cinema – Postcards from Poitiers

Lockdown? What lockdown? Seen on a riverside walk yesterday morning.

We are now at the midway point in the current lockdown, the third that France has gone through. When announcing the new restrictions at the end of March, President Macron said, ‘From mid-May, we will start to open again’, and it looks increasingly likely that there will be some relaxing of measures by the middle of next month. According to the magazine Le Point, the government’s plan is to allow café terraces to begin to reopen from Monday 17th May, with cultural venues such as museums and tourist sites also opening at this point. The opening of café interiors and restaurants is provisionally set for some time between 1st and 15th June. If this plan comes to pass, it will put us almost exactly a month behind the UK, who saw their own current lockdown gradually coming to an end with the opening of schools, ‘non-essential’ shops, and pub gardens on 12th April.

Comparisons between the two countries are complicated, because the UK’s third lockdown, which started in January, was much more stringent than France’s current one. One sensed then that the French government were pleased that their own handling of the situation (for instance, by not having a Christmas easing of restrictions as in the UK) had enabled them to avoid a similar January close-down. However, four months is a long time in politics, and the situation is very different today. The vaccine campaign in the UK led to a significant drop in the numbers of both cases and fatalities, whilst the relatively slow vaccine roll-out here, coupled with the arrival of several new variant strains of Covid-19, has led to figures going in the opposite direction.

M. Macron is reported to have been reluctant to impose a third lockdown until the worsening statistics made one clearly unavoidable. Faced with a disenchanted electorate and a long re-election campaign, he was keen to administer an effective medicine without making it too difficult to swallow. The current ‘partial’ lockdown is the result.

Like most people, I was glad of the lighter restrictions, with no documents to fill in whenever you leave the house, and more freedom to travel and exercise. At the same time, there is the nagging suspicion that it might have been better to bite the bullet now and have a complete lockdown, in order to benefit later on. There is also the feeling that the new rules are illogical. I can weave my way through the crowded street market but not sit in a cinema with carefully separated seats. I can stand with other people eating at a fast food kiosk but not sit on a terrace eating a proper meal. I can drink a Coke in the street but not a beer. I can buy books and records and patio furniture (garden centres are open) but not clothes or a kitchen table. Any business that does repairs can stay open, so you can have your shoes mended, but you can’t buy a new pair.

These are all minor inconveniences, and hopefully all of this will pass fairly soon. However, the future is far from clear. The journalist John Lichfield does an excellent job analysing the progress of Covid-19 in France and its treatment. In his latest bulletin, he talks of steadily improving vaccine roll-out figures and a dramatic drop in care home deaths, from 1,300 a week in November to 50 a week now. Overall, there are signs that a plateau has been reached. Numbers in acute care have been stable at around 5,900 for five days.

However, the third wave of the pandemic in France – 82% UK variant – is still at a high level, with over 30,000 cases and 300 deaths a day. The grim statistic of 100,000 Covid deaths in France was passed during the week. New scare stories about vaccine risks and variant strains appear almost daily. The government will have to balance very carefully the political desirability of relaxing current restrictions against the risk of increasing the spread of the disease.

***

Food for thought

***

One evening this week, we rewatched Peeping Tom, the film that more or less finished the career of director Michael Powell. On its release in 1960, the critics queued up to express their outrage. Caroline Lejeune in The Observer described it as a ‘beastly film’, whilst the Daily Express, subtle as always, said it was ‘more nauseating and depressing than the leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay, and the gutters of Calcutta’.

Since then, the film has been reassessed and is now regarded as a classic of British cinema. It all seems very tame now, and it’s difficult to see what all the fuss was about. I’ve watched it several times and nearly always see something new to appreciate in it. This time it was a shot of the newsagent in Rathbone Place, where Mark, the eponymous peeping Tom, works.

29 Rathbone Place W1.

When I was young, every corner newsagent looked like this, festooned with adverts for cigarettes and ice cream. If you click on the image above, it should open in another window. Enlarge it, and you can just about make out a cigarette machine above the Wall’s sign on the right of the picture. These were once very common, as were machines which for a pre-decimal sixpence would dispense a carton of milk.

The pub that features in the film is the Newman Arms in Rathbone Street, a place where I’ve wasted many a happy hour. As well as Peeping Tom,it’s noteworthy for two other reasons. First, it was the pub on which George Orwell, once a regular there, based the Proles’ pub in 1984. Second, in about 2010, it was the first pub in London where I came across the vile practice of allowing people to ‘reserve’ tables. In a public house! I was outraged!

Mind you, I had the last laugh. I stormed out, and ten years later left the country, never to return. That’ll teach them.

***

Things I’ve learnt this week:

The symbol of the Alzheimer Society of Canada is the forget-me-not.

In 1986, Michael Foot MP was made the Chair of a disarmament committee. The Times headline ran: ‘Foot Heads Arms Body’.

The Swedish expression ‘Skita i det blå skåpet’ is used to describe someone who has embarrassed themselves or has taken something too far. It literally means ‘to shit in the blue cupboard’.

9.00 yesterday morning. The view south from Pont Joubert, five minutes’ walk from our house.

***

There are times when you become aware, if only dimly, that you are living through history; when you realise that current events will be closely studied and speculated on for generations to come. They become ‘a thing’. I think the last such ‘thing’ was the attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001. An event of such significance that, very quickly, its date was sufficient to identify it and give it a name. Like an earthquake, 9/11 had an epicentre, in New York City, but the seismic waves spread rapidly throughout the world, and one can argue that they continue to do so.

The current ‘thing’ is different. The events of 2020, and now 2021, are more like an eclipse than an earthquake: an unscheduled eclipse slowly spreading over the world, catching people unawares at first, but gradually becoming a new normality. In films, sometimes, the transition of time, or some other form of progress, is marked by changing from black and white to colour. At present we seem to be going through the reverse process: everything slowing down as days become increasingly dull and repetitive with, for many of us, little or no reason to bother leaving home. The colour gradually drains from life.

I once thought that Brexit might be the next ‘thing’ I would live through. It is, of course, a significant event, but it’s been overshadowed by what is being increasingly referred to, with some justification, as ‘the plague’. On January 1st, whatever your view of Brexit, you were probably more interested in the latest set of hospital statistics or news about the roll-out of vaccines. If nothing else, the current situation helps give one a sense of perspective. This ‘thing’ will pass eventually, and a different sort of normality will slowly emerge. Time will tell how different it will be from the pre-2020 world. Hopefully, it will be in colour.

***

Oddly enough, in an attempt to escape from the current gloom, I’ve been immersing myself in old black and white films, in particular French films of the 1940s. I’ve been interested in finding out how French filmmakers coped during the Occupation and to compare their work with that of their British counterparts working under very different conditions.

The first film I’ve been looking at is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (The Raven), made in 1942.

The story centres around a doctor who starts receiving poison-pen letters accusing him of carrying out illegal abortions and having an affair with the wife of another doctor. Similar letters are then sent to numerous people throughout the town. The situation becomes increasingly serious when a hospital patient commits suicide after receiving one. In a skilfully depicted atmosphere of mounting tension and increasing malevolence, suspicion falls on various people before the truth is revealed. The film is a gripping Hitchcockian thriller that stands up very well today. There’s a trailer on YouTube, and the DVD, with English subtitles, can be bought for about a tenner.

I’d started looking into the actual making of the film in more detail, but I’ve the attention span of a moth, and I got completely sidetracked when I discovered that the plot is based on a series of events that occurred in a town called Tulle about 130 miles from Poitiers.

In 1917, during the Great War, many of the town’s prominent citizens began to receive luridly detailed anonymous letters accusing them of immoral behaviour. The letters were signed ‘l’Œil du Tigre’(the Eye of the Tiger). Over the next six years, more than 300 of these letters arrived. A town clerk is said to have killed himself after receiving one.

In 1922, a letter appeared in front of the municipal theatre, charging fourteen prominent married citizens with carrying on illicit affairs. Efforts to find the sender were stepped up. A hypnotist and a medium were brought into the investigation. Embarrassed, the Tulle police proposed taking fingerprints. (They received a mocking letter: ‘The Eye of the Tiger wears rubber gloves’.)

Eventually, suspicion fell on Angèle Lavale, an unmarried woman in her thirties. Both she and her mother, Louise, had received letters. Angèle’s had claimed that Jean-Baptiste Moury, a previous employer of hers, was ‘a seducer’. It was rumoured that Angèle had a crush on Moury, who had spurned her and was planning to marry another woman. The police suspected that Angèle wanted revenge on Moury, and that the other letters, including the ones to herself and her mother, were merely camouflage.

Finally, Angèle agreed to be examined by a handwriting expert.

After hours of her copying block-printed letters, he concluded she was indeed the Eye of the Tiger. She was charged with writing most of the letters (some were obviously written by cranks). Angèle and her mother became social pariahs and were booed and hissed at in the street. People refused to share their church pew. Finally, tragically, Angèle and her mother made a suicide pact and tried to drown themselves. Only the mother succeeded, and Angèle was rescued by two passers-by. There is some doubt as to whether she actually intended to honour the agreement.

Angèle left town. When she reappeared in a nearby village some weeks later, Tulle’s citizens demanded that she return to face trial. Some months later, she did so, wearing a black mantilla over her face in mourning for her mother. She maintained her innocence but was found guilty, given a suspended one-month prison sentence, and fined a total of 300 francs.

Slowly, public opinion began to shift. The whole affair was a tragedy; Angèle was a pitiful creature who never really meant to hurt anyone. The Paris newspaper Le Matin described her in the dock as ‘a poor bird who has folded her wings’. The affair brought her celebrity status throughout France, and numerous Frenchmen ‘of good position’ offered to marry her. She accepted none of them. After an appeal against her sentence was denied, she went to live with her brother in Tulle. Apart from a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital, she rarely left the house until her death in 1967.

It’s a terrific yarn, and in reading about it I’ve discovered various other interesting strands to follow, but for now I want to get back to the making of Le Corbeau. I will pick up that story in a future blog.

***

Things I’ve learnt this week:

From 1912 to 1948, painting was an Olympic event. In 1924, Jack Yeats, brother of the poet W. B. Yeats, took the silver: Ireland’s first-ever Olympic medal.

In the film industry, a ‘mickey’ is a gentle camera move forwards. It’s short for ‘Mickey Rooney’ (a ‘little creep’).

In 2012, a missing woman on a vacation in Iceland was found when it was discovered that she was in the search party looking for herself.

Tag: cinema

A glimmer of hope

Colour or black and white?