The Souvenir's Joanna Hogg sounds alarm on future of arthouse cinema
The director Joanna Hogg has sounded a warning on the future of arthouse cinema in a call to arms that saw her attack a “certain kind of cinema” for being “homogenised” and lacking passion.
Hogg, whose most recent film, The Souvenir, won a Grand Jury prize at the Sundance film festival, was speaking at a screening in London on Tuesday of a freshly restored silent film, and echoed Martin Scorsese’s recent attacked on superhero films.
“What will happen in a few years, even five years’ time?” she said. “Will I still be able to make films? Will I be able to make films that you can see in a cinema like this? I may have to do something else,” she said. “I think it’s a very serious moment. We have to really be awake to do something about it,” she added.
Hogg was discussing the preservation and restoration work of the Film Foundation, of which she has recently been made a director. “It’s particularly timely to keep thinking about this kind of restoration work when the world of cinema is changing,” she said. “There’s a certain kind of cinema, but I’m not sure if you can call it cinema, that’s very homogenised in a way, that’s not created out of a real passion.”
Hogg’s remarks echoed those of the Film Foundation’s founder Martin Scorsese, who told Empire last month that he considered Marvel movies “not cinema” and then restated his argu
ment in the New York Times.
At the screening, Hogg suggested that stewardship of our cinematic heritage was somewhere between a moral obligation and a gift to future generations. “It would be very selfish of us not to be concerned with our culture and think of the future. It just seems incredibly careless of us not to look after an art form that’s still so young.”
Ninety per cent of silent films had been lost, she added, saying: “Could we imagine not being able to read War and Peace? That we couldn’t get hold of a copy, it’s unimaginable. Or say there’s a Caravaggio that is falling apart, that’s fading, that needs work, that we would discard it? That we wouldn’t actually work to restore it?”
Hogg spoke about how she was inspired to become a film director after watching classic movies on TV as a child (“I was known as square eyes”) and also by seeing arthouse cinema in London as an adult.
Commentators defended Scorsese by pointing both to the work of the Film Foundation and his support of younger film-makers to demonstrate that he is actively involved in the cinema beyond his own work.
The film shown at the screening, Maurice Tourneur’s 1919 drama The Broken Butterfly, was a prime candidate for a benevolent restoration – each scene picturesquely framed and delicately lit, with soft tints and illustrated intertitles. It is a poignant romantic melodrama whose plot has some jaw-dropping moments. Its now little-known stars, Pauline Starke and Lew Cody, give intensely serious performances. Hogg told the audience that the film had moved her to tears and that she had “goosebumps everywhere” while watching it.
Scorsese suggested the film as a candidate for restoration – as a littleknown work by a pivotal silent-era director. Tourneur was born in Paris in 1876, and began and ended his film career in France, but for several years in the 1910s and 1920s worked in the US film industry, during which time he made The Broken Butterfly.
His most famous Hollywood films include the epic The Last of the Mohicans (1920) and The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), starring Mary Pickford. His cinematic legacy includes not just his own movies, but those of his son, Jacques
Tourneur, who who became a Hollywood director, making the film noir Out of the Past (1947) and cult favourites such as Cat People (1942).
The Broken Butterfly was restored by the Film Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory in association with Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, and was funded by cognac brand Louis XIII. Accompanied by a live improvised score by silent film pianist and composer John Sweeney, the film tells the story of a young woman, raised by a punitive aunt in a Canadian village, who falls in love with a musician who composes a symphony in her honour. As their affair takes a tragic turn, she learns a horrifying secret about her childhood.
The restoration, which has cleaned up the image, reintroduced the title cards, and involved commissioning a new score, has also been screened in the US and France, will be made available online.
• The Broken Butterfly be available to watch at on 14 December. will filmfoundation.org
mathematician who happens to be a woman tackling one of her subject’s most pressing conundrums.
I hope her journey provides a history of mathematics and the ways it has changed the world, the challenges women in particular have faced in trying to join its professional ranks, and a glimpse of how exhilarating it can be. My favourite kind of maths reveals the outer reaches of the imagination and how in finding a solution it is possible to illuminate an idea. Maths can shine a light on both the simplest and most complex things; the same is true of my favourite literature.
So if you’re in search of a glorious read packed with mathematical thoughts, here is a list of some of the most inventive, mind-bending, wondrous books I know:
1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis CarrollMany assume this book – with its pills and potions and magic mushrooms – is about drugs. But scholar Melanie Bayley suggests it owes its mind-bending quality to maths. Carroll was the pen name for mathematician Charles Dodgson, who disliked the symbolic algebra and projective geometry that were gaining favour in his day. He satirised them by taking them to their most bizarre extremes: Alice’s height fluctuates rather than staying constant, the multiplication table falls off base 10, and when Alice grows back after an episode of shrinking, she finds herself all out of proportion. Though Carroll may not have been a fan of this kind of maths, his experimental, perception-distorting Wonderland makes an irresistible case for the exhilarating playfulness of maths and the mind’s infinite weirdness.
2. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton JusterMilo comes upon a road sign directing him to Digitopolis, which is five miles, 1,600 Rods, 8,800 yards, 26,400 feet, 316,800 inches and 633,600 half-inches away. “Let’s travel by miles,” advises the Humbug. “It’s shorter.” Milo responds: “Let’s travel by half-inches, it’s quicker.” Soon after, they are led by a creature called the Dodecahedron to their destination, where they learn about the land of Infinity, and Milo meets one half of a child (or 0.58 of a child, to be precise) who represents the fraction of the average family that has 2.58 children. An enchanting exploration of how to pay attention to the world, full of wisdom, logic puzzles and fun.
3. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor DostoevskyIvan’s love for the sticky leaves in spring, his longing for and subsequent rejection of harmony and forgiveness, since it demands he accept the suffering of children, have stayed with me, along with this passage tying those ideas to maths: “If God indeed created the Earth,” he says, “he created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind … Yet there have been geometricians and philosophers [who] even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on Earth, may meet somewhere in infinity.” The year I read this was the same year I learned about hyperbolic space, where – as it turns out – parallel lines can and do meet. I became a maths major: how could I resist?
4. Too Much Happiness by Alice MunroSofia Kovalevskaya was a 19thcentury mathematician at a time when women were not allowed in most of Europe to attend university. She married a man who promised to take her to Germany to study, and she became a pioneer, making major contributions to the field and becoming the first woman in Europe to obtain a doctorate in mathematics. Still, her life was filled with tragedy and disappointment, and the title story of Alice Munro’s collection is a rich but searing fictional account of her life.
5. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas AdamsIn this jubilantly madcap novel, we’re asked to consider bistromathematics, where the relationship between the items on the bill, the cost of each and the number of people at the table proves that:
“Numbers written on restaurant cheques within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.” Perhaps it’s the very precision of mathematics, its very seriousness, that makes it so delightful to see it used in the service of nonsense.
6. The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko OgawaAn astoundingly lovely book about a woman who comes to work for a once-great mathematician. Due to a traumatic brain injury, he has only 80 minutes of shortterm memory available to him before he forgets everything. Also about kindness and love, loyalty and loss, it is filled with beautiful maths, simply and clearly described alongside finely drawn relationships between the characters.
7. The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le GuinIn the ancient world, maths, physics, and philosophy were studied together as “natural philosophy”. The disciplines were broken apart with the development of modern science, but it’s good to remember that once they were united. I recommend everything Le Guin has ever written, but for the purposes of this list, I urge you to read this one in particular. It is about a mathematical physicist and activist who is grappling with theories of time and how they define two different societies, and what our understanding of the natural world suggests about reality, perception, and how it comes to bear on personal, existential, philosophical and moral questions.
8. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted ChiangThis collection contains several maths-y stories, my favourite of which is Division By Zero, about a brilliant mathematician. To her great despair, she ends up proving that mathematics is inconsistent (and is able to prove that any two numbers are equal). A beautiful, thought-provoking story (in a beautiful, thought-provoking collection) about belief, understanding, faith and love.
9. The Ore Miner’s Wife by Karl IagnemmaThis absolutely gorgeous story from Iagnemma’s collection On the Nature of Human Romantic Interactionis about a miner who thinks he’s discovered the proof to the problem: construct a square, equal in area to a given circle. His wife, not knowing what has suddenly taken his attention and his time, fears he is being unfaithful. A moving exploration of the solitude of the mind, the joys of entering a problem whole and the desire and impossibility of truly knowing those we love.
10. In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider RahmanA sprawling, virtuosically told novel ablaze with ideas and passion. Set during the invasion of Afghanistan and the financial crisis of the aughts and narrated by a mathematician-turnedinvestment banker recounting the story of a lost college friend who was also once a mathematician, this is a complex, far-reaching book about history, politics, race and class, as well as love and exile. And maths.
• The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung is published by Little, Brown. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on orders over £15.