Daniel Harding – Page 4 – Pandora's Looking-Glass

Event Horizon: the ubiquitous cigarette

One of the most recurrent motives throughout ‘Event Horizon’ is that of cigarettes and smoking. Set in a distant future world with heightened technology, nevertheless the cigarette still appeals as a basic human necessity, grounding all the developments of technology in a firmly human mentality, that of needing ‘a quick gasper.’ After Smitty successfully navigates the ship through turbulence to bring the Lewis & Clark opposite the Event Horizon, Fishburne’s character tells him “If you’ve got ‘em, smoke ‘em,’ at which point he duly does so.

The use of the cigarette has several functions. Apart from allowing the camera to track round the various crewmembers as it follows the passage of the cigarette from hand to hand, it contrasts feelings of ease with those of tension. DJ casually removes his cigarette to inject Dr. Weir in preparation for the gravity-tank, which contrasts with Weir’s apprehension as he admits suffering from claustrophobia. Smitty smokes as a relaxation after fighting to bring the ship through turbulence, but his smoking also betrays his nervousness on hearing the real reason for the mission in Weir’s briefing. It also forms part of DJ’s own character, combining with his reticence and underlying tension, to portray an individual on the verge of a breakdown.

The secondary function of the cigarette is to create contrast with the surrounding advanced technological environment. In an age when interstellar space-travel has apparently led to the construction of vast ships, gateway-opening gravity propulsion systems (the language Weir uses to describe its function is dazzling, impenetrable and certainly confusing), with advanced computer software and medical facilities, people still continue to rely on old-fashioned nicotine in paper wrappings. The constant visual reference to cigarettes grounds the almost bewildering world of technology in a tangible plane, to which most viewers will relate. The fragility of the rolled cigarette clashes with the heavily metallicised world in which the crew are accustomed to living and working, emphasized by a shot of the comparative sizes of the rescue vessel, tenuously clasping onto the ‘Event Horizon’ itself, which dwarfs her completely.

There’s a wonderful shot in Aliens, where the camera tracks up an elegant hand holding a cigarette: subsequently revealed to be Ripley’s, it looks rather like the skeletal hand of one of the alien monsters themselves – a brief but neat ambiguity.

In space, no-one can hear you smoke.

Posted by Daniel Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to view his Music Matters blog.

Fee or free ? Museums and galleries

Titian: Bacchus and Ariadne — Bacchus and Ariadne, Titian

In an article in The Independent yesterday, Adrian Hamilton makes the point that our public galleries and museums are neglecting their core collections, and devoting their energies to mounting exhibitions instead.

The reason, he argues, is ecomomics: exhibitions are more likely to attract media interest, with specific themes uniting the display, and also more interest from the public. People will also buy merchandise associated with a particular exhibition: the Van Gogh tea-towel or Dali catalogue. All these factors combine to mean one thing: more money.

With the abolishment of entry fees under Labour back in 2001, musuems and galleries are having to work hard to compensate for cuts in funding. Exhibitions and featured attractions are more likely to bring visitors through the revolving doors than focusing on the objects that are a part of the institution’s regular collection.

As Hamilton says, “Free entry has brought a huge expansion in the customer base. But it has been at a cost of directing museums to showmanship and to commercial avenues of income at the expense of concentrating on their own collections and adding to them. The funds available for purchase are derisory. The attention of keepers has been directed to the numbers passing through the doors.”

He proposes that museums and galleries should consider re-introducing entry fees, with reductions for the young and the elderly, which would then allow them to provide exhibitions driven not by the need to generate revenue, but to showcase what the gallery or museum already owns.

Turner painting — The Fighting Temeraire, Turner

As someone who loves the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, both of which are free, this option scares me. I have two very young children with whom I want to share my love of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne and Crivelli’s Annunciation when they are old enough: I want their imaginations to be lit up by sacred paintings from the Renaissance, whorls of colour in Turner, Stubbs’ rearing horses or Monet’s floating lilies. If I had to pay for us all to visit each time, this would be costly and would, I’m sure, discourage many from visiting.

I can, however, see the point, though: museums and galleries need to bring paying visitors through the doors to keep themselves going.

Would you pay entry fees to galleries and museums if, by doing so, it guaranteed their continued existence: or would it put you off ?

Event Horizon: combining genres

One of the great strengths of Event Horizon is that it works to combine two separate genres, science-fiction and horror.

Of course, the Alien films also effect some combination of the two, although in this case it is the stalker-type film in the manner of Jaws and the fear induced by a remorseless killer – the same fear so effectively worked on in Westworld and later mimicked in Terminator.

In Event Horizon, the horror element is derived from the paranoia experienced from within the crew themselves, which they have brought with them. It is much more of a psychologically-based horror – the fear within.

It might be argued that, from a certain point of view, the genres of horror and science-fiction are related. The polarized stances of writers Ray Bradbury and Arthur C Clarke are illustrative of this: Clarke’s writing believes that technological advancement will save mankind, Bradbury that it will be its ultimate destruction, and horror and catastrophe stalk the latter’s pages. Both horror and science-fiction concern the exploration of the unknown, the reactions of human beings to adversity, to situations reaching far beyond the areas of ordinary experience. Each genre can use the surprise factor, the unexpected, as a device to propel the narrative forward, and both place individuals in situations and predicaments outside the boundaries of everyday life.

The important difference between them can be summarized simply by the idea of ‘internal versus external experience.’ Science fiction, by definition, concerns situations that are conjectural, that have yet to exist: it is a genre that projects forward, to explore potential advances in society, technology and in human evolution (apart, that is, from the tired and unreliable technology of Star Wars mentioned previously). Thus, the concerns of science fiction are often necessarily external concerns, where mankind reacts to elements in an external world which differs from our own. Much of the fascination with this sort of narrative is as much to do with the extrapolation, by the author or director, of how technology or humanity – or even both – will evolve, as it is with the unfolding plot.

The primary concern of the genre of horror, however, is with an internal universe, with the dark elements that like with mankind, within the soul or the mind. The phobias that afflict everyone to a greater or lesser extent are internally created: though they may be triggered by external factors, such as spiders or, in the case of Event Horizon, by stasis tanks, it is the manner in which these elements work upon the internal landscape of the human soul that horror seeks to explore.

Event Horizon therefore represents something of a crossover between these two styles, combining aspects of both and allowing each to inform and work upon the other. The important elements of science-fiction are present – technology in new forms, humanity in a new environment – but inextricably woven into the fabric of the narrative are elements also of horror – a menacing evil, the internal fears and secrets of the various crewmembers.

Indeed, in this film, the one has directly contributed to the creation of the other: it is the manufacture of the gravity-drive mechanism that causes the horror to come forth. Hence the significance of the fact that the drive is often referred to as a gateway. The evolution of a particular technological achievement has led to the evil coming into this dimension, through the opening caused by the functioning of the gravity-drive.

The idea of humans tampering with things beyond their control and thereby unleashing malevolent force is a crucial part of horror, reaching back as far as Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and (for science-fiction), the original Godzilla where the monster is created by nuclear weapons, and also now of science fiction. The various novels concerning the effects of hallucinatory drugs, by writers such as Jeff Noon, Philip K Dick or William Burroughs, heighten what it means to experiment with drugs and the sense that it is always guesswork, and always involves an element of risk caused by a lack of knowledge or understanding, or of certainty. Dr. Weir begins as a scientist, someone whose vocation concerns experimentation to create empirical fact, and finishes as a personification of evil – a twist that neatly reflects the concerns of the film itself.

Posted by Daniel Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to view his Music Matters blog.

Defining the non-human: a twist in the tale

Matt Smith's Dr Who — Defining the non-human ?

I’ve written previously about science fiction’s essential truth: defining what it means to be human.

But a recent episode of Dr.Who, ‘Amy’s Choice,’provided a new slant: defining what it means to be a Time Lord. (Warning: a few plot spoilers ahead: for those of a nervous disposition, look away now.)

With the revelation that the Dream Lord was in fact the Doctor himself – the clues were there, in retrospect: who else might know the Doctor’s dreams, and has been with him all the time ? – in fact, the dark side of the Doctor, given voice through psychic pollen that feeds on one’s innermost thoughts, the true thrust of the episode became clear: it was about what it meant to be a Time Lord.

As the Dream Lord himself says: ‘The old man prefers the company of the young.’ He was giving voice to the dark preoccupations lying with the Doctor, about abandoning his companions, never making real friends, losing touch with them ‘once they leave the Tardis’ (and what about poor old Adric, sometime companion to Peter Davison’s incarnation, who left the Tardis not by choice, but by dying ?).

And the dilemma for Amy: does the Doctor really trust her when he hasn’t even told her his name ? The Dream Lord voiced the self-doubts that plague us all when we lie lost awake at night and the demons come knocking…

Here, all those things that are important to defining the human – relationships, trust, friendship – are presented as elements that the Doctor does not, indeed, cannot ever, have.

It seems to suggest the Doctor, as a Gallifreyan, is the opposite of human: his whole existence is diametrically opposed to the human condition. And he even has two hearts.

Interesting…

Posted by Daniel Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to view his Music Matters blog.

Slipstream Showcase

Across the course of this academic year, Slipstream has challenged staff and students at the University of Kent to create ambitious and inquisitive responses to the Cultural Olympiad and the 2012 Games, supported by the Creative Campus Initiative.

An interdisciplinary approach lies at the heart of the work and this has provoked a diverse and flamboyant collection of new art work ranging from an interactive cycling concert to a memory provoking ballroom dance with elderly people on the University labyrinth. The work culminates in an exhibition of performed and visual artworks across Kent in June 2010.

The Slipstream Showcase will profile commissions by Chris Yates, Neil light and Jim Lockey & Katy Norton, whose work has been mentored by curator Sue Jones and artist Adam Chodzco. Samples of project work on both Canterbury and Medway campuses will include Le Reve de Newton, Iron Gym and Moving Memory.

We look forward to seeing you at the showcase and individual events – all of which are free.

The Slipstream Showcase is based in the Marlowe Building Foyer, on the University of Kent’s Canterbury Campus.

For more information please contact Tania.holland@canterbury.ac.uk

Can I Kick It ? Music and the culture of football

(For Ian Swatman)

Every weekend, thousands of devoted worshippers congregate together and lift their voices in communal song. I’m not talking about Sunday services in church: instead, of the thousands of football fans who chant and sing in football stadia across the country.

It’s impossible not to participate in such singing: I’ve stood on the terraces at the Goldstone Ground, Brighton & Hove Albion’s former ground, or gathered with others in front of the television screen or before projector screens in pubs, gripped by World Cup fever. At such times, spontaneous song bursts out – often with lyrics that, alas, I fear I cannot reproduce here – and you find yourself swept along, either by the joyous song greeting passages of play going well for your side, or (more often) to heap scorn and derision on players or, more excitingly, the match referee whose judgement-making (and parentage) gets called into question.

The affinity between music and football appears often: the Laudamus Te of Poulenc’s Gloria from 1959 was apparently inspired by the composer watching Benedictine monks playing the game. More recently, football chanting finds its way into the music of dedicated Arsenal-fan and British composer Mark-Antony Turnage’s Momentum, where the brass section burst forth with a derisive, sneering melody that imitates ‘Olé, olé olé olé!’ Football has also inspired a whole opera from Turnage, The Silver Tassie from 2000, where ace footballer Harry Hegan goes off to the trenches of World War I, is tragically injured, and returns confined to a wheelchair.

Handels’ Zadok the Priest may not have been inspired by football originally, but its presence is obvious in the pastiche theme to ITV’s coverage of the UEFA Champions League.

The minor third interval is prevalent in football chant, perhaps because it’s the easiest interval to pitch instinctively: think of ‘There’s on-ly one, A-lan Shea-rer!’ It features to great effect in the opening of Skinner and Baddiel’s anthemic ‘Football’s Coming Home (Three Lions).’

Music is also used as a motivational tool at football matches: heroic, tub-thumping tunes blare out over the tannoy as the teams stream on to the pitch at the start of a fixture, exhorting players to greater heights and fans to show their support. (At Brighton’s ground, Tina Turner’s Simply The Best greeted the players: although, given the poor form of The Seagulls as they languished in the lower divisions, perhaps it was being used ironically.) It also gives voice to feelings of patriotic pride, as teams and fans unite in singing their national anthems before World Cup games. And say what you like about England’s national anthem, it has a significant advantage over many others: it’s short.

And who can forget football’s own contribution to music, in the World Cup songs that are occasionally thrust into the charts at World Cup time: John Barnes’ rapping in New Order’s World In Motion from 1990’s World Cup ? Barnes, a footballer possessed of silken skills and touchline trickery of an almost balletic quality, but whose elegant grace on the field deserted him in the recording studio (the full horror starts at 2′ 30″).

With World Cup season nearly upon us, music will appear everywhere, from opening ceremonies to programme closing titles. It’s hard to imagine the world of football without it…

(This post was prompted by a colleague, who commented that he’d registered with this blog and could he please talk about Hull City ? Well, Ian, in the spirit of the title of this piece: yes, you can!)

Posted by Daniel Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to view his Music Matters blog.

Playing with time: Because I Could Not Stop For Death

Published only after her death in 1886, Because I Could Not Stop for Death is a tiny masterpiece by the American poet Emily Dickinson. Its effect is completely disproportionate to the scale and manner of the poem itself, as is the concept with which an apparently disarming rhyming-scheme is dealing.

The poem plays with time, or the perception of it: the narrator is far too busy for her activities to be halted even by Death, although it appears Death stops to collect her.

Because I could not stop for Death,/ He kindly stopped for me;/ The carriage held but just ourselves/ And Immortality.

The second verse then settles and creates a sense of calm, as the narrator escapes from the hectic passage of everyday time :

We slowly drove, he knew no haste, / And I had put away / My labour, and my leisure too, / For his civility.

The next verse continues the idea of time slowing and stretching, as well as portraying different times of the day: the morning of school, the lazy haze of a field of wheat as the afternoon and the setting sun of the evening creating a warm, pastoral image

We passed the school where children played,/ Their lessons scarcely done;/ We passed the fields of gazing grain,/ We passed the setting sun.

The carriage stops beside her grave, which she calmly seems not to recognise:

We paused before a house that seemed/ A swelling of the ground;/ The roof was scarcely visible,/ The cornice but a mound.

But it’s the final verse that really takes your breath away. Time suddenly contracts: there’s almost a sense of pausing, of suddenly becoming still as the narrator realises that she is dead, and the journey in the carriage is without end.

Since then ’tis centuries; but each/ Feels shorter than the day / I first surmised the horses’ heads/ Were toward eternity.

The same sense of dawning realisation which is striking the narrator is also striking you as the reader. It really is like being dashed in the face by cold water. The first time I read the poem, I felt slapped in the face: the implications of that last verse absolutely brought me up short.

For me, this is akin to walking through a room and out onto a balcony: suddenly the view before you unfolds across a wider plane, and you realise the context in which you had been reading before is operating at a much larger scale than you could have previously imagined. As great poetry can, from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Larkin’s musings on misery, the focus of the poem shifts in a flash from the specific to the universal in a way that pulls you up short and makes you reconsider.

(There’s a setting by composer John Adams of the poem, as part of his piece Harmonium, which you can preview on his MySpace page here: click to open in pop-out player).

Short, deft but astonishing: Dickinson’s poetic strengths in a nutshell.

Posted by Daniel Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to view his Music Matters blog.

Infinite Space, Infinite Terror: a contradiction

The catchphrase used in Event Horizon‘s marketing, the title of this section, is remarkable for the fact that the film itself endeavours to run contrary to this idea.

Normally, most science fiction highlights the intense isolation of being lost in the limitless reaches of space, by means of a space-walk episode to re-enforce the scale of endless emptiness dwarfing the human figure, or panning back from an apparently large spaceship to reveal the vast depths of space surrounding it.

Much of the intensity of the first third of the film is generated by the fact that it is not the boundless reaches of space which inspires fear, but the claustrophobia of enclosed areas. Although the film contains numerous instances of both devices – pulling back from Weir’s cabin to emphasise the epic scale of the space-station at the beginning, or moving around the outside of the ‘Event Horizon’ itself before the two ships dock – there is primarily an emphasis on claustrophobia, on characters caught in oppressively confined spaces. The same sequence which pulls back from Weir’s cabin to illustrate the overwhelming size of the space station also re-enforces the small size of the cabin he occupies.

The gravity tanks are also extremely constricting, triggering Weir’s first hallucination aboard the ‘Lewis & Clark.’ When he first enters the stasis tank, Weir reveals that he suffers from acute claustrophobia, a condition which induces the episode that follows. His fear is brought about not by being dwarfed by boundless surroundings, but by being confined.

As the camera tracks around the empty tunnels of the ‘Event Horizon’ when first entry into the ship is made, again it is the oppressive atmosphere of enclosure which pervades the film, enhanced by the effect of echoing corridors. Blobs of escaped coolant fluid and forgotten tools float haphazardly around these empty tunnels, illustrating the lack of human control exerted in this environment.

The terror of the film, the second element referred to by the film’s catchphrase, whilst in part emanating from the surroundingly desolate universe (the crew make repeated references to how far from home they are, interrupting their leave in order to undertake the rescue mission, of which details are initially withheld from them) is also brought with the crew themselves – possibly brought aboard directly in the soul of Dr. Weir himself. As Conrad referred to it at the end of Heart of Darkness, the greatest horror lies not without the human mind, but within it. The evil brought back into our own dimension by the creation of the gravity-drive feeds upon the secrets and paranoid fears which each crewmember carries within themselves. When this element really begins to dominate in the latter part of the film, the narrative moves from its science fiction concerns to the genre of horror, effortlessly and efficiently blending the two.

Next week: more on the combination of genres.

Posted by Daniel Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to read his Music Matters blog.

Not another elf! The status of fantasy literature

It’s very fashionable these days to deride fantasy fiction. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings has spawned thousands of derivatives, everyone is fed up with trolls and orcs: the apocryphal comment “Not another bloody elf!” uttered at one of the meetings of The Inklings, where Tolkien, Lewis and others read extracts from their books to each other, has become legendary, taken up by many.

Fantasy literature is often viewed with suspicion as much as anything: professing a liking for it is tantamount to admitting that your reading tastes have never matured, and you’re still reading what is often regarded as children’s fiction. It’s not Proper or Serious Fiction.

This is a shame, because fantasy literature is quite capable, when done well, with intelligence, of grappling with all the issues that supposedly only serious fiction can take on. Scratch the surface of a fantasy novel, and underneath the same set of values can be found operating: moral issues, ideas about knowledge and learning, or politics. And it has been around for centuries: the gripping drama of Beowulf could have been written as far back as the eighth century.

For Tolkien in particular, magic is inextricably interwoven with knowledge. Unlike pulp fantasy fiction by writers such as James Barclay, where magic is simply employed as a tool with no regard for cause and effect, for learning and wisdom, for Tolkien, this is exactly what magic is. Tolkien also claimed that the original impetus behind the writing of the Lord of the Rings was purely linguistic: he was interested in exploring language, and playing with back-formation to create a hypothetical ancestral language. Tolkien was an expert on Beowulf, and had delivered a seminal lecture on it, The Monsters and the Critics, that is often credited as being the most important piece of scholarship on the poem . He was also interested in creating a mythology for England, something which he felt it culturally lacked.

And fantasy literature is often pastoral in its imagery, which, in an urban age increasingly saturated by technology, reminds readers that there is landscape and nature around them.

Fantasy literature, it is true, is full of derivative pulp novels. But in the hands of someone like George R R Martin, whose A Song of Ice and Fire sequence of novels has stretched so far across five mammoth books and shows no sign of ending, it can become an engrossing study of the dynamics of political power, and an exploration of moral codes; it’s almost turning into the fantasy equivalent of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Or Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, where the anti-heroic figure of Covenant rejects the fantasy world into which he is plunged and spends the novels fighting against it, a theme fueling the whole series.

Myth-making, linguistic invention, morality, an exploration of the implications of knowledge, political machinations: fantasy literature has the capacity to illuminate the same ideas as other fiction genres. It’s not just swords and sorcery: thankfully.

Posted by Daniel Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to view his Music Matters blog.

Reading ‘Event Horizon:’ an introduction

Released in 1997, Event Horizon represents a collision of genres derived from other film styles: from science fiction, horror, the action movie and war films. The otherwise predictable story – a rescue mission ship sent to recover a deep-space exploration vehicle that has reappeared after mysteriously disappearing seven years previously, and the anticipation of the various horrors that the crew will doubtless encounter aboard the stricken craft – is rescued from tired repetition precisely because it combines these genres: elements from each blending into a more engaging film.

Most science fiction films require little cerebral engagement from the audience, except perhaps an ability to marvel at the conjectured technological innovations, or at the film’s special effects. The better films, as indeed arguably all good science fiction should, set up their own world, along with its machinery, its social hierarchies and its technological evolutions, its own races and their cultures, and present it as a given, entirely credible, premise from which the film will depart. In fact, the most successful science fiction perhaps does not even attempt to amaze the viewer, or the reader, with its dazzling array of inventions: it simply gets to grips with the plot immediately, and by and large will ignore its own technology, or at least take it for granted. This makes the audience do so as well – only gradually as the film unfolds is the scale of the technological universe presented, unfolding through the demands of the narrative, and not governing it.

In this manner, the viewer accepts without consideration the premise set up by the narrative, and only marvels at it afterwards. Of course, some films demand the opposite reaction: the tired and frustratingly incompetent technology that is a feature of the first Star Wars trilogy, or the murky android flesh parlours in Blade Runner, complete with almost ever-present rain-soaked streets and citizens alike.

The structure of Event Horizon is also not presented as a straightforward sequence of events: a mysterious beginning, unexplained flashbacks, ambiguous characters towards whom the viewer’s attitudes will slowly change over the course of the film; all endeavour to subvert a traditional, organic sense of narrative progression. Total Recall also plays with the audience perception of characters and events successfully; perhaps because it is based, like Blade Runner, on a short story by the master of science-fiction, Philip K. Dick. Some elements of Event Horizon are clearly derived from the Alien series, inaugurated by Ridley Scott, later also the director of Blade Runner. The camaraderie shared by the crew of the ‘Lewis & Clark’ owes a great deal to the character-bonding in war films, while the tense build-up of expectation leading towards an unknown denouement is inherited from the horror genre.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring various themes and devices employed in the film. Next week: ‘Infinite Space, Infinite Terror: a contradiction.’

Posted by Daniel Harding, Deputy Director of Music at the University of Kent. Click here to read his Music Matters blog.