Category: Culture

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

Shimmering silver costumes. Specials on da rocks. Spiteful dancehall girls waiting for their big break. Welcome to the world of Bugsy Malone. Slightly feverish, suffering the consequences from getting too ‘tight’ the night before, I decided to revisit my childhood favourite. My mother protests, “not everyone has had as camp an upbringing as you”, but I really think every child, and film-loving adult, should be made to watch this film. How does a film that merges The Sopranos with Cabaret, is set in New York but was filmed in Slough, relies entirely on a cast of under 15s, and has iconic songs that the children certainly didn’t record themselves, last beyond the bizarreness of 70’s British TV? Charm. 

There’s a cold, deserted New York street where moonlight and outsiders dare to tread. The sound of frantic footsteps dart behind a brown stone, disturbing the alley-cats and a mother at her wit’s end. Shouting. The arrival of the gang in this dead-end spot signals the struggle. Roxy the Weasel, covered in deadly custard, lies in the gutter. Cut to song. 

Gang warfare, the Mob, showgirls who sing suggestively to an audience of mobsters, politicians, and wise guys, shoot-outs and lock-ins. Most children’s films would try and distance themselves away from this crime-ridden world, even if it’s romantically portrayed in 1920’s glamour and gowns.  Part of Bugsy’s magic is that it’s a film for children, starring children, yet why treat children like kids, give them a film that grows up with them. Children aren’t as afraid of playing in a grown-up space as we often believe, Bugsy accepts this and cuts out the middleman by making the kids the heroes without diluting their characters or stories. ‘Namby-pamby showgirls’ are criticised by tedious casting directors, all 13 still, who effortlessly deliver lines exclaiming how they could ‘do something’ with that ‘great face’. From Fat Sam’s Tony Soprano reminiscent demeanour, to passing waitresses and agents, all the characters are given their time to play pretend at full, convincing pelt. The moustaches drawn on with pencils, eyes gaze up as Tallulah glides across the stage ready to start her number, she rolls her eyes in tired professionalism, winking at mobsters and factory workers alike. She opens her mouth ready to sing. ‘My name is Tallulah, I live ‘til I die’. Whilst it may sound like a perfect copy of a showtune, it sounds like a copy written by the kids based off snippets of songs heard through their parents’ records with their innocence of songwriting shining through. This is a musical that wants to feel like a child’s game, and it’s terrific. 

A world powered by peddle-powered cars that are constantly running from the creek of peddle chains belonging to rival mobs, where characters retire from a stressful day with a cocktail and a cabaret, guns that actually shoot; it’s all rather charming. Age appropriateness without patronising. The gusto to the commitment of Bugsy being a mob film is fabulous without pretension; language, names and settings are all so perfectly in keeping with the genre, why sacrifice any of the more cert 15 bits? Despite this age-blind approach, the film gives no sour stage-school taste. Jazz hands are firmly excluded from this speakeasy. Jodie Foster, who plays the wickedly witty chanteuse Tallulah, arrived at the Bugsy set fresh from the scenes of Taxi Driver; these are children who are already immersed into the adult world of acting, why not let them play-pretend as adults, but without the bullets? 

Bugsy finishes galivanting through 1929’s Little Italy with a Leone style shootout. Fat Sam’s Grand Slam is covered in cream, the volume of which almost ventures into the absurd. The glittering girls are dulled. The piano keys glue together under the warfare. Tallulah lets out her last quip, ‘so this is show business’, as she wipes the custard from her eyes. In the normal world, this is catastrophic, a merciless shooting of an entire speakeasy. Yet in Bugsy’s world, it is the perfect finale to extended game of dress up. The previously deadly custard bullets loose all killing potential, causing all to erupt into a custard coated final number. The costumes must all go back into the box, the kids must go back to their respective houses for tea, and they turn back into kids once more – just kids, having fun. Whilst they are convincing and almost scarily good at dressing up as adults, Bugsy Malone has managed to escape a fate of being caged into the weird children’s media of the 1970s by keeping a surreal sense of fun and games close to its chest. They ‘could’a been anythin’ they wanted to be’ and they chose to be fun. 

By Jack Fry

I wait on springtime with bated breath. Like leaves on a vine, I desperately seek out any creeping sunlight. I really do feel reborn as the weather changes and my levels of vitamin D rise. To many, the first true sign of spring is when the blossom appears; I returned home from Durham last week to find the magnolia tree at the bottom of my garden had bloomed a brilliant white. Spring to me is the first time you tentatively hang your sheets on the washing line, a toasted hot cross bun slathered in salty butter, rain that glimmers as it refracts the pale sunlight, the first freshly cut lawn, a thawing of creaking winter bones. Someone wisely suggested to me recently that spring was a better time for New Year’s resolutions and I always feel a reinvigorated sense of purpose at this point in the year; spring is often associated with renewal, awakening, and growth. The season is transitional and fleeting, a bridge between extremes. I feel each song included is a call to recognise not the sublime, but those smaller moments that occur in between, a moment where a beam of light just breaks through the clouds or the unfurling of a leaf, blink and you’ll miss them and summer will be upon us. So with all this in mind, I’ve curated this seasonally-themed playlist. 

Light of a Clear Blue Morning – Waxahatchee

This Waxahatchee cover of a timeless classic by Dolly Parton, and the album it’s included on St Cloud, feels incredibly emblematic of spring to me. The album, full of songs of renewal and hope, was written following a period when Crutchfield had embarked on a new love affair and had chosen to get sober, observing the world with an intense lucidity. Crutchfield sings in the first verse, a line I think we are all too familiar with after a winter spent in Durham:

“I’ve been looking for the sunshine

You know I ain’t seen it in so long”

With the spring equinox having just passed, the daylight hours now outnumber the dark. And so when Crutchfield’s glassy voice cuts through the grey clouds, she embodies the communal sense of hope that comes with a blue sky day, singing: “Everything’s gonna be alright, It’s gonna be okay”.

Morning has Broken – Yusuf/Cat Stevens

I just managed to catch Cat Stevens’ Legends slot while working at Glastonbury last year and his presence, especially whilst performing this song, brought about a tangible serenity amongst the crowd. This song will always be reminiscent of this time of year for me; when I was growing up it was always sung on Easter Sunday at church. It feels like a companion song to the ‘Light of a Clear Blue Morning’ –  one is an actual hymn and the other is a hymn-like tribute to the renewing power of the morning. 

Little Green – Joni Mitchell

To celebrate the return of Joni Mitchell’s catalogue to Spotify, listen to this moving and deeply vulnerable ode to the child she gave up for adoption whilst at art school, with lovely lyrics capturing the season:

“Just a little Green

Like the colour when the spring is born

There’ll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow”

New Jade – Caribou

One of my favourite electronic musicians, Dan Snaith makes music under the moniker Caribou. This song from his most recent album evokes the vivid greens of spring with its title. The lyrics referencing new beginnings, stabs of drums throughout and slightly psychedelic production make for a propulsive and joyful springtime listen. 

“It’s like a new first kiss

Yeah, you can start feeling glad

We’ve been waiting for so long

And now he’s finally gone”

Deeper Well – Kacey Musgraves

In this cut from her new album, Musgraves sings of some emotional spring cleaning, where she dispatches some bad habits and unhealthy people from her life and in return draws from a richer spiritual source.

Wash. – Bon Iver

Whilst this title I believe refers to a place, Washington State, I was always under the impression it actually referred to the act of washing. For me, the piano motif sounds like the steady drip of melting ice or raindrops post-April shower. It sounds like a seasonal cleansing, washing away the woes of winter for a fresh start.

Go Do – Jonsi

To me, this song truly captures the energy of spring, an urgent life force compelling us forward. The glitching of the sonics at the beginning resembles the natural world stuttering back to life, a bird beating the water off its wings, a bud breaking through the earth. Whilst I generally don’t like being told what to do, this song can be the exception to the rule, its thumping drums could make even the most sluggish seize the day. 

April Come She Will – Simon and Garfunkel

The most obvious choice of the playlist doesn’t particularly need explaining.

The Foggy Dew – Ye Vagabonds

Earlier this week I went for a walk to watch the sunrise and returned with my boots sodden by the dew, no longer frost. This achingly gorgeous Irish folk sung by a brother duo in lilting harmony is a recent find and one I have on repeat.

Four Seasons In One Day – Crowded House

British weather is unpredictable even in summer, but springtime is when it’s at its most fickle, when the climate assumes a rather fluid identity, giving us warmth, chill, and downpours sometimes all in a matter of minutes. As I write this the sun has offered a brief interlude to an afternoon of torrential rain, hail and gusts of wind that knock the breath out of you. Thus this single from the Australasian band’s album, Woodface, seemed rather apt.

Cattails – Big Thief

Adrienne Lenker, the frontwoman of Big Thief, is in my opinion a songwriter who singularly captures small moments of beauty, as I explained earlier on I find these collected ephemera to be representative of the essence of spring.

Sleep the Clock Around – Belle and Sebastian

The whimsical production of this song in the beginning sounds like birdsong and the song itself sounds like reemerging into the world after a winter of hibernation, sleeping the clock around. The line, “Then the moment will come, and the memory will shine” in conjunction with the brass and synths is absolutely euphoric.

Rise – Eddie Vedder

Like Autumn, the transitional nature of this season can often place me in a plaintive mood and the line “such is the passage of time/ too fast to fold” very much reflects this. This rousing tune from the Pearl Jam frontman, created for the Into the Wild soundtrack, will stir you from your winter slumber.

Silver Soul – Beach House

Beach house sounds like daydreaming feels, and I often catch myself at the moment fantasising about the idyll of summer. The hook is a repeated mantra that “it is happening again” announcing to the world the excitement of a new season and assuring us that with the continuous passage of time, spring will roll around once more no matter what.

By Chloe Stiens.

Bass bass bass! Also, it’s finally getting warmer…

This week’s playlist can be found at the top of the “Spring ‘24” Spotify playlist, attached here:

The Flying Burrito Brothers, Just Can’t Be

• On their 1971 eponymous album, the first without Gram Parsons. 
• If I was going on a long drive in summer, this is what I’d play with the windows down. Maybe I’m listening to it as wishful thinking (it’s freezing in Paris)! I like the mixolydian modal influence, and the bass.

ENNY, I Want

• You may know the South-East London rapper’s song with Jorja Smith, ‘Peng Black Girls’, also from 2021. The second verse slightly reminds me of Little Simz’s ‘Woman’… I’d love to hear them on a track together.
• Again, I love the bass on this song. It fully explores the potential of a synth bass, in both its bouncy tone, and wide range.

Led Zeppelin, Good Times Bad Times

• Another windows down song, this time from 1969.
• John Paul John keeps the bass moving in quavers or semiquavers throughout, complementing the sporadic drum fills. It really takes off in the guitar solo after the second chorus.

Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek, Nem Kaldi

• My new favourite song, by multinational band Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek. There is a great article by The Guardian that talks about their creative process that spans national borders, that you can read here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/nov/24/grup-simsek-band
• The group call their music Antonalian folk. Here, you can hear the influence of Turkish music, as well as psychedelic rock. Like Arab music, Turkish music uses modes that include tones outside of the Western conception of harmony (such as ‘half-flats’, which can be heard here in the vocal line and solo instruments. I particularly enjoy the timbre of the bağlama, a kind of lute.

Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, II MOST WANTED

• New music by Beyoncé, featuring Miley Cyrus. I wouldn’t necessarily call this country, but its influence can be felt. Cyrus’ husky voice perfectly complements Beyonce’s smooth tone.
• There are no drums in this song, just bass! This allows the song to maintain its acoustic feel, while keeping it rhythmically grounded.

Marvin Gaye, What’s Happening Brother

• This song, from Gaye’s 1971 album What’s Going On, tells the story of a soldier returning from Vietnam, and getting used to how life has changed since he’s been gone.
• Here, you can really hear the influence of jazz and funk in the chord progression, which is constantly shifting tonal centre, and in the syncopated bass.

Control Machete, Comprendes, Mendes?

• From the Mexican hip-hop groups 1997 album, Mucho Barato. I like the trumpet-mute sample, and the bass slide.

Julia Jacklin, Don’t Let The Kids Win

• From the Australian indie-rock artist’s 2016 album of the same name. The simple guitar chord accompaniment complements the poignancy of the lyrics.
• My brother already doesn’t think I’m cool, sorry Julia.

The Pixies, Ana

• Again, I really enjoy the tonal instability here, as well as the counterpoint between the multi-tracked vocals and lead guitar.

Art Tatum, I Cover The Waterfront

• A version of the jazz standard (composed 1933), by one of the greatest jazz pianists, Art Tatum. Here, you can hear the influence of stride players like Fats Waller.

Photo credit – The Flying Burrito Brothers, Spotify

Feierlich, Misterioso

By Harry Laventure

Solemnly, mysterious etch the brackets into which we are hemmed in the opening sears of the first movement. Violins buzz with the tremors of dust disturbed in the prelude of a tempest’s caprice, and call the calling of sombre fanfare. Thus the brass asserts itself above the tremolo in forceful simplicity, and therein the inscribed syllables of loft find their reciprocal: the nod of a bull before the altar’s slaughter. Forgive the Classicist his unimaginative vices, but there is something of Homeric grandeur in this sonic landscape. The twin rumble of drums are hammers to the battlelines, and we are sealed in amidst the scattered promises and declarations of an uncanny hero’s ambition. Our tension is permitted a woodwind reverie of gasping brevity, a bouquet of memories before commencement. We hear what it is to soar in the vignettes of a past well spent, spliced with shots of remorse too thrifty. Then comes the surge, at the mercy of a rolling wave’s architecture: from the raging torrent swells some dark god – the conductor himself? – and with it the orchestra is electrified into a monument of raw majesty, blasting thunderous bolts of assault on the ear in ruthless succession. Paralysis of megalophobia, to coin a phrase. Under these auspices does Bruckner begin his theological wrestling match: the unfinished Symphony No.9 in D minor.

Some forty-five minutes earlier, I had disembarked at Newcastle station. Abiding thematic etiquette, the fragrance of a fashion show induced hangover had left me feeling penitent. Indeed, advancing on the refractive armadillo of The Glasshouse at Gateshead by afternoon sunlight, I mused that perhaps this was the only way to appreciate a work written on the composer’s death bed. Macabre remarks aside, I had never visited the International Centre for Music; I was quite shocked to find such a titanic figure perched like an enormous silver hippopotamus enjoying a river tipple. Changing its name from The Sage in 2022, the £70,000,000 project was built in 2004, and houses a small rehearsal and performance space, a 450-seater, and a 1,700-capacity auditorium. The latter of these formed the arena for the afternoon’s concert – the third day of The Glasshouse’s Big Bruckner Weekend in celebration of his 200^thbirthday. 

A true centurion of the concert hall, my grandfather had attended all three days, witnessing the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s take on Bruckner’s 7^th (“quirky”), the Hallé’s portrayal of his 8^th (“breathtaking”), and the Royal Northern Sinfonia’s performance of his ‘Great’Mass No.3 (“quite staggeringly beautiful”), to name the party pieces. Whilst we enjoyed a sobering glass of elderflower, I surveyed the belly of this beast to the soundtrack of three of Bruckner’s motets, live. Bar the occasional jolt of ground coffee belted from its chamber, a reverential silence cascaded upon the open-plan café and restaurant as we were serenaded by the Royal Northern Sinfonia’s chorus. The acoustics cradled the gentle cadences of these chapel-sized blooms, and the delicate parhelia of technicolour lights above provided fitting aesthetic symmetry. It was moving in a soft way, and quite unlike the rip-roaring blasts of the symphony to come. A composer of measure, I chortled to myself. 

On 4^th September 1824, Anton Bruckner was born intothe Grimmly named Ansfelden, Linz-Land. A variation on a fairy-tale theme, he was the eldest of 11 childrenand the son of the village schoolmaster. Though the family’s poverty rendered a solely musical career untenable, his early years ran parallel to the lines of the stave – lessons in violin and the organ from his father set the tone for the man who would come to be known for his meticulous, obsessively-calibrated scores. Prior to this symphonic success, he trained as a schoolteacher, returning from positions at Windhaag and Kronstorf to the monastery where he had once played chorister: St. Florian’s. 1855 saw him grace the organ-pipes of Linz Cathedral, before spending the best part of a decade studying under Simon Sechter and Otto Kitzler. The latter of these two pedagogues would introduce Bruckner to his most profound musical influence and champion in Richard Wagner. By 1868, Bruckner had secured the position in the Viennese Conservatory previously held by Sechter, and had become court organist for Emperor Franz Joseph I. Then, and only then, could he turn his hands to composition. 

Many biographers have gone to great lengths to demonstrate the peculiarities of this “late blooming”. Aged 38, Bruckner had already outlived Mozart and Mendelssohn’s entire careers before he put quill to stave– I daresay you can hear it. This procrastinated musical puberty meant a very choppy few years for the Austrian. His organ playing was unquestionably gifted, but his composition was the subject of frequent and vehement ridicule. Brahms would lambast his work as a toggle of‘symphonic boa-constrictors’, referring to the man himself as a drunkard and a ‘bumpkin’. Indeed, though Wagner considered him the finest symphonist since Beethoven, Bruckner’s 1877 premiere of the 3^rdsymphony was such a catastrophe that most of his audience left before it had finished. As a man of perpetual low self-confidence and revision, he would go so far as to beg the emperor to prohibit the draconian critic Eduard Hanslick from writing about him. It was only twelve years before his death, upon the opening performance of his Symphony No.7 in E Major in Leipzig, that Bruckner would receive due applause for his work. The final nine years of his life would see him metronomically sway between grave illness and the attempted completion of his most grandiose aspirations yet in his Symphony No.9.

Feierlich, Misterioso. The existential sobriety of a pious man’s last musical musings is indeed enveloped in enigma. Even the famous dedication Dem Leiben Gott (To the Good Lord) is a matter of dispute, with some suggesting Bruckner’s doctor Richard Heller fabricated it. Quoted or not, it goes some way to connote the scale of this biblically infused colossus. Numerous writers (the present not exempt) have resorted to hyperbole to articulate the majestic physicality of the work. Graf would compare Bruckner to a medieval architect before a Gothic cathedral. The Glasshouse’s website calls him ‘musical marmite’, with the tagline ‘Bold. Brassy. More peaks than the highlands’. Perhaps Douglas Kennedy’s Leaving the World puts it best: ‘the search for the divine amidst the whirligig of the quotidian; the notion that there are large, ethereal forces at work in the universe’.Between belches of dissonance and swooning passages of beauty, the composer’s behemoth embraces every kaleidoscopic slide of life as the man in fever clings to the bedsheets with atavistic desperation. 

And so, it fell to the Scottish Symphony Orchestra to inflate this piece to popping point. I took my seat, awkwardly parcelled the programme below my chair, and performed the stand-up stand-down routine as last-minuters scuttled past me. Settled, the doors locked us in. The young iridule Alpesh Chauhan strutted as a gladiator to his conductor’s perch. Thus, the ring completes. I have gone to some lengths to describe the scintillating opening of the first movement, triumphant and commanding with phrases of delicacy. In many ways, this is a fitting synecdoche for the whole chapter. There are groans of elephantine proportion, and cadences like the exhalation of a dandelion on a clement gust. Rapid, tumbling passages expel us from paradise, before peacefully curious, dainty perambulations hold our hands with glee. The movement finishes as it started, as a towering pillar that confronts even the casual listener: the aggressive finger of accusation to the heavens seen in a high church spire. The Scherzo of the second movement is crashing and dynamic, tying us to the back of a chariot that drags us through wastelands by night, by way of Bruckner’s own katabasis. Bewegt, Lebhaft. Emotional and lively, it attacks the ear with vermiculite aggression, and wouldn’t be out of place replacing Williams’ famous Imperial March. Finally, the Adagio is Bruckner’s ‘farewell to life’. If the battle has been lost and won, the bittersweet third movement is reflective and elegiac, at once a lament and a celebration of achievement and decay. Langsam, Feierlich. We start as we begin, but emerge changed utterly: solemnly, but slowly. Mystery gives way to clarity and consideration, but the conclusions are of magnificent scale and effect. Unsurprisingly, there is Wagnerian climax in the spine-tingling ‘cathedral of sound’, and we are left in the cosy fallout of a truly nuclear finale. If this sounds excessive, it is. The SSO were sublime, and Flora Willson’s review was absolutely right to praise Chauhan as a charismatic and balletic conductor, at once channeling the energy of this almighty work and bridling the tension necessary to execute it. I think I heard more than one exasperated “blimey” as I walked out, bereft. 

Given this sense of closure, it is perhaps even more bizarre to consider that this was not the intended ending. As Bruckner passed on to meet his maker, the fourth movement remained unfinished. His doctor Heller claimed that ‘he had drawn up a contract with his ‘dear Lord’’ – I wonder if it was fulfilled thus. Many have edited, revised, and ornamented the final movement in vain attempts to give the piece its full glory. But to my mind, performing it as is feels overwhelming enough, only just balanced. For all his division and derision, a word that doesn’t come up enough when discussing Bruckner is poise. Whether he pushes or pulls us, toys with our expectations or fulfils them, there is an innate sense of pacing that maturely pulses throughout – a sign of his age, possibly.

Bruckner’s reception through the years has been unorthodox to say the least. His influence is hard to express, but tangible. Occupying a liminal space between Wagner and Mahler, it is unsurprising that cinematic parallels are often drawn in the epic scale of his symphonies. This occurs in translation and paraphrase: as Bergman adopted the Scherzo of Symphony No.9 in Saraband, there is certainly more than a smattering of the Jaws bass in the opening minutes of the Adagio. Some have even suggested an impression on contemporary music: take to minute 3.05 of the 2005 Munchner Philharmoniker/Christian ThielemannSymphony No.5 in B flat Major, and try not to detect The White Stripes’ painfully omnipresent Seven Nation Army riff. 

Influence aside, Bruckner has been the victim of more than one biographical embellishment or rumour through the years. We have already seen the potential tampering of his doctor, Richard Heller, in the alterations to his final work. Morbid oddities are a weed-like motif throughout his other biographies. The mammoth ninevolume work of Auer and Göllerich (1922-37) mentions a compulsion to count, claiming Bruckner was addicted to numbering everything from windows, to steps, to the bars of his scores. We are also told of nine documented proposals to women much younger than him (all rejected), and a page in his notebook reserved for those whom he had taken a fancy to. He allegedly planned his funeral with fastidious acumen, and cherished a picture of his mother on her death bed. Once more, Butt names testimonies that Bruckner had ‘fingered and kissed the skulls of Beethoven and Schubert’. There is no denying that Bruckner was a most peculiar man. 

And yet, as with all lives of the artists, we must be on our guard to writers’ attempts to make the private moments of great creators and pioneers live up to the scale of their outward inventiveness. In many ways, we probably ought to be thankful for these attention stunts: in the 1927 printing of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Anton Bruckner receives no more than a singular paragraph, deemed too redolent of Wagner for due time and effort. We are on the correct trajectory to rectify this misdemeanour. Although we may never know the man, the panegyrics of our eyes will always harmonise with his work. The Glasshouse’s Big Bruckner Weekend did a stupendous job of facilitating that. The exhibition Bruckner, the Pious Revolutionary at the Austrian National Library’s State Hall will hopefully amplify awareness further. Only time will tell whether we are capable of more perseverant praise than sitting up and listening at a landmark like his 200^thbirthday. To plagiarise a toast, perhaps Ludwig Speidel put it best: ‘it is no common mortal who speaks to us in this music’. For all his solemnity and mystery, let us tip our hats Bruckner’s way.

By Zoe Worth

“A society suddenly saw what was intolerable in it and also saw the possibility for something else” (Gilles Deleuze)

“Birds fly, and far off” (Robert Grenier)

The events of May ’68 in Paris have been romanticised and permanently written into the national French consciousness. From memories of Marie Antoinette to the cultural and sexual upheaval of May 1968, rebellion has become an intrinsically French tradition. ’68, however, shatters the image of fruitless protest that many so often use to slate our European neighbours. May ’68 isn’t something that hums along in the evening news; it is something that has inspired an explosion in films, art, fashion and literature.  The anti-structuralist rebels were fatally sanguine; they treasured the art that was born in tumult. This reflected a longing for a dream world and a rejection of the messiness of the real world. There was a rush of existentialism; law was no longer relevant. And so the students took to the streets. Soon the structures would be dismantled and slightly later, the walls would blossom with scrawled slogans like ‘Althusser is useless.’ 

May ’68 is often seen today as glamorously bereft of any significance:“In contemporary French politics, it is “often derided as ‘nothing’ but in such a way as to confirm that it really was ‘something’, although no one is ever quite sure what”. Raymond Aron’s reflections on ‘La révolution introuvable’ encapsulates the oblique sublimity of the events. The title translates to ‘The Nowhere-to-Be-Found Revolution’. Somewhat paradoxical, of course, since revolutions burn with a rebellious spirit and swarm the streets. They become the defining characteristic of the time. So why is it that a revolution that seemingly represented the dreams of an entire society, still cannot be found? Was it that an entire society was asleep? In a reluctant amnesia that negated reality, intoxicated with the spirit of rebellion yet slumbering, ’68 was as much a spiritual, philosophical, and sexual revolt as it was political. Some call it unapologetically ‘postmodern,’ shattering sacrosanct establishments and bringing a new sort of self-awareness. It brought stylistically subversive forms of rebellion. Often witty, ludicrous, and poetic; postmodernism was confrontational, it worked at the boundaries of taste. Elegant but also tongue-in-cheek, the contradictions were ceaseless. Politics was now art.

May ’68 was not a call for A Clockwork Orange- esque ‘lawlessness’ but rather an ’emancipatory politics’ charged with creative potential. Of course, May ’68 wasn’t only about dismantling laws … that wouldn’t exude such an allure. The elusive, opaque goals of the revolution were never really made clear. Were they pacifists crystallised in the Anti-Vietnam war sentiment? Were they existentialists? Were they there to simply speak? To be young? Their odyssey of self-determination was largely founded on an empty rhetoric, a rhetoric so impressionable that it was inherently irresolvable. Maybe this was precisely the point; it was a rhetoric that could transgress generations. The sixty-eighters tied themselves to certain dreams of being slightly radical. I think everyone can agree there is a lot of that today. I certainly can.

I came across a cool memoir by Suzanne Borde, who was a girl at the time of 68. She made herself a skirt “red—that only reached to here, and wrote along the bottom, in black marker, INDECENCY IS NOT IN THE CLOTHING BUT IN THE GAZE”. This is something I can only imagine seeing in a place like the Tate Modern in an exhibition on rebellious punk fashion or something like that. It recalls a Vivienne Westwood kind of swagger that you certainly wouldn’t encounter sauntering down the Bailey. Yes, even the stunning expressions of “It is forbidden to forbid” speak to us now, hardly resembling the empty clichés that you’d think at first glance. These slightly sickly, floral slogans such as “the tears of philistines are the nectar of the gods” aimed to encapsulate the fever of the time but also the thoughts of the people whose hearts were captured by 68. Many of the sixty-eighters had everything our consumerist society could ever want, what were they protesting for? It was more of a disillusionment with the unemotional, individualistic style which was invading society. The revolutionaries wanted to challenge the comfort of everyday Parisian life, everything that made it drag. So, May 68 urged people not to negotiate with their bosses- but rather to abolish them.

They had to find a way to express themselves inexpensively and wildly. So, ‘la beauté est dans la rue’ (the beauty is in the street). The most exposed, boundless stage for the exaltation of angst, the anarchic, the anti-system. There was this clash between the kids who would rebel against anything and the generations who believed everything reasonable, everything they cherished, was being shattered into pieces. They blossomed from breaking convention, being sexually liberated and ultimately being understood. Whether that was through the lyrics of bands like the Velvet Underground. Or the art of Andy Warhol that blended fascination and revulsion for consumerism and mass media. Strangely, it seemed like everything and anything was both a source and a constraint on freedom. And so, anything could be rebelled against, really. Conformists had to hide their faces.  

“Be realistic: Demand the impossible!” Uttering what it was they were protesting for, would crack the magnetic allure. This recalled Blanchot’s words: “By saying my own name, I am singing my own mourning song”. What could be more of a killjoy than taking to the streets with an unemotional manifesto for revolution? The death of the revolution would come the moment it was believed to be something serious. Not something that could be lost in the seductive spring Parisian fog. It was far more in line with the rockstar bohemianism to demand the ‘impossible’—whatever that could mean. This slogan, penned by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse crystallises the heady opulence of 68—the transgressive voyage to self-determination. Perhaps this is why it is remembered, nostalgically, as a ‘non-revolution’. Waving their metaphorical guns, the children of 68 exuded a very pretty but rather empty fatalism. Glamorous yes, but certainly of no major political consequence. They became “the masterpiece of their own being” while delighting in the painfully brief moment when the world was expansive. Surely, their commitment to the cause is memorable. Particularly, if we compare it to the apathy that you are often meet with today when the word ‘politics’ is uttered. We all know there was nothing reasonable, or realistic for that matter, about the demands of May 68. Yet, I still find them thrilling.

The Dreamers (2003) by Bernardo Bertolucci sublimely captures the political tempest of Paris ’68. “68 might seem to have been a moment so cataclysmically beautiful and tragic as to be unfilmable”. Yet, this film delicately encapsulates the beauty of rebellion. 

Matthew, a pacifist American exchange student, meets twins Theo and Isabelle at a protest. We first encounter Isabelle at the Cinémathéque Française, chained to the gates. Only we learn that the chains are not locked. Simmering with temptation, she is only playing at protest. We find imperfection. Two Parisian orchids, swirling in cigarette smoke, utterly infatuated with cinema, revolution, and youth. Never has dissidence looked so sexy. The gruesome rebellion trickles into a dreamy realm through which the ménage á trois obliviously drift. Their opulent, olive-walled, high-ceiling bohemian apartment forms a hothouse for the trio to play out their edgy desires. Soundtracked by the likes of Hendrix, Francoise Hardy and The Doors, Bertolucci conveys the moody but seductive restlessness of the Dreamers.  Yet, The Dreamers is undeniably beautiful. The exhilarating scene where they race through the Louvre to the sparkling, whimsical New York Herald Tribune mirrors Godard’s Band of Outsiders, is visually stunning. They exist in this separate hazy realm- painted with the blissful innocence of youth, to quote Wordsworth: “To be young was very heaven” And much of 68 was about youth: the fatal sweetness of it. Cinema is treasured as the art of resurrection—far from being an escape from the world, it is an entry into it. Philosophy and literature are worshipped. Bertolucci works with the ripest, most sensual palette which tethers on the edge of anguish. The Dreamers play with dangerous intimacy, one that could be lit into flames at any moment. Their excessive desire and obsession with escapism paradoxically feel claustrophobic. The Dreamers eventually wake when a stone crashes through the window. This sort of fragility makes it even more mesmerising. Self-destruction was now seductively in vogue. Call it superficial, but there is something very electrifying about their endeavours for artistic renaissance. As they throw Molotov cocktails, the Dreamers delight in their mad desire for freedom in whatever form.

The whole world of social upheaval of May ’68 dreamed of tearing up the pages of de Gaulle’s France and with it, the institutions of monotony. The children of May ’68 were so overtly and knowingly romantic. Boredom still exists today, yes. But so does art and self-expression.  As do the modern-day romantics. As Jean-Luc Nancy contemplates: “the reason there is no possible legacy of ’68 is because ’68 never ended”. Therefore, when one comes to question whether such a thing as May ’68 exists, one can look at the children of ’68 who found redemption in revolution.

The Dreamers and children of ’68’s intense love for the evanescence of things and intense regret at their inevitable passing means that May ’68 remains a treasured little trinket from a far-off time—one where anything could mean anything. Yet its impact today seems impossible to strictly define. What happened when the dreamers flew from their bird’s nest? Does the obsession with rebellion remain or is it written off as starry-eyed absurdity? I think as an artistic and existential experiment there is much to admire. They had serious guts to imagine that, well, everything could be deconstructed. Its legacy insists in the youthful romanticism for positive societal change that brings people to protest, in whatever form that may be: l’esprit de rebellion. From this may flower a sea change for everything that seems so hopelessly permanent.

By Maisie Jennings

‘An endearing tale of sisterhood against the odds’ – this was my review of Julia Ducournau’s Raw, a French film about two sisters studying at a prestigious veterinary school, and their mutual gastronomic indulgence in human flesh. Irreverent Letterboxd witticisms aside, the film draws upon a fairly recent, radical tradition of subverting the horror genre through feminist iterations of body horror. 

In Raw, Justine is a naive first-year student, subjected by her older sister, Alexia, and her peers, to a humiliating and debauched hazing. Raised staunchly vegetarian, she’s drenched in animal blood and forced to eat raw rabbit kidney. Soon after, she develops an inflamed rash all over her abdomen; it’s a physical, Cronenbergian manifestation of her new compulsion for meat and flesh. Her transformation is terrifying, visceral, and located with her emerging sexuality. Justine’s cannibal interiority is gendered – she takes on masculine prerogatives of violence, animal bodily pleasure, a lack of inhibition, and sexual appetite. Ducournau addresses the feminist nature of Justine’s cannibalism as ‘a punk gesture against this patriarchy’; this is particularly resonant in Justine’s first taste of human flesh, which arises from a bikini wax gone horrifically awry, resulting in Justine heartily gobbling her sister’s severed finger. It’s a startling reiteration of girlhood. The body horror of the film – its teeth, blood, viscera – is a corporealisation of feminist resistance. 

The body, or biological horror genre is concerned with transforming the human form through grotesque violations of the body. Often, in mainstream slasher films and horror cinema, female bodies function as the site for such mutilations – as a locus of fear and pain. There are long, gratuitous shots of women in peril, sexualised acts of violence, the penetrating blade of a male killer. Body horror, with its emphasis on the consciousness of terror, is able to respond to the treatment of female bodies and pain. 

One of the very earliest instances of this occurs in David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome. The film begins with scenes of graphic sadomasochism and torture, as the protagonist, Max Renn, discovers ‘Videodrome’ – a broadcast of snuff films we would now associate with dark corners of the internet. Max, a sensationalist network director, believes he has found the illicit ‘high art’ for his channel to distribute. In reality, the broadcast causes malignant brain tumours and hallucinations in the viewer, causing a maddening addiction to its sexually violent content. As ‘Videodrome’ distorts Max’s grip on reality, he develops a vaginal opening in his abdomen in which hallucinatory tapes are forced inside. Cronenberg is depicting the way we internalise content literally, through a technological wounding of the body; the way pornography is consumed is likened to the slow, insidious progression of cancer. However, in giving Max this exposed vaginal wound, Cronenberg is also turning the sexualised gaze of the camera away from the initial BDSM snuff videos and towards the pornographer himself. Max becomes vulnerable to penetration; he becomes the subject of violence and terror. Cronenberg’s body horror challenges the exploitation flicks Videodrome is in dialogue with – he is self-reflexively commenting on porn, B-movie horror, and our easy consumption of violence against women. 

In inverting the traditional subjugation of the female body, Cronenberg’s influence on subverting the location of pain in cinema through a feminine transformation pervades an assortment of arthouse and mainstream horror. Returning to the emergence of female sexuality explored by Raw, the preeminent site of grotesque feminine transformation is puberty. This is perhaps an obvious focal point; I think, since the first film adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie in 1976, there could be an entire subgenre of ‘menstrual horror’. The purported mystery and shamefulness of female adolescence is hyperbolised through monstrous encounters with PMS-induced bloodlust. It’s a trope with the potential to be both incredibly demeaning, and remarkably feminist. The difference, I believe, can be negotiated through explicit emphasis on the duality of the female body as an object of subjugation for its assumed weakness, as well as for its perceived threat. This is how body horror can be used as a process of ‘othering’ to identify and explore female bodily experiences and psychological landscapes. 

Films like Ginger Snaps (2000) and Jennifer’s Body (2009), straddling the genres of supernatural body horror and young adult coming-of-age, inaugurate a playful, yet distinctly feminist reimagining of the terrifying metamorphosis of a teenage girl. Both films also centre the importance of female friendships and sisterhood, and, arguably, entail queer interpretation and analysis. They stand as unlikely predecessors of Raw, a film so graphic it caused some viewers to faint at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, crucially, however, they demonstrate the broad spectrum of feminist cinema body horror is able to engage with. It is a genre that is as much transformative and shifting in its content, as it is in its nature. 

By Jack Fry

In Maggie Nelson’s musings of prose poetry on the colour blue, ’Bluets’, she references Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it. ‘Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many coloured lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus,’ wrote Emerson.” 

In 2019, I wandered around the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. Whilst moving through the chronology of Picasso’s work, I came across his blue period and was at that moment moved inexplicably. I gazed wide-eyed, drinking in their hues, saturating my eyes. These paintings are distinct from the rest of his work because they are bathed in the light of the blue hour, that time just after the sun has set that casts the world underwater. Picasso painted using an intense Prussian blue pigment at a time of inner turmoil, and I, like Picasso at that moment, was contained in a bead blown of Prussian blue glass. 

“Does the world look bluer from blue eyes? Probably not but I choose to think so (self-aggrandisement).” 

 Maggie Nelson, Bluets.

In 1953, ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ was not in a dissimilar emotional state to Picasso. In a career slump and deserted by his wife Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra, attempted suicide in his bath. From this period of melancholy came what I and many believe to be Sinatra’s masterwork, “In the Wee Small Hours.” On the album cover, he leans against a street lamp in the gloom; he could almost exist among the forlorn and downtrodden characters of Picasso’s Blue period. “In the Wee Small Hours” is arguably the first concept album of all time. The development of the long-form vinyl prompted artists to consider the LP’s potential as a new format less restricted by timings – an opportunity for a cohesive artistic statement beyond just singles. So Frank began his remarkable run at Capitol with this brooding album of takes from the American songbook contemplating themes of lonesomeness, lost love and late-night ruminations. This quote from Bluets seems like the thesis statement of the album: 

“I don’t want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid any “blueness.” Above all, I want to stop missing you.”

Maggie Nelson

The motifs of the album permeate the orchestration with string arrangements rising and falling elegantly like the hazy smoke from a cigarette, and the percussion section sounding like those first stars to puncture the night sky. The languorous tempos sustained throughout the tracklist slow reality, building a kind of noirish reverie. 

‘I dim all the lights and I sink in my chair

The smoke from my cigarette climbs through the air

The walls of my room fade away in the blue

And I’m deep in a dream of you

My cigarette burns me, I wake with a start

My hand isn’t hurt, but there’s pain in my heart

Awake or asleep, every memory I’ll keep

Deep in a dream of you’ 

Deep in a Dream

Sinatra’s voice’s unique quality lies in his phrasing, and his ability to inhabit a mood, to convey emotion. On this album his vocal delivery is as if he were drunkenly confiding in the bartender, the tenderness in his vibrato amounts almost to a trembling lip. Adam Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker, “He sounds the way you would sound if you could speak the things you feel.”

This album gave me new insight into Sinatra, beyond the facade of bravado. Beneath the glamour and swagger, there was a sensitivity and a fatalism.

“’Cause there’s nobody who cares about me

I’m just a soul who’s bluer than blue can be

When I get that mood indigo

I could lay me down and die”

Mood Indigo 

Musicians often report visions of colour (or strong associations with colours) when listening to a song or note. I don’t believe that I have synaesthesia, this neurological condition where one sense merges with another. However, in listening to Sinatra, reading Nelson, and observing the work of Picasso, l noticed an interconnecting thread, all pieces of fabric sewn together on the same patchwork quilt. It was as if all three artists were telepathically in sync, as though they were seeing through the very same blue eyes, inhabiting the same Prussian blue bead. It felt meaningful yet hard to articulate.

An article in the New York Times on the colour blue referenced the painter Raoul Dufy’s fascination with blue and its “optical purity” saying that “blue unlike other colours can be brightened or dimmed, the artist said, and “it will always stay blue.” To me, this connects to these blue-related works. Nelson, Picasso and Sinatra convey an essence of human emotion, a distilled heartache and longing. The works resonate powerfully because they have an intensity that cannot be muted, it’s elemental like the blues of the sea and sky.

In writing this piece, I tried to refrain from discussing the tortured artist trope or romanticising depression as a necessary quality for creativity. Many creators are defined by this cliché and their famous bouts of depression as if they have a one-dimensional personality and are only capable of feeling sadness. It should be noted that these artists all went on to create work that revels in the “lighter” side of human experience, they found new ways of seeing, changed the colour of their iris and entered differently coloured beads. This is not to dismiss these darker works’ significance or emotional vibrancy but to only see blue is to neglect the beauty of any other colours. So as Nelson writes,

“And now, I think, we can say: a glass bead may flush the world with colour, but it alone makes no necklace. I wanted the necklace.”

In ‘Bluets’ Nelson quotes Wittgenstein’s remark, “If only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost.” 

I have tried to utter the unutterable and I have not in my writing communicated what I felt experiencing their art, but perhaps you will find that lost quality and purity of emotion and feel it too if you seek out these works, adding a bead to your necklace.

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

Tattoos drawn on with eyeliner borrowed from the girlfriend in the Coppola-style Marie Antoinette costume. A fitted white t-shirt. Greased hair that looks like an effortless “F you, world” to what other people would call showering before work, but really took 45 minutes and a fine-tooth comb to perfect. Carmen “Carmy” Berzattos were en masse last Halloween. “Yes Chef!” has become a dog-whistle amongst those who want to signal to others that they too have watched the hit, Grammy- winning TV show, The  Bear. Yet, this phenomenon is not down to one TV show, this is a legacy finally taking hold. Chefs are cool thanks to Anthony Bourdain.

Bursting onto the scene in the 90s, Bourdain’s New Yorker article Don’t Read This Before Eating, which later became the basis of the remarkably cool Kitchen Confidential, took the lid off from this edgy underground hidden in plain sight. The Escoffier notions of overly gastronomic, mustache twisting chefs have since been fleeting; chefs are cool people, who just happen to like good food. When Bourdain criticises people who order well-done steaks it feels like an in-joke, stove-top banter, not the scathing judgment of some worn out Cordon Bleu alumni. His writing, his intensity, both in print and on screen, strikes us as simply friendly, never passing judgment, at least not too severely. 

​Bourdain scoffs “who cares” when told his Georgian dumplings “aren’t very sophisticated”; if the food is good the food is good, no two ways, two stars about it. “I eat a lot of shit”, remarks Bourdain about filming Parts Unknown, for Bourdain the food was glue holding his show, and career, together. We eat to explore, and each meal tells a story about an area. Fresh out the fryer, scotch eggs arrive, yoke dripping down the chin to escape a greedy end, a pub that feels like the smoking ban never came into place – why do we eat here? And why does it taste so good here? The bún chả eaten in a front room restaurant in Hanoi with Obama, the overly truffled animal rights nightmare of a meal eaten in Montreal, all receive equal praise. 

Unlike Obama, Bourdain refuses to travel with cars and escorts that equate to the protection of a US backed and built nuclear bomb shelter; he slips in and does as the Romans do, even if that means crashing a Shanghai wedding to experience Chinese drinking culture in full force. Everyone in Vietnam, President or not, eats off plastic stools on the pavement, no reservations, no table service – just something steaming and delicious with a cold beer. There is no brashness. No guidebook. No Michelin guide. Just people eating a meal and being human. Bourdain wants Americans to have passports and to use them, and what better way to persuade people to get to know a stranger in a strange land than through our voracious need for the delicious. Food is shown to be an experience, a political moment, a zeitgeist of the area. “The smell: that’s the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul”, quotes Bourdain as he introduces us to Hanoi. The smell of incense pours from every size temple, a split keg from last night’s bia hơi leaves a tang within these notes, humidity colours the streetside with impossibly green plants that sweat against the fumes of thousands of mopeds, against these endlessly moving bikes aunties and workmen sit alike letting their lotus tea and thick, treacly coffee steam into the air, sizzling herbs and simmering pots of a bone broth left to bubble up the smell of something amazing and only to be slurped down in an almost religious trance, gulping to savour this fleeting flavour forever, the smell of life everywhere.

For his American audience this is monumental. This is Vietnam without the war. This is a place at ease, a place that in so many ways is like theirs – if only they took the time to join the flow of thousands of Vietnamese people on the streets of Hanoi, to throw away their ideas of what dining should be, to sit on a plastic stool and enjoy the experience that we call eating. This is Bourdain’s rock-star in a chef’s hat legacy on travel; leave your expectations behind and get ready to experience the chaotic, friendly, altering reality of immersion. Whatever the local delicacy is, there is a care to show it at its most organic state, be that be on a boat on the Congo, or in a pub with Nigella. All food is good, why be pretentious about eating a Jollibee ‘jolly spaghetti’ or eating freshly hunted game from A.A Gill’s estate if that’s what you’re meant to do to have a good time?  

That is what essentially being a chef comes down to, ensuring people have a good time from whatever you can provide for them in the under 30 minutes wait time it takes to pan fry fresh trout, reduce a jus, and shout at your KP for being a slow ‘mal carne’. Bourdain exposed us to real eating, real kitchens, real people. Food is not aspex coated truffles from some unpronounceable 20km radius of Tuscany, it’s where people flock to have a good time over. Kitchens are not in fact military operations, but made of people who know what people like, and have a good time doing it. Revisiting his first experience in a kitchen in Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain introduces us to a Down and Out reminiscent Orwellian underworld, although this time with slightly better worker’s rights; temperatures are high, and temperaments are higher. The air is perfumed with seafood, garlic, and hints of cigarette smoke. Knives flash and pans blaze. Someone’s speaker is swelling with old school rock as another FOH gets bollocked for not being able to operate within this mystic backroom. Grill chefs show off their newly formed scars as the KP’s hands break out in soapy soars. The EPOS machine whirrs. Baptisms happen over the pastry station as a rookie earns his stripes in this misfit’s lair. These characters may be loud, mean, and sometimes dangerous, yet they know how to transform a place of relentless 12 hour  work days into a community. Food isn’t a chef’s armoury, it’s they’re ability to understand people, in and out the kitchen. Walking into my first day as a chef 8 months ago, I realised this. We may have been working through a heatwave in a poorly ventilated kitchen with 6 tickets racked up and waiting, but I was welcome and cared for in a way like no other. I adopted the name ‘chef’ and joined. 

Carmy No.4 of the party is starting to waiver. He trudges up to the bathroom, wobbling against every instinct telling him to lie down and not summit that treacherous peak of the staircase. He may have whacked a pizza in the oven for dinner and hasn’t cooked something that would take longer than 15 minutes to prepare in months, but he knows he loves food. He knows The Bear was a good show for more than just it’s writing and Jermey Allen White, he felt tension like no other watching Boiling Point, and when Thomas Straker’s homemade butter or WhatWillyCook’s loaded breakfast crumpets videos appear on his for you page, he never scrolls past. Even being one of many counterfeit Carmies has given him a taste of that chef community, the chef respectability advertised to him. Bob Ross passes him with a “Behind, chef.” as Carmy No.4 rolls a cigarette and prepares to enter the rabble once again. Eating is cool. Being a chef – cooler. 

by Maggie Baring

In 1939, red-headed 28-year-old Viola Hogg embarked on a yearlong tour of Australia and New Zealand with the Australian Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company, where she played the principal roles for many of their famous operettas, including Josephine in HMS Pinafore, and Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance. It was during her tour of Australia that she met her husband, Frank Tait, who was one of the Tait brothers who contributed significantly to the prosperity of C.J. Williamson’s, an Australian theatrical management company. Viola’s involvement in opera, in particular the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, led to her membership of the order of Australia, the writing of two books, and a lifelong commitment to the arts in general; helping to establish the Performing Arts Museum in Melbourne and serving for a short time as artistic director of the Williamson Company. 

This inspirational woman, who died in 2002 — the year before I was born – is my great-grandmother, and has been a personal inspiration to me in my artistic endeavours. When Durham Opera Society, therefore, began opening positions for Assistant Director for their upcoming operetta, HMS Pinafore, I jumped at the chance to continue her legacy in some form, and to contribute to the revitalisation of opera for audiences who have, since the mid 1940s, increasingly lost interest. 

Audiences often see opera as an elite form of performance, with inaccessible lyrics (often in a different language), expensive tickets and formal dress requirements. One of DOE’s (Durham Opera Ensemble) aims with our production this term, which will be staged in early March (29^th February-2^nd March), is to debunk these elitist tropes; encouraging informal attire and offering tickets at affordable prices. Gilbert and Sullivan operas are the perfect performances to stage in order to raise the appeal of opera for modern audiences and the younger generation. Pinafore is written in English, containing moments of comedy and satire, whilst the songs themselves are memorable and highly energetic. Recognisable songs and lyrical phrases such as ‘He Is An English Man’ and ‘Sisters, Cousins and Aunts’ will remain stuck in audiences’ heads after the production, if they weren’t already ingrained there from the sheer fame of these iconic scores. The potential for slapstick and pantomime in Gilbert and Sullivan are also endless and deeply exciting for a director. 

DOE’s attempt to appeal to families with young children is a part of the company’s vision of inspiring a love for opera in young hearts that has perhaps been lost in the modern era. DOE has allocated a specific performance (the Saturday Matinee) and are also encouraging informal attire when attending the production. It is unfortunate that often, when one asks their friends if they have seen an opera, the reply is often that they have never been due to expense, a lack of interest or an inference that it only appeals to an older generation. The rare occasion one has been, it is often because one of their grandparents forced them.

But Opera does not have to be such an intense, formal and confusing experience. When I first watched a Gilbert and Sullivan production, I was struck by its similarity to musical theatre (the same caricatured cast, vibrant and recognisable songs, simple storyline), and its sense of fun and informality. Furthermore, if one looks for more than just entertainment in their viewing-choices, Gilbert and Sullivan, and HMS Pinafore in particular, also includes some topical debates and political satire about the role of class in society. 

Tickets for the production are already on sale on the DOE website, and I thoroughly recommend a visit. Only a few weeks into intense rehearsals, and the show is shaping up nicely, with a dedicated cast and passionate creative team. The performances will be held at the Assembly Rooms Theatre in week 18.

By Edward Bayliss

Our current season has so often been relied upon in cinema to accelerate some kind of dramatic effect. Importantly, winter hosts the world’s favourite event in the Christian calendar. Think of charity, love, and compassion, along with accentuated feelings of security and warmth; that is, if you have God and triple glazed windows. Just as easily, winter can be a hellishly frigid wasteland, and if that’s not bad enough, you might find yourself on a Norwegian glacier with Nazi zombies chasing after you (Dead Snow). There is such a thing as winter without Christmas.  

Nevertheless, winter cinema isn’t always just a godless freeze, nor is it as simple as warm candles casting long shadows across tastefully decorated drawing rooms. Let’s leave this binary to thaw into a messy puddle and look at two films that toy brilliantly with the season of snow.

Director Michael Dougherty wages war with Christmas – the American Christmas – in his 2015 film, Krampus. The slow motion opening credits show a shopping mall opening to hordes of frenzied shoppers, each looking to get their hands on last minute presents for the festive season. Shots of credit cards, cash, plastic, sickly greens, reds, and golds all drip like syrup before the camera. In this ‘monster of melodrama’, fantastically choreographed fights break out between rival shoppers – even the most grotesque scenes can become beautiful if seen in slow motion. As this plays out, we hear the tinny tune of ‘It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas’. It might look like Christmas, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas. 

And this is what Krampus does so well. It treads a careful path between the horrific and the familiar, the fantastical and the realities of family dysfunction. The eponymous character originates from Austro-Bavarian folklore, and punishes badly behaved children, almost like an anti-Santa. He absolutely brings with him a menace that will frighten younger audiences, including my 12 year old self upon first viewing. But on rewatching it now what seems especially unnerving to me is the subcurrent of uneasiness on which the film awkwardly floats. The constant darkness of winter, the disorientating use of animation, and the apparent question of dream and reality at the end of the film all threaten our sense of truth and fiction. Beneath the clotting accessories and circumstance of Christmas which Krampus so knowingly flaunts, there are mounting feelings of disillusionment on the part of the audience. 

Gasper Noé uses winter sparingly in Climax (2018). For the director, the colour of winter is unmistakably white, with its clinical and undistracting exactness. The notion of mise-en-scène is almost entirely buried under a reliably indifferent blanket of snow. It is in these couple of snow scenes that the camera comes back to its sober sided self, and watches overhead as the story’s fallout unfolds. 

Climax is set almost entirely in a remote empty school building in France, 1996. A dance troupe host celebrations as their rehearsals come to a close, though, unbeknownst to them, their sangria is laced with LSD. Noé takes us on a trip quite unlike any other I’ve seen in cinema. It is exhaustingly colourful, even kaleidoscopic, as the camera becomes entranced (the ‘master shot’ in this episode lasts a staggering 42 minutes). Sweaty and claustrophobic, the school rooms and corridors become a labyrinth with dark corners for even darker deeds.

Like a splash of water to the face, we gasp as we escape the school and are met with a bright shock of snow which brings with it a crisp clarity, both in terms of actual visuals and narrative understanding. Noé places a crawling body in frame against the blank canvas snow, presenting an arresting point of comparison between the stuffy slants of light and shadow in the school complex and the ‘freeing’ embrace of the ice cold winter. 

When you picture winter in cinema, you might think of snow blizzards so bad they look like TV static, honey tongued dialogues between repulsive characters, and the same old love stories over and over again. But let’s not meet this season’s cinema with a sigh.  

Here are a few other films that do interesting things with winter:

Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen)

The Shining (Kubrick)

Snowpiercer (Bong Joon Ho)

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Kaufman)

The Thing (Carpenter)

Cool Runnings (Turteltaub)

Groundhog Day (Ramis)

The Hateful Eight (Tarantino)