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Bolton2010 PDF
Bolton2010 PDF
Page’ and ‘The Modern Age: London in Image’. Like any compendium
on the inexhaustible city, it contains some curiosities and good things. In
addition to the essays already mentioned, Roger Webster usefully
compares three adaptations of Conrad’s tale of London terrorism, The
Secret Agent, concluding that Hitchcock’s 1936 version, Sabotage,
although least faithful to the novel, actually comes closest to creating a
credible sense of imminent urban apocalypse while also retaining
Conrad’s vision of the fragmented ‘monstrous town’ in its spatial
arrangement. Martin Dines and Jeremy Reed both evoke the centrality of
the city to narratives of gay sexuality, the latter in terms of Derek Jarman’s
Soho. But perhaps most interesting of all is Sara de Freitas’s exploration
reviews
Screen Study Collection at Birkbeck
carries on the research begun as
heavily on the experience of the metropolis.
part of the AHRC ‘London Project’ Although there is no discernible end to the making of books about
<http://londonfilm.bbk.ac.uk/
London, cinematic London has been poorly served until recent years,
about/project/>; and the new
London Film Museum is developing
despite the emergence of new institutions focused on the city’s film
a range of displays about the history heritage.9 Indeed heritage has been the concern of what work has hitherto
of film personalities and production
been disseminated, much of it devoted to recording the vanished or the
in London <http://www.
themovieum.com/> [all accessed
disintegrating fabric of London’s entertainment empires.10 Now Brunsdon
25 June 2010]. and the various contributors to London Eyes have made a welcome start on
10 See, for instance, Allen Eyles’s
a new integration of the material with the cultural, not to mention the
books on Odeon cinemas, and other
publications from the Cinema
topographic and the psychic. But there are still many trajectories and
Theatre Association. genres remaining to be explored before the imagery of London is as fully
understood as its writing.
doi:10.1093/screen/hjq019
Sophie Mayer, The Cinema of Sally Potter: a Politics of Love (Directors Cuts).
New York, NY and London: Wallflower Press, 2009, 256 pp.
L U C Y B O LT O N
reviews
Gold Diggers ‘terribly alternative’, to her comments upon Potter’s
clothes, her laugh and her ‘enormous style’, the writing is generous, frank
and personal. Mayer’s confessional opening reveals the impact on her of
seeing Orlando (1992) as a teenager: ‘By opening my eyes to the idea that
all art forms could change the individual and society, Orlando became
part of a cavalcade of popular culture that altered my relationship with
power and hierarchy in all its forms: not only gender and sexuality, but
also nation, class and ethnicity’ (p. 3).
Mayer, like Fowler, stresses the nature of Potter’s filmmaking as
collaborative – with composers, artists and producers, but also with
viewers – and Mayer’s book is testament to that particular relationship.
Again picking up on the idea of non-verbal communication, Mayer draws
on the idea that Potter’s films develop ways of touching the viewer and
that her use of film form, such as the closeup and rhythmic editing,
enables the films to ‘reach out and affect our bodies’ (p. 6). Referring to
the work of Laura Marks on film phenomenology and haptic visuality,
1 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Mayer describes Potter’s films as becoming ‘events that have happened to
Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment and the Senses
us’ (p. 7).1 Thus Mayer describes the revolutionary nature of Rage in
(Durham, NC and London: Duke cinematic terms as a refashioning of film, but also by confessing that it
University Press, 2000), and Touch: ‘looks and feels like no other film I have ever seen’ (p. 10).
Sensuous Theory and Multisensory
Media (Minneapolis, MN:
Mayer alternates analysis of specific films with thematic chapters
University of Minnesota Press, (Working, Moving, Colouring, Listening, Feeling and Loving), aiming to
2002). create a framework of dialogue, bookended by chapters on ‘Becoming’,
2 Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923),
trans. Ronald Gregor Smith
parts 1 and 2. This notion of dialogue and respecting the other derives here
(Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1958). from Martin Buber’s I and Thou,2 a book Potter reads onscreen in The
3 Here Mayer cites Potter in women as lack (p. 31).3 The dissection of narrative in Thriller reveals that,
interview with Valentina Agostinis,
for Potter, ‘The case is not closed’ (p. 33); she sees beyond the analysis of
‘Interview with Sally Potter’,
Framework, no. 14 (1981), p. 47.
lack to the possibility of alternative ways of being.
Having the space to develop points of close textual analysis at greater
length than Fowler, Mayer considers Lola in the context of performance.
For Mayer, Lola is always performing – even during sex and at the
moment of death (p. 73), which may account for the nervousness
identified by Fowler. Mayer considers other performing females alongside
her, including the performance of female beauty by Jude Law as Minx in
Rage (p. 80). This focus on performance enables Mayer to discuss how
ideas are conveyed onscreen through cinematic means – colour, light,
costume, speech – across Potter’s films as evolving, connected and
circulating.
Similarly, the chapter on colour ranges from the monochrome
landscapes of The Gold Diggers, through Orlando’s sumptuous palette, to
the skin colours of the talking heads from Rage and the backgrounds
against which they are set. This approach draws out the significance of
colour in Potter’s work but also demonstrates how colour can be talked
about as a matter of substance. There is a circulation here of meaning
between filmmaker, writer and reader – as the colours in Potter’s films are
drawn together for discussion and thereby raised to a new status of
meaning for the reader who can in turn re-view the films with new eyes.
Mayer’s observations are suggestive, not definitive: blue, for example,
‘has something queer about it’ (p. 118).
reviews
intended circulation of meanings and ideas. On occasion, this approach can
feel rather disconnected, but it is neither scattergun nor whimsical – Mayer
cites the cinematic evidence to support her claims.
Unlike the motes described by Julie Christie, Mayer’s book does settle
into a cohesive whole. Fowler ends with a well-structured interview with
Potter and a comprehensive filmography, underlining this work’s
credentials as a solid place to start. But through Mayer’s unconventional
prose and provocative proposition a deeper appreciation of Potter’s work
can be attained.
doi:10.1093/screen/hjq018
CAT H E R I N E O ’ R AW E
The mammoth size of this book is all the more striking due to the fact that
it is, ultimately, a discussion of just three neorealist films, Roberto
Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946), and Vittorio De
Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). These films, which form the core of the
neorealist corpus, have been the subject of endless critical attention since
their release, and continue to attract new work of all sorts, both within and
1 See, in the anglophone context, outside Italy.1 Neorealist cinema has constituted for many years the
Mark Shiel, Italian Neorealism:
foundational story of Italian cinema, to which critics inevitably, and at