THIS SPORTING LIFE (Lindsay Anderson, 1963)

Adapted by David Storey from his partly autobiographical novel, This Sporting Life is a film that keeps telling us how powerful it is but whose power never materializes. It immediately plunges us into a maelstrom of violence on a Yorkshire rugby field; thereafter, Frank, a hospitalized bloodied player, is jabbed by fleeting bits of memory of his recent life. We are thus introduced to his volatile relationship with his landlady, Margaret Hammond, whom he professes to love and whose kitchen table he is prone to assault. Margaret, a widow obsessed with the memory of her dead husband, is also hospitalized eventually, for a brain hemorrhage. Blood flowing becomes a motif as life constantly hovers near death.
     Rugby as sport is a means for working-class youth to attain local celebrity and, as Storey and director Lindsay Anderson employ it, a metaphor for the struggle of working-class people to survive. (Previously, Frank had been a coal-miner.) Gerald Weaver owns both the local factory and the rugby team. Margaret’s husband died at the factory; Weaver tells Frank it was a suicide, but we suspect the cover-up of an accident for which Weaver would have had to pay the widow much more than he got away with. Frank’s last name, Machin, suggests “machine”; he also is a tool of Weaver’s, the suggestion being that capitalists exploit workers for their own benefit. Right before Margaret’s expiration at hospital, a spider appears on the wall above her bed: a symbol of this exploitation. Frank punches it.
     This is Anderson’s feature debut; the film’s social import is murky and abstract. (Joseph Losey was first approached to direct.) At thirty Richard Harris (best actor, Cannes) seems old to be addressed as “Lad” and monotonously explosive; Rachel Roberts, however, is excellent as Margaret.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=16

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=19

ECHOES OF FORGOTTEN PLACES (Robert Fantinatto, 2005)

Robert Fantinatto’s Canadian documentary Echoes of Forgotten Places (secondarily titled Urban Exploration[,] Industrial Archaeology and the Aesthetics of Decay) unearths abandoned factories and other industrial constructions in Toronto. It begins lamely and unconvincingly, with various voiceovers and slick interviews, but it advances across its three-quarters-of-an-hour length to a fine montage of mostly static images, albeit accompanied by intrusive dire music. However, we do come to sense the abandonment of structures that we find ourselves haunting in a realistically detailed dream.
     A series of dissolves, beginning with an aerial shot, depicts the current city in color. A woman’s (perhaps co-scenarist Leesa Beales’s) voice: “Our great cities of glass, steel and concrete seem to exist in a permanent state. But even these great buildings will one day join the other ruins and monuments of the past. How quick we are to forget how we got here. . . .” Terribly worn archival black-and-white footage replaces the crisp color; we see men—ghosts now—at work: “The manufacturing industries were the heart and soul of communities. Whole towns were built around them.” We emerge into sleek color and retreat again into black and white: “[I]ndustries began to close. Cheaper labor was found elsewhere.” It is perhaps Fantinatto himself whom we follow and whose more diffuse, pretentious speech we hear: “The land becomes valuable, and the demolition crews pay a visit. . . . Sometimes there are precious few moments left to capture an image or make a record of a condemned place.” All the while, the music cheapens the fine, beautifully edited imagery. (Fantinatto edited.) There is rhetorical nonsense about the “enormous silence” that has replaced industrial noise before Fantinatto gives us the silence. Except for the music!
     Following the final montage, archival black-and-white footage brings back the workers, the ghosts.