Watched Delta a recent Hungarian film. Having difficulty understanding how other reviewers, including major film critics, description the film as about incest. The central sexual encounter is a violent rape by the stepfather that happens in the distance. I think at no point do we see any incest or I would suggest any hint of incest, but many images that have an ambiguity if you do not know the context, hence you may well encounter incest if it’s in the mind. As the incest that is in the eyes of the peasants, but did they tolerate the rape? A perfect image of misreading occurs when we have silhouettes behind a sheet, cleverly implying a sexual reading only for us to be brought short when we realise it is the pegging out of the washing.
What we do see is male violence to women. We learn that the half-brother is much affected by nursing a girl who had got pregnant ”I had to nurse her, the baby was stillborn, But she disappeared”
Owes a bit too much to Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky, and these bit come over as mannered. Given better fortunes in the making of the film the pacing may well have been better considered. and the overly beautiful camera better integrated into the story, a story which looks as if it was rescued in the making.
Still trying to resolve the last of the Vodňany sequence, I want it to be open ended but I had closed it off in a lazy pat way, maybe I now have got to a more edgy, open and mysterious feel. I think that what I was after was similar to the atmosphere of opus 16, that would be my ideal! Not Vorgefühle, remember now that I added that word at some stage to the bottom of Song to the Dancer 2 which I struggled over from 1981 until 1991 ( it was after all a portrait of Schoenberg). I have in mind more the second movement The past. Also painted a small view of Třebon, out of desperation as much as anything else, used a drawing I did on an Easter visit to the place. Like many things I throw of in a hurry it came out well.
Diotima Quartet played at HCMF in November, they were stunning, so looking out for recordings I found they have released performances of the new Bärenreiter edition of Janaček 2. Performances, because Garth Knox joins them for the original version with a Viola d’amour. Either way a revelation but with the Viola d’amour the music gains a hidden harmonic sense. I have always sensed a hole in the middle of the writing, now filled.The first quartet is perhaps even more of a surprise, it now shows its bones through the skin as never before.
