Corrie’s bright day in the dark
Corrie Hall Last Saturday showed one film after another from morning until night, stopping only for refreshments and the setting up of the next transmission. Everyone had a great time. It was like sharing in a warm family occasion, specially when sitting at a long table to tuck into delicious soup and in the evening a fabulous mixture of chilli con carne and curries. The unofficial Corrie Caterers should definitely go into business!
The films were loosely connected by the theme of childhood. The day kicked off with a number of Tom & Jerry shorts, and the reaction was slightly strange. The adults laughed, but children gazed at the frantic antics in astonishment rather than amusement, which raised questions in the mind. Was the action too riotously inventive for them to understand? Too fast? Too surreal? Have times changed? Well, yes, of course they have. A black-and-white documentary called Singing Streets showed children in Edinburgh five decades ago, before TV or video. They played peevers and skipped with fantastic skill in a shared turning rope – and sang fluently in countless circle games. Boys and girls were very separate, and it was the girls who dominated the scene. And how energetic they were, how lean and fit! Some, admittedly, had pinched faces that spoke of hunger, but there was no obesity then.
An animated French film called A Cat in Paris was an absolute delight. A cat burglar (accompanied by a burgling cat) leapt
and crept through evocatively drawn Parisian roof-scapes, while the main theme was the abduction of a little girl whose mother was a high-ranking police detective. The faces of both humans and cat were reminiscent of Modigliani’s painting, stylised and slant-eyed yet full of feeling.
In total contrast, we were back to black-and-white for The Kidnappers, where a rigidly Presbyterian Scots-Canadian grandfather gives his orphaned grandsons a terrible time until their innocence and his wife’s gentle, enduring wisdom bring him to see the error of his ways.
The Kite Runner is of course a modern fable about intolerance, well worth re-seeing for its stunning sequences of Kabul among its snowy mountains, the sky full of fluttering, diving kites being flown with lethally competitive purpose.
A very sensitive Swedish film, My Life as a Dog, was about a boy shattered by his mother’s slow and unpleasant death from a lung disease. He was also grieving for his dog, which he believed to be still alive, taken into care elsewhere when the household fell apart. The film had an interesting take on the unorthodox approach of a likeable man who ran a refuge for such children with inventive battiness, but was unflinching in its conclusion – that truth has to be known, even if it comes with brutal directness from among the children themselves.
The final film, Padre Padrone, was set in the rough hills of Sardinia, where a young boy is forcibly removed from school by his father, who wants him to help tend the sheep. The boy’s life changes when a couple of itinerant musicians mooch through the rough fields, playing an accordion. He gathers the strength to confront his brutal father and affirm that life can be different – and yet, the old ties and the old ways retain something of their power.
Altogether, it was a great day. Some people dropped in just for a film or two of their choice, others settled in for the whole day – but everyone reeled home with heads full of action and images and new thoughts. A bright highlight in a cold January.
