Photos: Classiq Journal
“It’s like life really; you start out with a rough
overall design for it, but the dream is always changing,
evolving and you have to be open and adaptive to the unexpected.
I think from the outside I can even be seen as a bit of a drifter,
but I think it’s more like tracking a boat: you have a destination
in mind but it’s not that simple, you have to make a lot of seemingly
wayward manoeuvres to get there. And in these detours lies the magic.”
Ed, I Love the Seaside
Viewing
‘Round Midnight, 1986
Bertrand Tavernier
Bertrand Tavernier had an affinity for music and a love for cinema. In no other film of his was that probably more evident than in ‘Round Midnight, his elegy to jazz that captures the very essence of jazz music and the jazz musicians’ lives like no other. Actually, the film reminded me of Geoff Dyer’s book, But Beautiful. Dyer writes beautifully in such a way that you can not tell where reality ends and where fiction begins. It takes imagination and ardor and improvisation and spontaneity to write like this and the portraits of the musicians he evokes – Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Art Pepper – are alive, intimate, lyrical, heartbreaking, and capture the spirit of jazz better than any other writing. And so is Bertrand Tavernier’s portrayal of his character, Dexter Gordon/Dale Turner.
Tavernier wanted to base his film on the friendship between the pianist “Bud” Powell and Francis Paudras, a Parisian lover of American jazz, who wrote a book about it, Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell. Saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who had a long career playing with some of the great American bands in the 1940s and ‘50s, played Dale Turner – Tavernier and producer Irwin Winkler wanted to get musicians, not actors for the leading roles and they put together a group of great names led by Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Billy Higgings, Ron Carter, Freddie Hubbard and Chet Baker. François Cluzet played the French friend.
Dexter Gordon is Dale Turner, and commands the screen with an instinctive naturalness. As Irwin Winkler writes in his auto biography, Dexter’s “dialogue was not from the script; it was improvised, like the notes on his saxophone, delivered in a voice damaged by years of cigarette smoke and drugs – too unique for an actor to imitate. He had not only played jazz, he talked jazz. He not only played drunk, he was drunk.” François Cluzet, short and slender, was shot by Bertrand Tavernier so that he was always looking up to his idol, but no sequence is more moving than that of him staying outside the Blue Note nightclub where Dale Turner is playing, crouched, listening transfixed by the vent, because he doesn’t have enough money to get inside to see his idol play. Another unforgettable scene is when singer Lonette McKee joins Dexter on the scene. Her voice and Turner’s saxophone transport you to another time and place, difficult to describe in words.
Morocco, 1930
Josef von Sternberg
I would often watch it just for the costumes. The top hat, tuxedo and white bow-tie Marlene Dietrich wore for her first performance in her first American film became her signature look. By deciding to put her in trousers in the first important act, Josef von Sternberg not only built up the anticipation of the audiences, who were anxious to see Marlene’s legs revealed as they had been made famous in The Blue Angel (1930), also directed by von Sternberg, but this smart move would always link her image to that of an enigmatic persona, who, unlike many other stars, would use subtext to enhance the femme fatale perception of her. The director had seen her wearing a man’s suit and a top hat at a party in Berlin, and it inspired him to use it as a dramatic look for her first musical number in an American film. The result still tantalizes the viewers, more than nine decades later. Wearing men’s attire suited Marlene like a charm, but whether in a man’s suit or a glamorous gown, she exuded sex appeal all her life, never lacking tastefulness.
Point Break (1991)
Kathryn Bigelow
This is a film that takes my mind to rebellious summers and endless beach days as a way of life. It’s a perfect blend of fearlessness, atmospheric scenery and thriller action (mainly thanks to the two leading men, Keanu Reeves, as rookie FBI agent Johnny Utah, and Patrick Swayze, as the leader of a gang of surfers who moonlight as bank robbers) that pulls you in and lingers with you long after the ending credits. But there is also a philosophical side to the characters and that’s one of the most interesting parts of the movie, allowing you to be part of it and make your own version of it. It is also the film that introduced me to Kathryn Bigelow’s work years ago, and what a fine job she does here!
And I have to mention another favourite Bigelow film: Strange Days, from 1995. It paints a Los Angeles of the year 1999 at the confluence of futuristic landscape and 1940s noir, of science-fiction and crime thriller. We live in the digital age, in the age of virtual reality, but it still feels unsettling to watch the prospect of computer-generated reality as imagined almost thirty years in advance. It just shows how creepy the world would become; it shows how creepy the world has become almost thirty years on. “Jacking in” means attaching a “squid” to your skull – a brain wave transmitter that creates the impression that you are having someone else’s experiences. And don’t we today want to constantly watch other people’s lives, to have their experiences? And some of the technology we can use, like social media, seems so much more gentile and harmless that you don’t even realise the danger and audacity of our new reality. The mood, the noir-inspired hero (the morally ambiguous hero alienated from society, charismatic yet flawed, harking back in the past, played by a fantastic Ralph Fiennes), the relentless and suspenseful pacing, the cinematography, Bigelow’s skill to make you live the characters’ experiences – this is one great piece of cinema making.
Reading
The most authentic, laidback and cool travel and surf guide, and so much more than that. I Love the Seaside: The Surf & Travel Guide to Southwest Europe gathers intel from across the coastlines of Portugal, Spain and France into a beautiful book that is a world in itself. Backdrop stories about the surf culture in the region, short interviews with interesting local people, knowledge about local food, culture, makers and menders, little gems found on site, true and tried over the years. Places that may not be picture-perfect or where they may not speak English, but where you will experience something real. And having it on paper offers you an enhanced sense of place, awaiting for notes to be penned on the side and revisited as time passes, its pages a little more creased after each time we open it.
Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux. He writes about George Orwell before he was George Orwell, but a 19-year-old policeman in Burma. They say those five years were the years that made him. “Drawing on all his powers of observation and imagination, Theroux brings Orwell’s Burma tears to radiant life, tracing the developments of the young man’s consciousness as he confronts both the social, racial and class politics of his colonial colleagues, and the reality of the Burma beyond, which he yearns to grasp.”
Les Classiques de Lire Magazine dedicated to Marcel Pagnol in its entirety. “My grandfather is timeless,” says Nicolas Pagnol. So is this special number of Lire magazine.
Sylvie Simmons on Tom Waits in Mojo magazine (the print edition): “The Heart of Saturday Night, released 50 years ago, lit a path for Tom Waits’ next decade of music-making. Beat poetry and noir jazz entwined and his roots in rough-and-tumble San Diego showed through in his first truly Waitsian oeuvre. All the elements were there, ready to be drawn out.”
Listening
The Podcast: Wild, Wild Podcast and its episode on Il Cinema Ritrovato as we get to follow Adrian Smith around, watching movies, attending the festival’s phenomenal book fair, buying film posters and casually talking about films and Bologna. To any friend of cinema, this sounds mighty good.
The soundtrack: ‘Round Midnight
The album: Unforgettable Fire, U2
Making
Ciel Glue is a French artist based in Portugal, whose influences come from his love of surfing and the ocean and his collages are one of the best things I brought home from a trip to Portugal. His art plays on the idea of timelessness using vintage imagery to add an element of not only fun but an understanding that surf will never age.
“I take great pleasure in finding these images of vintage surfers, their lives destined to the closed pages of a dusty magazine at the back of a library and rescuing them from their dark, eternal fate. Bringing them back to the ocean and placing them on the waves of their life. Giving back to them that feeling of the first drop in. My line of creation resides around the sentence: ‘To read the wave.’”
Mojak makes hats, inspired by the sea, timeless and handcrafted, for a lifetime of adventure. It was early summer 2016 when Bodensee-born Emanuel Mauthe set off on the 1280 km journey to the French Atlantic coast.
“The two most beautiful things are the home from which we come and the home to which we wander.” – Heinrich Jung-Stilling
He did his work in pouring rain, thunderstorms and, by French standards, unbridled cold. He had set out to deliver surf equipment. To protect himself from the constant rain, he pulled out his old hat, which he had inherited from his grandfather years ago. Looking back, this moment was the birth of Mojak. Constant rain was followed by sunshine and heat. One evening, he met the musician and surf instructor Jules Ahoi. Over a glass of red wine and good music, they talked about their passion for travelling, and, as the story suggests, their shared passion for hats.
Exploring
The surf culture and the hiking trails along the coast of Portugal, on the cliffs above as praias, each one a stunner of a hike that will leave the walker spoilt for view. There is something about surf culture that never stops short to fascinate – the surf culture of Portugal in particular, a country that somehow feels personal enough yet exotic enough. Surfing, just like mountaineering, and the people at its core imply passion, improvisation, rhythm and tempo, a love for challenges and a motivation that is stronger than our fears. Surfers, wherever they ride, have a local demeanor that’s only derived from the proximity of the sea and their love for it. Even if you don’t surf, when you find yourself around them you almost feel the need to always be with a step in the ocean. Stop for lunch at a restaurant-café with a Californian vibe and bohemian atmosphere on the brim of the beach cliff, watch the surfers wax their boards outside their private cabins, and step inside one of the many welcoming surf shops that seem set up for ocean lovers and have all surf essentials but also lifestyle clothing and accessories, art and books… Yes, it looks a lot like summer.
“I love the sea, because it teaches me, as writer Pablo Neruda said. We always search for perfection, and waves are the best metaphor for life. The perfection depends on how willing you are to catch waves. If you go out often, no matter how the waves are, you will find some perfect days, because you did the preparation in ‘bad’ days, on the other hand, if you are only looking for those perfect days of surfing, maybe when you’re out there, you won’t appreciate it. We need the bad experiences to give significance to the good ones.” – artist Lisa Marques, I Love the Seaside
On an end note
With a medieval castle, an old cathedral and white washed winding streets, Silves is the most charming little town in the South of Portugal. Found inland, off the beaten path (which is why we love it), this Moorish historic town along the Arade River has one more little gem tucked within one of its quaint cobbled squares: Café DaRosa. Opened 50 years ago, it sells traditional pastries as well as coffee and the best berries lemonade. But it’s not just the tradition, it’s the location, the friendly yet elevated atmosphere and the intricate interior decor with its marvelous blue-tiled walls that make Café DaRosa a luxurious treat and worth the half an hour or an even longer detour from the coastline. In an age when so many new ventures pop up over night and this return to traditions can sometimes feel condescending more than it is authentic, it feels good to spend time in a place that has been slowly writing its own story for half a century.
The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Wachstumsversuche, with Sarah Schill. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.
“And if you find a bumpy dirt-track leading to a remote surf spot,
think twice before you share your ‘secret discovery’ online.”
I Love the Seaside
