red thrones and shoes

Last night, I went to see Throne of Blood by Akira Kurosawa on my own at the reopened Filmhouse. They are doing a series of Kurosawa’s Shakespeare adaptations-Throne of Blood is Macbeth, Ran King Lear, and The Bad Sleep Well Hamlet. I am going to see The Bad Sleep Well this week. The schedule is here. I highly encourage you to go if in Edinburgh! The Filmhouse has been revamped under new ownership and it now has very comfortable red plush seats with drinks holders. Their program is unapologetically arty and interesting.

Filmhouse is the perfect place to see a film alone and I have been going to see Kurosawa films alone for a long time, in different countries. I remember at university going to see one which a then boyfriend wouldn’t come to because it was sunny outside and since then they always seem to be rereleased in cinema when I am feeling most alone. I feel content with my aloneness when watching Kurosawa films. Most of my relationships have been an extraordinary waste of time and precious life but Kurosawa films, however long ( The Seven Samurai is over 3 hours) never are. A few years ago I went to the GFT in Glasgow to see Seven Samurai on my own again. It depicts an honourable and good type of masculinity, which is why the single mother in Helen Dewitt’s The Last Samurai watches it with her son Ludo-to give him good male role models ( I grew up in a single parent home too, though unfortunately we were not shown it). The samurai become stand in non existent husbands, boyfriends, fathers.

Throne of Blood was an extraordinary adaptation, set in a magic filled Feudal Japan when women painted their teeth black (ohaguro) and with exquisitely creepy ghosts. It depicts a bad masculinity and a man’s fall into it: corrupt, vain, power hungry, violent, dishonest, impressionable, superstitious.

After, I ran into some friends after in the lobby, going to see the new David Cronenberg film and we had a drink. I haven’t felt like I have had a ‘base’ in Edinburgh for a while ( My favourite pub, The Cumberland ruined the quiet 70s atmosphere of its back room with some gross trendy velvet mall like interior design so I basically stopped going. A cinema seat must be plush velvet, but a pub seat must be wood!) and I’ve been feeling really angry with Edinburgh mostly because its lonely here, but at least I have Filmhouse in the meantime.

I am rereading Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye about a young vietnemese woman who spends all her time in Paris going to Catherine Deneuve films. She writes “my person vanished in the darkness of the movie theatre” and “I was like a boat adrift, and the gleaming marquees were lighthouses” . I read it in the Filmhouse bar before my film, and there were alot of other people alone there reading too.

Next month at Filmhouse there will be a Powell and Pressburger season, my favourite director team, I am very excited to see The Red Shoes in 35mm. On July 25th they are showing Metropolitan in 35mm with a Q&A with director Whit Stillman. I think they are showing Barry Lyndon at some point too, which I have never seen on a big screen.

I was thinking more about why I love Lovejoy so much and watching the new Adam Curtis doc put it into Thatcherite perspective. Lovejoy is a “"divvy” : someone with an innate talent to spot a good antique, but never has good cash flow or assets- he is a renter always trying to scrounge together his rent, he works for the posh but can never become one of them ( On being invited to a party at a big house, the host tries to extract free labour from him by asking him to price some rare pieces and he is justifiably mad and gets his revenge) or own what they do, despite having a better appreciation and knowledge of art. He is framed by a rich man who wants to dodge import taxes on a painting, and ends up in jail for 8 months instead of getting out of it through justice. The show breaks through the Thatcherite myth of meritocracy and makes fun of it: Lovejoy has talent, merit, generosity but he is forever skint and has to delve into small dishonesties to survive, exploiting the vanity of the rich before they exploit him. I also like the way he asks for his money in a way a lot of people would find rude but which brings money to the surface of cultural and arts work when it is usually hidden and unmentionable.