If you were to make a list of ‘trigger warnings’ for Pier
Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, it would be
hard to know where to start. Even forty years after its release, the film
remains banned in several countries. The film, loosely based on the notorious
Marquis de Sade’s novel Les 120 Journées de Sodome, has been branded as
the “sickest film of all time” by critics. Its unrelenting look at the
depravity which humankind can sink to has lost none its power to shock.
Whilst de
Sade’s novel was the starting point for Pasolini’s project, the director shifts
the context away from eighteenth-century France, setting the film instead in Salò,
a town in northern Italy which Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government
effectively made their capital from 1943 until their fall from power in 1945.
The place had particular relevance for Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose brother – an
anti-fascist activist – was killed there in the final year of the Republic’s
existence. In the film, four Italian libertines kidnap eighteen teenagers,
planning to use them purely for their own sensual indulgence, using sex and
violence with complete amorality. The film follows the grim progress of these
four months, and is divided into three parts: the Circle of Manias, the Circle
of Shit, and the Circle of Blood – a structure alluding the definitions of Hell
in Dante’s Divine Comedy. These names give you some idea of why the film
has an infamous reputation within the history of transgressive cinema.
The film is one which attracts folklore,
adding to the mysterious aura which surrounds the work. Legend has it that the
critic Roger Ebert owned the film for years after the film’s release, but
supposedly died without ever watching it, as he was too intimidated by the
graphic content. During the making of the film, several reels of footage were stolen,
and thieves demanded a ransom for their return. Yet most notably of all, the
director was murdered before the film was even released in Italy – life seeming
to mirror the gruesome content of Pasolini’s own art. A seventeen-year-old male
prostitute, Giuseppe Pelosi, was arrested when he was found with Pasolini’s
car. Although he admitted running over Pasolini several times with the car
after an argument, many years later, after his conviction, Pelosi denied his
participation in the murder, claiming that three mysterious men were involved.
The case remains unsolved.
Pasolini’s homosexuality is a
crucial aspect of the film’s story. As a gay communist, there was no place for
him within the post-War political system of Catholic Democracy. Everything
about Pasolini – his sexuality, his radicalism, his aesthetic principles – violently
offended the sensibilities of Italy’s cultural and political elite. Openly
despised by many, one reviewer urged that Salò be shown as a defence
exhibit at the trial for Pasolini’s murder, on the assumption that anybody
capable of directing such a film was practically begging to be murdered. Pasolini
was uncompromising in his disdain for bourgeois convention – the film seeks to
shock its audience so as to reveal the limits of their repressive tolerance.
John Waters, another film provocateur, described Salò as a film about
the “pornography of power” – a film which shows the gruesome reality of what
happens when a desire for unadulterated sensuality meets unchecked authority.
Waters’ description demonstrates how Pasolini’s film is a work for our times. The spectacle of today’s demagogues is distinctly pornographic – images of Trump or Farage being ‘outrageous’ are the background noise of our lives now, always present even if at a low level. We have become numb to their bile, unable to feel the shock which we know should be there. One of the libertines in the film says: “All is good if it’s excessive” – they carry out their awful deeds in the name of glutting their sensual pleasures to the excess. The populist message of today is similarly in thrall to the sensual – it is a politics of carnal slogans and impulses. You don’t think through: ‘Take Back Control’, you feel it on a gut level. If Pasolini’s film speaks to our age, then it should remind us why we need works like his. We need films which violently shake us awake, forcing us to confront what we would rather not think about or pretend wasn’t there. Pasolini uses the language and imagery of obscenity in order to shock, but if not shocked, we would only be indifferent. And indifference would be infinitely worse.
I’ve always loved Spider-Man. Spider-Man was my very first
word (allegedly). I owned Spider-Man annuals, action figures, Top Trumps,
lunchbags. Sam Raimi’s original trilogy, meanwhile, introduced to the young me
a new imaginative universe on the fringes of the real world, where Peter Parker
would fight the Green Goblin or Doctor Octopus before hurrying back to Queens
in time for dinner.
I steered clear of the Andrew Garfield films; I was older
now and besides, they looked too clean, too cool, too effects-driven. It was
with some trepidation that I watched Tom Holland don the suit in 2016’s
‘Captain America: Civil War’ and then 2017’s ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’. I
enjoyed them both, but I wanted a bit more from the superhero I’d always liked
the most- greater stakes, bigger threats, and action that twisted and swerved
with all the improbable physics that the character’s (frankly bizarre)
superpowers seemed to demand.
‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ found my hopes met. Post
snap-reversal, Peter Parker and his schoolmates head to Europe on a vacation
which, far from being the break from crime-fighting Peter hoped for, turns out
to be the setting for his greatest challenge yet. What follows is terrific: a
pitch-perfect teenage (read: awkward) romance with great action, all anchored by
solid performances from the ever-maturing Tom Holland, a charismatic Zendaya
and Jake Gyllenhaal, in a role that isn’t what it first seems.
Ok, so after ‘Avengers: Endgame’ the stakes feel slightly
diminished, despite the best efforts of the script (‘Now, this is an Avengers
level threat!’ being one slightly on-the-nose example). Still, this remains
pure blockbuster filmmaking- polished, snappy and buoyant.
Last week’s open days saw more than forty people take part in the Alternative Open Days Tour, which aims to cast a light on Oxford’s “uncomfortable” past and present.
The tour, an initiative of the Oxford Climate Justice Campaign and the Uncomfortable Oxford Project, aimed to raise awareness among prospective students and members of the public of Oxford’s historic involvement in British colonialism and its contemporary involvement in fossil fuel extraction.
Sites of interest included
the India Institute, Hertford, New College, All Souls, the Rhodes Statue, Oriel
College’s façade, and Wadham College.
Tour attendees were also
told of Wadham’s recent efforts to come to terms with its legacy, such as its
moves towards fossil fuel divestment and its request for an ‘Uncomfortable’
investigation of its own colonial past, the first for an Oxford college.
The Divest and
Decolonise tour is the two groups’ first joint programme, and both say they
are planning to continue with similar tours at the beginning of the academic
year.
One participant, Christabel
Buchanan told Cherwell:“The divest and decolonise protest tour
was fantastic. Extremely eloquently delivered, the tour guides took us to
places with particular significance to the university’s colonial past and
present. As an Oxford resident who has never been to the University, this
really opened my eyes to how tied the University is to colonial practices such
as resource extraction and dirty investments.
“We learned that, thanks
to pressure from students, there are moves away from profiting from the fossil
fuel industry and towards renewables or other environmentally sound investment
choices. Thanks to its international reputation, Oxford University could lead
the way in local and ethical investments, and it is encouraging that some
colleges such as Wadham are taking this stance, alongside mindset shifts in
other previously colonial institutions like the Rhodes Scholarship. It’s
certainly not easy to find out where powerful institutions’ investments
eventually end up, so this student group is doing great research, campaigning,
and – thanks to this tour – outreach!”, she added.
The Oxford Climate
Justice Campaign (OCJC) is an official campaign of the Oxford University Student Union, and campaigns
for the full divestment of University and college endowments from the fossil
fuel industry. The campaign has attended several open days at individual
faculties, handing out flyers to prospective students with information about
Oxford’s investments and responses to climate change.
Uncomfortable Oxford,
which was founded by students last year,is a public engagement project which
aims to raise awareness of uncomfortable historical legacies present in the
University’s past or present. The project runs ‘uncomfortable’ discussion-based
walking tours informed by archival research, covering topics such as imperial
and colonial legacies, gender and ethnic diversity, ethical funding and wealth
inequality.
An OCJC spokesperson
said of the tour: “As evidenced by the recent school strikes across the world,
young people are angry at the apathy of those in power towards the climate
crisis. Oxford owes its prospective students a reformed attitude towards the
future. While visitors gathered for the open day, the Oxford Climate Justice
Campaign and Uncomfortable Oxford urged the University to engage with its
history of exploiting both people and planet, and to use its wealth and
international prominence to construct a fairer world for the next generation.”
University Council voted to
institute a blacklist on direct investments in coal and tar sands in 2015.
However, the University’s official position on divestment falls short of
campaigners’ demands to remove both direct and indirect investments in coal,
oil and gas.
Furthermore, an
investigation carried out by Cherwell in 2018 revealed over £150 million
invested by Oxford colleges in offshore funds that include exposure to fossil
fuels, tobacco and arms.
Within individual Oxford
colleges, 26 common rooms have passed motions in favour of full divestment from
fossil fuels, and three colleges, including Lady Margaret Hall, Wadham and
Balliol have set up official divestment working groups, which report to
Governing Body. St Hilda’s has moved its endowment to Sarasin’s Climate Active
Fund, which monitors and encourages the transition of companies in the
portfolio to net zero-carbon targets.
Over 70 British
universities, as well as five Cambridge colleges, have committed to full or
partial divestment from fossil fuels.
White curtains quiver in the non-existent breeze that haunts
the clinical interior of the Hayward gallery. With that slight movement, too,
the image projected onto the curtain sways – Victoria Sin’s wide eyes flicker
involuntarily as the camera slowly zooms into their face. In sparkling lingerie and full drag inspired
by Cantonese opera, the model, laid out demurely across
a satin curtain, stares back at the starers; sometimes sultry, sometimes vulnerable,
always, somehow, piercing.
“Look. Look. Look – At her.”
Victoria Sin’s A View from Elsewhere, Act 1, and She Postures in Context, three film-art pieces projected onto a curtain-enclosure, embody the spirit of the Hayward’s latest exhibition Kiss My Genders. The exhibition, made up of over a hundred artworks by thirty different international artists, centres around gender identity and fluidity. Physically enclosing their viewers in the wavering medium of cloth and projection, Sin appears to comment on the insubstantiality of gender boundaries, but in subverting perspective and viewing experience, also draws attention to the role of performance, presentation and spectatorship in all elements of identity. Hayward claims the exhibition focuses on “content and forms that challenge accepted or stable definitions of gender.” Paintings of hunter-gatherer tribes with drag elements question the West’s suppression of third-gender narratives, while sculptures made of artificial oestrogen and testosterone break down, biologically, what it means to be “male” or “female”.
But more than just gender identity, the exhibits are an expression of the individuality and the internal or cultural conflicts of the artists. Amrou Al-Kadhi teams up with Holly Falconer to explore what he describes as the “disorienting” experience of being drag as a person of Muslim heritage by modelling as drag persona Glamrou wrapped in a Persian carpet. Cloned in different poses through triple exposure to express the incongruence of these disparate cultures, Al-Kadhi demonstrates their successful unification in the persona of Glamrou. Meanwhile Juliana Huxtable’s photographic self-portraits deflect identity-labels entirely; using makeup, costumes and fantasy backgrounds, she deflects the reductive categorizations ascribed to her as a “black intersex artist” by creating personalized embodiments of mythology, sci-fi and super-heroes. Kiss My Genders thereby becomes an exploration not only of the boundaries perceived in gender – but of individuals’ cultural identity experiences.
With this exhibition, an art assistant explains, the Hayward is attempting to break the mould of LGBTQ+ and gender-related exhibitions, which often focus on the violence and oppression experienced by these communities. Instead they want to celebrate different identities. Nonetheless, the exhibition is palpably political: Zanele Muholi explores black lesbian and transgender experiences in South Africa through photography – and acts of violence are still an all too present component of that. In her series Crime Scenes she stages the aftermath of brutal murders, photographing the upturned feet of model corpses buried in sheets of plastic and litter. Paintings like YESSIR! Back off! Tell me who I am, again? combine illustration and collage to satirize the way gender transition is spoken about. The artist, Flo Brooks, depicts a fictional cleaning company scrubbing away at a therapist’s room, reflecting his experience of the “hygienic spaces” he experienced while transitioning; “spaces designed to clean, conceal and correct” things socially considered “dirty, abnormal or other” – but also addresses the way transgender issues are generalised and “sterilized” through neat clinical terms. Artists in Kiss My Genders marry the intensely personal with the social, emotional with the playful, and at the same time evoke all the contrasting feelings of pride, comfort, fear, frustration, belonging and exclusion.
The exhibition succeeds in its “celebration” and “expression” of identities – but the presentation, at times, is confusing. The works of some artists are split across multiple floors, the labelling unclear, and it is generally worth asking the art assistants to talk you through the rooms – difficult, when the gallery is at its busiest and a shame for an exhibition set on “opening doors.” Perhaps this is all the more noticeable as the exhibition appears to be catered towards an audience that identifies with binary genders – many of the artworks require the context of the theme or artist in order to be appreciated. Often, however, this is used in a positive way; many of the exhibits are truly thought provoking.
Most strikingly, Something for the Boys takes us through a spiral of ruched curtains in metallic pink – as if we are walking into a private adult show, yet at the same time, as if we were walking onto a stage. In the centre of the spiral we find ourselves in a circular womb-like room with a screen. Cutting between various LGBTQ+ spaces in Blackpool, the projected film shows an increasing disconnect between sound and image; a drag queen mouthing to “I am who I am” off-sync, interjected with a club-dance choreography, stills of gay clubs, the camera panning over pornographic videos and fetish-wear, and back to the drag queen – except this time she just mouths, and all we can hear is industrial sounds – once again connecting gender-identity and sexuality to cultural identity as a whole. But there is also something intimately performative about the display – the gesticulations and dances, unhinged from their appropriate music, seem to point to a theme of performance and spectatorship at large. And suddenly, that circular room no longer feels like a private theatre. It starts to feel like a stage, and the question crosses our minds – who is really the performer here, the drag act, or us, playing up to our female/male expectations? Just as Victoria Sin’s insistent murmurs, Kiss My Genders seduces its audience into truly looking – and becoming aware of the instability of their perspective in the process.
To say that the Kronos Quartet have been influential in contemporary classical music would be an understatement; they have defined the genre since their founding by violinist David Harrington in 1973. Over their incredibly successful career thus far the San Francisco-based quartet have sold over 1.5 million records, won two Grammy awards, have had over 900 works written for them, and even appeared on Sesame Street.
What characterises Kronos is their commitment to performing
works from outside the European classical tradition and of which they are the
first performers, from composers from Malawi to the Congo to Israel. They also
reach a global audience; I speak to Kronos’ founder and Artistic Director David
Harrington fresh from a sound check in Detroit.
He is friendly and gracious and immediately puts me at ease over the phone, as I was nervous, having been a massive Kronos Quartet fan for years. I ask him about his vision for Kronos, and whether it has changed over the 40 years spanning their career.
Famously the founding of the quartet was catalysed when Harrington
heard George Crumb’s Black Angels, which
is considered by many to be an anti-war piece, and the quartet was founded with
the backdrop of the Vietnam War.
“What I’ve noticed is there have been other wars since the
American war in Vietnam, and it seems like my country just tends to get into
conflict. The experience of hearing Black
Angels was extraordinary having grown up playing Haydn and Mozart and
Beethoven and Schubert. That was the music I knew about and then around age 15
I heard Bartok for the first time and the next year I started playing music by
living composers. The backdrop to all of this was the war that was going on and
it was on our television every night. At a certain point every young man my age
had to deal with the draft.
“Do you know the story of why we didn’t record Black Angels for 16 years? The reason we
didn’t record it is that I always wanted Black Angels to be the first piece on
an album. In those days you couldn’t just go onto Spotify and hear whatever you
wanted; I wanted people to have to confront that piece; to not be able to get
away from it, to have no preparation, just like when I heard it. I just turned
on the radio and a moment later there it was; I wasn’t ready, I had no idea
what it was I was hearing, it just grabbed me. It was so physical.”
I question whether Harrington thinks that music has a different energy or meaning during wartime, especially music that was composed around the time of the Vietnam War for Americans.
“One thing that you need to know is that when I called George Crumb (the composer of Black Angels) before our album came out, I wanted the programme notes for that piece to be in his words. I explained to him that for me this was an anti-war piece and I said, “in your opinion, is this what it is?”. And he would not say that. That taught me that music belongs to each one of us and the way we interpret it is very personal and yet it is just as valid as what the composer thought. If you look in the score it does say “in tempore belli” (in the time of war). I asked him if this was his response to the Vietnam war and he would not say yes or no; what he said was “there were strange things in the air”.
We moved on to the topic of why music compels Harrington and he brings up a quote that stuck with him from composer Henryk Gorecki:
“I remember when I was twelve years old; we went out on a school visit to Auschwitz. I had the feeling the huts were still warm. (this was in 1945)… The paths themselves—and this image has never left me—the paths were made from human bones thrown onto the path like shingles. We boys—how to walk on this? This is not sand, not earth. We were walking on human beings. This was my world. The only way to confront this horror, to forget—but you could never forget—was through music… The world today, it’s the same. Also a nightmare, crushing us. Somehow I had to take a stand, as a witness and as a warning… The war, the rotten times under Communism, our life today, the starving, Bosnia—what madness. And why, why? The sorrows, it burns inside me. I cannot shake it off.“
Harrington reflects on this.
“This experience shaped his entire life and the only thing
he could do as a response was music. I think there are these moments in life
that are so huge that we don’t recover from them; we absorb them, we deal with
them, we listen to them and I kind of think that is what musicians do. Is that
our job? I’m trying to figure out what my job is every day!
“What is the purpose of music? What is it for, what are we doing; what is a musical experience? For me these are fluid questions and the answers keep changing and perhaps each new piece is an answer to that.”
Kronos are notable partly for their collaborations with musicians
from all around the world; one of my favourite albums of theirs is Pieces of Africa, which features African
composers from across the continent. I ask Harrington how he decides on his
collaborations and what makes them successful.
“I’m interested in learning new things about music and there
are so many people in the world that can teach us things that we don’t know. I heard
marvellous recordings when I was in high school from places in Africa; and I
just noticed a feeling and I realised that I’d never heard a violin or viola or
cello have that sound and I filed that away and realised that someday, I wanted
my instrument to sound like this. And eventually it became clear that my
instrument is not the violin; it’s the string quartet.
“It’s thrilling and amazing to be able to participate in
music from cultures that we’ve never had a chance to physically visit but
through our imaginations we can go there at will.
“Someone asked me once, “How can you do this? What do you know about African music?” and I remember saying: “I didn’t go to Vienna, Austria until I was about 35 and I grew up playing Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, who all lived there. They all were of the same religion, they spoke the same language, they were all white guys. I was from Seattle, Washington; what do I know about Vienna?”
“Music is an imaginative thing; it’s a way that we humans
have figured out to share information with each other and to express things
about our lives or cultures. So much can be embedded in music and none of us
own it; we just get to share it for a little while.”
One of Kronos’ most important new projects is Fifty for the Future, an educational venture of unprecedented scope in the contemporary music world. They have commissioned fifty new works from 25 female and 25 male prominent and emerging composers from around the world, designed to guide young professional string quartets in performance of 21st-century repertoire. All of the scores and recordings are available free to use for anyone around the world, and Kronos performs at least one of these works in all their concerts.
I ask why there such a need for it, and why young string
quartets are not playing more 21st century music.
“When I was 12 years old, I joined the Columbia Record Club;
you sent in a penny and got five or six LPs. I was reading a biography of
Beethoven and I read about the Late Quartets, and that month one of the
offerings was the first Late Quartet. I put on the recording and the opening
E-flat major chord just wiped me out. I thought it was the most incredible
sound I had ever heard in my life and I wanted to learn how to make that sound.
So what I did was made my way down to the Seattle public library and checked
out the score and parts. I called some friends and a couple of days later we
were in a room trying to play that piece. For a split second that opening chord
sounded like the record! It was really a split second but that’s all you need
to give you the confidence to show you that you can do this, that you love
this, that you want more of this. That’s what happened to me.
Years later whilst coaching we realised that no one could
get hold of the music we were playing, and the music schools were asking Kronos
to send Xerox copies of the parts of published music. We can’t do that; it’s
illegal, and we began thinking how can we solve this problem. The idea of Fifty
for the Future happened naturally out of this.”
I ask Harrington how he had the idea and got the quartet up
and running.
“I was not such a good student; I had trouble learning. I went to the University of Washington – this was in the time of the Vietnam War. I studied poetry, and latin for a little while, and at this point I’d stopped playing violin. I had to work so hard to learn latin that it got me back into the discipline of being able to play violin. I went back into the music school and there were these very wonderful high powered European male teachers, and I couldn’t learn a damn thing from them. They all had one set way of doing things, and I shrank. At age 21, I ran into the woman who became my teacher for the next 30 years, Veda Reynolds.
“Veda became my teacher and her approach to the violin was so beautiful and individual. She studied with Carl Flesch, had all the training she could have, and this made her infinitely flexible, not rigid, as a teacher.
“We had the most magnificent lessons. In our final lesson,
there was a sound I wanted to make and I couldn’t make my body do it and we had
a four or five hour lesson on this note, and the last thing she ever said to me
was “the great thing about music is it can always be better”. That was her
approach; you find a way, you use your imagination, you think about imagery.
“I was about 21 and I thought the US army was going to draft
me and I decided I was not going to be part of that war. I would not; they
could put me in jail, do whatever they want. I found out that the Victoria
Symphony in British Columbia had an opening for the violin, so I auditioned and
got the job. In the meantime I had my draft board appearance and the US army
didn’t want me! But by then I’d signed a contact with the Victoria Symphony so we
went to Victoria for a year and the conductor knew I loved playing quartets so
one day he asked me if I would like to be involved in setting up a series of
chamber music concerts at the Provincial Museum. So I got my first training in
setting up concerts and organising musicians in Victoria.
“We came back in the summer of 1973 and a few weeks later was when I heard Black Angels on the radio, and a week later than that was when Kronos had its first rehearsal. Everyone I talked to in the music business in Seattle said this will never work. In the first two years of Kronos we played in countless different venues; from classrooms to ferry boats to art galleries. At a certain point we realised Kronos was a West Coast group so we moved to San Francisco; we didn’t know anybody, but we decided that was the place we needed to get our energy from.
“That first year I went to a concert of a very prominent American string quartet; they even played Beethoven Op. 127 (the first Late Quartet), and I was invited to the party afterwards. I was talking to one of the members, and I said that I hoped one day that my group will sound like you and have the kind of ensemble you guys have. He put his arm on my shoulder and said “don’t worry kid, you never will”. That pissed me off so much!”
I remarked that they had the last laugh…
“No, it still pisses me off! This is part of music
education, and that was the underlying feeling I was getting from so many of
the authoritarian figures in the world of music at that point. A little pat on
the head, maybe someday you’ll sort of get it right…
“I have never ever wanted Kronos to be part of that conversation and that approach to music, that exclusive club of those who can and the rest of us that can’t. For me music is something we get to share with each other; the sound of the string quartet is one of the magnificent creations of humanity and the impact that it can have is something I want to celebrate. I want more of the world into this sound, that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert created the foundation for and I think a great way of celebrating them is for this art form to be more and more vibrant. “
Kronos Quartet present Sight Machine at the Barbican on 11th July.
Kronos Quartet & Trevor Paglen: Sight Machine is part of the Barbican’s 2019 season, Life Rewired, which explores what it means to be human when technology is changing everything.
A recent Guardian investigation into racism in the university sector has Oxford joint second for racism complaints recorded over the past five years.
Overall, Oxford recorded 39 official complaints, the same number as Cardiff. Only Cambridge, with 72 complaints, came higher.
The process for reporting complaints is not consistent across all British universities, with some only recording complaints against staff or students but not both. It is not known how many complaints of racism have been made to the University unofficially.
These results come in the wake of the recent access report, which showed a significant offer gap between UK applicants based on their ethnicities, which 25.5% of white applicants receiving an offer, compared to 15% of Asian British applicants and 17.8% of BME applicants overall. All college admit a greater proportion of white applicants than BME.
A spokesperson for the University told Cherwell: “Student welfare is our number one priority at Oxford, and there is no place for racism or discrimination of any kind. Excellence has no set race, background or gender and we are determined to build a more inclusive Oxford.
“We continue to make good progress towards this goal and are proud to be one of only 10 UK universities to hold a Race Equality Charter award.
“Specific commitments include increasing the ethnic diversity of all categories of staff, stronger representation of BME staff in decision making at all levels, and improving the overall experience of BME students.”
This investigation comes as students at Goldsmith’s University in London enter the 17th week of a protest against institutional racism.
Commenting on the figures, MP David Lammy said: “It is absolutely clear from these findings that many universities are not treating racism with the seriousness it deserves. If universities do not act fast to change the culture, form the lecture hall to the student union, talented students from BME backgrounds will continue to be locked out.”
Christmas Day
2017 consisted largely of me crying my eyes out at the ending of Toy Story 3
and vowing that a) I had been a cruel mother to many of my toys and b) no
cinematic ending could ever be as beautiful.
I was not happy
when I heard they’d be making a sequel. What need was there to continue the
story when the previous film ended so poetically, with toy owner Andy’s
bittersweet farewell, as he set off to university? Despite my reservations, I
still had to go to the cinema to investigate; you never know until you try.
I spent the
entire running time attempting not to cry at what was a wonderfully insightful
U-rated children’s movie. The opening scene transports knowing viewers nearly a
decade back to Andy’s childhood and an emotional parting between two favourite
toys. Yet we are soon firmly established in the present, in adorable Bonnie’s
bedroom of pastel hues and unbounded imagination. In a dusty cupboard her toys
restlessly await the most nerve-wracking part of their day: the crucial thirty
minutes of morning play-time when only the best toys will be chosen.
Controversy abounds:
Woody – the Toy Story franchise’s beloved hero and former owner Andy’s
treasured favourite – hasn’t been picked in weeks. It’s like not being invited
to your best friend’s bouncy castle party in primary school, but a million
times worse when it’s a fictional plastic cowboy you’re rooting for. Before the
audience has time to process this unsettling reality, poor Bonnie is in tears
at the prospect of going to an orientation day at her new kindergarten. Woody,
against the advice of his fellow toys, resolves to help: scrambling into the
toddler’s cute purple backpack, he accompanies her to school.
At this point
(and I promise you I normally have a heart of stone so this is unusual) I
really had to hold back the waterworks: at kindergarten Bonnie gets crayons
taken off her and sits alone crying. Heart-wrenching, honestly. Until Woody
comes to the rescue, discreetly throwing some trash on her table for her to
make art out of. Ingeniously, out of this trash Bonnie makes a new best friend:
Forky, a spork with googly eyes and pipe cleaner arms.
Forky is a troubled soul. He doesn’t understand he’s a toy and continues to leap joyfully into the warmth and comfort of every bin in line of sight. Like a weary granddad in the school holidays Woody is run ragged trying to ensure that, as Bonnie’s most beloved toy, Forky doesn’t go missing. When Bonnie and her parents end up on a road trip with a stop at the carnival and Forky gets lost, Woody must rescue him before Bonnie leaves, devastated.
This is where the
film really gets going, with Woody embarking on a brilliant solo escapade. On
the journey returning Forky to Bonnie he ends up in an old antique store in
hope of finding a long-lost friend, stumbling across faulty doll Gabby Gabby.
Encircled by her creepy ventriloquist doll henchmen (all called Vincent) she
clearly seems the villain, but the tragedy of her predicament – a lost toy
never loved – soon hits home. Aching for completion via Woody’s working voice
box, which could replace her own broken one, she captures the naïve (and
honestly pretty dim) Forky, knowing heroic Woody will return for the sake of
his beloved Bonnie.
And so Woody
teams up with a motley crew of lost and broken toys in a hopeful rescue
mission. But the enterprise throws up some agonizing questions for his inner
voice (which Buzz Lightyear thinks is just his factory-installed voice panel):
is there any point returning to Bonnie when she just isn’t interested in him?
Initially
incredibly dubious about this film, I was wholly overturned by the end. In a
conversation about it with my Dad, I realised I’d entirely missed the point of
the franchise: it’s not about the owners, it’s about the toys. I realise how
obvious this sounds, but it struck me that it’s about the concept of ownership
and the loyalty you feel you owe others versus yourself. Toy Story 4 is about
both owners and toys growing up in the comfort that friends will always remain
so if you’re making decisions that are truly right for you. I realise how deep
I’ve made this sound, as it is essentially an extremely funny,
light-hearted children’s film, but the charm of the franchise (and kids’ movies
generally) is its ability to translate into adult life. And if it can make me
cry it must be good.
Last week the Oxford Union played host to the Oxfordshire
finals of the Debating Matters championship.
The competition for sixth-form students took place as part
of the Oxford Festival of the Arts, a city-wide festival which ran from the 21st
June to the 7th July.
The student debating section of the program ran throughout the day, involving a number of local schools in the area. The event concluded with the main schools’ debate on whether ‘populism is a threat to democracy’ in the afternoon.
The public debate, taking place in the evening, held the title ‘From sexting to screen addicts: should we be afraid of online harms?’ Participants included Jess Butcher MBE, a technology entrepreneur, and Professor Victoria Nash, the deputy director of the Oxford Internet Institute.
Professor Nash said: “At a moment where mainstream politics is becoming increasingly polarised and emotive, it was so encouraging to see these young debaters using evidence, logic and respect to make their case. Free speech is certainly not without its limits, but we will need more, not less, open and honest debates on big societal issues if we’re going to tackle populism and intolerance.”
Debating Matters is run by BOI (Battle of Ideas), an
‘educational and citizenship charity’ founded in 2018, but it was originally
run by the Academy of Ideas, of which the debate chair, Claire Fox, is a
founder.
The University and College Union (UCU) has accused Ruskin
College in Oxford of “victimisation” of its members following several
disciplinary and redundancy threats directed at members of the union.
Three reps from the UCU face disciplinary investigations. Dr
Lee Humber was suspended days after the local branch passed a motion of no
confidence in college’s principal.
Ruskin College insisted that there were “spurious reasons”
for his suspension, but the events were unrelated.
A rally was held in April outside the college to call for Dr
Lee Humber to be reinstated by the Headington College.
The college revealed its intentions to launch an
investigation into what the UCU considers to be the trade union duties, as well
as the activities of the other two UCU reps.
Alongside the three staff under investigations, a further
two members of staff, also members of the union, are at risk of redundancy. The
college aims to axe four of the posts and move the other to a fixed-term
contract.
According to the UCU, poor management has left the college’s finances in a challenging position, with course closures and financial deficits.
The union said that management needs to work with staff to
resolve the situation, rather than attacking trade unionists and “shooting
messengers raising concerns.”
In light of this “victimisation”, the UCU has warned the college to stop pursuing what it considers to be unfounded disciplinary action, saying it will otherwise have to consider strike action.
Paul Cottrell, the UCU acting
general secretary, said: “The college has to step back from these attacks on our members otherwise
we will have to step up efforts to resolve this mess and that may well include
strike action.”
“Ruskin College boasts of its working class, trade
union and social justice history, but in reality our reps are being harassed
and victimised.”
The European Commission has announced the funding of a new
Innovative Training Network, which will train PhD students in Machine Learning Skills
to address Climate Change.
The network, known as iMIRACLI, will bring together leading
climate and machine learning scientists across Europe with partners, such as
Amazon and the MetOffice, to educate a new generation of climate data
scientists.
The project will start in 2020 at a summer school held in
Oxford, funding 15 PhD students across Europe.
Each student will have a climate science and a machine
learning supervisor as well as an industrial advisor.
Machine Learning, underpinned by AI, has advanced rapidly in
recent years and offers new tools to study, analyse and learn from the mass of
data being collected by Earth Observations.
While there is a general acceptance that Climate Change is influenced by human activity, many aspects of climate change are still not fully understood. This is largely due to the uncertain role of clouds in the climate system.
It is this understanding of the role of clouds for climate
change that the association of nine Universities will focus on with a pioneering
programme of study.
Philip Stier, Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Oxford University, is the lead PI for the project.
