I continue to be interested in how the iPhone software handles low light, especially when using the longest lens. Here’s another example taken at night.
Blimp
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) is an odd movie, because it’s essentially an argument for something it never directly mentions: the bombing of German cities.
It’s divided into three periods: the Boer War, the Great War, and World War II. In each of them our protagonist, Clive Wynne-Candy, is a soldier: first a Lieutenant, then a General, then a retired General working with the Home Guard. In each period his actions are governed by a strong sense of fair play and gentlemanly dignity. The point of the movie, as I see it, is to honor him for that lifelong integrity but to insist that the time for such integrity is over.
The keynote is struck when Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, his old friend and one-tome romantic rival, a German driven from his country by his opposition to Nazism, says: “Dear old Clive, this is not a gentleman's war. This time you're fighting for your very existence against the most devilish idea ever created by a human brain: Nazism. And if you lose, there won't be a return match next year; perhaps not even for a hundred years.” Wynne-Candy is repeatedly described as someone for whom war is a game, if a solemn game, and who therefore prides himself on playing by the rules. But when one is faced by an enemy such as the Nazis — an enemy that knows no rules, no laws, no principles — one must throw out the book.
This is the argument also of a young soldier whose mockery of Wynne-Candy sets the movie’s story in motion, and Wynne-Candy ultimately accepts the mockery. He knows, and says, that he cannot change, but he also comes to believe that he must pass the torch to those who are willing and able to fight the Nazis in the same way the Nazis fight. He pledges to take that soldier to dinner, and in the movie’s last scene he salutes him. (Note that Wynne-Candy is not dead: it is all that he has stood for, the Colonel Blimp in him and in England, that has died. But Colonel Blimp here stands not for the blustery jingiosm of the comic but rather for a set of moral standards applied equally in peace and in war.)
We are clearly meant to admire him for his sense of honor, but even more for his awareness of his own superannuation. And then what remains is to do to the cities of Germany what the Nazis have done to London and Coventry. Maybe that position is right and maybe it’s wrong, but there’s no doubt that it’s the position The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp was produced in order to defend.
(It’s noteworthy that Churchill hated the movie, even though it supports the war policy that he himself advocated and carried out. Apparently Churchill didn’t like the idea of a wartime movie with a sympathetic German character, even if the character is fervently anti-Nazi and is played by an Austrian Jew who came to Britain in 1936 to escape Nazism.)
My friend Tim Larsen with an interesting thought:
In all of human history Queen Elizabeth II is the single person who has been most prayed for. From her birth in 1926 she was included in a petition myriads of people prayed day after day: It called upon the Almighty to bless and preserve “all the Royal Family.” From her accession to the throne in 1952, millions began to pray for her daily by name: “That it might please thee to keep and strengthen ... thy Servant Elizabeth, our most gracious Queen and Governor.” A modern form introduced during her reign that is often used today pleads, “Guard and strengthen your servant Elizabeth our Queen.”
For a healthy balance between the apophatic and kataphatic we should look to the liturgy. The liturgy is a complex performance, a ritualized midrash on Holy Scripture that alternates between moments of knowing and not-knowing. Think of the Sanctus, where the seraphic hymn of “holy, holy, holy” declares the LORD’s radical otherness even as it announces his presence among us. The readings and their commentary in the sermon would seem to represent a powerfully kataphatic moment, and so they are; we do not proclaim the gospel with our fingers crossed. And yet the public reading of Scripture, a practice especially dear to Anglicans, reminds us that there is always more of Scripture than we can exhaust with our ideas about it. Sadly, the lectionary regularly edits out some of the weirder stuff in the Bible. We could use more of the weird stuff — more reminders that God is God, and that there is always more of God to know. Yet at the heart of the entire liturgy stands the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, in whom the invisible God has made himself startlingly well-known to us humans. The passion is a divine mystery that in a certain way excludes us; it is God who is the agent here, not ourselves. And yet the assembly that celebrates it is the body of Christ, the community of those who have been incorporated into Christ’s passion and death, and in him offer their worship to the Father.
introducing
Six Books With Introductions Worth Pausing Over: Well, okay. Since I have tried to be a conduit for old books, I have no business criticizing this — but hey, like Iago I’m nothing if not critical, so:
The six “stories from the past” were published in: 1916, 1980, 1869, 1952, 1983, and, basically, 1906-08 (the period during which Henry James dictated to a secretary his prefaces to his novels). Might it not be possible to have a more expansive sense of “the past”?
So here are a few essays that reckon with the ongoing value and power — the power to speak to us, to our condition — of genuinely old texts:
- Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”
- Bernard Knox, “The Oldest Dead White European Males”
- Daniel Meldelsohn, “Lost Classics” and this essay on the Aeneid and empire
- Brian Phillips (yes, the soccer guy): “The Tale of Genji as a Modern Novel” (very much worth getting through the JSTOR paywall if you can)
For deeper dives — from recent writers and not-so-recent ones — see Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic, Erich Auerbach’s Dante, Poet of the Secular World, Edward Mendelson’s The Things That Matter, and M. I. Finley’s The World of Odysseus.
These are all texts that wrestle, sometimes uncomfortably, with stories from the past, stories that always speak to us but sometimes in strange dialects.
On, and please read Auden’s great poem “The Shield of Achilles.”
Currently reading: The Gathering Storm (The Second World War) by Winston S. Churchill 📚
Had the Queen died earlier in the year, it’s not difficult to imagine Johnson harnessing the event to his great survival project. So we should be grateful she lived long enough to save us the prospect of Johnson in Westminster Abbey, mugging his way through Ecclesiastes and hinting that, in a way, she had been the Boris of people’s hearts. Think of it as her final service to the nation.
This is a very good point.
The rain did a lot for this fella.
What the iPhone software does with very low light (don’t be deceived by the sky in the background, this was taken in a pitch-black night) sometimes looks like rotoscope animation.
