I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
My passions include:
Gary Oldman & Val Kilmer; collecting ‘Old Hollywood’ themed coffee table books; second-hand bookshops; trying not to let the responsibilities of adulthood obliterate the delights and memories of my inner-child; ideas; Hamlet; Gothic Literature; a nice, long walk; coffee; sleep; Whitby Abbey, from the Dracula association (this picture hangs in my bedroom); wondering about the identity of Jack the Ripper.
There’s a scene from Robert Bresson’s film Pickpocket, which the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader quotes repeatedly in his work – but Schrader alters it.
The version in American Gigolo takes place in an official area. A woman visits a man. They’re separated by a pane of glass. The woman brings her right hand up across the line of her body, reaching forwards, and rests the outer edge of her fingers along the inside of the glass. The man leans in to press his forehead against the same point on the other side of the glass, hard. Their movements are reciprocal rather than identical. It’s the closest they’ll ever get to touching.
In Pickpocket, Bresson’s protagonists are also separated, but by bars rather than glass. They can touch, if only obliquely. She kisses his fist, which grips a bar. He presses his cheek to her temple; or rather they press together the small cross-sections of skin that can be contained within a single square of the prison grid.
In the version of the scene from Schrader’s Light Sleeper, there are no bars and no glass, and the final shot initially appears to be a still, which freezes the image of Willem Dafoe’s character kissing the hand of Susan Sarandon’s character. But even as the credits roll, even as they keep rolling, it’s only the flickering of Dafoe’s closed eyes – moving like those of a dreamer in the R.E.M. phase – that betrays the patience of both actors.
Spanish fingers pointing to their first star on World Cup winning jerseys.
This photo shows me sitting next to my first boyfriend Peter Zombory-Moldovan (on the right). I was two years old and Peter was our neighbour in Manchester, England. Apparently the two of us would kiss and hug so enthusiastically we’d tumble over onto the floor. I don’t remember loving this little boy of course, it’s all hearsay, but I have no doubt toddlers can feel as strongly for their special friends as adults do.
I was struck by Glyn Davis’s review of Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, in The Age (26 June 2010), which he describes as ‘a work of passion’. The comment led me to wonder what it would take for more academic writing to be passionate, committed and ‘urgent’.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
Great series, great introduction – can’t wait to read the rest of them!
Thanks Megan!
I’m loving how one word can inspire such a different interpretation in each person, and in turn, me a different empathic response to them.