Hope and anger in the ink and on the streets

[sovay]

It feels like such a cheaply sentimental connection that I must not have allowed myself to see it for years, but the first film of any lasting meaning that I saw after the dislocating and disposessing move from New Haven which marked the end of my academic career and with it the whole pattern of my life to date was A Canterbury Tale (1944), that touchstone of continuity and exile. I got up in the morning to watch it off TCM. It gave me déjà vu as if I remembered some of its strongest, strangest images, even though it seemed after the fact impossible that I should have had any previous chance to see it. It was my introduction to Powell and Pressburger and I immediately set about tracking down as many of their films as were available in my country as I had never done with any filmmakers before—I could explain it as finding something to study after suddenly having for the first time in twenty-odd years nothing assigned, but then I could have dedicated myself to just about anything encountered in those three-ish weeks including for God's sake M*A*S*H. I had just written the most Christian poem of my Jewish life and so was perhaps more than ordinarily primed to accept Emeric's cathedral. I had forgotten that the only time in my life I was in Canterbury, I had written about its layers of time, Roman roads, the scars of the Blitz, I had linked it with the archaeological eternity of DWJ's Time City. I could have imprinted on any of the characters with their griefs and doubts of lovers and livelihoods and I went straight for Colpeper, the sticky-fingered magus in his panic of losing the past, his head so far up his home ground that he has not yet learned the lesson of diaspora, how to carry the tradition wherever you go, including into the future. I had heard it myself since childhood and never had to put it so much to the test. I loved the film at once and desperately and it still took me years to see how like time itself nothing can really be lost in it, the lifeline I called it without recognizing what it held out. I keep coming back to it, still excavating that bend in the road. It had what I needed to find in it unexpectedly, the coins from the field returned in a stranger's hand.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Lovely, Sovay. All of it.

[regshoe]

♥

I must thank you for recommending this film. It's significant to me for kind of different reasons, it has a lot of meaning; it is beautiful and so is your writing about it.

[selkie]

Someday it will be revealed why that year was so relentlessly, cosmically shit, and we can locate that reason, beat it senseless and steal its fucking pocket money, but until then I’m so glad you have Powell and Pressburger and also, we are still here.

*hugs* Catch you after Kabbalat Shabbat with 50 of my closest pals.

[nineweaving]

It had what I needed to find in it unexpectedly, the coins from the field returned in a stranger's hand.

So beautiful.

*hugs*

Nine

[thisbluespirit]

Oh, you managed to write a little about it! And so beautifully, of course. I need to rewatch it, because I was ill at the time and my memories of it are vague but it was such a beautiful, layered film that I am storing up for a good day (brain/energy-wise) so I can take in so much more this time. I'm so glad it was there for when you needed it. That is what art really is for, in the end, I suppose. <3

(I did manage to get fully through uni so I stopped studying in the usual manner, but you reminded me here - I remember some time afterwards, happening to go into the history section in the big Waterstones in a neighbouring town and looking at the books there and just realising suddenly that I was absolutely starving for study. That moment was a big part of what made me go back to my family history (started as a teen, for school) - I needed something to pin it on or it wouldn't have worked for me. I'm glad you found your new sources for study then - for your sake, and of course, because we all have profited from it in so much since!)

[phi]

Beautiful

[gullyfoyle]

Here is something I shared last year on the social media platform that shan't be named (but sure as shit wasn't X) after I watched "Made in England."

In "Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger," of one of the themes of "A Canterbury Tale," Martin Scorsese says "If you stop, listen, pay attention, the past will speak to you, and the voices of the past will help you to make sense of your life in the present."

Nearly as beautiful as what you've written.