'Life moves pretty fast' - Meanderings (V)

I’ve not felt the prickle for quite some time. But last weekend, there it was, an insidious little itch, rising to the surface, about halfway through Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtman’s Contract. Let me explain. There was real excitement in getting to see a Greenaway film for the first time at the cinema, and one that I hadn’t yet seen on the small screen. This 1982 film, purportedly one of the most painterly from this most painterly of directors, was a perfect Sunday afternoon treat. Yet, somehow or other, I’d gotten the wrong end of the stick. Reviews and synopses had led me to believe that this story of an artist contracted to produce twelve drawings of a country house, would feature tableaux vivants representing the paintings of Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Vermeer. The anticipation of feasting visually, say, on Caravaggio’s Conversion of St Paul or Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, casually dropped into the narrative, was thwarted. Whilst the cinematography unmistakably conjured up those great masters, there was nothing as exact as a particular painting.  

Marc Chagall, American Windows #4 (1977)

Was I trying too hard to make hints into something more substantial? Probably. My mind’s eye attempted to twist an ill-tempered dining scene into Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus. And then desperately swapping the genders in Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream - the artist Mr Neville climbed into a bath and held up his under-shirt rather than Mrs Talman. Eventually, after accepting that I’d been overly literal in interpreting the summary of the film, I found my bearings. The cinematography was incredible, clearly deploying Caravaggesque chiaroscuro - characters bathed in candlelight in the opening monologues and dialogues - or the draughtman’s bold pencil strokes -  reminiscent of Rembrandt’s sketches - as he set about his task.   

But what of that prickle? This is an annoying sensation that comes over me, thankfully less and less as I age, of not quite getting a film like this; of not having the intellectual heft to appreciate art; or of being exposed as a fraud by those much smarter and more knowing than me. Of - not to put too fine a point on it - not belonging in an art-house cinema, a theatre, an art-gallery, a concert-hall or an opera house. This errant nonsense is quickly dismissed. The only things you need after the cost of your ticket, are a sense of wonder and curiosity, a lively imagination and enough coffee inside you to keep your concentration fizzing. The prickle, I decided long ago, is quite clearly a class thing. 

Rankled by this return of the repressed, I attempted to unpack it further, and it got me thinking of a recent political exchange between the MPs Angela Rayner and Dominic Raab. A sneering Raab, winked in the manner of an Easter Island statue with something in its eye, and then attempted to take Rayner, and by extension her class, to task:

“She talks about working people. Where was she when the comrades were on the picket line last Thursday? Where was she when the Labour frontbench were joining them rather than standing up for the public? She was at the Glyndebourne music festival sipping champagne, listening to opera. Champagne socialism is back in the Labour Party.” 

Rayner was more than a match for the bullying blowhard. Right after the exchange, she found the perfect riposte: proud, witty and devastating:

“My advice to the Deputy Prime Minister is to cut out the snobbery and brush up on his opera. The Marriage of Figaro is the story of a working-class woman who gets the better of a privileged but dim-witted villain.”

Touché! That this kind of cultural ring-fencing and snobbery still exists, and right at the heart of a ‘levelling-up’ government, is quickly dealt with. Nobody with even half a brain-cell would give it the shortest of shrift. Rayner took care of herself and her rapier skewering of Raab was irresistible. Why was I still angry though? Raab is a mediocrity who is dying a long, slow political death. Perhaps it was the champagne element? A criticism of, not so much enjoying a particular kind of art, but how you go about enjoying it? Again, the answer was ‘yes’. 

This exchange - along with my musing on art in film, and the impotent attempt to wheedle out visual tableaux in the Greenaway - led me irrevocably towards my favourite use of art in film ever, something that captures the unbridled and democratic joy that art is able to give us all.     

Art in film can be very hit and miss. There is, of course, Greenaway’s magnificent Nightwatching, all about Rembrandt and the creation of his largest masterpiece The Night Watch. Perhaps that had something to do with my muddled thinking on watching The Draughtman’s Contract. There are the biopics of artists. Some I’ve enjoyed such as Final Portrait (Giacometti) and Frida; some I’ve not: Lust for Life (Van Gogh) and Pollack are just silly. But then again, I’m not a big fan of a biopic. I like biography to accompany creation, not lead it. 

Rather, I prefer art when it creeps into films that are not necessarily about artists. Or, to go off at a tangent, art that creeps into a biopic that is anachronistic, such as Derek Jarman’s wonderful allusion to Jacques Louis David’s The Death of Marat in Caravaggio. That said, David's painting gets everywhere. It rocks up in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and also The Godfather. But my favourite use of art is quite literal, the truant diversion to the Art Institute of Chicago in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Each time I watch this scene, it engenders some kind of powerful emotion. More often than not it’s joy and the pleasures available to us just through being alive. But sometimes it catches me out, leaving me melancholy, and even on occasion resulting in a tear.

It’s even occasionally inspired trips to London’s National Gallery, seeking out my favourites - Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus and Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire - and simply standing in front of them whilst playing The Dream Academy’s instrumental cover of ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’ through my headphones.

Over the years, I’ve had conversations about this scene, and almost every time there’s been agreement about just how magical it is. There was one memorable naysayer though, who declared that it ‘mocked’ or ‘cheapened the way in which we look at art’; and that the character of Cameron and his reaction to Georges Seurat’s mesmerising Pointillism in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, was puzzled and dismissive. Because of that he resorts to ‘goofing around’. You only have to watch it to realise that this is ridiculous. Cameron, along with Ferris and Sloane are excited, inspired and touched by what they encounter.   

This charge of ‘mocking’ or ‘cheapening’ art is almost the reverse of Raab’s charge to Rayner - she’s okay to visit the opera as long as she isn’t drinking champagne, i.e. behaving in a ‘class appropriate’ way; Ferris and his friends are very welcome at the art gallery, as long as they behave in a manner that is reverent, severe, and silent. Awe should be declared by stroking your chin and keeping your head still (look at the beautiful way that the three of them mock the reverential pose). Plainly, that's more nonsense. It might, too, be a dismissal of the films of John Hughes. The fools! Hughes may not be an aesthete in the classic sense, and is certainly making a very different kind of film to Greenaway’s, but he was an absolute master. And this scene is ravishing cinema.

Strangely, I never pause the reel as each painting glides past. I love the way the camera shakes ever so slightly, in the way that our own heads are never completely still when we gaze at a piece of art. The colours and moods and the emotions that each of these famous works conjure up as they sweep past seem to say something about how quickly life rushes past you - and yes, the most famous line in the film flags that up. Mary Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath; Picasso’s painful (literally) Nude Under a Pine Tree flanked by Giacometti’s L’Homme Qui Marche I; Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (have you ever noticed that there is no door in or out of the diner, just one into the kitchen?); Seurat and Kandinsky and Toulouse Lautrec; Matisse's astonishing Bathers by a River; one of Rodin’s many Balzac sculptures (learn more of what Rodin’s Balzac was up to here); and the perfect place to make out, in front of one of Marc Chagall’s stained glass windows.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks (1942)

Goofing around, having your breath taken away and coming close to being hypnotised by something you aren’t quite understanding, sharing a tender kiss. All of that seems to be at one with the nascent discovery of beauty. Some of us wake slowly to art, and it can take time before it finds its way beneath your skin. For me it happened in my early-twenties, as I stood before John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shallot at Tate Britain. Perhaps my instinct up until that point had been to mock any aesthetic impulse (the so-called ‘middle-class' ones anyway), to ward off beauty with self-deprecation, to not allow myself the privilege of losing myself in the Lady’s Pre-Raphaelite tresses. For our trio of truants, it’s an awakening too, be it sharing a kiss in front of a Chagall window or stilled by a Seurat. There is absolutely no doubt that this is the affect that the painting has on Cameron. He and his pals can react in whatever way they want. To stand, glass of champagne in hand on a balmy summer evening, whilst listening to music, is not a betrayal of anyone. You can care about the plight of the workers and their wages and lose yourself in a beautiful aria. It seems almost redundant to say that compassion and aesthetic sensibility are in any way contradictory.   

It should be redundant. Even on a Sunday, entering the BFI to watch a film that is challenging, frequently baffling, and definitely one that can firmly be described - unimaginatively - as ‘art-house’, there still remained the working-class prickle that signalled the absurd question ‘what am I doing here?’ Don’t even give that prickle a moment’s thought. And if you do, treat it with the gleeful contempt that Rayner treated Raab.

So, in honour of John Hughes and his trip to the art gallery, and, indeed, Greenaway, for his provocative and dazzling films, let’s have the line. “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Keep attending the opera, Angela. And I'll keep bouncing through Greenaway’s films, carried along by Michael Nyman’s raucous scores. Clap between movements if you’re inclined, eat a pork pie at the Proms if you are peckish (guilty), and pay attention to every thought - no matter how silly or confusing - that buzzes through your mind. As long as don't impinge on anyone else’s enjoyment, whatever you do is legitimate. Unless it’s Raab. If you see him in the cinema aisles, chuck popcorn at him. It's what he'd expect you to do. 

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Postscript 

The mystery of Greenaway and the missing tableaux vivants might have been solved. Revisiting A Zed and Two Noughts last night, a film first and last encountered late at night on Channel 4, not only made me ponder how much of an influence it had made on The Mighty Boosh and its 'Zooniverse', but also revealed a ravishing framing of Vermeer's The Art of Painting. 

Vermeer, The Art of Painting (1668)

'The Art of Film-Making', Peter Greenaway and Sacha Vierny

I love the shift in tone from Vermeer's cool gold and blue to Greenaway and the cinematographer Sacha Vierny's ravishing red.