phillip french on the lady vanishes

The screenwriters, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, both much influenced by Hitchcock, had radically reworked the plot and the characters and most significantly had invented the insouciant cricket-loving Englishmen, Charters and Caldicott. As played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, they were to become the greatest comic duo ever created in the British cinema, national archetypes that stamped themselves on several generations of moviegoers. The role played by Wilfred Hyde-White in The Third Man was originally written by Graham Greene for Radford and Wayne, and they were much admired by Harold Pinter. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/jul/24/my-favourite-hitchcock-lady-vanishes

dear roland, tan frances

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me. ― The Pleasure of the Text

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The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself). ― The Pleasure of the Text

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All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.

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Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order.

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Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre.

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Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed. ― The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France

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I am either lacerated or ill at ease
and occasionally subject to gusts of life ― Mourning Diary

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Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die. ― Writing Degree Zero

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virginia's flights of fancy

Woolf also wrote about life in London that in the "street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime". From these overheard conversations, she suggested, it was possible to "penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others".

secret gift of reading 2

The act of reading is always an act of infidelity.

secret gifts of reading

Those periods in life when you can't find the energy, time or headspace to read books are tiring. The act of engaging with another mind over a number of pages is strangely calming. To be denied that means one flounders around in one's own mind, dealing with nothing but one's own thoughts. And this is tiring.

Guzmán y su mochilla

"Each of us carries a backpack on our shoulders; this bag cannot be removed. One carries it one's whole life. In this bag one carries a lot of important things. For example: the memory of your mother, your birthplace, the first day at high school, your first love, your first lovesickness. All this is never forgotten.

"That is the true homeland – somewhere you live during the first 20 years of your life – and that accompanies you until death. It is not necessary to be in a particular country to feel Chilean, Peruvian and Argentinian. One's homeland is carried in the depths of one's heart."

Patricio Guzmán

URUGUAY 1924-30 - courtesy Jonathan Wilson @ Guardian

URUGUAY 1924-30

1924 Olympic final Colombes, Paris

3-0 v Switzerland (Petrone, Cea, Romano)

Mazali; Nasazzi (c), Arispe; Andrade, Vidal, Ghierra; Urdinarán, Scarone, Petrone, Cea, Romano

1928 Olympic final Olympisch, Amsterdam

1-1 v Argentina (Petrone; Ferreyra)

Mazali; Nasazzi (c), Arispe; Andrade, Fernández, Gestido; Urdinarán, Castro, Petrone, Cea, Campolo

1928 Olympic final replay Olympisch, Amsterdam: 2-1 v Argentina (Figueroa, Scarone; Monti)

Mazali; Nasazzi (c), Arispe; Andrade, Piriz, Gestido; Arremon, Scarone, Borjas, Cea, Figueroa

1930 World Cup final Centenario, Montevideo: 4-2 v Argentina (Dorado, Cea, Iriarte, Castro; Peucelle, Stabile)

Ballestero; Mascheroni, Nasazzi (c); Andrade, Fernández, Gestido; Dorado, Scarone, Castro, Cea, Iriarte

Uruguay's success at the Paris Olympics is one of the great romantic tales. This was, first and foremost, a team of workers, including, among other professions, a meat-packer, a marble-cutter, a grocer and an ice salesman. They travelled to Europe in steerage and played to pay for their board, winning nine friendlies in Spain before they even reached France. Uruguay were the first Latin American side to tour Europe, but they attracted little attention – at least initially – only around 2,000 turning up to watch them eviscerate Yugoslavia 7-0 in their opening game in the Olympics.

Word soon got around. "Game after game," the poet Eduardo Galeano wrote, "the crowd jostled to see those men, slippery as squirrels, who played chess with a ball. The English squad had perfected the long pass and the high ball but these disinherited children from far-off America didn't walk in their father's footsteps. They chose to invent a game of close passes directly to the foot, with lightning changes in rhythm and high-speed dribbling."

In four games they scored 17 goals and conceded just two in their four matches, beating a Switzerland side co-managed by the remarkable trio of Jimmy Hogan, Teddy Duckworth and Dori Kurschner 3-0 in the final. Uruguay, wrote Gabriel Hanot, the editor of L'Equipe, showed "marvellous virtuosity in receiving the ball, controlling it and using it. They created a beautiful football, elegant but at the same time varied, rapid, powerful and effective". And British football? "It is like comparing Arab thoroughbreds to farm horses."

Argentina, who hadn't travelled to France, were furious and, on Uruguay's return, challenged them to a game, winning 3-2 on aggregate after crowd trouble curtailed the second leg in Buenos Aires. When they met in the finals of the 1928 Olympics and the 1940 World Cup, though, Uruguay emerged triumphant. "Argentina," wrote the great Italian journalist Gianni Brera, "play football with a lot of imagination and elegance, but technical superiority cannot compensate for the abandonment of tactics. Between the two Rioplatense national teams, the ants are the Uruguayans, the cicadas are the Argentinians."

on being asked whether the film is political or not

The process of a director's Q&A obeys certain rules.

It is a public event, in front of an audience. But it must be born in mind that the filmmaker is not an actor.

- The first rule is that the filmmaker has to defend and promote their film. (If there has ever been a Q&A where the filmmaker has chosen to slag their film off, this could be seen as breaking the rule.)
- Secondly, given that this is a public scenario there is a minor obligation to entertain. There is nothing worse than having enjoyed a film and then being bored by the director's words afterwards.
- Next, related to the above point, the director needs to be concise. Even the best of points can be subverted by verbosity. The filmmaker will have spent hundreds, even thousands of hours working on the process of making the film. This cannot be encapsulated within the framework of a Q&A session.
- Finally, the filmmaker's ego should not come through too overtly. The film will be no better or worse for anything the director subsequently says about it.

Given all of this, and the other rules which will exist but have not been noted, there are all kinds of pitfalls to be negotiated which may impede fluency, spontaneity or clarity at the point at which the microphone is handed over.

There are things that need to be said and things that don't need to be said. Maybe there's a technique for striking the balance and finding the right words.

The microphone is indeed handed over.

Avoiding all eye contact, the co-director starts to speak.

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shard liggers

In a seemingly improvised bar at the back of the BFI they're handing out free beers. The art crowd who have just been to see a screening of a film about an obscure art-saint-fool who was the Goons before they were the Goons and was Duchamp after he was Duchamp and like everything unusual and British has been stuck in a margin somewhere that now equates to this bar - This art crowd. A crowd who should be too cool for free beers but isn't. Creating a surge at the bar which reaches its waveform peak within three minutes of the bar being open and then elides, fades aways, diminished until only the potted few, including us, return for the red wine which is all that now remains, the surge having washed the beer away. We prop up the bar and observe and discuss, as half-forgotten faces from London's demi-monde are remembered; as people talk with overstated enthusiasm about things that can't be heard from our vantage point. A film critic, one of the mavericks, appears. His film script has been eviscerated by a modern-day script guru. Who has told him that there needs to be three reasons for every shot. As though there are three reasons for every word. Or thought. Or tear. Perhaps there are, in the guru's world. There's so much Vivienne Westwood on display that the room collapses under its post-punk weight. People are fleeing. They're going to see the Shard lightshow. A transformative event. In the history of London. With three reasons for every laser. Later, after cheap Thai, we stand outside Waterloo and look up. A few half-hearted lasers are still ligging across the sky. As though searching out the last of the free beers.

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