You might not immediately be able to put a face to the name ‘Laura Linney’. And you wouldn’t be the only one, since despite a prolific film career spanning over a decade, and a wide range of prestigious award nominations, she rarely appears in the press unless in connection with her latest film or character. You’ll have a hard time trying to find Linney gracing the gossip pages of Heat magazine. Perhaps this is why I don’t instantly recognise her when introduced to her amongst a small group of people having a civilised cup of tea at the Randolph. Those who are unfamiliar with Linney’s filmography will most likely recognise her as “that American one from Love Actually”, or as Frasier Crane’s girlfriend, if you were still watching Frasier by 2004.

Linney’s career thus far has seen her working with some of the most well-respected artists in Hollywood, in a host of highly influential films, and yet she remains surprisingly level-headed and approachable. Interviewers in the past have noted how Linney frequently makes sure to introduce herself personally to everyone present, and our interview does not prove an exception. Standing to shake hands with each flustered student that arrives to meet her, she remains unwaveringly friendly and, much to my relief, wholly unpatronising. We begin with small talk about malfunctioning Dictaphones, as I attempt to set mine up, before I enquire whether she’s managed to visit some of the more picturesque Oxford Colleges – ‘I would have’, she says sadly, ‘but they’re closed to the public, so I sort of peeked in through the gate and tried to get a sneak look in’. I consider pointing out that she’d find it relatively easy to use her celebrity status to get a private tour, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that such antics wouldn’t be her style.

A brief glance at the films Linney has featured in over the last decade reveals real variation in the projects she chooses to take on. From the unnerving thriller ‘The Mothman Prophecies’, to quirky blockbuster ‘The Truman Show’, or even the Edith Wharton classic ‘The House of Mirth’, Linney refuses to restrict herself to one genre, no matter how successful she may prove to be within it. She denies sticking to any sort of overall ‘game plan’ when selecting roles, believing that having such a fixed career path and setting out to prove oneself to the public is often counterproductive. ‘When actors choose their own material, I think it’s a little dangerous because there’s some personal agenda there that’s at work that isn’t necessarily very good for the material’. She may well have a point. It’s often painfully obvious when actors take on a particularly controversial role merely for the sake of publicity (‘Eyes Wide Shut’ anyone?), or veer towards films they believe have ‘Oscar winning potential’ (think gay cowboy dramas and the like). This is a technique which can go horribly wrong, with actors choosing parts which they simply can’t pull off. ‘You can see some people choosing something that just doesn’t work, and you can tell they did it because they wanted to be sexier, or there was some need to prove a side of their personality…’

Yet Linney seems to avoid falling into this trap, genuinely choosing projects based on their artistic worth, or how much they interest her. Such an attitude certainly involves making sacrifices – for her role in the low-budget film You Can Count On Me, released in 2000, she received the union minimum wage of $10,000, but was rewarded in return with her first Academy Award Nomination for Best Actress. She received a second nomination a few years later, this time for Best Supporting Actress, for her role in Kinsey, in which she played the eponymous sex psychologist’s wife, opposite Liam Neeson. This approach to her career may explain why she’s been involved in such a wide range of different films, and successfully avoided being typecast.

So what persuades her to take on a new project? Unsurprisingly, ‘nine times out of ten it’s the script and what potential the script holds. Then there’s director or actors. There has to be one of those three elements. If there are two of the three then that’s pretty good…’ So has she ever been involved in something with all three elements? The response is instantaneous – ‘Yes. Mystic River, because that had a great script, Clint Eastwood and Sean Penn. Didn’t take long to figure that one out.’

Her immense enthusiasm for these films, evident in the warmth with which she talks about them, undoubtedly results in intense dedication to the project in hand. Listening to Linney describe how she manages to cope with the disjointed way of filming a movie, out of chronological order, gives you a particularly clear insight into her approach to acting. ‘A lot of times, I’ll take a big piece of cardboard and I’ll make charts and lists and graphs, and I do all sorts of “mad scientist” things so if I do a scene, I can see where it falls in sequence.’ This science metaphor seems appropriate here, since Linney’s approach to the development of her character seems almost mathematical – ‘if I know something in scene five has to hit in scene sixty, I need to set it up properly. If I’m, doing scene 59 and there was something that I did in scene 7 that relates to that, I have to remember what happened.’ Award shows and glamour aside, Linney clearly takes each role very seriously.

As an actress, she doesn’t like to anticipate, in the long term, where her career might take her, preferring, as she puts it, ‘the unexpected things in life – that’s just the life of an actor.’ As such, when I enquire as to what her dream role would be, she is adamant that she can’t bring herself to try and imagine it. ‘You know, I can’t answer that, because I don’t think that way. I wish I did. I really wish I could think that way. It would make my life, and probably my agent’s life much easier, but part of the fun for me is not knowing what’s around the corner’.

Indeed, her career has been far from one-track, with Linney eager to switch, at least temporarily, from film to television when given the opportunity, most notably in a recurring role on Frasier, for which she won her second Emmy award. ‘The thing that was so interesting, and the reason I did it, was that I know absolutely nothing about the sitcom’. The experience, she says, was completely different to any of her previous projects, and highly liberating – ‘you have to be willing to be very flexible, because things change constantly… you really have to be as free and as easy as you possibly can be, and not let yourself be thrown by anything. You have to go into sitcoms with a real sense of joy.’

On the other end of the spectrum, Linney’s appearances on Broadway have seen her tackle highly serious dramas, most noticeably Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, in which she and Liam Neeson, in their roles as Elizabeth and John Proctor, created an “emotional temperature that leaves you weak”, as one enthralled critic put it. When asked whether she’ll be gracing the boards of London’s West End in the near future, she insists that ‘anywhere I’m invited to in theatre I would pretty much show up’, (take note, budding student directors) and admits that she’s hoping to make a return to the stage before long.

Linney genuinely seems to revel working within a large cast of characters, be it on the stage or in front of the camera. Speaking about ‘Love Actually’ she admits to finding the experience a hugely positive one – ‘I loved being around all those people, I loved the ensemble feel, that one producer would do something and then pass the baton to the next producer. It was this sort of collage of little things, and you were just a small part of something much bigger.’

As the interview draws to a close, I ask her what she’s going to be talking about at the Union, and the reply is unsurprisingly modest – ‘mostly it’ll probably be more Q & A, just where I think I can be more helpful… just seeing what students are wondering about’.

At this she stands once more to greet her next eager visitor. One presumes she must get rather tired of this process, after a decade in the spotlight, but if she does then she certainly doesn’t let it show.

By Daisy Johnson 
The word ‘fuck’ retains its official status as one of the foremost ‘taboo words’ in the English language, ranking third after those real stinkers that you aren’t allowed to have in print. However, since making its debut on BBC television in 1965 the word ‘fuck’ has become so popular that you wouldn’t bat an eyelid at its use. Having said that, I did recently hear a girl say to her friend in a scandalised whisper, “You can’t say ‘fuck’ in the British Museum!”, but really, even recourse to it in a tutorial would not cause much of a stir. What explanation can be given for ‘fuck’s’ paradoxical position between profanity and popularity?

In terms of profanity, ‘fuck’ is one of the oldest words, maintaining the vulgar meaning of its earliest usage. The OED holds that its roots are Anglo-Saxon, though its first identified written use in English was by the Scottish poet William Dunbar. In his delightful poem, “In Secreit Place”, a real love story about a liaison between a kitchen maid and a smooth-talking city boy. In the line “Yit be his feiris he wald haif fukkit”, ‘fuck’ is used in an almost identical context to its primary meaning today. Not to spell it out too explicitly, the kitchen maid has thus far withheld her favours from the city boy, and he’s getting a bit impatient, because “by his fire, he’d like to…” etc. Earlier even than this, the bastardised Latin ‘fuccant’ appears in a coded poem written in Latin and English some time before 1500. Attempts to translate the code have yielded “non sunt in coeli, quia fuccant wivys of heli”, which is “[the monks] are not in heaven, because they fuck the wives of Ely”. Notably, even in these very early uses of the word, ‘fuck’ is associated with severe impiety and bawdy behaviour, and was regarded even then as a taboo word.

So what typically constitutes taboo words? And why does ‘fuck’ remain one of them? Swear words, which exist in almost all languages and cultures, are certain words considered to be vulgar, usually because of their association with a corresponding social taboo. In English, swear words are largely related either to blasphemy, and particularly the defaming of Christianity, or, as in the case of ‘fuck’, related to obscenity. Quite logically, the more improper the action associated with a swear word, the greater the impropriety of uttering it. Lesser taboo actions, such as burping and swearing which, whilst considered generally impolite behaviour in public, and thus linguistically unsophisticated rude, are not actively offensive, and so do not rank as ‘swear words’. One might imagine the consequences, however, of performing ‘fuck’s’ associated action in public. This comparison is sufficient to explain ‘fuck’s’ classification as a swear word.

Of course, references to the naughty and socially inappropriate things we do are frequent and sometimes unavoidable, but a separate language exists for describing sex (‘sex’ itself being an example). Words such as this are hardly considered swear words. It must be concluded then that ‘fuck’ is so offensive not because of the physical action it describes, but because of the intent with which it is spoken. It is certainly the case that the word is rarely said without an indication of contempt and crudity. In fact, there is almost an element of self-aggrandisement about the use of ‘fuck’ – swearing, after all, is cool. There’s no denying it. Using ‘fuck’ suggests promotion of free speech and sexual liberation, which places you in the camp of ‘fuck’ pioneers like D.H. Lawrence, whose battle in Lady Chatterley’s Lover to use ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ as parts of every day speech was finally won when the novel was published in 1960, three decades after its completion. In fact, the sixties saw the real beginnings of the widespread use of ‘fuck’ in the public and media spheres. It is certainly appropriate that the first man to say it on television, the critic Kenneth Tynan, became a pornographer in the ‘70s. The use of ‘fuck’ finds you upholding trendy sixties principles of freedom and radical thought. Super cool, right?

Right. Except it would be foolish to suggest, in 2007, that every person who utters ‘fuck’ as the Tesco carrier bag on their handlebars swings dangerously close to the spokes of their bike wheel is demonstrating their support for the free love movement. Realistically the reason that ‘fuck’ is becoming more common has little to do with its role as a symbol of anti-establishment subversiveness. In fact, it is mainly because ‘fuck’ is being progressively dissociated from its literal meaning and finding a place as a mere linguistic expletive. ‘Fuck’ and its associated parts of speech are rarely now used to really swear. Instead it is most commonly either a descriptive word, or an interjection of anger, surprise or even delight.

‘Fuck’, and particularly ‘fucking’, has considerable power as descriptive speech. ‘Fucking’ with its freedom to be classified as an adjective or adverb depending on context, can be used as an intensifier with a greater force than a simple ‘very’ or ‘really’. Consider the difference between saying “not fucking likely” and “not very likely”. The two are going to get very different reactions, and certainly have different meanings. The former is much more forcerful and negative, thanks to the power and shock-factor still associated with ‘fuck’ Also, as an interjection, ‘fuck’ is a surprisingly meaty and satisfying utterance. It opens with a fricative consonant, ‘f’, which is formed by forcing air through the channel made when the lower lip and the upper teeth come together, and closes with an aggressive ‘ck’, formed by stopping airflow in the vocal tract. This combination works to create a very definite and harsh sound, which can alter in tone to deliver a strong impression of a particular emotion. For example, the typical loud use of ‘fuck’ to express anger or frustration comes out like a verbal punch; it is a cathartic utterance which embodies and goes some way to exorcising the anger of the speaker. Alternatively, a ‘fu-uck!’ which goes down at the end and has a drawn out vowel is a verbal image of surprise or disbelief. ‘Fuck’ with a smile is a kind of happy, feelgood expression. A recent survey by a professor of management at the University of East Anglia has found that swearing in the workplace as a means of diffusing tension and high emotion in fact boosts team spirit and morale, so long as it remains in the form of interjection and not personal insult, because it can foster solidarity amongst employees and encourage them to share their feelings. The professor, Yehuda Baruch, hopes the survey will encourage people to re-evaluate the role swearing can play in our lives.

In an attempt to do that, then, it should be acknowledged that ‘fuck’ may have lost some of the taboo present in its literal use as it has become more prominently employed as a simple space-filling interjection or useful intensifier. The danger now, perhaps, is that linguistically it will move the other way, and become a clichéd form of speech, requiring us to formulate new taboos for our own time. Since I am rather fond of it in speech, I would counsel avoidance of excessive over-use of the F-word, for fear it will diminish even further in impact. For tips and tricks in this matter, perhaps consult the wiki – ‘How to stop swearing’, which demands that you punish yourself for excessive swearing, and reward yourself each time you manage to substitute ‘flip’ for ‘fuck’. “Don’t think you’re not cool when you don’t swear! You’re cooler!” On second thoughts though – fuck it.

While you are gently sleeping on a Saturday night in late October (OK, fine, while your feet are sticking to the floor in The Bridge), a college somewhere in Oxford dresses up in sub-fusc, stocks up on port and walks backwards around a quad, spinning at the corners. For an hour.

Yes, it’s the (in)famous Time Ceremony that has been part of Merton’s history since 1971. It seems the college that apparently never leaves the library has gone loopy. The ‘official’ website that you can find on Google doesn’t help much either – it describes the ceremony as “designed to remedy the ill effects of man’s abrupt interference with the diurnal cycle”. But let’s just think about it for a second. A Saturday doing something that is quirky, eccentric and quintessentially Oxfordian? Plus a chance to quaff stupid amounts of fortified wine? Surely it is better than yet another stale night dancing to the same old tunes in the same old place with the same old drinks on offer. Plus it gives you an interesting story for friends from other colleges and universities, or even ultimately the grandchildren. Provided that the port hasn’t messed with your brain’s memory stores by then, of course.

The ceremony itself is notoriously difficult to get into. The late gates of the College are locked and entry is only through the lodge, with a Bod card and provided no non-Mertonians accompany you. It seems that akin to the Freemasons, we think that we are the only ones able to save the world – in this case from the rupture in the space-time continuum that the putting back of the clocks inevitably leads to. Two toasts are held at the Sundial Lawn, a self-proclaimed centre of the universe – including a call for “Viva la counter-revolution”. The self-professed reactionaries then walk backwards for an hour, drinking vast quantities of port, making fools of themselves and generally trying not to fall on the grass. In the name of the universe of course.

Walking forwards doesn’t feel quite natural for some time afterwards, and you are reminded why port is in the same group as morris-dancing and Harry Hill: it’s an acquired taste. But the ceremony is an amazing experience in an all-Oxford way. Merton is often thought of as the ‘work hard’ college – and whilst that might be true, people shouldn’t forget that the phrase also contains a ‘play hard’ part. When we’re not walking around backwards at least.

It is a sad fact that Oxford is not known for its raving. Books, yes. Archaic traditions, yes. Grimy drug-fuelled hedonism, no. We simply don’t have the time, even if we had the inclination in the first place. Several hours frenzied dancing, and an exhaustion that can last for days are not conducive to essay deadlines. Thus raving has been something of a minority pursuit, with only a hard core of committed individuals bravely setting forth into their sweJames Kingstonaty basements on a regular basis. No longer. Experts have observed the rise and rise of a new breed of raver across the land, a breed particularly suited to Oxford; the Rahver. You may have seen them; you may even be one of them already. One thing is for certain: they are inescapable. Glow-sticked and glow-painted, the hordes are here to stay.
Luckily, they are easy to spot, even when not wearing their standard uniforms of retro Adidas track jackets, aviators, coloured leggings or, for the more daring, a mild gurn. The average rahver is convinced he is a bit of raver, and this is how we can catch him out. Central to this self-identification is a professed love of drum and bass. (though even this is not always essential – last night at the Coven ‘Halloween Rave’, all the glammed-up rahvers, perhaps confused, danced to 50 Cent and YMCA. Fools.) For those of us unversed in the ways of the rave, drum and bass is, as defined by Wikipedia, a type of music “characterised by fast tempo broken beat drums (generally between 160–180 beats per minute) with heavy, often intricate basslines”. It being a well established genre, there are many different DJs (“disk jockeys” to those OUCA members out there), mixes, mixers, labels, etc, to be listened to. The Rahver, rather sadly given their occasional attempts at authenticity, knows only one group, a group taken as representative of all dnb – Pendulum, the knowledge of whom is used thus in conversation, perhaps as one meets another cool looking kid.

“So what sort of music are you into mate?”
“I’m big into my Drum and Bass, actually – I really like Pendulum”
“Oh cool. What else are you into then?”
“Well I really like seeing Pendulum live”

To be a true rahver you must know this group, know every track name (“Put Slam on! Put Slam on!”), and talk about Pendulum every time raving comes up in conversation. The true raver, however, is not fooled – Pendulum are but one group, and one that may even be (whisper it) a bit…mainstream. Of course, this being Oxford and us students a canny lot, some more dedicated rahvers are aware of this, and despise Pendulum, whilst pretending to know of ever more obscure music. Each preciously aims to go to more and more events, so that he can appear more and more hardcore. Each jealously accumulates a knowledge of increasingly esoteric sub-genres – ‘psy-trance’, ‘liquid jungle’, ’scouse house’ ‘happy hardcore’, ‘raga drum dub’, ‘euphoric trance’, ‘hardcore gabba’ and, of course, ‘drum dub raga scouse’. After all, if you can’t be a bit edgy and feel yourself superior to others, then what is the point of adopting a subculture in the first place? One-upmanship is the essence of true rahving.  

So why ‘Rah’ver? And how can we become them, aside from adopting a Pendulum obsession? A Rahver is ‘rah’ because he or she is essentially not a part of the grimy drum and bass scene. Often private schooled, a rahver feels equally at home at a cocktail party, or assaulting a pile of books in preparation for an essay. The true drum and bass fanatic, gurning his way through life in a constant cycle of pill induced ups and downs, most certainly is not.  Rahving allows us clean kids to get a delightful frisson of underground cool – and of, course, display our creative side. The rahver, instead of the grimy T-shirt favoured by the other inhabitants of raves, will dress up in fabulously bright clothing. Strange headgear, funky trousers and leggings, brightly patterned shirts, and an improbable amount of glowsticks are key to the rahve uniform.

For it is a uniform. Finding conformity in their non-conformity (exactly like the indie kids they sneer at) rahvers daub themselves in fluorescent paint, just so that under the UV lights they stand out as all the more crazy and unique – though compared to the poor drug-addled wrecks who can occasionally be glimpsed at dnb events (at whom the rahvers cast disapproving glares, shocked by the obvious naughtyness), the rahvers, despite all their attempts, are neither. So, if you too wish to be a rahver, remain sure of two things – your own vibrant superiority, and that it’s only for the weekend. 

No matter how much you rave about how good – or bad – an adaptation is, you can almost always expect the same response: Yes, but is it faithful to the book?

Fidelity to the original, popular wisdom tells us, is all that matters. Look at the 11,000+ people on Facebook who believe that ‘Harry Potter 7 Better Be 7 Hours Long’. Adaptations should, apparently, behave towards the books they’re based on like clingy lovers, doing everything their partners do and never falling out. They should be considerate, reliable and above all else faithful.

Or, to put it another way, unoriginal, uninspired and uninspiring.

That’s not to say that faithfulness is in itself a bad thing. It’s the commonly-held misapprehension that faithfulness matters more than anything else that’s the problem. If this were true then adaptation would be a pointless art-form: why adapt, if you’re just treating a film like a dot-to-dot or paint-by-numbers, lazily transferring the black and white of the printed page to the moving pictures of the cinema screen?

Why adapt if you accept the popular belief that the book will always be better?

The truth is that just as novels and short stories can achieve things which film can’t mimic, filmmakers can do things which writers can only dream of. Every art form has its limits – and its potential. The best adaptations are those which pretend they’re not adaptations at all: those which don’t try to repeat what the book has already done, but focus on what the film can do instead.

The opening sequence of The Exorcist is a case in point, nine and a half minutes in the Iraqi desert which prove that the difference between reading and seeing can, quite literally, be believing.
The film vacillates obsessively between loud, rhythmic noises – the call to prayer, pickaxes on rock, hammers on anvils – and periods of near silence. And then there are the faces, a series of unsettling close-ups punctuating the wider shots. The one-eyed blacksmith. The increasingly anxious Father Merrin. And, most disturbingly of all, the barely-glimpsed, utterly malevolent visage of the old woman in the carriage which nearly kills him – so blurred and so quickly gone that we are left wondering if it was even human.

The effect is lost in writing about it. But when watching the film, the presence of evil is utterly palpable; our reaction to it, visceral. All this before we have any plot – before the conventional work of adapting a book begins.

The recent adaptation Children of Men succeeds for similar reasons. Unlike The Exorcist it bears no resemblance at all to the original novel, other than its use of the book’s dystopian premise of worldwide infertility. Uncomplicated by plot and character, the film hangs on a series of action set-pieces conveyed to us through unbelievably long and highly-choreographed tracking shots. It’s what the film can do, not what the book did, which matters.

The filmmakers behind both films realised that whereas our response to a book is ultimately linguistic – we process the words, then respond – our response to film can be sensual and more direct. Overemphasizing the value of faithfulness to plot and character ignores what gives film its distinctive power, namely the hypnotic interweaving of sound and image which transports the viewer to another place.

But adaptation, of course, is more than simply a synonym for filmmaking. It’s about grasping the power and potential of cinema, but it’s about grasping the power and potential of a book as well. Ultimately an adaptation’s success (or lack of) depends on how it uses its source material. The problem for filmmakers is that the all-important balance between faithfulness and unfaithfulness, borrowing and originality is unique to every film.

Just compare Brokeback Mountain and M*A*S*H – the former so clingy in its relationship with the story on which it’s based that they could get married (or at least get a civil partnership), the latter so sluttish in its use of improvisation that it bares little resemblance to its script, let alone the original novel. That both are excellent films has both nothing and everything to do with how faithful or unfaithful they are. They’re excellent because they strike near-perfect – though completely different – balances between use of their source material and original input. Ang Lee’s unobtrusive style is exactly what Brokeback required – just as the episodic anarchy of M*A*S*H reflects the film’s focus, the madness of war.

Once we get over the tendency to condemn filmmakers for the sort of creative freedom which we celebrate in authors, it’s difficult to say definitively that any book is unfilmable. Certainly, the more stylised the writing, the trickier the process of adaptation becomes. Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses is disappointingly flaccid compared to Cormac McCarthy’s brilliantly idiosyncratic prose style.
But then Hubert Selby Jr’s equally unconventional portrayal of addiction in Requiem for a Dream has more than met its match in Darren Aronofsky’s disorienting adaptation, a film not unlikely to induce seizures – and in that respect, it does complete justice to the book.

When adaptations are at their best – when they surpass the original – the book versus film debate can be settled with a simple analogy: it’s the difference between inhaling a drug and injecting it, as the characters in Aronofsky’s film find out to their peril.

by Laura WilliamsFrom the 1930s until as late as the mid-’60s, American movies were subject to a production code that imposed massive restrictions upon what they could and could not show on the screen. The list of rules included regulations banning portrayals of ‘vulgarity’, ‘excessive or lustful kissing’, ‘sex perversion’ (homosexuality), and forbidding the villain from ever being allowed to get away with his crimes. The resulting films portrayed an idealised America, a reassuring social morality and an optimism about everyday life which was lacking in the decade following the Wall Street Crash.

The Awful Truth is one such film, but it deserves to be remembered as more than just another 1930s slapstick comedy. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne star as a newly separated couple, who spend the ninety days before their divorce is finalised sabotaging each other’s new romances, obviously still crazy about each other. The witty dialogue and physical humour creates a hugely underrated comedy film of a quality rarely seen since.

The couple’s misadventures culminate with Grant arriving at Dunne’s singing teacher’s house, suspecting the two are having an affair, and he tries to barge in. During a tussle with the doorman, Grant does a hilarious pratfall – almost his trademark in his early films, a talent from his vaudeville days – he lands almost entirely on his face. Eventually bursting through to the living room, he find his wife singing to a crowded room, with her teacher accompanying her on the piano. Astonished, Grant slowly takes off his hat, listening to his wife sing, then sits down awkwardly on a chair at the back, while Dunne glares at him, still singing. It’s not over yet, as Grant leans back on his chair and falls again, and the fall just keeps on going.

Eventually, he rights himself and looks over to his wife with an expression of endearing helplessness. As Dunne catches her husband’s eye in the last phrase of the piece, she laughs a little out loud – perfectly on key – and then ends the song. She’s not only realised that her husband has shown up because he’s still in love with her, but also that she’s still in love with him, and all she can do is laugh. The scene is a perfect moment in life and cinema, showing love, huge and simple, in that instant – and it gets me every time.

What makes this film even more enchanting is that much of the script was improvised. When shooting began, director Leo McCarey only had a very sketchy script for the cast to work with, and both the leads, convinced that without a script the film would be a flop, tried to walk out. (Cary Grant allegedly wrote an eight-page letter to the film studio entitled ‘Things that are wrong with this picture’.) As it turned out, Grant was the one who was wrong. Irene Dunne was nominated for an Oscar for her performance, and Grant was rocketed into super stardom, becoming one of the most sought after leading men for the next three decades.

by Mary WaireriThe Times BFI London Film Festival is by far and away Britain’s biggest public film event. The Festival is known for providing a platform for a vast range of innovative, exciting films catering to a broad audience. This year, 185 feature films and 133 short films from 43 different countries were premiered at the Festival. The festival also attracted a record number of accredited press delegates from 52 countries as well as the highest ever audience attendance – a mark of its increasing popularity and success.  Suffice to say, the Times BFI London Film Festival is a big deal.

The London Film Festival is also a good place to get a sense of the films that we can expect to see over the coming weeks and months. In short; the good, the spectacular, the bad and the incredibly bad are all available here. David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises  quickly found a place on the more positive side of the fence and has already attracted rave reviews from such unforgiving critics as Mark Kermode. Written by Steve Knight (who also wrote the screenplay for Dirty Pretty Things), Eastern Promises stars Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts and explores the dark sub-cultures of London within the context of thriving immigrant communities; organised crime, people-trafficking and other similarly jolly themes. Interview starring Steve Buschemi and Sienna Miller has also garnered positive responses. The film explores the relationship between a world-weary ‘serious’ journalist and the soap-star he’s forced to interview.

From the mainstream to the downright weird, quality documentaries from around the world also emerged at this year’s festival. One of the most interesting was In the Shadow of the Moon, which is based on the Apollo missions and features commentary from Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and other survivors of the Apollo missions. In the Shadow of the Moon features stunning photography and is all the more interesting because it is largely based on previously unseen or long abandoned footage.
Amidst all the quirky but glittering gems to premiere at the London Film Festival there were of course some lumps of coal. Luckily I was only exposed to one of these; Closing the Ring. Starring Shirley MacLaine, Pete Poselthwaite and Mischa Barton, Closing the Ring is the story of a young woman whose fiance – a pilot in the Air Force – crashes his plane in Northern Ireland during World War II leaving her embittered and unable to love again. The most distinguishing thing about this film is that the wooden performances given by the leads are very well disguised by the plethora of clichés in the script and direction – I found myself looking around to see if anyone else was cringing as much as I was. However, all in all, the Festival seems to have gone off with all the usual glamour, flair and just the right touch of the bizarre.

Waking on a Sunday morning in Oxford, vaguely hazy about a bop the night before, the gentle tinkle of bells filters across Radcliffe Square to your college room.“Oh no,” you’ve probably thought at least once, “who on earth could be making such a racket this early?” So the bedcovers are pulled a little higher and it’s back to sleep.But for a small and dedicated band of slightly mad individuals, braving the cold morning air to yank at ropes connected to colossal metal weights is the only hangover cure they’ll ever need. And surprisingly, tens of thousands of ordinary people are prepared to get up and ring for weddings and church services, as well as evening practices, every week for an entire lifetime.Bell ringing is one of those peculiar cultural interests unique to England, like cricket and warm beer, and has remained popular since the 17th century. Formerly the preserve of male, vaguely genteel types with too much time on their hands, now anyone can ring, and it’s the sort of equalising interaction that brings wealthy financiers onto a level playing field with kids from deprived inner-city backgrounds.Change ringing is the art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a series of mathematical patterns known as ‘changes’. It’s not quite music, and it’s not quite maths, but it’s a good way of imagining how numbers might sound if you could hear them. There are around 6000 rings of bells used for change ringing across the world, and the vast majority can be found in England and other English-speaking countries. Oxford alone contains a fair few of them: the most prominent are the six particularly heavy bells hanging in the University Church, St Mary the Virgin, next to the Radcliffe Camera. Other towers with bells are St Cross, opposite the Law Library and on the way to St Catherine’s, St Mary Magdalen opposite Sainsbury’s, and in New, Merton and Magdalen colleges. Bells and churches have, like so much of the historical architecture in Oxford, blended seamlessly into the changing landscape around them.Groups of swinging bells in English church towers date from the 10th century, and certainly by the 15th orderly ringing with changing note patterns was taking place. But change ringing only really took off after Charles II’s restoration in 1660, when puritan rules forbidding bell ringing were swept away. It may seem hard to imagine now but under Oliver Cromwell, ringing bells was the equivalent of staging an all-night rave and trying to get one over on the authorities. There are records of bell ringers being pilloried or, even worse, investigated as Catholic plotters and agents.The first recorded society of ringers was the Ancient Society of College Youths, founded in 1637 and still in existence almost four hundred years on. But the man most influential in developing the science and art of change ringing was a determined amateur mathematician named Fabian Stedman. His first book published in 1668, Tintinnalogia, set down all the available information on systematic ringing, and the principles in his 1677 follow-up Campanologia remain essentially unchanged today.Ordered ringing works by hanging bells in large wooden or steel frames inside a belfry, and pulling them from a rope attached to a wheel that goes down into a ringing room. When pulled, the bell rotates almost full circle, with the clapper inside swinging round and striking the bell: pulling the rope back again through two successive revolutions constitutes a whole pull. A kind old man once came to my tower when we were going up for practice one night. He asked me, slightly bizarrely, if we could play Elvis for him. Or maybe The Hollies, as he hadn’t heard them in a while. I made some sort of blustery apology about how bells didn’t make that kind of melody, but were just permutations of bells governed by a pre-determined algorithm that happened to sound quite nice when put together. The bemused expression on his face told me I was never going to be a maths teacher.Perhaps more simply, imagine there are six bells in a tower. The lightest bell is called the treble, or 1, and the heaviest is called the tenor, or 6, and in between are bells 2, 3, 4 and 5. Ringing the bells in order 123456 is called, rather simply, rounds, and makes a pleasant sound that any musician will tell you is a descending scale. Swap all the bells around one place to make 214365 and you have another row of changes. With six bells, there are exactly 720 different combinations of bells that you can make, or in the words of a mathematician, six factorial. On seven, there are 5040 possible combinations and on eight, 40,320. Ringing every one of those 5040 changes is called a peal, and takes around three hours to do, but few ringers, no matter how mad enough, are likely to try and ring for the 24 hours it would take to perform 40,320 changes in one go. In an alternative reality where human fatigue was not a problem, ringers could spend hours and hours ringing thousands of unique changes with no outside direction or coordination. Rather than memorising endless reams of numbers, ringers use a neat trick by following a simple pattern of where their bell moves around the other bells, known as a ‘blue line’ due to the colour of the patterns shown in ringers’ books. Method ringing involves memorising this pattern and other potential permutations that could be affected by a call from the conductor, the most common of which are called bobs and singles. No one knows why they’re called that, but having someone loudly shout ‘bob!’ in order to make things happen just adds to the general aura of eccentricity. Like other ringing jargon, methods are named to show what they involve. ‘Minor’, for example, means a method on six bells, while ‘major’ is a method on eight bells, all the way up to ‘maximus’ for twelve bells. Of course, this gives rise to silly names for methods like Coal Minor or Sergeant Bob Major (ho ho!) but most methods are named after places. There are, for instance, Oxford Treble Bob Major and Cambridge Surprise Major: combine them both and you have a method informally known as ‘Boat Race’.There are certain standard methods which every ringer knows, or has heard of, each of which has a name that only a bored English eccentric could come up with: Plain Bob, Little Bob, Grandsire and Stedman to name but a few. And of course, asking for some Reverse Canterbury Pleasure could get you more than you bargained for.
There are tens of thousands of ringers in England and Wales alone, although their average age must be well over 40. The bell ringing community even has its own weekly newspaper called The Ringing World (probably named in a spasm of excitement) which usually involves pictures of old ladies holding new ropes and endless pages of recent peals. Nevertheless, the number of ringers is rapidly declining as the popularity for something that rewards thought and patience wanes in a fast-moving 21st century. There is, however, some room for optimism: churches with towers, particularly in urban areas, are increasingly attracting young people from a mix of social backgrounds and religious beliefs (including those without any) who want something to keep them busy and off the streets. At one tower in Colliers Wood in South London, almost three-quarters of the band are still in their teens, and they are proud of their collective ethnic diversity. Although the stereotype that most ringers are white, middle-class and old remains largely true, especially in southern England, a gradual shift is taking place.At a tower out in the sticks, however, it can take months to learn how to handle a bell correctly, and years before you could be classed as a ‘good’ ringer. Ringers speak of having a ‘ringing career’, as you go from country bumpkin struggling to hold a rope to conductor of St Paul’s Cathedral. It really does last that long, but therein lies one of the attractions: there’s a real sense of satisfaction to be had from perfecting and honing a skill over the course of an entire lifetime. The sound of bells is something that, in England, forms a continuous part of our existence. Whether you happen to be religious or not, church bells can be found in cities, towns and villages across the country. They are there when we marry, when we die, and when we go about our daily lives by unfailingly chiming the time for us. They can be jubilant and cheerful at times of national celebration, or sombre and reflective at times of national mourning.The only extended period of time when English bells were silenced was during the Second World War, when they were supposed to only ring in the event of enemy invasion. But perhaps this goes to show how, even if bells aren’t ringing from shire to shire, they’re still always there to reassure us against the worst.

by Kristen DiLemnoIn the stark halls of an Italian monastery, selfhood and spirituality are locked in a silent battle. Directed by Saverio Costanzo, In Memoria Di Me follows a group of young men encouraged to lose themselves through self-denial and isolation.

Lost in confused melancholy, Andrea (Christo Jivkov) joins a community of novices training for the priesthood. The Father Superior (André Hennicke) encourages surveillance throughout his monastery, and Andrea enters into a network of spies eager to report their brothers’ peculiarities. Depressed novices leave without any comfort or reassurance from their brothers, and Andrea grows increasingly tempted to follow their lead and return to the bustle beyond his window.

When Andrea witnesses Zanna (Filippo Timi) slipping through the halls at night, his curiosity leads him into a fellow initiate’s crisis of faith and silent self-destruction. Andrea watches Zanna creep into the infirmary each night, only to be watched by Zanna in turn as he retreats to his cell. The real world tantalizes Andrea across the water – the monastery traps the novices on an island – and its brilliant colours ooze into the greys and whites of his cell.

During the day, the men read scripture with varying levels of interest, present homilies with varying degrees of cynicism, and scrub floors with general boredom. While the monotony of their existence is clearly established, the drudgery leaves us feeling almost as depressed as the novices.

In Memoria Di Me employs a sterile silence that feels meditative at its best and agonizingly flat at its worst. Novices tiptoe along the whitewashed corridors, sneaking glances to catch each other looking troubled, unsure or generally unholy. Andrea enters the monastery with a friendly smile, only to find his fervour quashed by frigidity and suspicion.

Why the program doesn’t entail an open forum for spiritual discussion and education remains unexplained. The passive-aggressive environment leads otherwise healthy men to silent mania, but we’re never presented with justification beyond vague biblical quotations. When another novice bails, he could very well be headed to a more agreeable monastery.

Andrea manages to spark a bit of interest for us during his wanderings about the grounds. Once Zanna finally confronts his follower, the two strike up a hesitant and confessional friendship that almost becomes engaging – Andrea treats religion scientifically, whereas Zanna can’t locate love or compassion within their walls. But when the Father Superior learns of Zanna’s criticism toward their destructive system, he humiliates the pair in public and puts an end to all interesting dialogue.

While Costanzo captures the isolation inherent in spiritual devotion, the in-house fighting among the brothers turns their experience into a petty – and remarkably dull – game. The negativity of the system isn’t strong enough to be a critique of the priesthood, but no one has a revelation strong enough to justify the experience. Instead, In Memoria Di Me registers as a sombre, gruelling snapshot of inactivity.