Sunday 19 October 2008

Sunday night is... a wedding and a barge


Yesterday in London for a wedding reception, then night at son Tom's with a walk around Holland Park and Kensington Gardens this morning, passing the houses of Michael Powell, Walter Crane, Jimmy Page, Michael Winner and Sir Henry Newbolt. Didn't knock in at any of them. Then big dinner with old friends near Holloway, so I am just back and rather puzzled by the sheer number of reactions to the Vettriano. And it was picked up elsewhere too. I have now said everything I am ever likely to say on Jack Vettriano. God knows why I started in the first place except to see where a piece of string might lead. Years of art and art history perhaps. I don't think it has led anywhere particularly useful.

In any case, here is something beautiful, in fact one of the most beautiful films ever made, the beginning of Jean Vigo's L'Atalante. A village church, a wedding procession through fields, and onto a barge.





Of course it is another Vigo film, Zéro de Conduite that is the source of the still at the top of my post on teaching. If you do not love these things I cannot help you.


4 comments:

puthwuth said...

I love this film and wrote about it here:
http://georgiasam.blogspot.com/2008/02/latalante.html

Mark Granier said...

I've never seen the film (though I've heard of it of course), but after watching that wonderful excerpt I'll go get hold of it one of these days.

George S said...

Nice the bit about Corbiere, Puthwuth. By coincidence I have just been looking at Martin Bell's piece of Corbiere in his Bloodaxe Complete Poems, The Ballad Singer at the Pardon of St Anne. Bell, I think, is the only one of the English poets to get Corbiere (and Laforgue) into his own poetry.

As for the film, it is out of this world (all the more so for being quite droll and in the world in fact.) Pace, switches of mood and motif... Get the film, Mark. A once a year view is good for anyone's soul.

Magnificent kittens, I agree. Our efforts to train our two are completely ineffectual.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the film, George. It was wonderful. No, I've not seen it before. It was a nice 'wind-down' after hurtling my way back from the Lincolnshire coast to The Midlands in three hours this evening. I can now retire to my bread oven with a smile thinking about the guy in the procession who smacked the wench's arse. Was life ever so simple? No matter. For a few minutes it was.