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Are you happy?

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The Curzon cinema in Oxford had a rare screening last week of a 1968, black-and white documentary entitled Inquiring Nuns, in which two nuns visited churches, shops, museums and other public places in Chicago and asked people whether they were happy. It was followed by a Skype Q and A with the director, who was very happy at the attention the film was getting fifty years after it was initially released, a state of mind that did not seem to be dampened by the fact that there were only about eleven of us there. ‘What makes you unhappy?’ the nuns asked on the thirty foot screen in front of me and across the span of history I wanted to shout back ‘Two of the eleven people here who are polluting the light with the little tiny screens on their mobile phones and thus not allowing themselves or the people around them to focus fully on what is happening on the huge screen in front of us.’ Why do people do that? Switch off your phones in the cinema people! I might have tweeted about it
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The Bible - U, PG or not Fit for Children?

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If viewing on mobile device click here for video The actor Christian Bale claims that he won’t let his daughter read the bible. Bale, who plays Moses in the forthcoming Exodus: Gods and Kings , believes the Bible is too violent for young minds and I can’t help but wonder if he has a point. One Christmas, when I was eight or nine, I was given a Children’s Bible for Christmas. I wanted a Six Million Dollar Man action figure but I got a bible. This bible had pictures on every page and was written in fairly simple language so I thought I would be okay and I started reading it in the same way that I read any other book, from front to back, page by page in chronological order. In Sunday School we had been told that reading the Bible every day was good for you and at first it was pretty exciting for in the first few pages we had the world coming into being, a terrible flood, violent family squabbles and Joseph and his amazing coloured coat (though I missed the songs in the Bib
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Salesman: Discomfort in the Marketplace of Religion

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Salesman Trailer One of the ironies of the Maysles 1968 documentary, Salesman , is that for years it didn’t really sell.  It’s one of those films that I have been intending to watch for a long time but there was always something readily available that I wanted to see more and this is a film with a few factors that might put you off. Salesman was shot on 16 mm using a pretty basic camera and microphone set-up in which the sound of the film moving through the camera comes very close to drowning out the words of the Bostonian salesmen depicted. After 10 minutes, I resorted to subtitles because I was feeling lost, although thankfully not in the same way as Paul Brennan, the bible salesman at the centre of this piece, a lost sheep who fails to find sufficient comfort in the capitalist gospel of America. Some have made the case that the technical shortcomings of Salesman merely  underline its brilliance. I was, however, amused by Albert Maysles’ response,
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Calvary

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  I have made the point before that watching a film can be something akin to a religious experience. A well-behaved cinema audience sits in a darkened space waiting for the coming of the light of inspiration, but sadly Pearl and Dean adverts come on instead, which as spiritual experiences go is like sitting through the long, rambling notices in church. 'You'll be happy to know that all the leaks in the church roof have been repaired but I'm afraid you'll still have to put up with the drip in the pulpit.'  'Tonight's service is on 'what is hell?' Come early and hear our choir practice.' Your mind wanders, you drift, you fidget, you're partly somewhere else and you hope the notices / adverts don't go on too long. Eventually the steward stops talking and the service begins. You pick up your popcorn because in this blog we can change from church to cinema as instantly as an onscreen scene change and munch your way through the sermon.
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Questions of Taste and The Act of Killing

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The most successful documentary film of the last twelve months is probably The Act of Killing , Joshua Oppenheimer's startling and original exploration of the cinema ganster death squads in 1960s Indonesia. Recently Nick Fraser, editor of the BBC's Storyville series, wrote an article for the Observer berating the film for being tasteless. He also accused the filmmaker of indulging mass murderers in a manner that served to teach the audience nothing. I am not an expert on documentary film but like most couch potatoes, I've seen a few over the years and I would assert that it is not necessarily the job of a documentary filmmaker to be tasteful. Sometimes tastelessness provides a straighter line to truth. One film that for me proved a significantly more troubling ethical dilemma than The Act of Killing was The Bridge , Eric Steel's 2006 film about people committing suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Steel's crew filmed the bridge for
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The Trailer

In 1983 the Odeon Cinema in Bishop Auckland closed and I felt miserable about it. For the three years since we moved to the town, this was a building I visited to escape the increasing seriousness of adolescence, a place where the magic of earlier days of childhood could be recaptured in exciting onscreen adventures that included The Empire Strikes Back , Raiders of the Lost Ark , and Clash of the Titans . I enjoyed going so much that I even went to see Robin Williams as Popeye . Others, however, were not so committed to the film-going way of life. The arrival of home video played a part but perhaps even more significant was the fact that many cinemas were in a dilapidated state and were sometimes staffed by people who had lost touch with the idea that a night at the pictures was supposed to be special and entertaining. Sitting in a chair with broken springs, and hearing a soundtrack though fuzzy speakers with your shoes glued to the floor by yesterday's pop was hardly the
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Tickled by Joy

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My grandfather could be quite serious. Whenever we met, he had a tendency to open the conversation with an obituary monologue, recalling the recent deaths of people I was supposed to know (but never did) and the various tragedies their families had been through in the preceding half century or so. It was difficult to know how to reply when I was 12. Sympathetic nodding seemed to go down well but was taken as a sign of encouragement as my grandfather reeled off the name of yet another person who had died without me ever knowing that they had lived. Probably my grandfather was at a stage in life when it was getting difficult to live in the present moment. Obituaries were interesting but they were a constant reminder of life slowing down and slipping away; they rendered the past more relevant than the present.  I don't read obituaries like my grandfather did and I definitely don't recite them. Perhaps that day is coming. However, I often do struggle to live in the presen
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