Michael Balcon and Basil Dearden
During this film we developed experimentally a new system designed to harness inspiration to efficient production methods. We decided to follow the lead developed in other industries - Prefabrication. With models and plans we rehearsed the film's action in drawings. Each individual shot in the script was illustrated during conferences many weeks before the shooting began, over a thousand action drawings - or set-up sketches as we came to call them - were made.
The dangers of such a method are very considerable. It
may have a claustrophobic effect. Crystallized at too early a stage, the
film may be stale when it reaches the critical moment before the camera lens.
The system may become the master instead of the slave.
There is no final answer to such criticism. It depends entirely on the personalities of the men who make use of the system. I think, on the whole, that the method was a success and in these days when it is imperative that cheaper, quicker pictures are made without loss of quality, this system, or some modification of it could be employed on most films.
from Saraband for Dead Lovers, the film and its production, Convoy Publications Ltd 1948.
29th, April, 2002
Noel Coward
When it was suggested to me that I should publish an omnibus volume containing seven of the most representative of my works, I stepped, for an instant, into eminent old age, and, smiling quaveringly across the years at irresponsible youngsters plouing through my musty old plays, I thanked God that the hurly-burly was over. Ic ould now retire in peace to my dim library and mellowing Kentish garden, and there, with my memories as sole companions, dream away the end of my days.
I find it very interesting nowadays, now that I have fortunately achieved a definite publicity value, to read criticisms and analyses of my plays written by people of whom I have never head and whom I have certainly never seen, and who appear to have an insatiable passion for labelling everything with a motive. They search busily behind the simplest of my phrases, like old ladies peering under the bed for burglars, and are not content until they have unearthed some definite, and usually quite inaccurate, reason for my saying this or that. This strange mania I can only suppose is the distinctive feature of a critical mind as opposed to a creative one. It seems to me that a professional writer should be animated by no other motive than the desire to writer, and, by doing so, to earn his living.
from the Introduction to Play Parade (seven of Coward's plays) published 1934, William Heinemann.
28th, April, 2002 (Sunday)
Metropolitan Anthony
The unique human tragedy, the only one that counts, the one
from which all others arise, is mortality, and this mortality
is linked with sin, as separation from God. And it is here that the death
of Christ and His Solidarity with us contain something more frightful than
we can imagine. A number of writers have pointed out that the fact that death
can be conceivable only through
severance
from the source of life. One cannot be, as it were, plugged into life eternal
and die. St Maxim the Confessor underlines the fact that at the moment of
His conception, at the moment of His birth, in His very humanity Christ had
no participation in death, because His humanity was pervaded with the eternal
life of His divinity. He could not die.
[But] He died on the cross, and His last words are the most tragic words of history. He, who is the Son of God, because He has accepted total, final, unreserved and unlimited solidarity with men in all their conditions, without participation in evil but accepting all its consequences; He, nailed on the cross, cries out the cry of forlorn humanity, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" When Christ said "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?", He was crying out the words of a humanity that had lost God, and He was participating in that very thing which is the only real tragedy of humanity - all the rest is a consequence. The loss of God is death, is desolation, hunger, separation. All the tragedy of man is in one word, 'godlessness'. And He participates in our godlessness, not in the sense in which we reject God or do not know God, but in a more tragic way, in a way in which one can lose what is the dearest, the holiest, the most precious, the very heart of one's life and soul.
from God and Man, (Chapter 3) published 1971, Hodder & Stoughton
27th, April, 2002
Alexander Walker
[Cary Grant] used to laugh at his own real baptismal name, Alexander Archibald
Leach. "Don't I sound like a bounder?" I heard him remark, when he was once
reminded of it. Alfred Hitchcock liked bounders and must have know a few
in his own petit-bourgeois youth spent in the same English
social stratum as Grant. Both transplanted Britons had a misogynistic side
to them. Hitchcock's bias is well-known and, towards the end of his life,
became distressingly pathological. Grant's, on the other hand, never showed
up to his disadvantage, for it could be subsumed into the churning
status quo of the Hollywood sex-comedies. There he could deliver
a punch to a woman's vanity, or even her gender, with such a roguish smile
that it seemed like a lover's backhander. In the relatively few films in
which he actually played a serious romantic lover, he is not as good as you
might imagine he would be. He makes you feel that he'd like to cut it up
comically, but has to play by the rules that aren't really his. Hitchcock,
typically, found a sinister use for his charm by making him a putative murderer
in Suspicion. But then Hitchcock liked those English murder-cases in which
the gentleman turned out to be a wife-beater and worse. Grant never again
let himself be cast as a murder suspect after that film. He'd relieve the
wealthy
of their jewellery for Hitchcock, even steal a taxi-cab from a woman in the
lunch-time rush-hour but that was the limit. And he'd gladly pay the penalty
for his sins that Hitchcock inflicted on him in a film like North by Northwest.
A helpless Cary Grant, at the mercy of a lethal 'crop-duster' plane, is a
humanised Cary Grant, returned, as Richard Schickel says, to the vulnerable
state of being the little boy he started life as.
from It's Only a Movie, Ingrid - encounters on and off screen, (Chapter 5) published 1988, Headline Book Publishing.
26th, April, 2002
Jane Austen
If Elizabeth, when Mr Darcy gave her the letter, did not expect it to contain
a renewal of his offers, she had formed no expectation at all of its contents.
But such as there were, it may be well supposed how eagerly she went through
them, and what a contrariety of emotion they excited. Her feelings as she
read were scarcely to be defined. With amazement did she first understand
that he believed any apology to be in his power; and steadfastly was she
persuaded that he could have no explanation to give, which a just sense of
shame would not conceal. With a strong prejudice against everything he might
say, she began his account of what had
happened
at Netherfield. She read, with an eagerness which hardly left her power of
comprehension, and from impatience of knowing what the next sentence might
bring, was incapable of attending to the sense of the one before her eyes.
His belief of her sister's insensibility, she instantly resolved to be false,
and his account of the real, the worst objections to the match, made her
too angry to have any wish of doing him justice. He expressed no regret for
what he had done which satisfied her; his style was no penitent, but haughty.
It was all pride and insolence.
from Pride and Prejudice, (Chapter 36)
25th April, 2002 (Anzac Day)
William Thackeray
A
few days after the famous presentation, another great and exceeding honour
was vouchsafed to the virtuous Becky. Lady Steyne's carriage drove up to
Mr Rawdon Crawley's door, and the footman, instead of driving down the front
of the house, as by his tremendous knocking he appeared to be inclined to
do, relented, and only delivered in a couple of cards, on which were engraved
the names of the Marchioness of Steyne and the Countess of Gaunt. If these
bits of pasteboard had been beautiful pictures, or had had a hundred yards
of Malines lace rolled round them, worth twice the number of guineas, Becky
could not have regarded them with more pleasure. You may be sure they occupied
a conspicuous place in the china bowl on the drawing-room table, where Becky
kept the cards of her visitors. Lord! lord! How poor Mrs Washington White's
card and Lady Crackenbury's card, which our little friend had been glad enough
to get a few months back, and of which the silly little creature was rather
proud once - Lord! lord! I say, how soon at the appearance of these grand
court cards, did those poor little neglected deuces sink down to the bottom
of the pack. Steyne! Bareacres! Johnes of Helvellyn! And Caerlyon of Camelot!
we may be sure that Becky and Briggs looked out those august names in the
Peerage, and followed the noble races up through all the ramifications of
the family tree.
from Vanity Fair, (Chapter 48), first published in serial form 1847-1848
24th, April, 2002
William D Thornbury
Serious students should be interested in the growth of scientific thought and in the men who have contributed to its advancement. To consider this ancient history which in no way [sic] contributes to an appreciation of present thought is actually a short-sighted viewpoint. The historical approach is unequalled in giving the student an insight into the scientific method (inductive logic). At least three distinct benefits result from familiarity with the growth of geomorphic thought. The student gains a better perspective from which to view present-day thinking. He is impressed with the fact that the subject is not static and will more likely keep his mind open to new ideas. Furthermore, he realises that most ideas which we today accept as self-evident met with resistance when first proposed and were slowly and reluctantly accepted as correct and that perhaps some of the new ideas which we scorn today may ultimately stand the test of time.
from Principles of Geomorphology, (chapter 1) published John Wiley & Sons, 1954
23rd, April, 2002
Vikram Seth
The phrase, however, was not innocent. 'One big happy family' was an ironically
used Chatterji phrase. Meenakshi Mehra had been a Chatterji before she and
Arun had met at a cocktail party, fallen in torrid, rapturous and elegant
love, and got married within a month, to the shock of both families. Whether
or not Mr Justice Chatterji of the Calcutta High Court and his wife were
happy to welcome the non-Bengali Arun as the first appendage to their ring
of five children (plus Cuddles the dog) , and whether or not Mrs Rupa Mehra
had been delighted at the thought of her first-born, the apple of her eye,
marrying outside the khatri caste (and to a spoilt supersophisticate like
Meenakshi at that), Arun certainly valued the Chatterji connection greatly.
The Chatterjis had wealth and position and a grand
Calcutta
house where they threw enormous (but tasteful) parties. And even if the big
happy family, especially Meenakshi's brothers and sisters, sometimes bothered
him with their endless, unchokable wit and improvised rhyming couplets, he
accepted it precisely because it appeared to him to be undeniably urbane.
It was a far cry from this provincial capital, this Kapoor crowd and these
garish light-in-the-hedge celebrations - with pomegranate juice in lieu of
alcohol.
from A Suitable Boy, (1.4) published by Phoenix, 1993. Vikram Seth's prose fiction debut, A Suitable Boy, sold over one million copies worldwide despite the fact that, at 1,349 pages long, it holds the distinction of being the longest single volume ever published in the English language.22nd, April, 2002
Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeil
The rise of English is a remarkable success story. When Julius Caesar landed
in Britain nearly two thousand years ago, English did not exist. Five hundred
years later, Englisc, incomprehensible to modern ears, was
probably spoken by about as few people as
currently
speak Cherokee - and with about as little influence. Nearly a thousand years
later, at the end of the sixteenth century, when William Shakespeare was
in his prime, English was the native speech of between five and seven million
Englishmen and it was, in the words of a contemporary, "of small reatch,
it stretcheth no further than this iland of ours, naie not there over
all."
Four hundred years later, the contrast is extraordinary. Between 1600 and the present, in armies, navies, companies and expeditions, the speakers of English - including Scots, Irish, Welsh, American and many more - travelled into every corner of the globe, carrying their language and culture with them. Today, English is used by at least 750 million people, and barely half of those speak it as a mother tongue. Some estimates have put that figure closer to one billion. Whatever the total, English at the end of the twentieth century is more widely scattered, more widely spoken and written, than any other language has ever been. It has become the language of the planet, the first truly global language.
from The Story of English, (published Viking) quoted in chapter 7 of Rewriting Writing, a rhetoric and reader, by Jo Ray McCuen and Anthony Winkler.
Sunday 21st, April, 2002
When I was a young missionary I used to spend one evening each week in the
monastery of the Ramakrishna Mission in the town where I lived, sitting on
the floor with the monks and studying with them the Upanishads and the Gospels.
In the great hall of the monastery, as in all the premises of the Ramakrishna
Mission, there is a gallery of portraits of the great religious teachers
of humankind. Among them, of course, is a portrait of Jesus. Each year on
Christmas Day worship was offered before this picture. Jesus was honoured,
worshipped,
as one of the many manifestations of deity in the course of human history.
To me, as a foreign missionary, it was obvious that this was not a step toward
the conversion of India. It was the co-option of Jesus into the Hindu worldview.
Jesus had become just one figure in the endless cycle of karma and samsara,
the wheel of being in which we are all caught up. He had been domesticated
into the Hindu worldview. That view remained unchallenged. It was only slowly,
through many experiences, that I began to see that something of this
domestication had taken place in my own Christianity, that I too had been
more ready to seek a 'reasonable Christianity,' a Christianity that could
be defended on the terms of my whole intellectual formation as a
twentieth-century Englishman, rather than something which placed my whole
intellectual formation under a new and critical light. I, too, had been guilty
of domesticating the gospel.
from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, joint publication of Eerdmans Publishers and WCC, 1989.
20th April, 2002 (The day the Daily Writer began)
A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal
Billy Collins
A poet…never speaks directly, as to someone at the breakfast table - Yeats
Every morning I sit across from you
at the same small table,
the sun all over the breakfast things -
curve of a blue-and-white pitcher,
a dish of berries -
me in a sweatshirt or robe,
you
invisible.
Most days, we are suspended
over a deep pool of silence.
I stare straight through you
or look out the window at the garden,
the powerful sky,
a cloud passing behind a tree.
There is no need to pass the toast,
the pot of jam,
or pour you a cup of tea,
and I can hide behind the paper,
rotate in its drum of calamitous news.
But some days I may notice
a little door swinging open
in the morning air,
and maybe the tea leaves
of some dream will be stuck
to the china slope of the hour -
then I will lean forward,
elbows on the table,
with something to tell you,
mand you will look up, as always,
your spoon dripping milk, ready to listen.
from Picnic, Lightning - University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998
Archive of the Daily Writer - April 2002 - Mike Crowl's Scribble Pad