Yesterday I finished reading Ben Pastor’s Lumen, which I highly recommend. I got turned onto Ben Pastor by Fredric Jameson’s recent article on genre in the London Review. I only skimmed Jameson and felt I didn’t want to put the work of understanding into it until I read at least one of the novels he used as a basis for the argument; and I’m very glad I did.
Lumen is set in occupied Poland in 1940. Mother Kazimierza, who is said to perform miracles, is shot dead in the convent garden whilst praying. A German General had just been to see her, there were Polish workmen working in the convent that day, some of which might have been partisans; also, none of the nuns liked her. Yet, no one seems to have a clear motive. The murder of someone many consider a saint is so explosive in a recently occupied Catholic country that Wahrmacht Captain Martin Bora is sent to investigate. He’s a highly educated upper-class Catholic, methodical, disciplined, madly in love with his wife and a lover of music. Father Malecki, a working class American from Chicago of Polish origin, who’d been sent to Cracow by the Vatican to investigate Mother Kazimierza’s miracles, will reluctantly join forces with Bora. The US is still neutral and Malecki is not as vulnerable as all the other locals, religious or not, who are constantly being rounded up on the edges of the narrative.
The Holocaust in process is ever present – Auschwitz is not far – but is kept largely on the margins: Bora is billeted in the former home of a Jewish playwright, Bora and Retz, his heavy-drinking womanizer of a room-mate go shopping for shoes in the Cracow ghetto; a nun of Jewish origin gets carted off on Christmas day…and so on.
Bora is solving a crime, he is making judgments and attributing guilt in a context where all of these things are constantly being muddied up, shifting, where training, loyalties and reason confront ethics and morality; where military hierarchies, precedent and law rub up against justice. The furnaces of Auschwitz are burning, a people are illegally occupied, the SS are reported by Bora to be breaking international conventions, the Russians are committing more atrocities on shared front lines. What are justice, guilt, conscience, morality and ethics in this context? Indeed, when is a crime a crime?
A brilliant detective novel, which I’m perhaps making seem more grim than it reads. The plot is so taut and the writing so efficient that one is completely immersed in the characters and the crime. I’m now on the second one.
Ben Pastor is the pseudonym of Maria Verbena Volpi, which adds yet another interesting twist.
I finally got around to seeing the Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix, which I’m finding fascinating. Warhol is accused of being banal, superficial, celebrity sucking, money hungry; the work damned for being the campily desirious doodlings of a superficial homosexual etc. Each of those characteristics with a basis individually but collectively at odds with each other. There’ a moment at a gallery opening where a well-dressed clearly well-heeled lady looks with a combination of scorn and disgust at one of the ‘Sex Parts’ paintings he did with Victor Hugo that I think encapsulates these contradictions. How can something so dangerous be banal? What’s the connection between the explicit and rapacious sexuality in those paintings and the celebrity commissions? Wouldn’t such work – so clearly homosexual – affect the year’s taking? He was putting on display what others in this period – Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg — were being more ‘polite’ about; and people were scorning and fleeing. And isn’t highlighting the forbidden and expressing it through camp in itself explosive in this period, the opposite of the banal? The form of the series is fascinating as well, the editing, the voicing, the wonderful home footage. The whole Jed Johnston saga was very affecting. But it’s the unapologetic queerness of the work in mid-century America that really strikes a chord and seems a key.
I love reading short essay books like Vicente Monroy’s CONTRA LA CINEFILIA: HISTORIA DE UN ROMANCE EXAGERADO/ Against Cinephilia: A History of an Exaggerated Romance. If they’re halfway intelligent and informed, and Monroy’s is much better than that, you find yourself arguing with them, sharpening your own thinking and maybe even learning something new.
That said, I found myself arguing with Monroy more than with many others in this genre. There is already quite an extensive literature on cinephelia, one he doesn’t draw on but for a brief mention of a Christian Keathley essay. Here cinephilia is an exaggerated love for cinema that makes those who suffer from it ill, makes them hide from the world under the guise of understanding it; and prevents them from acting in the world. But cinephilia has histories, plural. The accounts I heard from Réal La Rochelle in Quebec, Victor Perkins in the UK or Jorge Iglesias in Cuba, all dealing with the 50s and sixties have different practices, different canons, different outputs. Love of cinema is all they share. Plus that cinephilia was different than that of the 20s or that of the 80s. A sharper definition, an attempt at historicising, a delineation of different effects and outputs (the founding of magazines, cinémathèques, the founding of archives etc.) would have considerably changed the pamphlet’s main argument.
I bought this book because it was in Spanish and because I was interested in cinephilia in Spain or at least from a Spanish perspective. But this books speaks of a larger cultural colonisation. It’s all the same anecdotes (about Bazin, Cahiers du cinema, Goddard & Rohmer, Moullet’s assertion that morality in film was a question of travelling shots, and Jacques Rivette’s denunciation of Pontecorpovo’s KAPO on those grounds) that fanboys world-wide share as a a history and frame of reference but at the expense of the local. Laura Mulvey’s famous essay is trotted out to speak about gender bias. Victore Erice is brought in to question whether cinema is dead, and that’s about it: if there are other Spanish critics or theorists mentioned I missed them. Certainly, one gets no sense of the histories or effects of cinephilia in a specifically Spanish context (even the differences between cinephilia in Barcelona in Madrid in the sixties might have been illuminating).
Monroy is not responsible for the other thing that bothered me in the book, they’re widespread, though he does uncritically reproduce them. The first is what I think of as a kind of self-serving bad faith around cinema as experience. Friends who are devotees of Merleau-Ponty and who are happy to quote Vivien Sobchack on film nonetheless refuse to acknowledge that where and how they watch a movie affects their experience of it (and thus also understanding and evaluation). So here, Monroy talks about going to the Filmoteca in Madrid to see Renoir’s The River and the transformative effect it had on him; then how he tried to repeat it with less and less success as the years went by. He also mentions that during the next 12 years he saw films in his laptop because he could find a better range of films there than was offered on Madrid screens. Yet, he doesn’t make the connection between seeing films on a big screen, in the dark, with others…and that transformative experience. Related to this is a kind of bewilderment that so many cinephiles give so much importance to that moment when one steps outside the cinema Yet, if the experience of watching a film in a cinema is immersive then that moment when one steps out is important because that’s the moment where one stops feeling or absorbing and can start thinking and making sense (this is really why I could never get on with Bordwell’s argument on Making Meaning. Personally I get too involved to make the kind of inferences he thinks viewers make, plus desire, and colour, and other kinds of visual excitement interfere with reason). So, it strikes me that the whole argument suffers from a lack of definition of terms, what is cinema and when; what is film-viewing and when; what are the discourses around all of that and when?
The last thing I want to mention – and perhaps a proof that the Cinefilia Monroy is so much against is not worth the fight – is that this is a book about Cinefilia that doesn’t really bother with films. There’s an international canon of references here, which is really to say mainly French (Bazin, Deleuze, the Cahier Boys, Barthes, Serge Daney, Bellour, Metz, Rancière) but whereas most of them expressed their cinephilia with a discussion of films, Monroy turns to theory to argue against it. Another trend in which films themselves seem to matter less and less even to Film Theorists and Film Historians.
I just finished reading ‘Fabiógrafía’. Who could resist the title? Or for that matter the subject? Fabio is the Fanny who lit up so many early Almodóvar films (PEPI, LABYRINTH, even LAW OF DESIRE) enlivening General Erection Contests or Killer Driller porno shoots with her gender-bending freshness, candour, intelligence, bravery and wit. I thought that like, so many in the Movida, she’d died in the nineties of either AIDS or heroin. But no, here she is telling us her story, and tarnishing her legend in the process of gilding it.
The story is told by Fabio but written up by Marío Vaquerízo, Alaska’s husband, who keeps bragging that he’s got a degree in journalism but constantly demonstrates how little he learned from it.
He certainly doesn’t question anything Fabio/Fanny says (did all teenagers really go live on their own at 17 in Spain in the 70s? If not, what was it that drove him to leave his family home in Ciudad Pegaso , the factory town he grew up in on the outskirts of Madrid? His sexuality?). Nor does he contextualise; and so he allows quite a lot of corkers to get through. Did people really enjoy a lot more sexual freedom under Franco? If Fanny says so it must be true. She tells us all about her drug taking, the various people she lived with, her relationships with various artists around the Movida, and whether and how they got along with each other; how her collaborations with Almodóvar in the films, records, comic books, and live shows came about and how it came apart (she got hooked on heroine and became unreliable). But she tells us the facts, not the processes that led to them nor how she felt about any of it.
Everyone was great, everything was fun; 90% of the book takes us to the late 80s….and then people start to dies and her career goes down the tubes…and the book quickly comes to a close. We get little about any of this. In fact we get little about her feelings; if it wasn’t fun, it doesn’t really get discussed in Fanny’s universe. So we know she put her parents through hell, went in and out of re-hab, has three incurable chronic diseases (but which ones?). She’s re-found God and attends mass regularly; she’s become a right-winger who’s carried the flag in the monument to Franco and Fascism that is ‘El valle de los caídos/ The Valley of the Fallen’. She’s gone back to painting not very good pictures which everyone tells her are great. Self-analysis is clearly not her thing. Like in Lana Turner’s autobiography however, we do get an account of practically every outfit she ever wore, where she bought it, how she put it together and whether it was Bowie, Iggy, the Velvets or the New York Dolls who influenced it. So it wasn’t a total loss. But it makes for sad reading, particularly since one suspects 80s Fanny would have seen present-day Fabio as her worst nightmare.
Half-way through Andrew Hussey’s extraordinary SPEAKING EAST: THE STRANGE AND ENCHANTED LIFE OF ISIDORE ISOU, Isou, barely 20, has yet to arrive in Paris, the city where he would found LETTRISM, become a left bank avant-garde celebrity, and live in for the rest of his life.
In those first twenty years, his family left his hometown of Botosani for Bucharest due to waves of pogroms in northern Romania. As a teenager, he became a ‘huligan’, derived from hooligan but commonly used in Romania to describe a ‘generation of young intellectuals who deliberately taunted and terrorized the older literary generation, and who declared that they hated anybody not born in the twentieth century’(p.39). At first glance, not that different than a later generation’s not trusting anyone over thirty. But the huligani have a more violent and destructive edge. In Micea Eliade’s novel HULIGANII, ‘they all dream of committing suicide, drink heavily, rape each other or are simply bored and sadistic. Life is pointless, art an illusion, philosophy is a dead-end and the civilisation that made them is about to fall’ (p.40).
Isou would see many of his Huligani friends join the fascist Legionnaires of the Iron Guard. Isou was not yet sixteen when he was almost killed by this group during the pogrom of January 1941, some of the blackest moments in story of the Jews in Romania. During the rest of the war – much of it spent in forced labour, witnessing friends and neighbours beaten, tortured and killed — his biggest fear was ending up a nameless corpse, lost to history. He tried escaping to Palestine and failed; he made another arduous trip to the Hungarian border, and also failed; he tried to get to Turkey and that also failed. Each of these attempts involved extraordinary adventures and hardship. He finally succeeds in getting papers falsely attesting that he was a displaced French Jew, papers that would succeed in getting him to Paris. On his way there, and once again in Budapest, he’s feeling up a girl in a cinema where the first images of the liberation of Buchenwald are screened. The girl, still excited, tells him, ‘don’t stop. It’s only Yids. They brought it on themselves’.
What’s extraordinary about the first 125 pages of this book is not only a vivid evocation of Jewish cultures in Romania between the wars and how this intersected with the main intellectual currents in the country at large but also a teenager’s sexual and intellectual awakening at this intersection confronted with socially sanctioned violence and murder directed at him and all those he loves. And all of this before turning twenty.
According to Andrew Hysset ‘When he arrived in Paris in 1945, Isou began his career at the very height of avant-garde fashion. He was charismatic and good-looking, and he quickly gathered a pack of well-read young hooligans as followers. The new gang of lettristes was soon notorious for their punch-ups, their weird, threatening poetry, their girls and their arrogance. …The look was sexy and defiant: pure rock ‘n roll avant la lettre. Isou’s reputation was boosted by the fact that he was soon published by Gallimard (pp. 13-14).
Hussey convincingly argues that ‘lettrisme – was –or is the missing link between Dada, Surrealism and Situationism ‘(p.15). Tristan Tzara (an invented name meaning ‘sad country’ in Romanian) was an influence, as were Bréton and Buñuel; and Guy Debord, initially a disciple of Isou, would become his bitterest enemy; quite a distinction for someone who felt as victimised, misunderstood and oppressed as Isou.
According to Hysset, ‘Dadaism was conceived as a negation of the entire system of moral values underpinning Western thought. It opposed reason order, meaning and hierarchies in equal measure. …. In his Dada Manifesto of 1918 Tristan Tzara spoke directly to a generation of young men and women who had grown up despising everything around them, to all those who had lost faith in their homeland and its civilization: ‘No pity,’ he declared; ‘After the carnage we are left with the hope of a purified humanity…there’s great destructive…work to be done…..Dadaists and lettristes belong to the same family; they speak the same language in every sense,. There is however, one singular and crucial difference that separates them. The Dadaists had seen the massacres of the First World War. Isou had seen the Holocaust’ (p.13)
But what is lettrisme? For Isou it was a whole philosophical system; a way of understanding the entire world. Lettrisme had begun as a response to the lies and propaganda that Isou had met head-on as a young Jew in the Holocaust of Nazi-occupied Romania. If the world had to be remade, then a new language had to be developed, and what better way than noise without direct referent? It was a form of psychic self-defence, opposing the ‘controlling powers’ of so-called objective reality with a reassertion of subjective ‘poetic’ reality. It soon became something else, something more: a complete system within a system that married avant-gardism and Jewish belief. (p. 298). In poetry it took the form of letters or sounds devoid of semantic content. ‘The key to understanding lettriste poetry was to remake the world in its own image rather than simply reflecting the world as beautiful or ugly, good or bad. When men (and women) had discovered this, that they too could themselves be creators, their own creations, they would discover that they could walk with God as ‘the companion of Creations.’
The best description of lettrist poetry I’ve come across is from The Allan Ginsburg Project: ‘the Lettrist thing was to make use… not make use of mere sounds, but separate poems out into letters and letter-by-letter the poem should be composed – and so some Lettrist poems had no meaning at all – it was just pure sounds made by vowels and letters)…’. Ginsburg situates it within the work of e e cummings, Artaud, and Concrete Poetry. ‘cummings by isolating letters and words is a Lettrist. Antonin Artaud, to some extent, is a Lettrist, because certain of his poems are punctuated by sounds, shrieks, cries. People who write on typewriters and make designs of the page – like a swan – like John Hollander – that could be a variety of Lettrist, more like concrete poetry, as it’s called. Lettrist poetry led into concrete poetry where the page was a painting, and that comes out of Apollinaire. …But Lettrism itself is an interesting school. What it was was it went back to Kabbalah. In cabalistic studies the ancient Hebrew lore and practice was that each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, as some of you know already but for those who don’t, each letter had an assigned number, so that if you had a word, you’d then figure out the numerological meaning of the word, and so it was a mixture of the sound of the alphabet, and then the numerology of it, and correspondences between the aggregate of the numbers contained in the word and celestial phenomena, or recurrent mathematical or arithmetical or human numbered things, like six senses, or the number of hairs on the head, (or the number of God, for instance, is the magic number).
Isou saw himself as a chosen one, a half-divinity, and so did those who gathered around him. He was the young one with the answers. He hated Sartre for his bourgeois complacency; hated all the Resistants for their self-glorification; and with all the wrath and moral righteousness of a survivor of the Holocaust. He defended Céline for being honest about his anti-Semitism. He gloried in scandal, moral outrage, and was not above using violence as a means to be heard. By the 26th of January 1947, Isou was being covered in The New York Times, where John Lackey Brown wrote, ‘A band, led by a 21-year-old Romanian whose pen name is Isidore Isou, has created ‘lettrism’. The lettrists, determined to do Dada and the Surrealists one better, aim at the renovation of poetry not only by the invention of new words but of new letters.’ Brown then noted drily that so far they had invented 18 of them.
You can see some of Isou’s appeal here, in Le desordre, a film by Jacques Bartier. It’s St. Germain-de-Prés in 1946. Juliette Gréco sings. Boris Vian and Kosma play. Simone de Beauvoir, Alexandre Astruc, Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau and many others appear, even Orson Welles, who seems to be everywhere when it’s most salient. George Pomerand, Isou’s greatest disciple, appears chasing after Cocteau, burning art, and spouting Lettrist poetry (at around the 14 min. mark). Not great quality but rather fascinating.
You can see further examples of what Isou was trying to propagate and the way he did so in his own film, Traité de bavé et d’eternité. See how he riles against the pigs in the opening credits.
Soon, however, he got old. He thought he would live forever but had already outlived the very premise of a lettrisme so focused on youth violently providing the answers to the problems of the culture. He quietly converted to Catholicism so he could marry the woman he loved; a lifelong complicit partnership that produced a daughter, though the marriage itself was of short duration. Isou was selfish and impossible.
He made a living writing porn. Huyssen depicts Isou as totally accepting of sexuality as fluid, with an aim at pleasing women, and with extraordinary self confidence at dong so. IN his early years upon his first arrival in Paris he’d sold himself to women who could afford him. He also supplemented his living painting, and had a fair degree of success with it.
He missed the events of May 68 because he had a psychotic episode, was interned in a psychiatric ward and given electro-shock therapy. He would be in and out of mental hospitals for the rest of his life. The events of May 68 that he was so angry at missing are nonetheless something he and lettrisme would subsequently be credited with predicting.
What Hussey makes clear in the book is Isou’s sense of his own exceptionalism, his anger, his willingness to risk fights, physical and otherwise, all stem from his experience at suffering pogroms, at having survived being Jewish at a time of Holocaust. Even when meeting an old friend after forty years, when they discussed all the people they had known, neither could mention what each had witnessed the other had suffered and endured during this period. It was too horrible, still too powerful. A condition of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome that had conditioned their lives and that was to drive one of them into a deep mental illness.
Some of this was released in his constant obsession with sex and pornography (he was a prolific writer of it); some released in his art and politics. But much remain internalised and psychically damaging. Isou however was against any type of talking cures, as the dark recesses of the mind; the things that might drive you mad; or nonetheless also the found of creativity, of new thinking and of art. Thus to suffer and drive forward, something I somehow think in keeping with his own stance in relation to Zionism; rather than retreat into a safe space, which he saw as in itself a kind of defeat, albeit perhaps necessary; his preference was for remaking the whole world as jewish (partly through lettrism). For Isou, every poet was a Yid because, after the Holocaust, all poetry had to be written from the position of the other. A fascinating life.
In the conclusion of the book Hussey writes how he titled the book Speaking East because he wanted to draw attention to the centrality of Eastern Europe’s influence on main strands of European thought, that much of what we think of as ‘component parts of Western modernity – Dada, Surrealism and especially Letterism/ lettrism have their origins in Eastern Europe’ (p.298). In this – as in much else – he has clearly succeeded. It’s a stimulating page-turner of a biography.
We discuss Almodóvar’s second feature, Labyrinth of Passion, where Almodóvar himself appears both as director and rock star in minor roles. We talk about its convoluted plot, its verbal and visual campyness, its anti-authoritarian stance and its status as a youth film. We note how even in his second film, there are evident connections with his first film (not least in the recurring cast) and plot strands that will re-appear subsequently (the airport scene in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). We talk about it (briefly) as a document of its time, particularly in relation to the Nueva Movida Madrileña. The plot is straight out of Hello magazine; the idea that sex, drugs and art are a fun path without pitfalls to liberation is straight out of underground comics. Richard Lester’s cinema is a clear influence. Fanny McNamara steals the show. We could have talked for a lot longer.
Nope, Jordan Peele’s third film as writer-director, following his zeitgeist-capturing Get Out and complex, ambitious Us, invites its audience to speculate on audiences and spectacle. The kinds of things it wants us to think about are clear, and we discuss its themes of commercialised tragedy, fear of the audience, and photography as truth, among others – but what it has to say about them is at best muddled, and, more frankly, disappointingly uncritical. Like Peele’s previous films, Nope is a terrific conversation starter, but unlike them, its contribution to that conversation is weak.
The first of a series of podcasts on the work of Pedro Almodóvar. We begin the series with his first film, PEPI, LUCI, BOM Y LAS CHICAS DEL MONTON/ PEPI, LUCI, BOM AND OTHER GIRLS LIKE MOM (1980). The podcast discusses the historical context for the film; the ‘nueva movida madrileña‘; his style and how it improved over time; recurring concerns with pop culture (comics, films, magazines, pop music); recurring themes such as rape; camp as tone; the film’s combination of the outrageous with the common sense; how many of the actresses who would star in his films for the next decade already appear in his first film (Carmen Maura, Assumpta Serna, Julieta Serrano, Cecilia Roth, Kiti Manver, Eva Siva etc) and much more. We also talk of how this film has become a document of a series of individuals and indeed a whole sub-culture that was soon to disappear.
Just finished bingeing on Irma Vep which I started watching yesterday and loved. I was thinking what a great course it would make, using the original Feuillade and the nineties Assayas films as anchors but dealing with different topics the series brings up through other films about cinema in its broadest sense. Keaton’s Sherlock Holmes Jr, Hellzappopin, Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town, Fellini’s 81/2, The Day of the Locusts, The Player etc.
I liked how the series brings up and has a view on almost every topic related to filmmaking: the beauty of a travelling shot; the carelessness of the production in relation to safety; stars and actors; the importance of costuming; the changing technology; blockbuster cinema; the scleroticism of current art cinema; the possibilities of micro-cinema; cinema as product for systems, in this case global luxury goods advertising; objectification and the #metoo movement; consideration of effects, affect and value on how and where one sees the work (some derisory comments on You Tube); the centrality of desire at every level and at every stage of the work; the role of fantasy and light. I liked the structure of the piece with the inter-cutting of Feuillade’s series, re-enactment of the making of the original Irma Vep, and the filming of the current series; and then interspersing all of that that with dramatic re-enactments of Musidora’s memoirs.
I also adored the actors, Vikander of course, but also Vincent Lacoste as the vain leading man and particularly Vincent Macaigne as the director – clearly based on some level on Assayas – but a director unlike we’re used to seeing represented: insecure, impotent, still obsessed by adolescent sexual fantasies — in this case originating, as with so many of his generation, with Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel in The Avengers –– depressed and scared etc. Lars Eidinger, Tom Sturridge, Fala Chen and so many of the others also impressed and it was great to see Kristen Stewart appear at the end.
I liked the melodrama of the sexual infatuations, the fluidity of the representations and the matter-of-fact way they were presented. The series brings all these issues up and though one isn’t always in agreement – What is all this spirit stuff?- I welcomed the way it encourages us to think through the current mediascape historically, from a personal perspective. I have to think about it some more but I loved the experience of seeing it, both as metacinema and as a work in itself, and recommend if you haven’t already seen it; though I’m probably late to the party as usual.
David Leitch, who directed the surprisingly enjoyable Hobbs & Shaw, delivers another surprisingly enjoyable action comedy. Bullet Train is set upon the eponymous Japanese train, which, for two hours, hosts an assortment of assassins getting into scraps and scrapes at the behest of their various employers. It’s stylish, funny, smart, and features a wonderful central comic presence from Brad Pitt, who seems to have relaxed into himself in recent years, his performances exhibiting a delightful spontaneity. Definitely worth a watch, and going on the trailers, Mike really didn’t think he’d be saying that.
A couple of weeks ago I went to The Garden Cinema to talk to them about Almodóvar and Penelope Cruz for the cycle of Cruz films they’ll be screening soon. The discussion is a bit chaotic, like all good conversation tends to be, but Abla Kandalaft elegantly puts the reins on when needed. I make one error that I caught when I listened, and that is when I refer to the plot of Bigas Luna’s Golden Balls and say Javier Madeiro marries the boss’ wife instead of his daughter (the exquisite Maria de Madeiros).
We visit the MAC for a screening of the new 4k restoration of Psycho, one of the most analysed films of all time, and arguably director Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous. It’s a film we’ve both seen several times, but not for a few years, and in the cinema setting for which it’s meant, instead of the classroom, there’s a renewed and reinvigorated wonder to its imagery and editing.
We share our feelings about this screening, remark upon things we’d forgotten or had never noticed before, discuss how elements of the film have aged, and compare it to Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill, which was, shall we say, inspired by Psycho, and which we recently saw. We find plenty of room for criticism, but although we conclude that Psycho works for us more as a collection of a few iconic scenes than a thoroughly engrossing story from beginning to end, those scenes shine, and nowhere more vividly than on a cinema screen.
