Michael Palin

I went back to Oxford on Saturday for "one-off" Gaudy to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the foundation of Brasenose: a chance to meet up with old friends, revisit old haunts and enjoy what I hoped would be a memorable dinner in College. The sky was a brilliant blue and cloudless, the old stone glowed in the sunshine and the city seemed almost mythological: reflecting the shared memories of those attending the Gaudy rather than the mundane reality of the place I come to shop on an irregular basis.

As I made my way down Turl Street a woman stopped me: she had just seen Michael Palin in a DJ, and as I was also wearing a DJ she wanted to know what was going on. I explained about the BNC500 celebrations and this seemed to satisfy her curiosity. She was about to move on, but then turned back to me.

"Excuse me for asking, but are you famous?"

I thought about it for a moment.

"Not yet... but I'm working on it."

Good Bye Lenin!

These are the film notes for this Sunday's screening:

Germany 2003
Duration 121 minutes
Director: Wolfgang Becker
Starring: Daniel Bruehl, Kathrin Sass and Chulpan Khamatova

Awards and Nominations:
Nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Language Film
A further 31 wins and 14 nominations

Just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall Christiane Kerner (Kathrin Sass), an ardent supporter of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany, falls into a coma. After eight months she regains consciousness but her doctors warn her son Alex (Daniel Bruehl) that any further shock could be fatal, and so Alex and his sister make increasingly desperate attempts to hide the evidence of the sudden arrival of capitalism in East Berlin, pretending instead the East German regime remains in power.

As Alex desperately attempts to deceive his mother he resorts to media distortion and emotional blackmail to co-opt people into his schemes and to compel them to act against their principles. These are the tools that the East German regime used to control the general population - as shown so brilliantly in The Lives of Others (2006) – but here Alex’s sole motive is his love for his mother. Alex even manages to create an alternative history of Germany in which the West is cracking up and the generous East opens its borders to accommodate refugees from capitalism, but eventually his deception unravels and Christiane learns the truth about what has really happened.

The film shows that for some Germans the reunification of their country happened too quickly, with the loss of some of the good elements of East Germany as well as the bad. As Alex points out, in the false TV shows he creates East Germany is having the end it deserved rather than the end it got.

The film includes an apparent anachronism in that a t-shirt worn by one of the characters appears to picture the green glyph pattern from The Matrix – a film which did not appear until 1999. However in a deleted scene on the DVD the character, an amateur film maker, tells Alex about an idea for a film where people were enslaved by machines to produce energy while trapped in a computer dream world – a film in which characters live in a simulated reality. The film also contains references to 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange and the flying statue of Lenin echoes a scene with the flying statue of Jesus in La Dolce Vita.

Liberty in the Age of Terror

Last night we went to hear a talk by A C Grayling - a brilliant lecture in defence of civil society and enlightenment values. I always read his articles in The Guardian and other sites and I've just ordered the book (plus its predecessor which is the story of of the struggle for liberty and rights in the modern West) from my favourite on-line retailer.

After the talk Grayling took a series of questions including one about the future of print media. In his view the mainstream press is under huge pressure from the internet; he described the growth of blogging as giving people access to the biggest lavatory wall ever built in order to express their opinions, with at least 95% of what is published online being worthless.

It is not for me to comment on the value - or otherwise - of this blog. I hope that it will reflect the hard work by members of our committee to get our film club up and running: we have fun choosing our films and it's a pleasure to see a new film or revisit an old favourite. But I can't help remembering the warning words from Alan Bennett in Forty Years On:

"When a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, then the writing is on the wall".

The Reader

Here are my film notes for our next screening:

UK 2008
Duration 124 minutes
Director: Stephen Daldry
Starring: Kate Winslet, David Kross and Ralph Fiennes

Awards and Nominations
Won Oscar for Best Actress (Kate Winslet)
Won BAFTA for Best Actress (Kate Winslet)
Won Best Director (Stephen Daldry) in Evening Standard Film Awards
A further 10 wins and 25 nominations

In Germany in the late 1950s the teenage Michael Berg (David Kross) has an affair with an older woman Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) who then disappears. Years later Hanna reappears as a defendant in a war crimes trial based on her actions as a guard in a Nazi concentration camp. Michael, who is now studying law, realises that Hanna is keeping something secret which, if she chooses to reveal it, could save her from jail. During Hanna’s lengthy jail sentence Michael (now played by Ralph Fiennes) communicated with her by sending her recordings of great works of literature.

In the two decades since reunification Germany has examined its recent history in a series of internationally successful films like Downfall (2004), The Lives of Others (2006) and Goodbye Lenin (2003). The Reader is part of this same analysis of German history: it portrays Hanna’s trial for war crimes in the 1960s, but eschews any flashback to the events themselves that would allow the viewer to decide on her guilt or innocence. Thus the questions it raises are the extent to which ordinary Germans share responsibility for the Holocaust and other atrocities of the Nazi regime, and how this responsibility affects subsequent generations. As one of the survivors says to the adult Michael when he meets her in New York “What do you think these places were – universities? What are you looking for? Forgiveness for her or to feel better about yourself?”

The film is based on the 1995 novel by the German writer Bernard Schlink that became a best-seller in both Germany and the US. The screenplay is by David Hare who had previously worked with Stephen Daldry as screenwriter for The Hours (2002), but who has also shown a strong interest in this period in plays and films like Licking Hitler (1974) and Plenty (1985). Hare rejected the long internal monologues that Schlink had included in the novel and, more significantly, changed the ending so that Michael begins to tell the story of Hanna and him to his daughter, explaining this decision as follows:

“It’s about literature as a powerful means of communication, and at other times as a substitute for communication.”

It was Schlink himself who insisted that the film be shot in English rather than German as he felt that it posed questions about living in a post-genocidal society that went beyond the time and locations of wartime Germany, and he worked closely with Daldry and Hare to choose locations for the film.

The casting brings deliberate echoes of other films that have dealt with the Germany in the Second World War: Ralph Fiennes played Amon Goeth, the commandant of a labour camp in Schindler’s List (1993) while Bruno Ganz, in the role of Michael’s tutor, gave an unforgettable portrayal of Hitler in Downfall. However it was Kate Winslet who won most praise – and awards - for her performance: after a record number of nominations in 2009 she won the Oscar for Best Actress.

Selecting the 2009 Programme

It is the job of the committee to select the films that we screen in each season and we all take our responsibilities very seriously.

After a few false starts the films we choose for our programme seem fall into the following categories:

1. Box office successes which subsequently won major awards.

2. Independent films that came from nowhere to pick up a few awards.

3. Films starring Judi Dench, Helen Mirren or Kate Winslet.

4. A selection of classic foreign language films.

The benefit of this is that it enables us all to catch up on the films that we missed while they were on general release - a full-time job does limit the number of films you can see and my mental "must see" list grows longer by the week - as well as to stumble across the occasional unexpected gem.

For the start of the season we try to select a crowd pleaser to encourage members to renew their subscriptions. This year our choice was In The Loop, which despite the 24 carat swearing (apparently Armando Ianucci sends all his scripts to a swearing consultant who adds the expletives) was very successful. Apparently it's even better on a second viewing, and I look forward to seeing it again very soon.

Our next film was Conversations with my Gardener which definitely falls into the category of unexpected gem: a middle-aged French artist returns to his home village and deciding to renovate his parents' old home finds he has appointed an old school friend as his gardener. If the film ever suffered the indignity of a Hollywood remake it would easily lapse into the most awful sentimentality, but the director kept his actors just on the right side of mawkishness.

Later this month our film is definitely in Category 3: we will be screening The Reader.

Dreaming the same dream in unison

I have seen films in many different locations, from the sublime (Palais de Festival at Cannes) to the ridiculous (The Coronet on Didcot Broadway), but one factor remains constant: even a bad film can seem better by seeing it on a big screen in the company of others.

Once upon a time we poor film buffs were forced to haunt the wilder reaches of BBC2 in search of the occasional glimpse of films by Fellini, Bergman and Truffaut. The arrival of video cassettes improved the supply a little, but it took the the arrival of the DVD to compel movie companies to throw open the cupboard doors and ransack their back catalogues in a desparate attempt to shift some stock before DVDs go the same way as CDs and we download everything on to our iPods.

But no film company is able to provide the real audience experience, and it for this reason that twice a month a loyal and - hopefully - growing band of film fans meet in our local village hall to dream the same dream in unison.

The aim of this blog is to follow the fortunes of our village film club as we embark on our fourth season. Along the way I reserve the right to digress as I think fit into other film-related issues and to write about my favourite films, directors, actors, writers and composers.

The only common thread will be that there will be some link, however tangential, to film.