Theo Angelopoulos: a Greek tragedy

If you have ever watched a film by the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos you will have had high expectations for the project he was working on this week – a film on the Greek financial crisis.  Now comes the tragic news that Angelopoulos is dead as a result of sustaining serious head injuries when he was hit by a motorcycle while crossing a road in Athens during the shooting of the film.

Angelopoulos is one of the great visionaries of 20th century European  film, and I would rate his first international success The Travelling Players (1975)  in my all-time top ten.  Born in Athens in 1935,  Angelopoulos lived through the Nazi occupation of Greece during World War II and the ensuing 1946-49 Greek Civil War – and these events are recurring themes in his early films, especially The Travelling Players.  His take on the desperate situation that the Greek people find themselves in today would have been invaluable, coming from a man who has documented so much of Greece’s tortured history in the last half century.

Angelopoulos  was born to a middle class merchant family during the dictatorship of General Metaxas. His earliest childhood memories were of the sight of German soldiers entering Athens following the Italian invasion of Greece in 1940 – an image he later recreated for the opening scene of Voyage to Cythera (1983).  The war years were a time of great hardship and hunger for the family, and then, at Christmas 1944,  during the period known as ‘Red December’, his father was arrested and disappeared after being informed on by a cousin for not supporting the Communist party at the outbreak of Civil War.  This incident appears in both The Travelling Players and Ulysses’ Gaze (1995).

After studying at the French film academy in Paris, Angelopoulos returned to Greece to work as film critic for a left-wing newspaper, a decision that he later explained,  arising from the trauma of being assaulted by the police during a pro-Papandreou student demonstration in 1964.  He continued to work for the newspaper until it was shut down by the military junta  in 1967. It was then he turned to film making, directing films that have invariably been concerned with recent historical developments in Greece.  Although his first international success, The Travelling Players, was shot during the last year that the military junta was in power, it was  not screened publicly until after the restoration of democracy in 1975.  Angelopoulos once described the film as ‘the enactment of a series of occupations of Greece that continue to this day’.

In the film, a group of travelling players make their way through Greece from town to town putting on performances of  a traditional drama  Golfo The Shepherdess. The narrative concerns historical events in Greece between 1939 and 1952 as they are experienced by the travelling players and as they affect the villages which they visit. The film interweaves the personal dramas of the troupe with stories from the Greek myths and events under the pre-war fascist dictatorship, the  Italian and the Nazi wartime occupations, the liberation, the civil war between Greek Communists and monarchists, and the subsequent British military intervention.

Angelopoulos portrays these events in a characteristic elliptical style (probably the result of having to film under the strict censorship of the military regime), employing  slow pans, long takes and tracking shots.  The slow pace, long shots (there are only 80 in the film) and extended periods without any dialogue became the characteristic Angelopoulos style – one that did not please all filmgoers or critics.  But, if you allow yourself to be submerged in his slow, reflective and beautifully composed sequences, you will experience film making of great intellectual depth and beauty.  This YouTube clip from The Travelling Players (the entire film can be watched there) reveals many of the archetypal features of a film by Angelopoulos. It consists of one extended shot of an Athens square that includes two 360 degree pans.  Time shifts within the sequence: the massed flags and songs of the Communist resistance are dispersed as police fire into the crowd (symbolising the murderous conflict between the two wings of the nationalist resistance to German occupation); the square is left strewn with bodies through which marches a single bagpipe-playing British soldier; later, the square is reoccupied by the Communists.

At the turn of the millennium, Derek Malcolm, former film critic for The Guardian, explained why he had chosen The Travelling Players as one of his key films of the 20th century:

Why the military police who watched its progress allowed it to be completed is a mystery, since the film clearly examines the turbulent history of its country of origin from a radical Brechtian point of view. Perhaps the colonels’ men thought that this story of a troupe of itinerant actors touring Golfo the Shepherdess, a pastoral folk drama set to music and song, was harmless enough. But it wasn’t, since the period in which it is set (1939 to 1952) warmed the seeds of their masters’ military coup.

Almost four hours long, The Travelling Players has its actors first watch and then get caught up in the political events of the period, so that even the play changes its emphasis. As they progress through the often rainy and wintry provincial Greece in which Angelopoulos usually prefers to shoot, the sequences become longer and longer and the pace seldom changes. The whole film is accomplished in around 80 shots.

But despite that, and even though no one but a Greek can understand all the political, historical and mythic allusions, it is a fascinating progress, enlivened by Yorgos Arvanitis’s often luminous photography, Loukianos Kilaidonis’s throbbing music, including songs and dances adapted from folk sources, and performances that seem utterly truthful.

How does Angelopoulos achieve this magic? It is partly the utter conviction with which he steers his work towards an inner as well as an outward relevance. But take a look, if you want to see how he manages individual sequences, at the closing passage of this film, when one of the actors is executed for sedition and his fellow performers raise their hands above their heads to applaud his life at the graveside. Nothing could be done more simply – though in most successful simplicity there is a great deal of artfulness. But the sequence, perhaps because of all that has gone before, is far more moving than the myriad funeral scenes in movies manage to be. It has a grace that is almost totally absent from most of today’s cinema.

Angelopoulos went on to make more great films that collectively chronicle the contemporary Greek experience.  In a heartfelt appreciation on The Guardian website, Costas Douzinas of the University of London writes:

In his dreamlike historical films, he chronicled the melancholic nature of a nation torn between an invented tradition of classical glories and a traumatic history of repressive state policies, dictatorship, corrupt and dynastic politics. He narrated the lowly lives of the defeated in the vicious civil war 1946-9, the degradations and melancholy of exile, the Odysseus-like return of people who go back to a place they nurtured in their memories but turns out alien and unwelcoming.  In his mesmeric long sequences, a simple gesture, a silence or smile acquire philosophical depth and historic significance. This is epic cinema made out of the fragments of everyday life.

He did this through magical films such as Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), Eternity and a Day (1998)and The Weeping Meadow (2004), the latter two being the first two parts of a trilogy that was to be completed by the film he died while making this week. Those are the films that I have seen; there are others I must see in the near future: Voyage to Cythera (1983), The Beekeeper (1986), Landscape in the Mist (1988), The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991) and his most recent film, The Dust of Time (2009).  A sense of these films can be gained from this 12 minute tribute to Angelopoulos on YouTube:

There’s an extraordinary sequence in Ulysses Gaze in which a barge carrying an enormous statue of Lenin (surplus to requirements after the transformations of 1989) makes its way along the Danube:

Costas Douzinas comments:

Coming from the left, as did most of the Greek cultural renaissance of the second half of the 20th century, but ascribing to no orthodoxy, Angelopoulos described the degradations of ordinary people both in the hands of rightwing governments and in the Stalinist regimes where the defeated partisans retreated but found no haven.  For Angelopoulos, humanity survives in the memories and dreams of exiled, travelling people who never fully make it back to Ithaca. What makes us human, Angelopoulos tells us, is found in traumatic memories, in the desire to preserve an imaginary beauty, and in eternal returns perennially frustrated. Angelopoulos was both the Homer of modern Greece, and the country’s magical realist storyteller.

At the opening of his book The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation (1999), Andrew Horton wrote:

 The films of Theo Angelopoulos  matter. They matter because they dare to cross a number of borders: between nations; between history and myth, the past and the present, voyaging and  stasis;  between  betrayal  and  a sense of community,  chance and  individual fate, realism and surrealism, silence and sound; between what is seen and what is withheld or not seen; and between what is ‘Greek’ and what is not. In short, Angelopoulos can be counted as one of the few filmmakers of cinema’s first hundred years who compel us to redefine what we feel cinema  is and can be.

Watch The Travelling Players on YouTube in 15 parts:

See also

• Theo Angelopoulos obituary: The Guardian
• Great Directors: Theodoros Angelopoulos
• The Travelling Players: A modern Greek masterpiece by Susan Tarr and Hans Proppe (Jump Cut)

Dickens: Smiley’s person

I haven’t yet got my hands on the new Dickens biography by Claire Tomalin and I felt weak at the prospect of one thousand pages of Peter Ackroyd’s seminal account.  Instead I took up Jane Smiley’s Charles Dickens which was in the house and clocks in at only 200 pages.

Smiley’s is not an original work – she relies on Ackroyd and other recent surveys of Dickens’ life and work – but she does provide a concise and informative account that I’d recommend for anyone in this bicentennial year who wants a fast but insightful introduction to the phenomenon of Dickens.

I say phenomenon because Smiley observes the several ways in which Dickens is extraordinary – his ascent from a poverty-stricken childhood to his career as the most acclaimed novelist of his time (‘the first true celebrity’), his boundless energy and action-packed public life, and the dramas of his personal life and relationships.

Dickens’ energy seems to have been boundless throughout his life, something often commented upon by his acquaintances.  He had the habit of taking long, vigorous daily walks (he regularly covered twenty and sometimes thirty miles) on top of all his other activities – writing to the frightening deadlines of serialised publication, amateur dramatics, active involvement with charitable organisations, travel, social engagements , and the demands of his large and continually growing family. Even in 1865, just five years before his death and not a well man, he showed great courage and physical strength when involved in a serious train crash in Kent.

The original aspect that Jane Smiley brings to her account is to interpret the intersection between Dickens’ life and his writing from the perspective of a novelist. She discusses the way in which his novels not only reflected aspects of his personal experience, but how Dickens also used his writing almost as a form of psychotherapy to overcome feelings of guilt and shame about his childhood, his father’s bankruptcy, and the difficulties of his own marriage. In putting forward this Freudian analysis, Smiley notes that Dickens was Sigmund Freud’s favourite author.

Clearly, all novelists brings some knowledge of dramatic states of mind to their writing. As Smiley remarks, if  they had no such knowledge, then they would have no business with, and no interest in, novels or drama.

Audiences and readers want something to happen, and writers are ready to portray some of the things that can happen. Often this knowledge does have its root in the experience of the artist, though as frequently it has its origins in sensitive and eager observation (both of these were certainly true of Dickens). But the experience of writing about and depicting these dramatic incidents is at least as important as their origins, because the novelist bodies them forth, comments upon them, reacts to them; he learns from them and gives them both form and meaning, rather like, in a simpler way, expressing anger in words sometimes relieves feelings and sometimes exacerbates them.

Smiley examines each of Dickens’ works from this perspective – how he drew upon his life experience, and, simultaneously, how the process helped him to come to terms with hidden or suppressed feelings:

What might have remained inchoate becomes specific through making a narrative of it in a way that is analogous to psychotherapy. The novelist, unlike the patient, defines his story as fiction and therefore retains at least some distance from it, but he nevertheless learns to interpret it. Often it loses its power over him, as Dickens came to terms with his months in the blacking factory after giving them to David Copperfield. But he may also learn things about his true state of mind that might have remained shadowy had he not embodied them.

What makes this short book particularly interesting is the way in which Smiley relates each novel to Dickens’ biography, showing how each work of fiction not only drew upon his past, but also reflected his current circumstances and state of mind:

Authors live in a dialogue with their work, and their work is their inner life made concrete. Were they not susceptible to the reality of art, they wouldn’t have become authors in the first place. They would naturally be at least as susceptible to the power of their own art as to the power of the art of others, and from the beginning of his career, Dickens’s letters attest to his enthusiasm for and belief in every novel he wrote.

Smiley also explores the way in which Dickens’ popularity and notoriety grew rapidly with each successive novel, making him ‘the first true celebrity of the popular arts’, later earning the equivalent of around £30,000 a night in a dynamic one-man act in which he performed his ‘greatest hits’ – scenes from A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and so on – to the delight of rapt audiences.  She writes:

If we see Dickens as the first true celebrity of the popular arts – that is, a man whose work made him rich and widely famous, as close to a household name as any movie star is today – then we also can see him as the first person to become a ‘brand name’. For many years, his name on the first instalment of a serialization sold copies in and of itself. [... ]  Dickens … counted on his name to bring in a certain number of readers, and he felt a strong obligation toward them. He always felt his job was to please and entertain readers, not to shock and confront them, and certainly not to offend them.

Dickens was different, too, in another respect: unlike other Victorian novelists, he did not have family wealth to support him as a writer.  Instead, drawing on his deep reserves of skill and energy, he exploited his chosen modus operandi – the novel published as a serial – to the full:

The new thing, in every way, was for an author to support himself or herself through sales of his or her work, and in this Dickens was pioneer and exemplar. The form of serial monthly or weekly publication not only helped him find a wide audience (every issue sold, it has been estimated, found fifteen readers), it also helped him keep that audience interested. The analogy, of course, is to soap opera-type serials. Dickens’s exquisite natural responsiveness, combined with his amazing inventiveness, meant that a form other authors found onerous was perfectly suited to him.

Dickens, Smiley notes, had perpetual money worries.  Juliet John, Professor of Victorian literature at Liverpool University, and author of Dickens and Mass Culture, also remarked on how he wrote letters about money all the time:

When he did public readings, which were really PR tours, from the 1850s onwards, he would write to friends literally characterising the audience as pounds or dollars.

His lowly class origins were what made Dickens so dependent on earnings from his writing and, later, his reading tours (which brought him to Liverpool and the Concert Room in St Georges Hall many times between 1842 and 1869). But, argues, Smiley, Dickens’ social mobility made him unique in another respect:

Dickens found  himself in a unique position to observe all facets of British society. He was unconstrained by a classical   education, untrained, as it were, to look at English society in the traditional way. His first thirty years were, in a fashion that contrasted with that of almost everyone around him, a training in freedom – in forming his own opinions, in judging for himself, in observing the effects of one group upon another, one class upon another, of institutions upon individuals and individuals upon institutions. He differed from all of his contemporaries in that he represented no group, therefore he came to represent all. His medium, the novel, enhanced his freedom, since the novel can never work except through freedom – the author is free to write, and the reader is free to read. [...] The very oddities of both the man and his work further promoted his freedom, since his mind ranged freely over all sorts of characters, ideas, and settings. And he frequently took pains to speak out against abridgments of freedom, such as the closing of shops on Sunday, the only day when working people were able to buy, and other laws restricting the lives of the poor, as well as narrow and joyless religious and charitable institutions. By temperament, by training, and by intention, Dickens was a modern man, whose essential quality was the desire for freedom of thought and action.

The issue that has fascinated all observers is the relationship between Dickens’ politics and the novels. Smiley presents a complex picture of a man whose ideas became more radical as the years went by – who supported charities aimed at the betterment of the poor and marginalised, and spoke out in favour of campaigns to improve factory working conditions to which he donated the proceeds from several public readings – but whose radicalism was not Marxism.  Explaining the sources of his radicalism, Smiley traces a nexus between Dickens’ focus as a novelist and ideas rooted in his Christian values:

The conditions that so appalled Dickens constituted the major political and philosophical challenge of his era. The novel, like any other artistic form, makes an inherent philosophical assertion – that the mental life of the individual is worth anatomizing and that the disruptions that exist among individuals and between individuals and groups are understandable and soluble through individual transformation and action. Dickens expanded and expanded his canvas because he intuited that the complexities of the social dilemmas he was interested in could not be convincingly portrayed in miniature. Other thinkers, not novelists, had other ideas about the significance of individuals and individualism, but Dickens’s chosen form saddled him with a philosophical question he tried ardently to solve, both artistically and personally, for his entire life. The controversies that arise about Dickens’s real political views, in my opinion, arise primarily from the fact that a novelist always, and increasingly, sees the trees rather than the forest, and is naturally unsympathetic to a collective solution, while always more or less in favour of a connective solution.

It was that ‘connective solution’, Smiley suggests, which was central to Dickens’ view of the social problems of his time.  In an essay about a millworkers’ strike in Preston that lasted half a year and which provided the inspiration for Hard Times, Dickens wrote:

Into the relations between employerrs and employed, as into all the relations in life, there must enter something of feeling and sentiment; something of mutual explanation, forbearance, and consideration … otherwise those relations are rotten to the core and will never bear sound fruit.

Smiley pursues this idea through analysis of the novels, showing how Dickens reveals the failings of social institutions through the connections between his characters.In Bleak House, for example, the overarching metaphor is the ancient and costly Chancery suit of Jarndyce v Jarndyce to which every character, highborn or lowborn, is connected.

The book charts a succinct course through Dickens’ life, subtly interweaving biographical details with comments on the novels and Dickens’ developing style.  Smiley writes that,

Dickens’s tonal and stylistic choices were always remarkable for their richness and variety. He could do low comedy, melodrama, farce, fairy tale, confession, sarcasm, lyricism, romance, extended analogy, dialect imitation. He had an ear for every sort of discourse, both written and oral. He did not always use an elevated literary style, something for which he was criticized in his time. He was not always considered to be in control of his material, but rather he was sometimes accused of being carried into sentimentality or tastelessness.

One thing about Dickens’ novels that has been acknowledged by many commentators (though not discussed by Smiley) is how well they lend themselves to being adapted to screen and stage (though Smiley does suggest how his dramatic public readings were , in a sense, the start of this). Dickens has been adapted for film and TV more than any other  novelist. Television adaptations have followed at a steady flow over the decades.  In fact, sometimes it can be hard to recall whether our personal memories of a Dickens novel derive from book or screen (I touched on this, writing about Great Expectations recently).

A few weeks ago, in Dickens on Film, a documentary shown in the BBC Arena strand, the claim was even made for Dickens as the progenitor of film.  Ever since the first adaptation of A Christmas Carol in 1902, the programme argued, film-makers have identified all the key elements of cinema language in his work, from montage to cliff-hangers, and the importance of dialogue and cinematic pace in storytelling. Apparently, Sergei Eisenstein, George Bernard Shaw, and DW Griffith all contended that Dickens wrote in a cinematic language years before cinema. They perceived a cinematic quality to his narrative, in which chapters open with large, framing panoramic sweeps – the widescreen shot – and then home in on the particular – a household, a character, a street.

These days, as a result of over familiarity perhaps, we can take Dickens a little for granted.  Smiley identifies the significance of his contribution to the evolution of the novel, encompassing the lives of servants and masters in a way that only Shakespeare had done before him:

Dickens repeatedly pushed the English novel away from standard realism at the same time that he pushed it away from depicting the English bourgeoisie. He expanded the social and economic scope of the novel while expanding its linguistic resources with no regard for class status or stylistic propriety – he gave his narrator and his array of characters many tongues to speak in, quite a few of which were visionary or poetical, and which themselves undermined the  ‘realism’  of   the  form.  Ultimately, he required, or allowed, the reader to regard more of the life around him by allowing it to be important enough to get into a novel. He thereby expanded the audience of the novel itself.

Smiley concludes:

Some novelists plough the same field novel after novel. Others map the world. No novelist has mapped so much of the world, right at the borderline where the inner world and the outer world meet, as Charles Dickens. He has inexhaustibly delineated states of mind,  emotions,  symbols, ideas, the rational life, and the irrational life, but also London and Kent and Manchester and America and Italy and France and Scotland and Sussex and Essex and Norfolk. He is the novelist who comes closest of all novelists to delivering on that illusory promise of the novel – to tell everything there is to know about everyone, and to tell it in an incomparably fresh and delightful way.

Picture Post: photographing Liverpool

For two years now, Colin Wilkinson has been producing a tremendous blog about Liverpool and photography, The Streets of Liverpool, drawing on an archive of Liverpool photographs that he had built up over 30 years or more since founding the Open Eye Gallery. A good number of these photos have been used as illustrations in the many and varied books published by his company, The Bluecoat Press, including a selection from the blog, also entitled The Streets of Liverpool which I highly recommend to anyone with an interest in the history of Liverpool or in photography.

One of the things I learned from that book was that there is a mysterious void in Liverpool’s photographic record: the  earliest photograph of Liverpool that Colin has located in 30 years of research is this one, of St Georges Hall in 1850.  Yet one of the first licences for the new daguerrotypes had been granted for Liverpool in 1841, while in 1853 the Liverpool Amateur Photographic Association was established – one of the earliest anywhere, and with Francis Frith as one of its founder members.  But the recently discovered 1850 photo remains, at present, the earliest known photo of Liverpool, with very few taken in the subsequent two decades either.

Now Colin Wilkinson has authored a new book which also brings into public view ‘lost’ photographs of Liverpool – this time from its more recent past.  In Picture Post on Liverpool, Colin has located every issue of Picture Post that included a feature on Liverpool – but, even more significantly, he has discovered a whole host of unseen and unpublished photographs of the city in the magazine’s archives.

It’s a superb book, lavishly illustrated with evocative black and white photographs of Liverpool in the 1940s and 1950s, taken by master photographers such as Bert Hardy, Thurston Hopkins and John Chillgworth, assigned by the magazine to produce photographic spreads for feature articles.  Colin explains how the book came about:

For many years, I have been fascinated by Picture Post magazine. It started in 1938 before the outbreak of War and its innovative photo-journalistic approach rapidly pushed its circulation to over one million. Many of the best photographers and journalists were recruited and it set a standard in journalism and design that is still remembered over 50 years since its demise.  I decided to research the magazine’s coverage of Liverpool and managed to collect all the copies dealing with Liverpool. Remarkably, apart from one feature about the dockers in 1941, nothing else appeared until 1949. Then, over the next seven years, a further eight features appeared, regrettably mainly negative in their concentration on urban poverty.

In that final sentence Colin Wilkinson states his key argument here: that as far back as the 1940s, Liverpool was the place that journalists gravitated towards if they wanted to highlight aspects of urban deprivation, despite the fact that such problems were often general and could be found in many other places.  Too often, Wilkinson concludes, Picture Post coverage was ‘responsible for the demonising of a city struggling with deep problems of urban decay.  It chose to ignore the many positive qualities of a great seaport and contributed towards a media obsession with Liverpool – the problem city’.

The pattern is set in the first article about Liverpool to appear in Picture Post – ‘The Truth about the Dockers’, published in July 1941.  Even though it was only two months since the city had been devastated by the May Blitz, the story was whether the dockers ‘were pulling their weight in the fight against Nazism’:  ‘Heroes or Loafers?’, as the caption to the lead photo put it.  However, the story was written by JB Priestley, who is at pains to explain the many reasons why throughput on the docks should have declined (a pattern, it is revealed deep in the text, occurring at docks throughout the country).

The disparity in media coverage of the city is revealed especially in ‘The Truth about Teenagers’, a three-part series about teenagers published in 1957.  As always, Bert Hardy finds atmospheric images that might be left to speak for themselves.  But the story text, written by Trevor Philpott, and the picture captions are another matter entirely.  Take, for example, the image, in the spread below, of a boy lying on his bed in a sparsely furnished room.  The caption reads: @A teenager going nowhere: one of Liverpool’s youths sits out another day’.

Or this one, which if you have the book and are able to study body language and facial expressions closely, suggests no more than the exchange of friendly banter between the male and female couples.  The caption reads: ‘Boy meets girl in a Liverpool street.  Yes, the social graces have changed a little.  No time now for many of the formalities of courtship’.

The series began by visiting Great Barr comprehensive school in Birmingham, which is praised by Trevor Philpott as a bold and successful experiment, affording social advancement.  But in Liverpool, he finds ‘things are rather different’.  The first character he meets is Harry – 16, on probation and unemployed.  He goes on in this vein, referring to gangs, stolen cars and roaming the streets.  Then, in the third part, Philpott leaves Liverpool:

To get an environment as different as possible from the Liverpool back streets we went to Cambridge.  Here, amid the slow beauty and rich tradition the young student is given the breathing space to discover himself…

Interestingly, in the light of the recent revelations that the Thatcher cabinet toyed with the idea of leaving Liverpool to die and evacuating the city, Philpott observes that emigration is a popular idea in Cambridge, but that

It’s a disturbing thought Cambridge is so much concerned with emigration, whilst the rougher parts of Liverpool are not thinking about it at all.

The Cambridge issue is wonderfully illustrated with this fatuous picture of respectable teenagers getting it on ‘under the willows of Trinity College’.

Colin Wilkinson leaves the best to the last: a set of stunning photographs commissioned by Picture Post, but never published.  There are photographs by Bert Hardy from essays on Lime Street station, the Mersey ferries and Chinese merchant seamen.  But, as Wilkinson puts it, ‘the best photographic essay on Liverpool was never published by Picture Post’.  Entitled ‘The Slums of Liverpool’, it seems to have been shelved by Edward Hulton, the magazine proprietor, under pressure from Liverpool City Council.  The photos remain, but unfortunately so far Wilkinson has been unable to locate any trace of the text for the feature, written by Fyfe Robertson. The 22 photos were taken by Thurston Hopkins.  Colin Wilkinson praises them as:

Pictures of everyday life; of men, women and children fighting for existence, struggling to maintain the comforts of home life and striving to retain some of the dignity of humankind under conditions which are appalling …

There are street scenes (such as the image that forms the book cover, top), images of  appalling housing conditions (such as the child sleeping with a newspaper to keep the rain off the bedclothes, below via The Guardian), in pubs and at Paddy’s Market.

These photos reminded me of the scenes I encountered a decade later when, as a reporter for Guild Gazette, the Liverpool University student newspaper, I wrote an expose of conditions in slum housing owned by the University – properties acquired in advance of plans to extend the university campus.  The photos that illustrated that article were taken by Rog Millman, and they were very similar in feel and content those of Thurston Hopkins. A selection of  Millman’s photos, taken in Liverpool 8 in 1969, can be seen here.

But the images captured by Bert Hardy, Thurston Hopkins and others form a truly invaluable record of Liverpool and its people in the 1940s and 1950s.  Colin Wilkinson has done a great service by bringing these photographs back into public view, including priceless images seen for the very first time.

Great Expectations: what is a person’s worth?

I was dismayed by the recent BBC TV adaptation of Great Expectations (and by the almost uniform acclaim that it received), but unsure how much my memory of the work was influenced by the David Lean film version, so I decided to read the book again.  It proved to be a welcome return to a novel that had a profound effect on me as a child, with its central question as to how far the pursuit of status and wealth lead to loss of humanity: as Pip ascends he falls, and as he falls he rises.

I had  great expectations of the BBC series, following as it did a recent sequence of superb BBC Dickens adaptations: Andrew Davies’  superb Bleak House (2005),  Little Dorrit (2008 – Andrew Davies again), and Julian Farino’s Our Mutual Friend (1998). But this Great Expectations was a travesty, totally lacking the sense of Pip’s journey to moral awareness, as well as the one thing that makes any Dickens novel memorable and great – comedy and character.  Pip is not a prig, but this was how he was presented in the TV adaptation, seemingly ignoring the fact that the novel is narrated by an older Pip looking back and reflecting subtly and frankly on his earlier fears, ambitions and limitations.

Clearly, when you’re restricted to a three hour dramatisation you can’t include everything. But to leave out the humour, to distort key characters and to omit or leave undeveloped other important characters, such as Biddy or Wemmick, was lamentable.  Gillian Anderson’s portrayal of Miss Havisham was just plain daft, her youthful appearance making nonsense of the chronology of the novel.  The repeated club scenes and the brothel scene took one paragraph from the novel – that has Pip and Herbert joining the Finches in Covent Garden with a very subtle hint of a brothel – and over-egged it.

Dickens dreams of his characters - Robert Buss, 1870

Dickens gave us characters drawn from across the whole social gamut, and was the great delineator of the gulf that separated those at either end of the spectrum. Dickens’ great theme in Great Expectations (or at least, one of them) is the dream of social betterment (a dream that is revealed as a mirage).  Pip’s desire for self-improvement is the main source of the novel’s title: because he believes in the possibility of advancement, he has ‘great expectations’ about his future.  Advancement may be obtained through money or by learning;  but affection, loyalty, and conscience prove more important than social advancement, wealth or class.

Pip desires educational improvement: it’s a  desire deeply connected to his social ambition and longing to marry Estella. A full education (as well as money) is a requirement of being a gentleman. As long as he is an ignorant country boy, he has no hope of social advancement. There’s a hilarious scene early in the novel which reveals Pip’s understanding of this fact as a child. He learns to read at Mr. Wopsle’s aunt’s dame school, where Biddy is an assistant:

The Educational scheme or Course established by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt may be resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils ate apples and put straws down one another’s backs, until Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt collected her energies, and made an indiscriminate totter at them with a birch-rod. After receiving the charge with every mark of derision, the pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a ragged book from hand to hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some figures and tables, and a little spelling,— that is to say, it had had once. As soon as this volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt fell into a state of coma, arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The pupils then entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the subject of Boots, with the view of ascertaining who could tread the hardest upon whose toes. This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a rush at them and distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as if they had been unskilfully cut off the chump end of something), more illegibly printed at the best than any curiosities of literature I have since met with, speckled all over with ironmould, and having various specimens of the insect world smashed between their leaves. This part of the Course was usually lightened by several single combats between Biddy and refractory students. When the fights were over, Biddy gave out the number of a page, and then we all read aloud what we could,— or what we couldn’t — in a frightful chorus; Biddy leading with a high, shrill, monotonous voice, and none of us having the least notion of, or reverence for, what we were reading about. When this horrible din had lasted a certain time, it mechanically awoke Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, who staggered at a boy fortuitously, and pulled his ears. This was understood to terminate the Course for the evening, and we emerged into the air with shrieks of intellectual victory.

Later, as he begins to make his way, Pip takes lessons from Matthew Pocket; and later on Pip tells of hours, days spent in extensive reading.  Ultimately, though, Pip learns by absorbing lessons from his relationships with Joe, Biddy, and Magwitch, that social and educational improvement are irrelevant to one’s real worth.  Wealth is not a ticket to happiness; conscience and affection are far more valuable than erudition and social standing.  Joe provides a lesson along these lines early in the narrative, though Pip fails at this point to understand.  He’s just admitted to Joe (the only person with whom he can be so honest) that he lied to everyone about the nature of his first meeting with Miss Havisham:

I told Joe … that I wished I was not common, and that the lies had come of it somehow, though I didn’t know how. This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for Joe to deal with as for me. But Joe took the case altogether out of the region of metaphysics, and by that means vanquished it.

“There’s one thing you may be sure of, Pip,” said Joe, after some rumination, “namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn’t ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and work round to the same. Don’t you tell no more of ’em, Pip. That ain’t the way to get out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don’t make it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some things. You’re oncommon small. Likewise you’re a oncommon scholar.”

Joe offers a further lesson as he and Pip part at the end of the visit to London that has so embarrassed the young man:

“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith. Diwisions among such must come, and must be met as they come. If there’s been any fault at all to-day, it’s mine. You and me is not two figures to be together in London; nor yet anywheres else but what is private, and beknown, and understood among friends. It ain’t that I am proud, but that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these clothes. I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th’meshes.”

I had not been mistaken in my fancy that there was a simple dignity in him. The fashion of his dress could no more come in its way when he spoke these words, than it could come in its way in Heaven.

Reading these passages again, imbued with the sense of class and the perils of getting too far above yourself, I recalled how, in my teens, these ideas spoke powerfully to me as a boy from a working class background who had passed the 11 plus to go to a Direct Grant grammar.  This was a school which took fee-paying boys from privileged backgrounds, whose rugby team competed in a league with public schools, and where you would be caned if you played football in the lunch hour.

Coincidentally, while I was engaged in re-reading Great Expectations, BBC 4 broadcast a documentary about grammar schools that focussed on their heyday – the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, during which they were opened up to youngsters like me from working class homes, and before the introduction nationally of comprehensive schools.  What was remarkable about this film was the way in which Dickens’ theme in Great Expectations resonated throughout.  Remarkable, too, was the fact that just about everyone who told their personal story ended up at some point in tears.  For some, tears came with the memory of a teacher who had shown faith in their potential, for some recalling  sacrifices made by parents, while for others it was the memory of tensions and conflict with parents or peers who resented their advancement or could see no point in it.

That was my story, for sure. Later, at university and doing a course in sociology, echoes of Great Expectations came back to me when we studied the research that explored the tensions of between class, culture and school.  One such study was Education and the Working Class by Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden. First published in 1962, it took a sample of 88 working-class children educated in Huddersfield and revealed how they were caught between two cultures – home and school.  Meanwhile, there was Basil Bernstein’s work on language that underlined the point that the working class pupil is culturally different – but not deficient.

In Great Expectations, Dickens puts into Biddy’s words an awareness of these cultural differences:

I took Biddy into our little garden by the side of the lane, and, after throwing out in a general way for the elevation of her spirits, that I should never forget her, said I had a favor to ask of her.

“And it is, Biddy,” said I, “that you will not omit any opportunity of helping Joe on, a little.”

“How helping him on?” asked Biddy, with a steady sort of glance.

“Well! Joe is a dear good fellow,— in fact, I think he is the dearest fellow that ever lived,— but he is rather backward in some things. For instance, Biddy, in his learning and his manners.”

Although I was looking at Biddy as I spoke, and although she opened her eyes very wide when I had spoken, she did not look at me.

“O, his manners! won’t his manners do then?” asked Biddy, plucking a black-currant leaf.

“My dear Biddy, they do very well here —”

“O! they do very well here?” interrupted Biddy, looking closely at the leaf in her hand.

“Hear me out,— but if I were to remove Joe into a higher sphere, as I shall hope to remove him when I fully come into my property, they would hardly do him justice.”

“And don’t you think he knows that?” asked Biddy.

It was such a very provoking question (for it had never in the most distant manner occurred to me), that I said, snappishly,—

“Biddy, what do you mean?”

Biddy, having rubbed the leaf to pieces between her hands,— and the smell of a black-currant bush has ever since recalled to me that evening in the little garden by the side of the lane,— said, “Have you never considered that he may be proud?”

“Proud?” I repeated, with disdainful emphasis.

“O! there are many kinds of pride,” said Biddy, looking full at me and shaking her head; “pride is not all of one kind —”

“Well? What are you stopping for?” said I.

“Not all of one kind,” resumed Biddy. “He may be too proud to let any one take him out of a place that he is competent to fill, and fills well and with respect. To tell you the truth, I think he is; though it sounds bold in me to say so, for you must know him far better than I do.”

By the end of the novel, Pip has discovered the true worth of Joe and Biddy. Even the taint of crime and prison which Pip has been desperate to escape cannot hide Magwitch’s inner nobility, and Pip is able to ignore his social status as a criminal and offer him gratitude and succour. Pip has learned to trust his conscience and to a see the real worth of a person, irrespective of wealth, learning or social standing.  He has discover that the Victorian idea of a ‘gentleman’ is built on sand.

First publication of Great Expectations in All The Year Round, 1860

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations was published in thirty-six weekly instalments in Dickens’s journal All the Year Round between 1860 and 1861. The first part appeared on December 1^st 1860 (above).

I first saw David Lean’s atmospheric 1946 adaptation when it was shown by the film society at my grammar school (what is a good education worth!)  And did I find that the pictures in my mind were from that film or Dickens’ novel?   Well, the critic Roger Ebert writes:

Great Expectations’ has been called the greatest of all the Dickens films …[it] does what few movies based on great books can do: creates pictures on the screen that do not clash with the images already existing in our minds. Lean brings Dickens’ classic set-pieces to life as if he’d been reading over our shoulder: Pip’s encounter with the convict Magwitch in the churchyard, Pip’s first meeting with the mad Miss Havisham, and the ghoulish atmosphere in the law offices of Mr. Jaggers, whose walls are decorated with the death masks of clients he has lost to the gallows.

Certainly those were the images I had in my mind.  The film is memorable for its opening sequence on the marshes, enhanced by beautiful black and white cinematography by Guy Green.  In the TV version I had missed the scene where Miss Havisham, supported by Pip, marches around the table on which her mouldering wedding banquet is still laid out, stabbing each place setting with her stick.  That’s in the film – and in the book, too:

“This,” said she, pointing to the long table with her stick, “is where I will be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me here.”

With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then and there and die at once, the complete realization of the ghastly waxwork at the Fair, I shrank under her touch.

“What do you think that is?” she asked me, again pointing with her stick; “that, where those cobwebs are?”

“I can’t guess what it is, ma’am.”

“It’s a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!”

She looked all round the room in a glaring manner, and then said, leaning on me while her hand twitched my shoulder, “Come, come, come! Walk me, walk me!” [...]

“Matthew will come and see me at last,” said Miss Havisham, sternly, when I am laid on that table. That will be his place,— there,” striking the table with her stick, “at my head! And yours will be there! And your husband’s there! And Sarah Pocket’s there! And Georgiana’s there! Now you all know where to take your stations when you come to feast upon me. And now go!”

At the mention of each name, she had struck the table with her stick in a new place. She now said, “Walk me, walk me!” and we went on again.

The best of Lean’s film is in the first hour, but later on the film takes great liberties with the story with, for example, Estella never marrying the odious Drummle, Miss Havisham’s death occurring much earlier, and culminating in a happy ending quite different even to Dickens’ revised version.

This is the opening sequence of David Lean’s film:

The entire film can be seen on YouTube:

‘Which I mean to say, Pip old chap.  What larks!’

See also

• Great Expectations: on David Perdue’s Dickens web

John Surman: Songs from the West Country

Not much time goes by in our household without the music of John Surman being played; this week we’ve been listening again to a couple of albums he recorded in the 1990s that share a distinctive West Country ethos: Road to St Ives and A Biography of  the Rev. Absalom Dawe.  These albums epitomise how Surman, who was born in Tavistock, Devon in 1944, has often been inspired by his West country roots in the music that he has created since the 1970s.

Surman can be a difficult artist to pigeonhole: he’s a jazzman, obviously, but his compositions have drawn on folk, choral and other traditions, too.  As his official website puts it, ‘John Surman is one of the key figures in a generation of European musicians who have crucially expanded the international horizons of jazz during the past thirty years or so’.  Surman is also a multi-instrumentalist, playing saxophone, clarinet and keyboards, and most renowned as a master of the bass saxophone.  He has produced solo albums (such as the first two of my featured trio) on which he plays all the instruments, but has also collaborated with jazz musicians of renown from America and Europe, especially those who  record for the ECM label, for which Surman has mainly worked since the 1980s.  He plays in all kinds of settings, from small group to big band, and has produced albums that involve collaborations between himself and church organ (Proverbs and Songs, 1998 and Rain on the Window, 2008), with Jack de Johnette on drums and percussion (Invisible Nature, 2002), with a string quintet (The Spaces In Between, 2007) and with tenor John Potter singing 16th century compositions by John Dowland (In Darkness Let Me Dwell, 1999).

Road to St Ives is a set of gentle, lilting compositions, entirely a one-man effort, with Surman writing all the compositions and producing every sound heard on the album, building layers of sound as he plays melodies on bass clarinet and soprano and bass saxophones over a keyboard and percussion wash.

The album is inspired by the landscape and spirit of Cornwall, and while drawing on the English folk tradition, remains clearly in the jazz tradition. On the CD sleeve, Surman explains:

Most  of the  music  on  this  recording  has been inspired by the landscape and history of the county of  Cornwall in England.  I am not  Cornish.  My birthplace lies just to the east of the river Tamar, which forms the border between Devon and Cornwall.  However,  ever  since  my  first  visit  to  Land’s End, the county has held a special fascination for me. Its early inhabitants are traceable back to Paleolithic man. It has a language of its own, which remained in use up until the nineteenth  century.  With a rich fund of  folklore and legend in addition, I’ve found much to inspire me. The pieces are not intended to be musical  portraits of particular places or events, the titles being simply a collection of some of  the intriguing  place-names found on and around the road to St. Ives.

Surman’s soprano sax shimmers on this on the recording, lending tracks such as ‘Kelly Bray’ and ‘Perranporth’, with its sense of birdsong and birds wheeling and circling in flight, an ethereal air. In contrast, ‘BodminMoor, anchored by a bass figure on the piano, has a brooding air, but again with the saxophone suggesting wind, long views and birds in flight.  The most immediately memorable track is ‘Piperspool’, with its electronic noodling and breathy bass saxophone. The closing track, ‘Bedruthan Steps’, opens with synthesised notes that sound like distant church bells chiming.

In 1998 Surman produced a chamber orchestra version of Road to St. Ives. The work was commissioned and performed by the Bournemouth Sinfonietta.

Like many others, I regard A Biography of the Reverend Absalom Dawe as being John Surman’s most perfect achievement.  The album’s title refers to Surman’s great-great-grandfather, a country parson, and though there are no strings or vocals on this album, the form of many of the pieces is rooted in the English choral tradition, one of the musician’s earliest enthusiasms.  As a choirboy, and before he’d heard any jazz, he sang in West Country churches, and since the 1980s Surman has been reinvestigating these roots, especially on albums such as Proverbs and Songs (with organist Howard Moody and the Salisbury Cathedral Choir) and In Darkness Let Me Dwell, an album of songs by John Dowland performed by Surman and tenor John Potter.

On A Biography of the Rev Absalom Dawe, Surman once again plays bass saxophone as well as soprano sax, alto and bass clarinets, and keyboards. The electronic elements are limited and unobtrusive, and the keyboard’s bright tones are a good match for the fluid, breathy sounds of the wind instruments. The music is ethereal and atmospheric and the sound is crisp, the result of Surman recording each instrument separately and then mixing individual units into the whole. The compositions leap musical boundaries, with elements of contemporary classical composition, jazz, and European folk all being present.

The album opens with ‘First Light’, an atmospheric clarinet solo.  This leads into the beautiful, lilting melody of ‘Countless Journeys’. On ‘Twas but Piety’ a lyrical clarinet passage leads into a central section in which a jazzy saxophone improvisation begins over a funereal synthesised drone  before spiralling into a a passionate solo. ‘Wayfarer’ harks back to the sound of Road to St Ives, with a moody, reflective baritone sax solo played over a keyboard figure.

John Surman’s music transcends familiar boundaries. A deep love of the jazz tradition runs throughout his work, and he is equally affected by the melodic qualities of choral music – as a one-time choirboy – and by English folk music:

If I look back to what turned me on about music, it is what I heard before I ever came across jazz.

Much of his work is powerfully resonant of the landscape and tradition of the West Country, perhaps most especially on these two albums.