An Evening with John Henshall

I apologize for the lack of new posts lately, but I had been trying to enjoy my last days in London, and face my first moving out experience. I came back to Italy on Tuesday, and since the nostalgia for the city is increasing day by day, the only way to defeat the sadness is to remember the last amazing events I have attended.
Right after the meeting with Lois Burwell's inspiring persona, I had the chance to meet and listen to the life, the brilliant genius and humour, of John Henshall, a key figure in British Television.

The evening was structured in this way: Mr Henshall had prepared a rich and awesome presentation covering his whole career and showing rare (and sometimes considered lost) footage, part of his incredible archive.
John Henshall is so well known that the audience was already smiling waiting for his jokes, and, in my opinion, the presence of most of the audience meant friendship, and that gratitude you can only develop while working together on something so special as the moving image. Ex-colleagues, directors, actors, photographers, television personalities, everyone was there to be amazed by the great man behind his camera.

John Henshall started working at the BBC Studios when he was 18, two years later he was already part of the staff. His talent, uncredited for many years, was finally acknowledged after he left the BBC.
He worked on all kinds of television productions: commercial, tv drama, Top of the Pops, comedies, early music videos, etc.

However, his career's distinctive feature is that he has been an inventor in both photography, and camera-work. Many of the effects, and television tools we are used to today have to be accredited to his experimentations: the fish-eye lens, the first home-telerecording, early experimental colour transmissions, early light-weight videocameras, and, the great work he did on early music videos.

In fact, I now want to focus on the last part of this memorable evening. He had the chance to work and film some of the most famous artists of the 60s and 70s, who are still immortal icons nowadays: David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Blondie, Cher, Freddie Mercury, The Rolling Stones, Roy Orbinson, Cher, and many many others.
How to forget David Bowie's "The Jean Jenie", from the 1973 Christmas episode of Top of the Pops which was considered lost until two years ago? Mr Henshall had a copy of it.
On that particular performance, he used his experimental lens, along with other visual special effects, through his camera-work that epic performance is representative of the 70s as a decade, and of the glam rock.

Here is the performance, shown on the BBC, December 2011:

Thanks to these meetings I'm developing a 360° view on films' world. I now think that we don't have to think only in directors/actors terms. There is much more to discover, and many more people who stay behind the curtain (or behind the camera, in this case), but give a massive contribution to the film/tv show/music video/tv drama and its status of work of art.
My congratulations and greetings go to John Henshall, and the people who worked with him , like Moira Armstrong (director), Miriam Margolyes (actress), Ron Green (colleague cameraman), to the present or not in the audience, to all who share this passion, for making me understand that making films and television together is not only a job, it is a wonderful way to find real, and lasting friendship ties.

David Forgacs on Dirt and Order in Pasolini

Thanks to the King's College of London the BFI hosts a lecture on a topic/director, and so on, with different scholars and professors from all over the world. Back in March I had the pleasure to attend the talk of David Forgacs, Professor of Italian Cultural Studies at the New York University, and author of the BFI Classics on Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini. The talk was lead with the help of visual examples from films' clips, which helped both in terms of textual analysis, and in understanding the changes of context.


I will give you a summary of the main points of the lecture, which will certainly increase your knowledge of Pasolini's work, or, arouse your curiosity in it.
Professor Forgacs introduced the talk by stating the recurrency of two elements in Pasolini's productions: dirt of various kind, material or not, opposed to order, representing symmetry. These two elements could be interpreted as the director's divided self. There are interrelations between the two, concerning the meaning of dirt, especially, which is influenced by the changes in the historical context.

First of all, DIRT, meaning matter out of place, is subject of shifts in meaning and value. In Pasolini's early works dirt is positive element, whereas in the later Pasolini, dirt really becomes "dirty".
There are four types of dirt which can be recognized in his works:

1. Earth and mud
2. Trash
3. Excrement
4. Contamination 

1. The first kind of dirt in strictly connected to the Roman landscape, and to the Italian language, which contains a rich vocabulary of words to define this term. In the landscape of Pasolini's Rome, that of the Borgata, mud is everywhere. In his first novel, Ragazzi di Vita (1955), he plays with the different Italian expressions for dirt. The positivity of dirt is expressed in the children playing in the borgata, their strong connection to earth, and use of mud as a playing tool. In Una vita violenta (1959) he represents the beauty of the landscape spoiled with dirt.

In Accattone (1961), the ambivalence of dirt is reflected in the ambivalence of the main character, torn between sacred and profane, angelic and diabolical, in the ambiguous gesture of self-mortification.
Another famous mud scene is the one in Teorema (1968), experimented by Emelia's character. This scene can have multiple associations. Lastly, Petrolio (published posthumous in 1992), his last and unfinished novel, portrays the capitalist corruption, the end of the borgate, and the predominance of a dirty dirt.

2. Trash, in the early period, is considered a source of vitality. It is another concept which allows the writer/director to play with the numerous Italian words: immondizia, immondezzaio, ecc. This concept is firstly represented as the redemption of rubbish, recycling to make order out of waste.
In his later work though, he talks about "sconfinato immondezzaio", he transfers the term's connotation to people. In his Trilogy of Life (Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights) he represents an insincere eroticism, he defines young people as "immondizia umana". The ultimate level of the negative side of trash is expressed in Salò (1975), turning into aggressiveness and mysanthropy.

3. In Una vita violenta, excrements were represented as comic outcomes in the texts. This completely changes in Salò, in the dark comedy scene of eating shit. He wanted that film to be very difficult to watch. In the end, it became an allegory about consumption.

4. The contamination element started, once again, from the language, the Italian dialects, which Pasolini saw as enrichments of the language, were often used together with high literary language. There was the elevation of the poor characters etc. Ultimately, the contamination became of another kind: in films/documentaries such as Le Mura di Sana'a (1971), he represents the personal struggle against modernization. The deturpation, negative contamination.

Second, the element of ORDER divided into its two connotations:

1. Positive (frontal visual style, openness)
2. Negative (symmetrical, closure, oppression)

1. In the first case, to give some examples, he used close-ups in the middle of the frame, and short-takes. In this stylistic choices he was influenced by Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) with Maria Falconetti's close-ups.

2. In the second case, the negativity is expressed through an excessive symmetry: through architectural features (archs), for example. The term becomes negative when the films are about entrapment, giving a claustrophobic feeling.
In Salò, for example, there is an opposition between open and close spaces. It is an allegory about the control of body and behavior.

In conclusion, Professor Forgacs stated some general points while answering the audience's questions. Pasolini was very perceptive in his writing about Italy. His advice is to use Pasolini without thinking through Pasolini in relation to everything. He was a conservationist with radical beliefs, he did not follow a linear trajectory. The Libertines in Salò are Pasolini, the projection of his anger.



Thanks to David Forgacs, for an insightful talk and making we Italians in the audience proud of our culture, richness of language, and epic figures such as Pasolini.

If you are interested have a look at:
http://artbookscinema.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/london-gay-and-lesbian-film-festival.html