Green for Danger

I have staretd a new category, Classic Films, in which this is the first post. My main aim here will be to share some of my favourite films, a lot of which, like this first, will date from the 1930’s and 1940’s

The Cast

Leo Genn - Mr. Eden
Henry Edwards - Mr Purdy
Trevor Howard - Dr. Barnes
Ronald Adam - Dr. White
Alastair Sim - Inspector Cockerill
George Woodbridge - Det-Sgt. Hendricks
Judy Campbell - Sister Bates
Wendy Thompson - Sister Carter
Moore Marriott - Joseph Higgins
Sally Gray - Nurse Linley
Rosamund John - Nurse Sanson
Meg Jenkins - Nurse Woods

Plot Synopsis

Murder in a hospital! And the hospital itself is unusual, a lovely Tudor mansion with gigantic old beams and timbered floors, oak-panelled walls and flagged passageways. In the beautiful grounds are a weir stream and a topiary hedge, a long shrub-covered pergola and rock garden with such a profusion of flowers as only a great English estate can show. It is in fact, an emergency wartime hospital near London.

Higgins, a postman who is also a light rescue worker, is brought in as a flying bomb casualty. The surgeon, Mr. Eden, makes his examination. “We’ll operate at ten o’clock, Nurse,” he tells Nurse Sanson. At ten o’clock the operating theatre is ready. The steaming instruments have been taken from the steriliser, the great shadowless lights are switched on. Sister Bates, masked and gloved, gives a last look round; the patient is wheeled in; the anaesthetist starts up his machine. Suddenly, inexplicably, there is tragedy, the patient dies on the operating table. All those present are bewildered - and suspicious. Then, because she stumbles on evidence that the patient was murdered, Sister Bates is stabbed to death.

Inspector Cockrill, an ominously whimsical fellow, is called from Scotland Yard to investigate the crimes. He finds that each of five suspects has a strong motive for murder. Nurse Freddie Linley is one. Another is Dr. Barnes, the anaesthetist, with whom she is in love. There is also the woman-weary surgeon, Mr. Eden. The others are Nurses Sanson and Woods. The Inspector’s dry cross examination fails to trap the criminal.

Is Nurse Sanson the most likely suspect? “Obviously she couldn’t have done it,” Dr. Barnes protests warmly. Is it one of the doctors? The inspector finds Barnes and Eden fighting with Nurse Sanson an interested spectator. “We might perhaps arrange a future contest in aid of some deserving charity,” the inspector comments.

Eventually he decides to carry his investigations into the operating theatre. He stages a mock operation with the five suspects in attendance: Eden, Barnes, and the three nurses. Nerves are frayed, but each is determined to give nothing away to the watchful inspector. The ‘operation’ begins. Every detail of the postman’s death is carefully reconstructed. By this grim experiment, Cockrill proves that the crime was carried out by repainting cylinders of lethal gas normally coloured green - to resemble oxygen cylinders. And the murderer is dramatically revealed.

A Little more Detail

Adapted from the novel by Christianna Brand, one of her humorous whodunits featuring Inspector Cockrill of the Kent County Police, Green For Danger. The story, and its protagonist, are considerably altered from Brand’s original in this 1947 film.

Originally set in a military hospital during the Blitz in 1941, the film relocates the action to a civilian emergency hospital during the doodlebug campaign of 1944. The major changes in Gilliat and Claude Guerney’s screenplay, however, were reserved for the main character. Although Launder and Gilliat made a number of thrillers over the years, Gilliat disliked whodunits, and hoped to largely remove that element from the plot, but Brand’s original story was too carefully constructed to survive without it. Their solution, as Gilliat later recalled, was to “make capital of the very clichés of the detective novel”.

To this end they structured the screenplay so that the first third set up the mystery in a traditional fashion, though undercutting it somewhat with a wry voice-over. When Inspector Cockrill arrives, most of the viewer’s assumptions, about the characters and the mystery genre, start to unravel.

They turned Cockrill into the narrator and cast the comic actor Alastair Sim in the role. The film subtly guys the whole genre, with the Inspector frequently proved wrong and even partly responsible for the last death. In one priceless scene, he smugly turns to the last page of a mystery novel to find that he has incorrectly guessed the identity of the murderer.

This film is a wonderfully atmospheric British film of the period with a remarkable mixture of sly comedy and genuine thrills, with the sardonic and sarcastic humour of the protagonist providing a good counterpoint to the darkly atmospheric surroundings of the hospital - shot with considerable panache by Launder and Gilliat’s regular cameraman Wilkie Cooper. This is seen at its best in the night-time sequence in which the various characters roam around the hospital grounds before one of them meets her end at the hands of a spectral murderer dressed in a surgical gown. Except for two establishing shots at the beginning of the story, the film was shot entirely inside Pinewood studios, including all the ‘exteriors’. The result is probably Gilliat’s most visually accomplished and controlled film as director.

This is a film that is very much worth watching if only for Alastair Sim’s magnificent (as one coms to expect) performance as Inspector Cockrill.

Update:

I have since discovered that Alistair Sim was one of Edinburgh’s famous sons.

Crime or Art?

There is always the big question over graffiti, the question of whether it is crime or art. Personally I think that grafitti of this type definitely comes under the heading of art as it is brilliantly conceived and executed. However there is a form of graffiti that falls into the category of crime, and that is the meaningless, moronic scrawls of spray paint that can be found increasingly these days. I recently saw, in Berlin, a brilliant piece of very artistic grafitti that had been spoilt by a moron with a spray can scrawling all over it - in my mind it was pure jealousy…

The Halt during the Chase

Antoine Watteau

Antoine Watteau, who was a French painter, is regarded as one of the outstanding artists of the rococo period and as a forerunner of 19th-century impressionism.

Watteau was born on October 10, 1684, in Valenciennes, a Flemish town that had become French shortly before his birth. At the age of 14 he began to study under an obscure painter of religious subjects in his native town. In 1702 he went to Paris, where he eked out a living as a painter for a dealer in cheap devotional pictures. He later studied under the French engraver and stage designer Claude Gillot, from whom he gained an interest in the character of the fashionable Italian commedia dell’arte.

About 1708 Watteau began to work with the decorative artist Claude Audran, curator of the Luxembourg Palace collections. There he had an opportunity to study a great series of baroque paintings by the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. In 1709 Watteau placed second in the competition for the Prix de Rome and thereafter received many important commissions. Named an associate of the French Academy in Paris in 1712, he was elected to full membership in 1717. Watteau, who had a frail constitution and was often ill, succumbed to tuberculosis. He died in Nogent-sur-Marne on July 18, 1721.

Watteau’s canvases reflect the influence of the great Flemish painters, particularly Rubens, and of the Venetian school of painting. His own distinctive style, however, demonstrated a feeling for light and colour and offered a delicate sensuousness and lyric grace that had been previously unexplored. Other rococo painters imitated Watteau’s style, but they failed to achieve the dreamlike quality of his paintings. Watteau’s reputation declined with the rise of neoclassicism in French art, but after the French Revolution, and especially in the romantic period, it rose again.

The Halt during the Chase - Antoine Watteau - 1720

Here Watteau portrays a group of finely dressed figures in a woodland clearing. On the right a woman in yellow is being helped from her horse by an elegant gentleman. Other members of the party have already dismounted and are sitting in the foreground of the picture, a man and a woman with their backs to us are placed in the middle distance, and a man is holding the hands of a seated woman. The title tells us nothing more than that here are a group of people resting while out hunting; we have huntsmen, horses and dogs, but we do not get the impression that this is what the painting is really about. Instead, the artist raises questions in our minds about it; who are the people and what are they doing? Most of the people appear to be couples, so is this work about love and dalliance in the woods? We are left with the feeling that this is a possible answer, but, can we be absolutely sure?

Here Watteau has created an atmosphere leading us to thoughts of pleasure, but at the same time there is a wistful impression of transience; leaving us with the experience that the picture moves us, but we do not know why. All of the faces are either totally or partially hidden from us, that is except for that of the woman in the centre looking out at us inviting us to join them. The artist has idealised the landscape, and yet we accept it as we would a dream; the background diminishes with distance, and we cannot even be sure where the horizon is. The series of suggested meanings make this an enjoyable work; although we have to provide the suggestiveness for ourselves rather than having the artist hit us over the head with what we ought to think and feel about it.

Watteau’s is a very poetic interpretation, and he uses the natural world to represent a kind of Utopia, joining a long line of artists with similar pre-occupations; for example, Titian, Rubens, Boucher and Fragonard. Nineteenth and early twentieth century artists revived this tradition, with Impressionists like Monet and Renoir, and Post-Impressionists like Matisse and Bonnard all following in similar footsteps. So, there is real sense of continuity here, in that we know that Rubens looked at Venetian art, Watteau studied Rubens, and then Boucher and Fragonard were in turn influenced by Watteau.

Low Tide (Harbour)

Fishing boats lie stranded impotent in the mud,
Having been sitting proud, bobbing sensuously,
In the bustling, water filled harbour.
Trapped by forces of nature without chance of escape,
Until the tide returns again to restore their freedom.

Ropes and chains once unseen beneath the water
Lie now draped with slimy brown and green seaweeds,
Like so many stranded eels writhing in viscous mud.
Resting now in their ineffectiveness, their redundancy,
Their strength to be tested once more at high tide.

Fishermen mill around in groups, hands in pockets,
Waiting for the tide, discussing the weather,
Talking about past glories when fish were plentiful.
Others still are busy preparing for the next tide,
Mending nets, cleaning down boats, simply waiting.

Seagulls scavenge for any titbits they might find,
And people eating ice-creams, fish and chips etc.
Are prime targets for their terror tactics.
Despite all the warnings, DON’T FEED THE GULLS!
People feed them anyway, and deservedly get pecked.

The harbour in question here is Mevagissey in Cornwall, and the poem was written at least 15 years ago now. However, I think it still evokes my sense of place.

Happy Belated Birthday

I have only just realised, about three weeks too late, that this blog was two years old on the 8th of April. I really don’t know where that time has gone. I found it quite easy at the start to find things to post here because I had a lot of stuff already in a rough form that just needed polishing up before posting. However, as this stock of notes etc. has dwindled I am finding it increasingly difficult to find the time and energy to write new stuff; this is why the posts have become increasingly infrequent. I must try harder! The other thing that amazed me this morning when I checked, as I do occasionally, the stats was that in that two years this blog has had 47,195 hits, which is not bad for something that really started out as more of a general arts notepad for myself than anything else. Finally, thanks to all those who have made kind comments, and on occasions challenged what I have written; such things make me think about what I am writing and occasionally spark of some new ideas.

A Critical Evaluation of Kant’s Judgements of the Beautiful

Kant’s account of judgements of the beautiful

I intend to argue that Kant’s judgement of the beautiful imposes an implicit or potential experience of the sublime; that is the sublime as Kant himself describes it:

“the sublime by contrast, is to be found in a formless object insofar as limitlessness is represented in it, or at its instance, and yet it is also thought as a totality: so that the beautiful seems to be taken as the presentation of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, but the sublime as that of a similar concept of reason.”

Kant p.128

First let us define beauty, there are two concepts of beauty; neither is mutually exclusive, but each is rather like one of the poles of a magnet. One pole conceives beauty as imbued with lightness, balance and order, and having a sort of decorative quality; the other pole conceives beauty more often as allied with profundity and truth. This latter is a much darker concept of beauty which I would perceive to be contained within the sublime. Distinguishing between these extremes of beauty has less to do with the objects of appreciation - whether that be a rose, a sunset, a poem, a painting or a piece of music - than it has to do with the attitude of the individual appreciating the object (the appreciator). Therefore, anything that is possessed of the first kind of beauty must also be possessed of the second kind, that is, if the appreciator’s attention is sufficiently well directed, and if he or she has a degree of awareness of the constituent of the sublime within the beautiful. The second concept of beauty, the one allied with depth and truth, does not fit into Kant’s categories of the beautiful and the sublime as laid out in the Critique of Judgment; his analysis of the beautiful and the sublime yield a much more complex notion of beauty that Kant himself puts into words.

That which arouses the sense of the beautiful in us Kant defines as “purposiveness without purpose”; what does he mean by this? As far as I can read it, the categories of understanding are classificatory principles which order the sensory perceptions into practical structures of our everyday world. To find something useful in our everyday world, one structured in a way that suits both our understanding and some deeper need, is something we find gratifying. We take pleasure in the purposive form of, for example, a well designed screwdriver because we know that we can put it to good use. Whereas in the concept of beauty we recognize the same model of purposiveness in an object, we are cognoscente and appreciative of the structure and deliberation in the object, but the object in itself has no useful human purpose. So, we might say that an object is beautiful, as opposed to useful, specifically for the reason that it is imbued with certain characteristics that we can identify with usefulness, however, the object itself remains useless. So, Kant is arguing that it is because of this that our position with regard to beautiful objects is strictly disinterested, no matter to what degree its facet of purposiveness brings us pleasure.

“A flower, by contrast, e.g. a tulip, is held to be beautiful because a certain purposiveness is encountered in our perception of it which, as we judge it, is not related to any end at all.”

Ibid. p.120

By contrast, according to Kant, the sublime is a principle of disorder, of purposivelessness; it is the occurrence of our mind coming into contact with something that it cannot categorize or encompass. It cannot resolve any bounding organizing principle within the object because it finds it impossible to determine the object’s limits. The mind cannot determine the limits of the object because it challenges the imagination’s presentative powers; it is beyond imaginative power to present a sensible form to the understanding, and the powers of understanding are unable to make sense out of nothing. Therefore both the imagination and the understanding fail us when confronted with the sublime; and if this is the case then the sublime represents disorganization. A disorganization that is not simply an external arbitrary disorganization, rather it suggests an internal systemic disorganization, and it is our inability to bring order the perceived object that fosters the sense of disorganization; and this threatens us and our notion of ourselves as ordered and ordering entities. Kant identifies beauty with a quality, purposiveness, but associates the sublime with an unlimited quantity; beauty is calming, but the sublime perturbs us. Kant describes the purposiveness of the beautiful as “preadaptable to our judgement, and thus constitutes in itself an object of satisfaction.” On the sublime Kant argues that the purposivelessness of the sublime is the opposite as it seems “to violate purpose in respect of the judgment, to be unsuited to our presentative faculty“; he goes on to say that to encounter the sublime “does violence to the imagination.“

Kant argues that pleasure derived from the sublime is a “negative pleasure”; it is a pleasure that does not come from the sublime itself, it is more indirect, but from our feeling of relief upon our realization that this external disorder is not a threat to our internal order. That is, our recognition of an alternative purposiveness, which is identified by reason, and is independent of worldly threats, what Kant calls our “supersensible destination” which is to be good, i.e. moral. When Kant says:

The feeling of the inadequacy of our capacity for the attainment of an idea that is a law for us is respect. Now the idea of the comprehension of every appearance that may be given to us into the intuition of a whole is one enjoined on us by a law of reason, which recognizes no other determinate measure, valid for everyone and inalterable, than the absolute whole.”

Ibid. p.140

he seems to be arguing that an encounter with the unthinkable in the sublime highlights our inadequacies and our need to make ourselves adequate with regard to the notion of the moral law. Therefore, the sublime brings us to an acknowledgement that there is an alternative purpose other than the purpose which is susceptible to the threats of the world, that is, to be moral. With regard to that purpose, if an object can be perceived as posing no threat to us we are able more easily to perceive the object disinterestedly; any pleasure is derived from the knowledge of our inherent safety with regard to the perceived threat, Kant describes this pleasure of the sublime as a sort of joy, “the pleasurableness arising from the cessation of an uneasiness is a state of joy.“

Kant makes a comparison of the sublime and the beautiful thus:

“we must seek a ground outside ourselves, but for the sublime merely one in ourselves and in the way of thinking that introduces sublimity into the representation of the former - a very necessary introductory remark, which entirely separates the ideas of the sublime from that of a purposiveness of nature,“

Ibid. p.130

So, the beautiful is extrovert in its nature, whilst the sublime is introvert; it seems that here Kant is arguing that the experience of the sublime is a secondary aesthetic experience to that of beauty. Kant’s argument appears to be that the sublime is secondary to beauty because the experience of beauty is magnanimous, directing our attention outwards to the purposiveness of nature, whilst the sublime is simply directing our attention within to our inner purposiveness. Kant argues that neither art nor nature - in the positive purposive sense - are appropriate objects of the sublime, in his terms “rude nature”. I would argue that many things, from flowers to sunsets, poems to songs, can induce feelings of the sublime; therefore, I would disagree with Kant that the sublime is secondary to the beautiful in terms of the aesthetic experience, even though I would accept that its most powerful manifestation is in union with the beautiful.

There is a relationship between the sublime and the beautiful to which Kant does not refer, but which is contained within his own analysis of these concepts. If we accept Kant’s explanation of beauty, purposiveness without purpose, maybe we can forge the link between beauty and the sublime. Kant argues that the distinguishing feature of beauty is the quality of purposiveness, but beauty for Kant is purposiveness without purpose, so, if the quality of beauty is purposiveness, this means that the very essence of beauty is that it is without purpose. Therefore, the common ground between beauty and things that we find pleasing is purposiveness, however, what sets beauty apart is that an object has purposiveness but is without purpose; so it is not purposiveness alone that makes beauty, although it is necessary, but that the object is, ultimately, without purpose. Therefore if an object is, for us, without purpose it is purposeless which, in turn, means that it is purposiveless; so although and object can have the quality of purposiveness further examination reveals it to be actually purposiveless.

I share with Kant, although he expresses this more indirectly than I shall do here, the view that the concept of purposivelessness can be linked to the sublime. To make the shift from the beautiful to the sublime one has to confront this essential feature of the beautiful, its ultimate purposivelessness; this is a confrontation that our mind cannot organize, contain or make any sense of. Our imagination stretches out, but is unable to distinguish boundaries, thus its integrity is threatened and we have a feeling of some close, very real but unspecified danger. The mind then works to defend itself against this perceived threat; it reflects, reframes, takes a step back as it were, and reason is engaged; when this happens the feeling is one of relief at the cessation of the threat. This subsequent feeling of joy is the experience of the sublime in the beautiful. I would argue that it is possible to experience the beautiful without the sublime; to be impressed and pleased by the light and colour, the harmony and proportions in a painting by, say, Manet, to experience the purposiveness and order is a good experience and a sufficient one. To reach the sublime from here requires some effort to effect a confrontation with an ultimate purposivelessness; some artists appear to work harder than others to draw out the experience of the sublime from the beautiful, Cezanne for example. One can just as easily experience the unbounded sublime in forms found in nature, as Kant suggests in powerful waterfalls or overhanging rocks.

So in conclusion, when an aesthetic experience of the beautiful triggers a path of reflection beginning with a sense of order and harmony, but which becomes a search for a context for this order and harmony, this is when the contemplation of the beautiful shifts towards an experience of the sublime. This contextual search for order and harmony becomes a contextual search of the person, a search for one’s own purposiveness, a search within oneself, for one’s own place; this in turn becomes a philosophical search ending in an experience of the sublime. It is only then that the aesthetic experience comes close to the philosophical, because the end is delight no longer, rather it is akin to truth, truth about ourselves and out place in the system. Beauty’s purposiveness, then, seduces the individual into a search to test the meanings we are comfortable with, and which we take for granted; such confrontation of the sublime in the beautiful is both disturbing and cathartic. It is disturbing in that it shakes us from our disposition to disregard; but cathartic in that it opens up a new sensitivity towards our lives and the lives of those around us.

Bibliography:
Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Definitions of Art…

We all know just how difficult it is to define art, and it is not something that I would lightly try to do. However, a comment on my analysis of Dickies Institutional Theory comes as close to a working definition of art as anything I have read for quite some time now.

How about this as a working theory of art?

A work of art is any (human made) artifact which is purposely made to appeal to our sense of aesthetic sensibility and/or to our imagination.

This means that a sunset or daffodil could not be a work of art but a billboard alongside a grimy and noisy urban freeway portraying a juicy hamburger would be - as would something in the Louvre called “the Mona Lisa.”

This pares it down to the fundamental function without concern for an institutional role or for the need that the object have any intrinsic or socially recognized value. The qualification of the object as a work of art is based on its function, not its rareness. The only gatekeeper is the perceiver - as long as he or she is able to respond. If he is distracted by a traffic pileup ahead, he cannot appreciate the billboard. It failed to function as art for him in that moment, but unfortunately it may so function for the driver coming up behind at 60 miles per hour.

Relative to the billboard, Hanfling’s question,
“Someone who puts an object forward for appreciation must be prepared to answer the question ‘Why?’ - to tell us why it should be regarded as being worthy of this treatment; and the answer must be in terms of reasons that we can at least recognize as such”.
can be answered: Because it makes my mouth water.

Impressionism an Inspiration?

Over the last few months there has been a flurry of really good and thoughtful exhibitions here in Edinburgh. BondWoman and myself made the effort to see four of the best of them, at least in our opinion they were; the Joan Eardley (now finished) at the RSA, The Carol Rhodes (on until 24th Feb) at the Scotish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Basil Spence (on until 10th Feb) at the Dean Gallery, and the Ten Decades (also now finished) at the City Art Centre. All very different exhibitions, and in their own way very fascinating exhibitions, and I would urge anyone to go along and see the Carol Rhodes and Basil Spence exhibitions before they finish, both have the added advantage of being free.

In this spirit of cultural interest BW pointed out an article in Staurday’s Scotsman which we both found extremely interesting, something which is giving us both something to look forward to come the summer. We are both fans of the Impressionists, The Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists, and it will be interesting to see an exhibition that brings these interests together, hopefully in a way that casts some light on the way in which artistic movements affect, and effect, each other.

I know that I was pretty laxed in missing the last “great” (the Warhol) event, not really my thing; however this is one that I think should not be missed as i have the feeling that it will be a most illuminating exhibition indeed.

An Open Day

The Bonds spent quite an intersting hour or so yesterday afternoon wandering around the Leith School of Art. I had a chat with a few students, whilst waiting for BW to join me, to get a sort of feel for the place and how they feel about it; they were unanimous in their praise of it, all saying that it was bloody hard work but most satisfying. The whole object of the exercise was for me to get a look at what goes on there, as, although I have been painting for longer that I care to think, I am pretty much a self taught artist, having never had the chance to get into an art college; so I now think that it is about time to formalise my chosen profession.

In my few remaining years I plan to do a degree in Fine Art, more than likely at the Edinburgh College of Art; however, I need a decent portfolio and the Leith School of Art do an excellent year long foundation course which will enable me to put one together. Not only this but it will instil a little discipline into my working practices, and enable me to come to grips with the finer points of things that, at present, I am pretty crap at, such as figure drawing and painting. I have been feeling for a while that I need something to take me out of my box, and this seem to be just the thing; having seen what goes on there yesterday I now know that this course will take me so far out of my box that I probably will never find it again. I have become entrenched in my own little comfort zone, into which an unhealthy measure of complacency has also crept, so a good swift, hard kick up the backside is probably just what I need at this point in time…

I have set up this blog to chart further developments.

Resources

For those who would like to read more deeply the works of those artists and philosophers of the past I have created a page of resources where there will be found essays and complete works by such as Sir Joshua Reynolds and David Hume to name but two. Most of the stuff here is available widely online in text form, I have taken what I think are interesting texts and turned them into Word and PDF files. I confess that there are only a few things there at present, but with the passage of time I will be uploading more. Everything on this page will be concerned, in some way, with either art history, art theory, or aesthetics…