Lewis Morley

Another cameraman who finally hung his lens up last year was Lewis Morley, who died aged 88 in September. He was the creator of many famous images of the 60s, including the infamous one of Christine Keeler, in 1963, whose story is being sung in the latest Lloyd Webber musical, 'Stephen Ward'. Ward was the English osteopath involved in the Profumo Affair,  also recounted in the film, 'Scandal', (in which Ward is played by John Hurt).In the same year as the film, 1989, there was a retrospective of  Morley's work at the National Portrait Gallery, after which the famous chair  was kept in the gallery for many years. Morley himself saw the photo as a millstone, but reprinted it to please others, one print made in 1996 was re-sold at auction in 2006 for £22,800.


      However, Morley recreated the same pose with perhaps less famous effect using David Frost, Joe Orton and Dame Edna Everage.

Gilbert Taylor a technicolor dream

I've been telling myself lately that as well as watching a film because I admire the director's work, or because it stars one or more of my favourite actors, I should really try to become more aware of the cinematographers, and trace which of my most loved films share the same figure behind the lens - probably usually a man I suspect. So where to start.
Well it's the end of the year, start of a new, the time that we offer respect to those who passed away in the previous year, and in August last year Gilbert Taylor died aged 99, plenty of time there for a film or two.
His most famous work was the very first Star Wars film, now retitled Star Wars IV a New Hope. It was Taylor who wanted the look of the film to be clean, with a unique style that differentiated it from other previous sci-fi films. George Lucas was arguing for a diffused  look, Taylor wanted clarity, and with 20th Century Fox backing him up he eventually won.
A last link to the early days of film, Taylor had been a master of black and white film: Dr Strangelove, and A Hard Day's Night in which he used multiple cameras fitted with zooms.

During WW2  he photographed raid targets, shown to Winston Churchill at Number 10, and covered news stories of every kind.

After the war he worked with the Boulting Brothers on  Brighton Rock and Fame is the Spur (1947).
He began to use reflected light which gave a more natural look and to compensate for shortages of good quality film stock. He also became obsessed with the effects of generous exposures for films showing tough reality such as Yield to the Night (1956). Talking about Repulsion, Polanski commented that he never used a light meter, that his eye for exposures was perfect.

In 1961 he worked on the Avengers TV programme, in the early days of Honor Blackman .

His last film with Polanski, Macbeth, (after Repulsion and Cul de Sac) was in colour but its misty landscapes made it as near to black and white as possible.

He worked with Hitchcock on his penultimate film, Frenzy (1972), saying that Hitchcock never looked through the camera. The film was like a love letter to London.

In 1976 he won a British Society of Cinematographer's award for the Omen, on which he used silk stockings over the lens for a dreamlike effect. For the Death Star climax of Star Wars, he took ideas from the Dam Busters, in which he had worked on the special effects, streaming light onto the sets by chopping holes in the walls.

After Star Wars he went on various locations: Dracula -Cornwall, 1979; Escape to Athena - Greece 1979; Flash Gordon -Scotland , 1980. He retired in 1994 but carried on with commercials for a few years. His widow said that their life together had been a 'technicolor dream.'

Country Girl - Edna O'Brien

Another writer who I not only admire but have shared a homeplace with, though not at the same time, is Edna O'Brien; like Elizabeth Jane Howard carrying on writing well past 'retirement' age, O'Brien had a new book of short stories, The Love Object, published in October and is in her 80s (83 on 15th December). Having left Tuamgraney, in County Clare,she described her childhood there in her first book The Country Girls (1960), which  was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit in Ireland. She wrote it after leaving her homeland for London (via Dublin) as the runaway bride of the writer Ernest Gebler, breaking with her parents. Gebler envied her success from the start and the marriage was a failure, though they raised two sons, Sasha and Carlo (also a writer). The novel A Pagan Place (1970) was also based on her childhood.

At the moment she is working on a novel about the night economy of migrant workers, which should be completed in a year or so, after which she intends to  work on a couple of plays. Despite a lifetime of having to deal with her mother, the church and her critics, to name but a few of the  problems she lists in her career, she says that the reason so many writers have come from Ireland is 'desperation and a gra for the language....G R A ...it's the Irish word for love.'

Sh e has written over twenty books. In 1962 she won the Kingley Amis award for the Country Girls! She won the Frank O'Connor international story award in 2011, her first big literary prize, and The Love Object contains most of these prizewinning stories; she is particularly proud of 'Shovel Kings' about the migration of Irish labourers to London and in part based on interviews she made in pubs. In 2012 she published her memoir, Country Girl.

FOLK EAST

Had a lovely weekend at the Folkeast Fair at Glemham Hall last weekend. I missed last years at Somerleyton Hall, which I now regret, but at least I made it to this one. The site is splendid, rolling countryside and majestic trees, there was plenty of excellent music so choosing which stage to go to was often difficult, and the Soapbox stage was worth going to just for the sheer delight of the secret path through the woods, through a magical tunnel into a beautfully decorated tent- especially at night with  all the fairy lights. The highlight for me was the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, who I have music by, but to hear a large group of excellent musicians playing live, especially with all of their trademark quirky sound effects (rubber bands and telephone lines included) is something else, so a live album of theirs is definitely onto my wishlist.

RIP ELizabeth Jane Howard

This morning I was just reading one of the many articles printed recently following the publication of her fifth Cazalet novel, All Change, marvelling at the spirit of a woman who, despite being ninety, was writing her fifteenth novel, with a working title Human Error. A woman whose mother was usually silent about all the things that matter, but after Howard's fourth novel was published told her she thought the first one was the best. (As Elizabeth Jane Howard stated, it was like being told 'you were so lovely playing Juliet when you were 13.') A woman whose writing almost came to a standstill during her marriage to Kingsley Amis, the fellow novelist whose household of anything up to a dozen people she looked after, while he carried on writing even up until the point of moving house, when his desk was moved from under him. Personally I think she was the more talented writer and more interesting person, but I suppose I am biased. She spent her last decade and more in my home town, and I attended two of her readings several years ago; even more years ago I read her autobiography, Slipstream (2002). What courage and determination, despite recently suffering a fall and cracked rib plus increased physical frailty, she seemed determined to make up for lost time and show no letting up of her creative activities, writing every morning.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25581260