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I am resolved to make of myself a pestilent innovator
The one flaw in David Rudkin's The Ash Tree (1975) is the same one I just saw avoided in Mark Gatiss' The Tractate Middoth (2013): it shows too much. Not that it ruins the climax of the story, but I would have done better merely hearing the soft cries, uneasily childlike, and seeing the flickers of movement in the limbs of the ash-tree, bending its shadow across the desk of the protagonist as he sits up too late with his thoughts, playing the same doomed game of sortilege as his ancestor: Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be. The BBC could have held the special effects and come in under budget for once. The atmosphere is everything in this story and it didn't need the assist.
Edward Petherbridge is excellent, playing a double role: in the mid-1700's, the new Sir Richard of Castringham, lately arrived from the Continent ("He isn't pale enough for a lord!") to claim his inheritance upon his childless uncle's death; and his uncle's uncle, Sir Matthew Fell, who presided over the countryside in the days of the witch-hunts. He seems to be presiding still. His portrait hangs at the head of the stairs, staring pale as his Puritan collar. Voices call his name in the night, their cape-and-capotain silhouettes standing out against the moonlit panes like some history lesson in shadowplay. Times slide and blur, night and afternoon; Richard opens his mouth to speak of a new church pew and finds himself pronouncing a woman's death. Their voices echo in and out of one another, the same light, incisive temper. He should hardly be a haunted man. As craning and fey as Petherbridge can look, Richard is a vital newcomer, his hands assured on his horse's reins or his charcoals as he sketches Italianate improvements on his ancestral hall like a less self-absorbed version of Greenaway's draughtsman. He reads Fielding's Tom Jones and hangs suggestively intimate etchings where his ancestors' plain portraits once gazed down; he plans to install his fiancée, the smart Augusta, as soon the wedding can be decently arranged. The past should have no hold on him, ghosting and bodiless as it is. And yet, isn't it sensuality at the heart of this haunting? Sir Matthew was beguiled once by a yellow-haired woman smiling by a stream—and denounced her for running in her "night-shape" as a hare. I cannot believe it. But what I saw ye do, that I saw. And that have I had to testify.
It's a beautiful production, as carefully composed in its tableaux as Jarman's Caravaggio (1986). The witch put to the question gleams like a saint in an oil painting, her naked body sweat-streaked, soot-stained, her face all contempt for the squire's apologizing. A branch scrapes a window with a squeak of twigs and glass, but the rhythm is a lover's fingers, caressing to be allowed in. The witchfinders' drumbeat paces the moors like the heartbeat that has never gone out of the land. (And perhaps she was a witch when she died, Anne Mothersole; perhaps not. But certainly in the years since her hanging, she has had time to become one.) Especially given the doubling, the film takes a greater risk than I would have expected, relying on the viewer's ability to tell the two times apart even as so much of the story is their fatal merging—at points it's impossible to tell which squire of Castringham is speaking or seeing and it's a controlled, deliberate effect. The costumes help, but only when we can see them. The ash-tree helps nothing. The leaves rustle the same against the night sky.
In other words,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
handful_ofdust, if you haven't seen this: it's for you. Its only misstep for me really is those few moments near the end when we've already got the idea; we don't need it spelled out for us. It recovers for the final image, though, and ends with a true sting. And possibly I shouldn't have watched it last thing before bed, but I'll be distracted by Arisia in the morning. I am not playing sortes with anything before then.
Edward Petherbridge is excellent, playing a double role: in the mid-1700's, the new Sir Richard of Castringham, lately arrived from the Continent ("He isn't pale enough for a lord!") to claim his inheritance upon his childless uncle's death; and his uncle's uncle, Sir Matthew Fell, who presided over the countryside in the days of the witch-hunts. He seems to be presiding still. His portrait hangs at the head of the stairs, staring pale as his Puritan collar. Voices call his name in the night, their cape-and-capotain silhouettes standing out against the moonlit panes like some history lesson in shadowplay. Times slide and blur, night and afternoon; Richard opens his mouth to speak of a new church pew and finds himself pronouncing a woman's death. Their voices echo in and out of one another, the same light, incisive temper. He should hardly be a haunted man. As craning and fey as Petherbridge can look, Richard is a vital newcomer, his hands assured on his horse's reins or his charcoals as he sketches Italianate improvements on his ancestral hall like a less self-absorbed version of Greenaway's draughtsman. He reads Fielding's Tom Jones and hangs suggestively intimate etchings where his ancestors' plain portraits once gazed down; he plans to install his fiancée, the smart Augusta, as soon the wedding can be decently arranged. The past should have no hold on him, ghosting and bodiless as it is. And yet, isn't it sensuality at the heart of this haunting? Sir Matthew was beguiled once by a yellow-haired woman smiling by a stream—and denounced her for running in her "night-shape" as a hare. I cannot believe it. But what I saw ye do, that I saw. And that have I had to testify.
It's a beautiful production, as carefully composed in its tableaux as Jarman's Caravaggio (1986). The witch put to the question gleams like a saint in an oil painting, her naked body sweat-streaked, soot-stained, her face all contempt for the squire's apologizing. A branch scrapes a window with a squeak of twigs and glass, but the rhythm is a lover's fingers, caressing to be allowed in. The witchfinders' drumbeat paces the moors like the heartbeat that has never gone out of the land. (And perhaps she was a witch when she died, Anne Mothersole; perhaps not. But certainly in the years since her hanging, she has had time to become one.) Especially given the doubling, the film takes a greater risk than I would have expected, relying on the viewer's ability to tell the two times apart even as so much of the story is their fatal merging—at points it's impossible to tell which squire of Castringham is speaking or seeing and it's a controlled, deliberate effect. The costumes help, but only when we can see them. The ash-tree helps nothing. The leaves rustle the same against the night sky.
In other words,
handful_ofdust, if you haven't seen this: it's for you. Its only misstep for me really is those few moments near the end when we've already got the idea; we don't need it spelled out for us. It recovers for the final image, though, and ends with a true sting. And possibly I shouldn't have watched it last thing before bed, but I'll be distracted by Arisia in the morning. I am not playing sortes with anything before then.
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Youtube has a clip of his scene with Raleigh just before they go over the top. It has less sexual tension than it did on the page, probably because you can hear the guns in the background, see how nervous Raleigh is -- it's clear that their conversation as much about Osborne trying to distract him from his fear as it is the two of them bonding.
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I don't know Journey's End at all. Should I look into it? I gather World War I and actors I would like.
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It's also, IMHO, one of the slashiest things ever. You could logically pair any two of the characters, although Captain Stanhope and Lts. Osborne and Raleigh are its OT3.
OK, I may have a bit of a WWI kink. It's the puttees.
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The sexiness and physicality of Mrs. Mothersole is also very interesting (we never expect witches to be blonde, do we?), since all we hear about her in the story is that her rage and hatred was "poysonous" enough to freak an entire attendant crowd out on the day she died. At the ChiSeries reading, I got a surprising amount of response just by stressing how malignant Euwphaim Glouwer is; we're very used to this sort of retroactive acknowledgement that if there were witches, it was the witch-trial mentality that created them. But that final image of Mrs. Mothersole's withered shell in the pt beneath the burnt-out tree, contorted like a fertility goddess to sick her vengeance-seeking "children" up out into the world, is very telling.
no subject
Semi-related -- I've noticed that a lot of the folklore around witches (I'm thinking of the descriptions of how to do counter-charms against them)describes neither devil-worshippers, happy hippie pagans, nor wrongly-accused old women, but people pulling a kind of rural protection racket -- your cows stop giving milk, or the milk tastes funny, and then one of your neighbours will show up saying "Aw, too bad. Say, that's a nice pot -- can I have it?"
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. . . that's actually true. And I just saw a bunch of tribbles tonight.
It really is the weird case where I wish the BBC had put less money into a production. Mistress Mothersole's "young ones" would have been significantly more frightening as noises and shadow-glimpsed movement, skittering, mewing, something suddenly, horribly wrong with Sir Richard's silhouette. We get too much of a look at them. I started wondering how they were put together instead of wishing I'd never seen that much of them at all.
It's interesting how the mere act of removing the guiding narration sets you adrift, boiling the story down to its action/reaction roots, and giving you far less of an idea what you're "supposed" to think and feel at any given point.
I couldn't tell—it's one of the film's lacunae, like how long any of it takes—how far the relationship between Mistress Mothersole and Sir Matthew had progressed. She stares so hard at the other woman's hand in his: wife or betrothed, mother of his presumptive children. Mine shall inherit! Were those monsters that crawled out to kill him and his heirs his, too?
The sexiness and physicality of Mrs. Mothersole is also very interesting (we never expect witches to be blonde, do we?)
I didn't recognize the actress, but I loved her physical casting: she is a sexually attractive woman, healthy, well-figured, with that proud chin and the butter-colored flag of her hair, but she's not young (especially for the time—she looks in her early thirties to me, and by the time of her execution appears older) and her beauty is not exotic. I love the way she tucks her hair behind her ear, that first time we see her; she has a cat's grin. Nothing about her automatically signals other.
But that final image of Mrs. Mothersole's withered shell in the pit beneath the burnt-out tree, contorted like a fertility goddess to sick her vengeance-seeking "children" up out into the world, is very telling.
Yes. (And yes: like some awful sheela-na-gig.)
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Petherbridge is wonderful in this; I don't know if I ever watched his Wimsey. Another actor mightn't have made the time-blurred Fells work as well.
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How so? I don't know Rudkin at all. The earth-rootedness, the slipping time?
Petherbridge is wonderful in this; I don't know if I ever watched his Wimsey. Another actor mightn't have made the time-blurred Fells work as well.
I think the role for which he'll be remembered is Newman Noggs in the RSC's Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; I wrote about him in 2010 (and restrain myself from rewriting every time I link the description now). He's an excellent Wimsey as Harriet Walter is an excellent Harriet Vane, but the BBC lets them both down with Gaudy Night by stripping and compressing the story when it should be the most emotionally and intellectually complex of the series and then they never filmed Busman's Honeymoon at all. I still recommend watching for the performances. Every time the script does something frustratingly conventional, you can at least comfort yourself with the knowledge that both lead actors were fans of Sayers and arguing with the producer the whole time.
I think I am more impressed every time I think about his performance in The Ash Tree, because there is nothing showy to set off the two generations; there are places where we need to be unsure, one conversation carrying seamlessly into another across the gap of years, but then they need to be equally their own selves, so that we can see without anyone remarking on it what a bad sign it is that Richard who always looked forward is suddenly so past-dazed, distracted and drawn. And Matthew, for whom there is no right answer. By his times, he acted correctly in refusing to spare a witch's life—and yet we saw him first defend her to the witchfinders, with the same gentle inflexibility with which he later denies her. We can't help reading him as self-serving, or at least changeable, shaken as he is ("Lady, I am confounded"). And yet: the night-hare, her children, who do after all inherit. It's complicated.
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(How did you find The Tractate Middoth?)
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Enjoy! I didn't remember until you flagged his name just now that David Rudkin is somebody I wanted to track down—Penda's Fen. Thank you!
(How did you find The Tractate Middoth?)
Like this!
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You can find the whole of Penda's Fen on Youtube - it's awesome.