"pedestrian"; "flâneur"; a "gentleman stroller of city streets"; "lounger"; "saunterer"; "loafer"; a "person who walks the city in order to experience it"; an "idle man-about-town"; a "complete philosophical way of living and thinking".
The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; newsstands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done. -Walter Benjamin,"The Flâneur"
BEN BRYNMOR FOWLER
Currently living in Ebisu, Tokyo. A lover of city living & city walking, cinema, music, fiction, currently writing a PhD on contemporary theatre in Britain and Germany, and developing an intense relationship with apple gadgets.
OTHER HOMES:
http://www.scoop.it/t/british-and-german-theatre-today
Instagram username: IBKHOV
THE MOTHER OF THE BULL
Watching mothers of murdered school kids slapping Tilda Swinton and poking holes in her eggs, I was reminded of a trip I took in November to Spain with a friend. During a stop-off in Sevilla, I went on the guided tour of the Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza de Caballería de Sevilla, Spain’s oldest [and still working] bull ring. The tour-guide introduced us to a room hidden in the cavity wall of the arena, where a series of bull’s heads were hung on the walls. They were missing their ears, which along with the tails are cut off by triumphant matadors as trophies after the bull has been finally killed in the ring. But, she directed our attention to a rather more interesting mounted head in the room, hanging in pride of place, the head of a cow.
The tour guide then told us the story of how, in 1947, a bull called Islero had killed Matador Manuel Rodriguez Manolete during a fight. The bull, of course, was quickly dispatched. However, the aggrieved Spaniards weren’t satisfied with stopping at that bull’s life. In retribution, they had to go and find the mother that had produced the bull and kill her in order to prevent her ever again producing such a brave bull as the one who had killed their matador. So they found Islera, the cow mother of evil, and slaughtered her.
I LOVE Tilda Swinton. Let’s make that clear. But WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN is not a good film. I think it probably works great as a novel, I’ve not read it. But, like a bad act in an Ibsen play, it’s all exposition. We watch a woman picking over the bones of her past, but as audience members, we’re not filled-in enough to examine her choices and her behaviour with her until the last scene of the film, and her final visit to her son in prison, which just points up the mysterious complexity of the nature/nurture opposition that the character is trying to work through. It’s only then that we are looking at the situation as her, with her knowledge. Before then, we’re encouraged to see the film as a thriller, or even a horror, to connect dots and work out the plot instead of focusing on her obsessive analysis of her own actions in her past, which is what the film documents.
I also got really pissed off with the heavy handed red colour symbolism after 8 minutes into the film. Thankfully it calms down a bit as things go on. I took against the tendency to cut to extreme mouth close-ups of Kevin issuing particularly prophetic or laden pronouncements. John C Reilly as husband and father became too preposterous for me after the incident with bleach that leaves his daughter needing a glass eye. How can a man be so unaware?
Watching the film a second time is a lot more interesting. It’s much less Rosemary’s Baby, and I was rather more alert to the fascinating subtlety of Swinton’s performance. It’s more ambiguous, more surprising than you can appreciate on a first viewing, when the monstrosity of the child takes unnerving, central focus. It’s clear that she sees a part of herself in him which she can’t tear herself away from - re-creating his bedroom in her new flat with the exact shade of blue paint, still ironing his t-shirts, choosing to stay close to the prison in their hometown instead of choosing a new life, a new identity. In one way, he is her, an aspect of, a product of her, and that final scene might be a powerful, final recognition and acceptance of that. Didn’t get that first time round, where I was trying to play plot-detective. Should you have to watch films twice? Or perhaps the structure of the film wasn’t a central aspect of the matter of the film itself, it didn’t act as a form that gave eloquent, meaningful expression to content. For me, the way that the film organised it’s story just got in the way.
