A Canterbury Tale, Richard Rorty and Stanley Kubrick

Guy Stagg understands A Canterbury Tale:

A Canterbury Tale suggests that love of country does not mean some romanticised retreat into the past, but rather drawing on England;s heritage to navigate the uncertainty of the modern world. 

As a result, the film floats free from its origins as wartime propaganda to become one of cinema’s most beautiful explorations of history and belief. 

Though the pace is slow and the plot dreamlike, it finds space for art and nature, friendship and love, nation and faith – all the things people sacrifice their lives for.

I'm reminded of something the American philosopher Richard Rorty said:

National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.

Stagg does get something wrong though. He tells the always-moving story of how Martin Scorsese sought out Michael Powell, who by then was living in obscurity and near poverty, and told him his films had inspired a whole new generation of American directors.

But then he adds:

The best evidence of this influence is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the film’s opening sequence, a prehistoric ape throws a bone into the air; as it falls, the camera jump-cuts to a satellite floating in space. 

The trick was lifted from Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, which begins with a group of pilgrims making their way across medieval England. When a falconer sets a bird of prey into flight, it soars from his arm and sweeps through the air, to become a Spitfire diving from the sky. In a single cut, the viewer is carried from Chaucer’s England to the Battle of Britain.

I don't think Kubrick can have got this idea for his jump-cut from A Canterbury Tale. In a footnote to an article of his own on the film, Paul Banks says:

Ian Christie has recently pointed out in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, 6023 (7 September 2018), 6, that even if Kubrick had seen A Canterbury Tale before making his own film, it would have been the "severely truncated and re-ordered US version", the only print available between the late 1940s and 1978, which omitted the sequence in question.

Still, Stagg's short post on Engelsberg Ideas is well worth a read.

Stanley Kubrick began as a teenage street photographer

Before he was a film director, Stanley Kubrick was a photographer. 

And he never lost his interest in photography. I remember Keith Hamshere, the first boy to play Oliver Twist in Oliver! and later a leading Hollywood stills photographer, saying he learnt to keep out of Kubrick's eyeline if he was on set during one of his films.

If he didn't, Kubrick would notice him and say something like "Is that a new lens? How are you finding it?", the film suddenly forgotten.

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Peter Black says the Liberal Democrats must continue to oppose national identity cards.

Wealthy donors are increasingly funding political campaigns, eroding the public’s trust in the political process. The government has the opportunity to reverse that trend by limiting the allowed individual donation amounts and capping campaign spending by political parties, argues Rose Whiffen.

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Cambridge Town Owl introduces us to Cambridge's Elspeth Dimsdale, a pioneering woman Liberal parliamentary candidate.

Moon In Gemini calls Barry Lyndon (1975) a masterpiece: "He is despicable in many ways, but are the aristocrats he so desperately wants join really that much better? Do they snub him because he is cruel to his wife and stepson, or because he isn’t one of them?"

"He was so worried about being late, for example, that he would invariably arrive hours ahead of time – he once had to scale a wall at Lord’s after arriving so early that the ground was still locked. In 1984, confused about the regulations during an early-season Benson and Hedges Cup tie between Scotland and Yorkshire at Perth, he called two tea intervals. Whether it was bomb scares or pitch invasions, reflecting greenhouses or errant pigeons, they all conspired to trouble him." David Hopps has written the Guardian obituary of the umpire Dickie Bird.

No, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey didn't copy A Canterbury Tale

This sequence from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was made came out in 1968, which seem strangely familiar to anyone who knows Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, which was released 24 years earlier.

Was Kubrick influenced by the earlier film? Almost certainly not.

In a footnote to his article Deconstructing the Imagined Village: A Canterbury Tale, Paul Banks writes:

Ian Christie has recently pointed out in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, 6023 (7 September 2018), 6, that even if Kubrick had seen A Canterbury Tale before making his own film, it would have been the ‘severely truncated and re-ordered US version’, the only print available between the late 1940s and 1978, which omitted the sequence in question.

That seems pretty conclusive.

It's a lesson that just as technological innovations can take place simultaneously in countries that have no contact, so great directors can have similar brilliant ideas without influencing one another.

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"At the turn of the 20th century, British protectionists waged a long and unsuccessful crusade against free trade. Like President Trump’s policies, their campaign for tariff reform expressed the anxieties of a global power in decline." Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri draws an enticing historical parallel.

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"HS2's so-called bat tunnel has become a political scapegoat, used to justify rolling back environmental protections. But the real story is very different. The tunnel was not forced by conservationists or wildlife laws - it was a consequence of poor decisions made by HS2 Ltd and approved by parliament." Holy correction! It's the Bat Conversation Trust.

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Andrew Miller argues that the appointment of Harry Brook betrays the shocking tangle that England's once-formidable white-ball set-up has got itself into.

"What captivated Kubrick about Thackeray was his ability to expose the cruelty beneath the polished facade of aristocratic life. The rigid etiquette of the 18th century – a period described variously as an age of gentility, sensibility and enlightenment – demanded an emotional detachment that fascinated the director." Nathan Abrams believes that Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon deserves another viewing.