please know
That I’m just trying to find
Some way to keep me in your mind
And later on
Everyone will say it was cool

She had Billie Eilish style
Moving to Berlin for a little while
I’m tryna find something to hold on to
Never text me nothing
But she wants to tell me
She’s not that hard to find
And message me if you change your mind
Darling, I’ll keep fine

Here we can observe these concurrent hauntological futures – the anxiety Wood feels towards a separated future (‘Please know / That I’m just trying to find / Some way to keep me in your mind’), the mourned idealised future (But in my mind / We summer in France / With our genius daughters now / And you teach me to play the piano), and the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy (‘I’m tryna find something to hold on to / Never text me nothing / But she wants to’). More pertinently, we learn that he is fearful of every single one of them. He is ‘scared of / the phone’, of the inevitable conversation and subsequent termination of the relationship. Wood discussed the centrality of anxiety in his lyrics in an interview titled ‘Making Good Their Escape’:

“I wouldn’t consider anxiety a conscious influence of mine at all really – but it is often felt at times of great importance and times of great importance are naturally things we might choose to write or sing about.’

Despite his statement, a depressive anxiety pervades a great deal of Wood’s lyrical content, and it is expressed in a manner equivalent to that of Mark Fisher insofar as that its source appears external, a symptom of the surrounding hauntological culture. As Fisher puts it:

‘it’s no accident that my (so far successful) escape from depression coincided with a certain externalisation of negativity: the problem wasn’t (just) me but the culture around me.’

In Wood’s writing on AFUT, criticism of an external, sterile and recycled neoliberal culture is evident – in ‘Good Will Hunting’ the line ‘She had Billie Eilish style /Moving to Berlin for a little while’ carries a particularly mocking tone. However, in the lyrical content of the previous album, For the First Time (FTFT), it is far more overt, Wood’s tone appearing to be influenced by Jarvis Cocker of the band Pulp. More specifically the mood of the opening track ‘The Fear’ from their 1995 album This is Hardcore, which conveys an overtly British sense of class-based hauntological dread. This is particularly noticeable in BCNR’s ‘Sunglasses’:

Mother is juicing watermelons on the breakfast island
And with frail hands she grips the NutriBullet
And the bite of its blades reminds me of a future
That I am in no way part of
And in a wall of photographs
In the downstairs second living room’s TV area
I become her father
And complain of mediocre theatre in the daytime
And ice in single malt whiskey at night
Of rising skirt hems, lowering IQs
And things just aren’t built like they used to be
The absolute pinnacle of British engineering

Here, Wood’s alienation in a culture witnessing ‘the slow cancellation of the future’, one that he is ‘in no way part of’, is not merely anxiety inducing, it is painful – likened to the ‘bite’ of the NutriBullet’s ‘blades’. In the future’s absence, all that remains prospectively for him is to become his partner’s ‘father’, and rehash the same postcolonial complaint that ‘things just aren’t built like they used to be’, himself becoming ‘the absolute pinnacle of British engineering’- a reproduction of history being the ‘pinnacle’ of attainment and the only recourse for a young man existing in a hauntological culture: ‘20th century culture on higher definition screens’. Moreover, Wood’s anxiety is inherently tied to class, as evidenced by the particularly British cultural capital associated with the words ‘theatre’ and ‘whiskey’. The same sentiment is evident in ‘Science Fair’:

References, references, references
What are you on tonight?
I love this city
Despite the burden of preferences
What a time to be alive
Oh, I know where I’m going
It’s Black Country out there

I saw you undressing
It was at the Cirque Du Soleil
And it was such an intimate performance
I swear to god you looked right at me
And let a silk red ribbon fall between your hands

But as I slowly sobered
I felt the rubbing of shoulders
I smelt the sweat and the children crying
I was just one among crowded stands
And still with sticky hands
I bolted through the gallery
With Cola stains on my best white shirt
And nothing to lose
Oh, I was born to run
It’s Black Country out there
It’s Black Country out there
It’s Black Country out there

Here the band’s nomenclature takes on new meaning. Wood realises his own absolute absence of individuality within neoliberal hauntological culture at the Cirque Du Soleil, which marrs his ‘best white shirt’ with ‘Cola stains’. This is especially apt when considering Slavoj Zizek’s argument that Coca Cola is the perfect commodity, representative of ‘the mysterious something more. The indescribable excess which is the object cause of my desire’. As such, we might read this sugared staining as the very symbol of late-stage capitalism and consumer desire staining the oppositional ‘white’ clean slate for an alternate future. This is an especially effective reading of the lyrics when you extend the idea to the refrain of ‘It’s Black Country out there’, which could pertain to the consequential staining of the entire nation. ‘Out there’ becomes juxtaposed with an implied ‘in here’. ‘Out there’ it is ‘Black’, there is nothing- only absence. ‘In here’, at the Cirque Du Soleil, all that remains is the reproduction of an 18^th century form of entertainment, one in which the individual is ‘just one among crowded stands’, surrounded by ‘References, references, references’- there is nothing new. The sentiment bears resounding similarity to that of Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life- Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures:

‘…our zeitgeist is essentially hauntological. The power of Derrida’s concept lay in its idea of being haunted by events that had not actually happened, futures that failed to materialise and remained spectra’

It is no wonder, therefore, that a culture witnessing ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ would possess an ‘endemic’ depression. In ‘Track X (The Guest)’, Wood encapsulates such a bleak ‘zeitgeist’ artfully, positioning himself among the ‘spectra’:

Oh, and I guess in some way
I’ve always been the guest
Oh, and I guess in some way
I’ve always been the guest

Dancing to Jerskin, I got down on my knees
I told you I loved you in front of Black Midi
I told my friend Jack that it could havе been you
I know it was funny, but I was struggling, too

I left my drink on the eighteenth floor
I thought about jumping in your facе when you saw
I thought of my father and proving him wrong
But mostly of Molly and Dylan and my mum

The ‘zeitgeist’ is portrayed as one which is entirely alienating. Wood is not merely now a ‘guest’ in his own culture, he has ‘always been’ such, a fate which causes him to consider leaving his ‘drink’ (referencing the ‘slow sobering’ from the surrounding culture in ‘Science Fair’) and initiating the cessation of his own life in front of a loved one. This pervading sense of alienation is consolidated in the final track of FTFT, ‘Opus’, which ends with the repeated refrain, ‘Everybody’s coming up / Oh, I guess I’m a little bit late to the party’. The lines imply a hauntological reproduction of 90s MDMA addled British rave culture and, in fact, earlier live versions of the song support this, with a dropped verse reading ‘As he talks of his travels, with so much fucking grace / Planning their revenge in basements / Planning their next DIY free party in basements’. The repetition of ‘basements’ mirrors the ‘References, references, references / What are you on tonight?’ of ‘Science Fair’, laying bare a frustration of contemporary British drug and rave culture, which exists in an inebriated splendid isolation, confined to ‘basements’ and matching the ‘passivity’ of Fisher’s cultural diagnosis of a ‘reflexive impotence’. It is not only Wood who is ‘late to the party’, but the party goers themselves. The track’s title ‘Opus’, meaning ‘(as a result of) work’ / ‘labour’ in Latin, embodies this sentiment. The word is most frequently used to refer to the ‘Opus number’, chronological order, of a composer’s work. This is typically presented in the format ‘Opus 21’, for example. Wood’s ‘Opus’ is, however, one without a temporal signifier – it is a suspended eternal ‘labour’, one without past and future, which Fisher terms a ‘(collective) desolation of melancholia’. The very absence of a chronological marker represents the utter emptiness of a society wherein the most one can do is enact a ‘passive observation of an already existing state of affairs’. This disenfranchisement causes, Fisher states, a ‘malign spectre’ of depression. In Wood’s writing, this is neatly summed up by three lines of an Untitled track from his solo project ‘The Guest’- ‘But I was almost something / Yeah, I was almost something / And now I’m almost nothing’.

To conclude, the abstracted life writing of Isaac Wood’s lyrics is entirely enmeshed with the notion that the present is haunted by both the past and ‘lost futures’. This is shown not only to induce an inhospitable cultural reality, but a depressive state of being which seeps both into personal relationships and self-perception. Consequently, Wood’s creative output is limited to a kind of ‘observation’ devoid of agency, the futility and staticity of which lends, in hindsight, an almost inevitable sense to the termination of his publicly written work. What remains, therefore, is that the act of actively listening to, rather than hearing, Wood’s lyrical expression has a profound capacity to induce an implicit acknowledgement of one’s own hauntological reality.

Image credit:  the-artifice.com

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

When the moon slivers right in silver, and the cloud crowd around, expect to see the silhouette etch its away on the window. The gas hue of the lamp dances around the curtains, flirting with the supersonic glow of the TV. Mugs jingle. A smile creeps out. Rows of books, obscured by trinkets, memories, and the private and confidential. And all of this transmutes from your night-in by the fire side, to the kick inside of the footsteps, that stop momentarily, tying a shoe or checking their phone?, and feed off that light. The eyes that widen and feast whilst hands remain in pockets and lips blister in the chill, take the tableau in delight. You are being watched. Let us feast on your existence.

Inventory taken of your surface existence, let’s turn those eyes up, give them a real wedding breakfast. If those eyes were to take their shoes off by the door, weerily sigh as the keys clatter in the dish, and yawn and stretch towards the kettle, where do you expect them to go? A quick rummage through the notes on the fridge, a glance at the calendar, a poke through the medicine cabinet. But you curated your quarters so well, and wouldn’t you rather they dine on the print you choose to hang just there, or even at the way you placed the fruit in the bowl. How could these eyes be so cutting, so searching for clues in an investigation only Kafka could decipher, rifle through your home, your heart, your legacy of objects. Why, they delight in this seeing the mudnade objectivity of your existence, how perverse! But I gave you things to look at, some entertainment here and there, why must you devour all of me now – slurping the last drops of the tea from the pot like that gruesome teatime tiger expecting to be satiated from the stewed embers. Please, dear eyes, leave. Bolt the door behind you, and please, don’t come back here, just look at the way the window sill changes for you, and be content with that.

---

5th of February, 2025. My 21st birthday. And what better present, for a girl like me, to receive the news that Joan Didion’s therapy notes could soon belong to me. Isn’t this the news we have all wanted since her death? Finally, a chance to take stock of this brilliant mind, to really understand her. The literary community yelped.

Joan Didion is one of the US’s most defining writers. With needle-like precision she dissected America’s later 20th century. Her unrelenting commitment to journalism has rendered her with a wry, poignant voice, even its novelistic utterances. However, whilst she captured the world around her in her words, preserving the cultural offshoots and fascinations of America for us to gawk and examine like limbs in formaldehyde, Didion never quite captured herself. Her essays and articles harbour an essence, fleeting and distinct; like a stranger’s perfume as they walk past, we know it’s there but what is it, and where did it come from? From the Sharon Tate murders to the LSD shrouded Haight-Ashbury district, we locate a vision of Didion from the cultural landmarks she fashions herself around. This highly curated double-exposure of both author and object has enshrined Didion as the defining figure of a generation and that ‘California belongs to Didion’ without actually revealing the intricacies of being the woman who keenly observed the West Coast zeitgeist .

Did Didion pre-empt the sudden urge we would have to dissect, to own, that voice presented to us, thus her careful consideration of what she wanted us to know. She was a keen follower of Hemmingway, learning to structure sentences to the same acute precion by laboriously studying the very syntax and rhythm of them and synthesising this with her own literary vision. Everything she did was careful, precise, and exactly how she wanted to say it. Therefore, to leave something out in Didion world is not merely forgetfulness, or not being able to work it in, or being embarrassed, but a clear message about what she does and does not want us to see. Noli me tangere, for Didion’s I am. Her two most autobiographical works, My Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, continue to approximate Didion in relation to what is around her. As her world becomes swallowed by the shock of her husband’s sudden death, the continual murmuring anxiety of her daughter’s life and upbringing, the beeping of heart monitors, the gare of x-ray prints, the calendar squares with the sames of different hospitals and departments, we see Didion reconfigure her world on these terms, showing us her life in the truest forms, unsensational and unsympathetic.

The word raw enjoys being thrown around the confessional, personal writing scene. This piece was raw as when I cut into it all that came out were tears, and blood, and guts, and juice. Maybe Didion saw that the rawest piece is the one that submits to be cut into and exposes a fleshy marbling, the blood shocked still in the veins. This craving for the ‘raw’ – the supposed real – voice behind the author has led to the letters and diaries of most of the canon to be available. Reading another’s diary no longer feels like sneaking about into another’s bedroom, searching under the bed, the dresser, the piles of clothes, and cracking the code, but a right we expect to receive; why write and not publish it for us, your peanut crunching crowd. The harrowing entries of the Plath journals show one of the fiercest writers of the 20th century at her most fragile. She speaks of an immeasurable, unrelenting pain, that she attempted to make sense of through her nightly writing campaigns to her ferocious psyche. The readiness we are to access them leaves a sour taste in the mouth, as we realise the perverse voyeurism on display as we are delivered an author’s life on a slab.

I am by no means a literary critic, no less one who believes in the autonomy of the text and the death of the author. Life informs art, afterall. But, when reading Plath’s diaries do I really get a better sense of the pain trapped between her lines? Does knowing that Woolf ate an egg or some beef or a trifle on the same day she began to pen Orlando help us unlock the text? Probably not… The ownership of the diary is a grab to owning the author; we hold their lives in our hands and scrutinise the mundane details they flourish poetically attempting to figure them out. Didion was a mother and wife as well as the writer and icon that emerges in her writings. Her careful curation of self to ensure her other selves only appeared under her watch, her direction, her discretion, was an attempt to assert herself as a public writer with an enchanting capability to fascinate and entertain with her pen, not a public figure whose life fascinates us. The intimacy of Notes to John goes against the constructed self that Didion intended.

Anais Nin, storing her diaries in a bank vault (supposedly). The holy relic of the author’s diary is pestered by prying eyes.

By Nathan Gellman

Art is often described as a window into the mind and soul of the artist. Whether on paper, sheet music, or canvas, the true emotion and meaning behind pieces of art are on full display. Music is no different; at its best it captures not just a perfect performance but a moment of emotional truth.

However, in a time when overproduction is sucking the life out of modern music, we the listeners are flocking to live shows to feel a connection with the artist that used to project through sitting rooms on vinyl, cassette and CDs. 

I’m not suggesting that I have found a substitute for seeing your favorite artist live but through my discovery of my favorite artist’s early takes and demos, I have a newfound appreciation for his work and process. Demos provide an unexpected intimacy and emotional experience of hearing a stripped-down, natural take of your favorite songs. Therefore, I challenge you, the reader and listener, to embrace demos and take in the rawness, vulnerability, and authenticity within them.

Demos are a rough, often first take of a song used to capture an initial musical idea, contrasted to a studio single it is dirty, unproduced, and not aiming for commercial perfection, merely expressing the artists’ viscerality. Demos preserve the artists’ creative spark before it is extinguished during production. 

My personal affection towards demos came upon my discovery of George Harrison’s ‘Early Takes Volume 1’ which was released in 2012. It compiles demos, the majority of which were recorded during the ‘All Things Must Pass’ sessions. I fell in love with the album as a result of Harrison’s unfiltered voice, emotional closeness and the offhand remarks that bookend some tracks which made me feel like a fly on the wall during the recording sessions, privy to the secret moments most listeners never hear.

A couple of tracks stand out as prime examples of the unique strengths’ demos have to offer. Awaiting on You All is one of my favorite Harrison songs, with it being one of his most religious and spiritual. The master recording of the song is busy and vibrant with an all-star personnel of Harrison, Eric Clapton and Klaus Voormann to name a few. However, the heavy use of reverb really melts the sound into a buzz with it difficult to hear the individual instruments throughout the song. The early take strips this all back and sounds almost unrecognizable compared to the master. You are no longer listening to a catchy pop-rock song but a man expressing his devotion to God with the help of his guitar.

Among Harrison’s most spiritual songs is My Sweet Lord, his debut single and biggest chart hit. A song in my eyes which is perfect, an exposed cry to God, presenting himself as one of the most famous and accomplished people in the world – simply, a vulnerable devotee. While there is nothing to improve on, in my opinion the demo really highlights the devotion Harrison had through the tenderness of his voice accompanied by his acoustic guitar. 

But why do these distinctions matter, why should you care about these mostly subtle differences? 

I believe demos and early takes allow for more emotional honesty, making the artist, someone who themself is followed and loved more human, through presenting their truth to the listener with no interference from middlemen. Demos feel like a discovery, something you find in your attic that you weren’t supposed to hear. It is an artist’s raw talent that separates them from you and I, and demos through showcasing their natural talent demonstrate this fact.

Demos such as Harrison’s ‘Early Takes Volume 1’ remove the layers of master recordings and remind us that sometimes the first take says it best. In an age of overproduced music, demos stand as a stark reminder that sometimes less is more.  

By Edward Bayliss

Dan Richter arrived in the UK in the mid-1960s as ‘a 28-year-old, starving, mime teacher’, ready to absorb all that London, ‘the centre of everything new’, had to offer. Upon his arrival, he edited the avant-garde poetry review Residu, and performed in the 1965 International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall amongst Beat Generation poets William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. On October 24^th, 1966 Richter first met Stanley Kubrick, the man who would select him for the role of Moonwatcher, the central ape in 2OO1: A Space Odyssey’s ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence (and ask him to choreograph it). From 1969-1973, Richter would become personal assistant to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, helping shoot the video for ‘Imagine’ at Tittenhurst Park, and later work with the Rolling Stones to produce their concert film, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. Richter has since worked with production companies in LA, continued to teach mime, and has climbed over 600 North American peaks. 

I met him on Zoom for a 45 minute discussion of his time from 1966-1968, and working with Stanley Kubrick on what many consider to be the most influential film ever made, 2OO1: A Space Odyssey. 

It’s 10:00am LA time and the morning sunlight is coming across Dan’s sitting room, lighting his face kindly. He is 85 years old and undergoing chemotherapy for T-Cell Lymphoma. These facts do not show. His warm temperament and strong constitution translate easily through my laptop screen. I begin by asking him about his experience at the American Mime Theatre, his decision to travel to England, and how he came to be involved in 2OO1. Richter tells me he had ‘studied ballet’ and could ‘dance easily’ – he was a ‘natural, and could just do it’ – so that when he arrived at the American Mime Theatre under the tutelage of Paul Curtis, he was ‘the lead performer’ within a year. After four years, and having seemingly exhausted the potential that the AMT offered, Richter ‘wanted more’ and notes how ‘mime wasn’t as big in the States as it was in Europe’. Working in mime in the US  had become a tireless exercise of going to ‘cocktail parties to flatter rich people so you could get grants […] There’s gotta be more!’, says Dan. Subsequently, he took a leave of absence to study ‘mimetic forms’ around the world, travelling to Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, India, and Japan, where he made friends with Yoko Ono, who exposed Richter to ‘conceptual art’. ‘I did not want to go back to the States again, I wanted freedom […] to experiment, and live’, Dan adds triumphantly. After ‘falling in love with a woman who claimed to be a Russian princess in India’, he ‘followed her to Athens’ and ‘met all these poets’ which led him eventually to London where he began editing a poetry review, Residu, with his then wife Jill while beginning to teach acting classes. During his poetry reading with ‘Allen [Ginsberg] and all these crazy people’ at the Albert Hall, he met producer and poet Johnny Esam  (who ‘was friends with a friend of Sir Arthur Clarke’). ‘Arthur [who co-wrote the screenplay of 2OO1] and Stanley Kubrick had realised they didn’t have the opening of the movie – they had shot all the live action, and they had tried all kinds of things […] and nothing worked’, Dan recalls. They hadn’t, as Richter explains, explored the possibility of using a mime to choreograph the now famous ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence. Johnny, a mutual friend of Dan and Arthur’s, knew that ‘Stanley was looking for a mime’, and set into motion the next two years of Dan’s life: ‘I know the best mime around, it’s Dan Richter.’

 

When Dan met Stanley soon after, he says that he ‘asked for a stage, a leotard, and a couple of towels to stuff in my shoulders and he [Stanley] was very impressed’, having witnessed an improvised ape performance from Richter. ‘I was offered the job on the spot. That’s how I got the job.’ Dan’s process of mime acting is very particular: ‘my training was that we developed movement from the acting process first – you start with the motivations and characters and feelings, and you extend those.’ For Richter, the objective of the character informs the activities of the character. This was the basis of Richter’s approach to embodying Moonwatcher. 

The ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence is set in the Pleistocene epoch, about three million years ago; I ask him how he went about realising a time and place so far from him. Dan reminds me that archaeological discovery has come a long way since the 1960s: ‘In those days, very little was known […] I researched as much as I could, but I realised I had to make living creatures.’ Kubrick had located his ape species as the Australopithecine (discovered by Raymond Dart in the 1920s) who existed in South Africa at the time of the ‘Dawn of Man’s’ setting. Richter tells me that he ‘endlessly watched footage of Jane Goodall’s chimps and read about Diane Fossey’s gorillas and did piles of research.’ In his book, Moonwatcher’s Memoir, Dan goes into great detail of his interactions with ethologists, museums, the Royal Geographical Society and other bodies of information that would inform his understanding of the Australopithecine ape. Dan tells me that he ‘had to have a costume that would allow us to be expressive, not just the Michelin man with black hair all over you, all stuffed and puffed up.’ It was only with the assistance of now legendary make-up artist Stuart Freeborn (who would design and fabricate many key characters in the Star Wars franchise, including Yoda and Chewbacca), that they could realise a realistic costume that could function under dynamic movement. 

The ape that Richter plays, Moonwatcher, acts as a kind of proto-representative of the Biblical Cain figure, becoming a symbol of the evolution of human nature through violence. This evolutionary movement across millions of years is delivered through the most famous match cut in film history, from Moonwatcher’s bone to the weapons satellite. I ask Dan if he was conscious of the gravity of this moment within the context of the film. ‘The script was very sparse, very sparse’, Dan reiterates. He adds that ‘Stanley rarely talked about the big stuff, the big ideas – he didn’t want to put ideas into your head that would get you trying to do stuff, he was always concerned with each beat at a time.’ Though this may have been the case, Richter does acknowledge that Kubrick and Clarke were aware of a ‘Killer Ape Theory’ developed by Robert Ardrey in 1961, which postulated the idea that ‘early man started to progress when he started killing, and set us on an evolutionary path that would lead to modern man […] that was a big idea in those days.’ In spite of my original question, Richter declares that ‘my concern is not to tell the story, my job is to have a character who has got an objective, who uses an activity to achieve that objective, and has what we call an adjustment which is how he feels doing that – you don’t want to get sucked into conceptual stuff.’ There must exist a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ upon the consciousness of the audience, Richter advises, ‘and if you don’t have it, the chair becomes very uncomfortable.’

In his memoir, Dan describes the setting of the MGM studios at Elstree as being akin to Alice in Wonderland, or like a ‘great cathedral’, with elfish and pixyish characters working in and around the sets. I ask him why the studios, at first, had such an impression of mysticism about them. He tells me that ‘the MGM studios were built in the ‘30s, they had this classic, beautiful quality; it felt like you were visiting Orson Welles. There were all these people who were so good at so many things all going around – there were nine or eleven stages […] it was big.’ Dan pauses for a second, ‘it was just like being in a dream.’ With the words DAN RICHTER – DAWN OF MAN emblazoned across his new office door, he remembers thinking, ‘suddenly I had all this power […] everyone would be like, whataya think Dan?’ The incredible technical innovation that the production of 2001 provoked also contributed to the atmosphere of otherworldliness in Elstree Studios at the time. Dan mentions special effects supervisors Doug Trumbull and Con Pederson, saying of them, ‘it was just amazing; one of the things about 2001, was we actually invented new ways of doing things and technologies to do it.’ You don’t have to look far to identify such innovations; from front screen projection to centrifuge sets and zero gravity effects, the production behind 2001 really was pioneering.

Like the studio setting, it appears that at some moments Kubrick also impressed an aura of enchantment upon Dan. In his memoir, Richter draws attention to ‘the alchemy of Stanley’s art and process’ and describes the director as a ‘merlin’-like figure who ‘conjured’ this ‘wonderful, majestic film.’ Richter writes that Stanley has a ‘quality of otherness’. I have always been sceptical reading articles about Stanley which designate him, for example, as the ‘recluse’, the ‘phobic’, the ‘paranoid’, or the ‘museum piece’, so I ask Dan to expand on this comment. Dan says that Stanley’s office was a ‘teeny room’ and in it were ‘books, papers, drawings, and photographs piled to the ceiling, it was total chaos’. Despite all of this, Dan remembers seeing Stanley for the first time, a ‘frumpy little guy with a Bronx accent’, who was ‘very relaxed and immediately interested – I hear you know Allen Ginsberg’. Even though, as Richter tells me, ‘Kubrick is always the smartest guy in the room’, and often it feels as though ‘you’re playing checkers and he’s playing three-dimensional chess’, he had a casual manner about him with ‘a great sense of humour’ regularly ‘bumming cigarettes because Christiane [his wife] wouldn’t let him smoke.’ Kubrick surrounded himself with a young team who were willing to break their backs to support his vision: ‘If you could go along with it, it was an amazing ride, you know, on your way to eternity.’ However, Dan says grinning,  ‘a lot of the older technicians had some issues with him, saying, we can’t do that guv, and, well, they wouldn’t be round for long – he didn’t suffer fools easily’, but adds urgently that ‘there were a lot of us in our twenties saying sure, let’s do it, let’s try to figure it out.’ For instance, Dan says, ‘Stanley’s assistant Tony Frewin was only sixteen or seventeen years old – Kubrick was surrounded by young people who wouldn’t question him.’ It is far from the truth  to say that the director was exercising tyranny on set; in his memoir, Richter says that ‘Stanley’s behaviour wasn’t about control’, indeed, it is ‘people who don’t know him [who] portray him as a compulsive control freak’. Rather, Dan stresses that Kubrick would surround himself with people who offered ideas; he was ever-listening. Dan closes his assessment of Kubrick with the words, ‘he was a normal guy, but just happened to be a massive genius.’

After filming wrapped on 2001, Dan had very little to do with Stanley. I recall reading that Malcolm McDowell was a little hurt by this sharp cut-off of communications after the production of A Clockwork Orange was over. Indeed, Dan tells me that ‘you think you’re his best friend when you’re working with him, and then all of a sudden it seems like he doesn’t know you anymore.’ Dan would see Kubrick once more in his life. He looks up above his camera smiling: ‘I had designed and built a three-headed editing table for John and Yoko which I loaned to Stanley while he was shooting A Clockwork Orange in 1971 – I actually spent the day with him’, and in typical Kubrick character, ‘we talked about what kind of paper shredders we were using.’

 

By Lydia Firth 

In March, I was fortunate enough to catch Katy Hessel for a chat. If you’re not familiar with Hessel she is an art historian, Guardian columnist and curator, known for authoring The Story of Art Without Men and running the Instagram account and podcast The Great Women Artists. The Story of Art Without Men does exactly what it says on the tin: Hessel leads us through the history of art from the 1500s to 2020s exclusively from the perspective of women artists. The book takes its name from E H Gombrich’s canonical text, The Story of Art, which included absolutely no women when first published in 1950, and now, in its 16th edition, compensates for its erasure of female artists by including just one. Hessel’s antidote to this exclusionary tale is an invaluable compendium; an essential contribution to the art history canon.

A Sunday Times and New York Times ‘Bestseller’, a Trustee at Charleston Trust, an alumna of Forbes 30 under 30, I’d go as far as to say she defines the art history zeitgeist. Her dedication to educating others about female artists is demonstrated by her willingness to speak to me, the humble undergraduate, albeit over the phone as she dashes about the streets of London to buy a pancake pan to host some friends (it was Shrove Tuesday, after all). 

In The Story of Art Without Men, Hessel’s zeal for art is clear. I ask her how she first got into art. Growing up in London, she benefited from the various free galleries, visiting on Saturday afternoons with her sister. She recalls the Tate Modern opening when she was six: being in awe of Louise Bourgeois’ spider sculpture, Maman, and the expansive turbine hall, ‘how could you not be entranced by that’ as a child she questions. Going on to study art, the extent of the sidelining of women artists only dawned on her aged 21, when visiting an art fair and realising, out of the thousands of artworks before her, not a single one was by a woman. She asked herself whether she could name twenty women artists, ten pre-1950, any pre-1850. Despite her degree in art history, the answer was no. She tells me, ‘it’s not like these women didn’t exist. They existed, and they were incredible… you’re just actually missing out on having really interesting conversations about really interesting artworks.’ She hopes the book acts as an entry point into art history, the kind of book ‘on the first floor of the bookshop, that sort of made art mainstream’. Having received my copy for Christmas, purchased by my parents from Waterstones first floor (it was their book of the year in 2022), she has managed to do exactly that. 

Without The Story of Art Without Men, both myself and many others wouldn’t be familiar with the dazzling concentric paintings of Hilma Af Klint who produced some of the first major abstract works, before the likes of Kandinsky and Mondrian; the psychologically acute portraits of Alice Neel; the 18th century pioneer Angelica Kauffman. I tell her there are now art enthusiasts who may be more clued up on women artists than men. She says there’s a David Caspar Friedrich show at The Met which she might have to give a chance: we jokingly share a moment of misandry. I lament Durham not offering a degree in art history and Hessel suggests ‘there’s much more hunger’ for the discipline than ‘institutions actually have food for’. As a humanities student who has mourned the crumbling arts and humanities building juxtaposed against sparkly new facades of business schools and STEM buildings, these words resonate. 

I urge you to check out Hessel’s work: her podcast guests have included the likes of Tracey Emin and Marina Abramović. Ali Smith claims ‘her retake on the canon has changed it forever’: Katy Hessel is quite literally at the forefront of the art world, and changing the game with her passionate and palatable positive discrimination.

By Maisie Jennings

‘Emerald Fennell and Sam Mendes are a scourge on British cinema’; this is the polemic expressed by my friend Jack in a Bethnal Green wine bar. We are a few pints and half a bottle of wine deep, and they are lamenting the state of contemporary British filmmaking. I had seen the stills leaked from the set of Fennell’s upcoming film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, in which 34-year-old Australian actress Margot Robbie plays 18-year-old Catherine Earnshaw alongside Jacob Elordi as the brooding Byronic figure of Heathcliff. Fennell’s casting is divisive – central to Emily Brontë’s novel is the violent, metaphysical romance between Cathy and her adopted brother Heathcliff, who is described in the book with ethnically ambiguous terms, referencing his ‘dark’ skin and ‘gipsy’ origins. Arguably, Heathcliff’s non-white racial identity is essential in fuelling the complicated and fraught dynamic between him and Cathy, pulsating with shame, subjugation, and an ineffably spiritual connection. 

I’ll admit, I’m not too optimistic towards Fennell’s adaptation, particularly her handling of the class dimensions in Brontë’s text. Her last film, Saltburn (2023), offered a stylish, yet ultimately substance-less satire of the British aristocracy. What’s made clear, however, is Fennell’s commitment to provocation – mostly through blunt stabs at the erotic, which never really come to climax. Indeed, the promotional images for Wuthering Heights (2026) feature an illustration of one skeleton going down on another. While I’m not necessarily against an added psychosexual emphasis to the source material, the absence of sex in the novel was not merely a result of repressive Victorian morality, it was paramount in establishing the book’s extraordinary sadism – transcending bodies, surpassing death. The explicitly sexual ‘first looks’ at Fennell’s project might also invite audiences to interpret Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship as romantic; let’s be clear, this is not a love story. 

Much of the online discourse surrounding the film also concerns anxiety towards its historical accuracy. Daisy Jones, for British Vogue, defended Fennell’s inaccurate costume design – advocating for ‘fun’ and ‘whimsical’ approaches to period films because fiction is, after all, only fiction. Fennell’s casting director, Karmal Cochrane, offered a similarly shallow response to the backlash, saying that there is no need for accuracy because the original source material is ‘just a book’ and not based on real life. Of course, directors do not owe us an exact historical approximation. The intentional inclusion of anachronism in historical films is not always an inherently bad thing, it just has to be good. Interpretation is variable and cinema’s fecund ground produces endlessly diverse adaptations of original source material, prompted by the creative agency and artistic licence of directors. The criticism towards Fennell’s choices are not intended to dispute this fact, rather, the importance of interpretation rests, as ever, in its appreciation of source material, its generative, constructive element to the plot, and its execution. I’m dubious of Fennell’s commitment to these first two criteria, as for the third, we will have to wait and see. 

A week after my conversation with Jack, we met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, hidden just off the Mall by St James’ Park. They had invited me to a screening of Jacques Rivette’s Hurlevent (1985), a more stylistically classical, obscure film from the French New Wave director. It was the first time I’d seen a film on 35mm print, and while this made me feel enormously intellectual, it also created an elliptical, dreamlike atmosphere in which passions between Catherine and Roch (Rivette’s Heathcliff) oscillate like the tossing and turning of waking from a nightmare. Rivette loosely transposes the first half of Bronte’s novel onto the austere Cévennes countryside in 1930s France. Interior shots of the dark, stone farmhouse, functioning as a prison for its inhabitants, are contrasted with the barren plains of Southern France – recalling the bleak, untamed landscape of the Yorkshire Moors where Brontë sets her brutal novel. Rivette’s mise-en-scene is sparse and minimal, underscoring the isolation of his protagonists and their entrapment within an unforgiving rural microcosm of wider class stratification. His choice to set the film during the interwar period is also strangely effective; we can tell through the costuming that Hurlevent is set in a more recent past, but it feels so remote and gothic that it becomes impossible to comprehend the setting as modern. Grand sweeping shots of the landscape, accompanied by haunting Bulgarian choral music at epiphanic moments in the film’s narrative also serve as another anachronism that provides a new texture of alienation. 

Most importantly, Hurlevent also demonstrates Rivette’s extremely faithful reading of Brontë’s text. Rivette, in an interview for Senses of Cinema, stated that he was struck by the fact that, at the time, nobody had made a film adaptation featuring actors that were actually the age of the characters in the novel. The youthful theatricality of the teenage actors Rivette casts creates the sense that they are play-acting an adulthood far beyond their years – their squabbling, teasing, and exceptional cruelty towards one another only amplifies the tragedy of their fates. Although some English Literature students may find Roch (Lucas Belvaux) too blonde and boyishly handsome, this is rectified by his return to Hurlevent as a newly affluent businessman, consumed by his desire for vengeance. Rivette’s Roch in the latter part of the film is cold, sadistic, and brutally violent – probably the most terrifying interpretation of Heathcliff that I’ve ever seen. Refreshingly, Hélène (Rivette’s Nelly, played by Sandra Montiagu) is age-adjusted too – she is only in her early twenties and forms the film’s most central, grounding figure. 

Hurlevent is an unbearably emotional film; Rivette renders the dynamics of Brontë’s novel with such emotional intensity and affect that, at some points, it becomes difficult to watch. This is exactly how I feel in my reading of Wuthering Heights, a book so muscularly cruel and abusive that reading it feels nearly devastating. To me, this is at the heart of interpretation. An effective execution of a director’s artistic interpretation of source material and the intentions behind inaccuracies and anachronisms must culminate in constructing a powerful emotional response in the viewer that aligns with, or amplifies, the intention of the author or artist.

A director could stage source material in variously diverse and unexpected ways – think of the playful Beverly Hills setting of Clueless (1995), loosely adapted from Jane Austen’s 1815 novel Emma. It can only work effectively, however, if the viewer is transported to the emotional and thematic landscape painted by the original author. Wuthering Heights might be ‘just a book’, but any good adaptation appreciates the themes and dimensions that are essential to the original text, despite major or minor liberties. 

By Edward Clark

T. S. Eliot and Earl Sweatshirt (real name Thebe Neruda Kgositsile) are both visionaries. This claim is contentious – many find Eliot’s writing frustrating or pretentious and Kgositsile’s abstract delivery and style of hip-hop alienating. Nevertheless, both artists redefined what their craft could be, pioneering a new lens for poetry in interwar and modern eras alike. This essay considers how Eliot’s The Waste Land and Kgositsile’s “solace” both use abstract form, language and structure to express feelings of aimlessness after loss: Eliot representing the ‘lost generation’ of young people following the First World War, and Kgositsile dealing with depression and addiction following the death of his grandmother. Today marks a decade since Kgositsile released the ten-minute “solace” on YouTube channel dar Qness, accompanied only by the caption ‘music from when i hit the bottom and found something’. No rollout, no marketing. Split into five distinct sections like The Waste Land, the song delves into Kgositsile’s struggles with addiction, depression and grief. “solace” seemingly has little in common with Eliot’s masterpiece, a poem which encapsulated the aimlessness of modern twentieth-century society and cemented Eliot as a seminal modernist writer. Although it may appear fruitless to draw comparison between a groundbreaking century-old epic poem and a relatively unknown song released solely on YouTube, analysis of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Kgositsile’s “solace” suggests the unique role that forward-thinking art plays in conveying perspectives from ‘the bottom’.

As Eliot uses disorienting form to display a frustration with post-war aimlessness as a member of the ‘lost generation’, Kgositsile breaks down traditional hip-hop structure in “solace” to depict his difficulty in dealing with the grief of his grandmother. “solace” is split into five distinct sections, each providing a snapshot of different experiences of depression in loss. Kgositsile’s five-act structure is not only reminiscent of Eliot, but of Aristotle’s Poetics and a dramatic framework which Aristotle influenced – a form which both Eliot and Kgositsile themselves distort. “solace” and The Waste Land thrive on this type of disruption. If Aristotle’s dénouement of the fourth act intended to build towards a climactic conclusion, Kgositsile’s fizzles into depressive ambiance and Eliot’s five acts laugh in the face of structure altogether. Attempting to draw a single narrative between the fragmented voices of the poem does a disservice to the deliberate disorientation of Eliot’s writing. Beyond form, inversion of tradition and the familiar is the foundation of The Waste Land. The poem’s opening line ‘April is the cruellest month’ twists the opening to the General Prologue of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which describes how ‘Aprille with his shoures soote’ … ‘engend[er] the flour’ (April with his showers sweet … grow flowers). What represented new life in the Middle Ages is twisted by the 1920s to be lifeless and ‘cruel’. Kgositsile similarly distorts the optimism of April. A sample of Ahmed Jamal’s “April in Paris” is skewed and repeated to sound eerie and unsettling. A celebration of the beauty of spring through jazz is inverted to soundtrack Kgositsile’s lament that he has ‘been alone for the longest’. The rebirth of spring hurts more when stuck in a cyclical pattern of depression.

Where Eliot is constrained to the page, Kgositsile is provided with more opportunities for expression. His slurred, depressed tone leaves the listener with a pit in their stomach; a feeling only accentuated by uses of repetition throughout. The mantra of ‘it’s me and my nibbling conscience … I’m fixin’ to give up’ structurally emphasises Kgositsile’s repeated failure to climb out of the pit of depression which he raps about. Cyclical despondency is at the core of “solace”, the song beginning with a warped voice repeating ‘I’ve been here before’. Depression is not foreign to Kgositsile. A wide emotional range is expressed through instruments alone. The third section of the song lacks vocals altogether, sounding almost optimistic, yet then quickly descends into the darkest section of the track after a brief moment of reprieve. The decision to leave the most up-tempo, brightest moment of the song without vocals is itself reflective of Kgositsile’s low self-esteem – the song’s auditory moment of optimism is saved for when his vocals are absent. 

“solace’s” shifts between tones are reminiscent of Eliot’s poetic voice. In part one, The Burial of the Dead, Eliot uses enjambment to quickly change the meaning of his lines. The romantic image of ‘the hyacinth girl’ with ‘arms full’ and ‘hair wet’ turns sour as Eliot writes ‘I could not / Speak, and my ears failed’. Similarly, enjambment is employed at the beginning of part two, A Game of Chess, to create a flowing, confused and overwhelming body of text, reflective of the ‘synthetic perfumes’ Eliot describes. The abstract perspective of the poem disorientates the reader, placing them in Eliot’s aimless shoes. The words ‘troubled, confused’ are initially read as adjectives, leading on from the image of ‘perfumes’, yet as one follows onto the next line it becomes clear that they are intended as verbs. As optimism and pessimism are opposed in The Waste Land and “solace”, so are youth and death. Part one of The Waste Land questions a man, and by proxy the reader, as to whether the ‘corpse … in your garden’ will ‘bloom this year’. Rebirth is juxtaposed with the legacy of conflict and the First World War. How can new life flourish against a backdrop of violence? Kgositsile’s depression prevents him from disconnecting his physical body from his grief: ‘I got my grandmama hands, I start to cry when I see ‘em / ‘Cause they remind me of seein’ her’. At twenty-one, depression and grief lead him to despair, with seemingly no solace in sight. The final lines of the song are hopeless: ‘I’m the youngest old man that ya know’.

Years after The Waste Land’s publishing, Eliot described it as nothing but ‘a piece of rhythmical grumbling’. An untuned ear may describe Kgositsile’s solace in the same way. Both works represent the disgruntled voices of their generations a century apart. As The Waste Land instantly became a classic, its ominous tone connecting with those who connected themselves to a ‘lost generation’, “solace” has connected with thousands of fans around the world who relate to Kgositsile’s potent, free-flowing, faded depression. Yet it gets better. Eliot found happiness and connection in a second marriage later in his life, and Kgositsile is now a father and sober. Both artists pushed their art forms to convey their aimlessness and came out on the other side. Perhaps we can find solace in The Waste Land.

Image credit: genius

By Matty Timmis

It seems a long way away now, but for a little while the rhythm was clave. Life then was verdant, thronged with vistas burgeoning with delicate blossoms. Flaxen sands and purled, fizzing oceans gasped under the creaseless sky’s allure, as rays of sun slunk louche cross chestnut skin, laid out in listless, sultry bliss. This was the languorous pulse of Ipanema beach, where I was first seduced by the elemental disjunctures of Clarice Lispector. 

A true original, Lispector was at once a peerless wordsmith, a quixotic bohemian, and a figure of sheer tropical chic. Resoundingly international yet recognised only in the felicitous stupor of Brazil’s remarkable climates, her conceptualisation of literature nonetheless rings out distinct to me even now. Hers is a writing that is almost uninfluenced, a curiously profound game with the very parameters of character and narrative that glimmers with beauty and insight. 

Under the influence of a strong caipirinha, a camel yellow and a brandished sunset, her final and most famous novel The Hour of the Star, absolved me of reality. Even today the memory of this strange divinity, this complete luxation, still teases some awe from my mind stuck in dim days of drab and drizzle.

Born in Ukraine but raised in Northern Brazil, Lispector created an oeuvre unlike any I had and have since encountered. Sprawled across the sand, browned, blonde and careless, the delicate wisps of a revelation were conjured. As the gorgeous world promenaded before me, and as I gazed gently out across the décolletage of the bay, I was dazzled by a piece of writing I could not have comprehended had it not been in my very hand, rifling through my mind. I was utterly beguiled, transfixed by the gentle sway of the palms and the swirled, daring questioning of Lispector’s fresh formulation of language. That pearled sand enveloped my draped figure in a citrus, sun kissed lacuna; a fresh vision of what it means to live and  to write.

Make no mistake however, The Hour of the Star itself is in many ways reluctant to be beautiful. A psychological account of a disturbed writer struggling to tell the tale of a plain, poor Northern Brazilian girl living in Rio, our unorthodox narrator Rodrigo S.M. does his best to condescend and dismiss the subject he has been enraptured by, almost as Breton was with Nadja. The beauty and implicit value of Macabea and the life she leads is stammered out nonetheless, wavering with an oddly authentic charm, replete with the hopes and heartaches that constitute living.

It is a surreal enchantment then – The Hour of the Star – a strange sort of disconcertion, a swooning detachment from accepted reality. Akin almost to how I felt in a far flung corner of Ipanema beach, charmingly aware how very far I was from home. For a fleeting week my concepts of literature as well as the means by which I ought to live were inveigled.

Now distance is inevitable in literature, and it’s implicit in the very word ‘holiday’. No matter how profound, penetrating or encompassing a story is, it cannot replicate lived experience. Irrespective of the enlightening, revelatory, or otherwise wondrous qualities of a holiday, it cannot be a life. They are not however facile, a great holiday and a great book linger for a long time precisely because of their distance.

So this is the story of the time I felt furthest from home, more than physically – when the strict tempo of artistic preconceptions was loosened. The green and pleasant land seemed a wasteland to me for that week – I could hear the bells of Elysian fields tolling through my mind to a different lilt. Jolted out of my slightly stale conceptions of life and literature, my venerations fluttered fickle. Out flew my Graham Greenes and Virginia Woolfs – my freewheeling love of Kerouac and Faulkner gone – Lispector had a greater enlightenment. I desperately wanted to learn Portuguese.

But I hope this is more than just the tale of an exotic holiday where I read a genius but esoteric book. In many ways it is, as nothing changes really. I remain convinced that Lispector exists beyond the realm of genre and that it is impossible to write like her, and I can speak no more Portuguese than ‘obrigado’,and ‘bom dia’, so I shan’t be moving to Brazil anytime soon. Lispector’s reverence is worthy, found in her enchanting toying in what fortifies the constitution of  ‘the novel’, her narrative skipping and flowing, gamboling in a new patter of life. That week I spent sitting on Ipanema beach with a dear friend, drinking, smoking, and listening to this new patter unfold around me will surely be one of the most wonderful weeks I had the fortune of passing through. 

And that moment smoulders, flickering to a foreign pace in the richly coloured swirls of the irises. It’s a delightfully compulsive cavity, a refuge in the mind; the moment you peer above your sunglasses and your eyes drink in the fumes of discovery. Refreshing as a crisply inebriating drink, it thickens your blood with a rich and smokey dew. So brief but so potent, it is the insouciant rapture of a great holiday. 

Life beats on, but in these moments still the rhythm swings slow and asymmetric. Hear it drum as you unpack your bag after a trip and sand pours to the floor, feel it echo in the fresh creased spine of an enthralling book now dustless on your shelf. Your bag’s contents then are almost identical and you barely notice an addition to your shelf, but something has changed. Now some sand will long languish in the carpet beneath your bed, now an inflection will forever sway through your perception – that is the faint thrum of a ravished dislocation.

As a footnote, a slightly less ravished dislocation was the woman whose leg I watched unfortunately get bitten off by a shark as I was reading on Ipanema.

Image credit: Brazilian Embassy

By Mopsy Peel

Cinema Paradiso spills across the screen like the golden dust of a distant, sun-soaked summer in Italy. I find myself almost anticipating the yellow, looping cursive of Guadagnino to unfurl across the landscape. Released in 1988 and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, it begins in the glow of memory, weaving a tapestry of nostalgia that lingers long after the credits roll. Tornatore’s direction unearths the way cinema represented joy in post-war Sicily, where the screen was not just an escape but a vital thread in the fabric of community life. This was a time when cinema demanded presence, when a moment on screen was unrepeatable, and each viewing was a communal act of devotion. Tornatore captures this with an aching sincerity. Cinema Paradiso revels in the sentimental power of recollection. It insists that even when you leave a place, the past remains, so fulfilling, so irrevocably tied to who you are. The heart, it seems, is always anchored to the place it first beat.

For a brief time, Italian cinema had wandered from its post-Fellini heyday of the 1960s, leaving the world with a quiet longing for the flamboyance and creativity that once buzzed through its film industry. But Cinema Paradiso, in all its dusty nostalgia and unflinching emotion, allowed the world to witness not just a return but a reawakening. This film, a heartfelt love letter to the magic of cinema, clinched the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, reopening the door to Italian cinema. 

Cinema Paradiso tells the story of Salvatore “Toto” Di Vita, a successful filmmaker who returns to his childhood village in Sicily after the death of Alfredo, the local cinema’s projectionist. The film moves between Toto’s present-day life and flashbacks to his youth in the 1940s and 50s, when he formed a close bond with Alfredo. As a young boy, Toto was fascinated by the magic of cinema and spent much of his time at the Paradiso Theatre, learning from Alfredo and becoming involved in the projectionist’s work. Cinema Paradiso explores the interplay between memory, personal growth, and the transformative power of film, echoing the ways in which cinema shapes both personal identities and collective histories.

Yet, beneath its surface, this is also a film steeped in the ache of unrequited love – not merely the romantic strain that pulses through Ennio Morricone’s exquisite score, but the quieter, more elusive yearning for places and people we are fated never to return to. It is a love that resides in fragments, in the unsaid and unfinished, much like the stolen kisses from the film reels – those moments deemed too passionate, too indulgent, and ultimately cut from the frame, yet kept hidden away by Alfredo, locked in secrecy for Toto’s eyes alone. These excised pieces of desire mirror a generation ravaged by war, deprived not only of their romance but of the very space to express them, casualties not just of conflict, but of sacrifice’s quiet brutality. The concept of erasing all that is romantic, of removing the fullness of feeling, is turned on its head in another of Tornatore’s works, Malèna (2000). In this film, the societal gaze reduces the figure of Malèna to mere fragments of desire and shame, as though the censored moments from Cinema Paradiso have been resurrected, now thrust into the limelight of this secondary narrative, their absence in one film becoming the entire essence of another.

A critic, in their wisdom, once claimed that Cinema Paradiso is a movie you show people to highlight ‘why you love film’. It is as if Tornatore carved the very essence of cinema into this story – a love for its power and the bittersweet ache of its passing. Watching it, I am filled with a strange, distant longing, jealousy, perhaps, of the Italian ability to not just feel but to display it so openly, so freely. There they are, whole rows of people, tears cascading, without a trace of the British restraint or shame that so often clouds our own expressions. No uncomfortable irony to dull the sincerity of the moment. It is this unabashed expressiveness that allows connection to others. The emotional depth on screen, uncensored and real, is a power I envy and admire.

Tornatore suggests, through his filmmaking, that great art is a product of rupture. The need to move away, to feel fear, to be uncertain, is essential for creation. Comfort, it seems, is a poor progenitor of greatness. It cannot coax the soul into the wild, restless pursuit of true artistry. To me, this begs the question, is it possible to produce something of significance, something that resonates deeply, without a devotion to something larger than the self? As Toto ventures out into the world, seeking greatness and adventure, he leaves behind a part of himself – a piece of his heart still in the village, still in that cinema. 

On paper, Cinema Paradiso could easily be dismissed as another coming-of-age tale, but to do so is to miss the very heart of it. This is not merely a boy’s journey from innocence to experience, nor a bittersweet meditation on the passing of time. It is a film about film itself—a metacinematic reflection on the art form that has both shaped and been shaped by generations of dreamers. As I watch Cinema Paradiso today, do we, the Netflix generation, feel removed from the magic of a packed cinema, its seats filled with an entire community feeling together? Are we too comfortable now to understand that collective pulse? Have we lost something in our relentless individualism, the constant hum of distraction at our fingertips? Cinema Paradiso is not just a film but a testament to the undying love for storytelling, for those darkened rooms where emotions were felt in unison, where stories were imprinted on the soul. 

Image credit: cinememoir