Orphée

That, if you guys are wondering, is a picture of cars streaking past Stamford House last night. I had actually been trying to capture a scene in the shop windows, of a group of people having a little wine party in a closed furniture shop, but my phone's camera isn't good enough for long-distance espionage. But it is good enough - surprisingly good, in fact - for any day-to-day photo-taking that you can imagine, and especially good for night shots. I think this journal will become pretty polluted with pictures soon, at least until the novelty wears out.

Went to watch Jean Cocteau's Orphée yesterday at the Museum with Joel and a group of HC Humanities chaps, and found the place festooned for a real bash. The building was wrapped in copious amounts of red, and even had those swiveling spotlights on the lawn that you usually only come across in "20th Century Fox" logos. Apparently, it was a HSBC event that had something to do with a women's golf tournament. It sure looked posh; and I guess it's something worthwhile for the Museum to host, since it does bring a real frission of life into the district.

As dignitaries and debutantes delighted themselves on champagne and tapas upstairs, we found ourselves in the basement Cinémathèque watching this film which is the first of a series of films portraying Greek mythology. I can't honestly say I liked watching it, but I have to admit that it is a pretty dense and meaty film, drawing from the traditions of French absurdism, Greek mythos, contemporary politics and perhaps even a dash of (dare I say it?) impressionism. The imagery and plotline are strange, to put it mildly, and outright surreal at times. It's certainly not a film to be watched if you're searching for entertainment, though I do get the feeling that it tickles some deeper satisfaction at having watched something inscrutably meaningful.

There are some ideas that are pretty innovative. If you're familiar with the original Orpheus myth, you would see how apt it is to cast Hades as a woman, thereby making Orpheus' journey into the netherworld into a product of both his love for his wife, and a certain fascination with the dark seduction of Death. And the heroic epic is rendered absurdly trite by being cast in terms of a domestic tragicomedy. But at other times it strikes me as purely eye-candy. But, to be fair, Cocteau does have his characters remind us not to try too hard to understand it, and if one can submit to the implications of unfettered postmodernism then I guess the film is a pretty holistic investigation of what that philosophy could mean to the artistic world.

And works like this make it clear that when I talk about film, I should be more precise. There are the movies, which are pictures that move, and then there is film, which are pictures that move people. The former tend to be justified by the people that watch them, and the latter are justified by the people who create them. And so, films don't need an audience to exist in the form that they do, at least not so much as movies.

And I also wonder whether it'd be appropriate to introduce this type of cinematography to my kids. It's not so much that they won't understand - I doubt that the difference a few years of experience makes will be all that much when watching something as amorphous as Orphée. But it could be premature, jumping several stages of mental maturing, and effectively cheating them out of the satisfaction of finding out these things by themselves. But what exhilaration it would be, if it were possible to turn English lessons into a pseudo-film club! We're always talking about brave new ways to teach, and perhaps it's time that more scrutiny is placed by the curriculum on this medium that has, without a doubt, grown into something that is culturally important.