Brief Encounter

What a film! All the more amazing that it comprises such a small-scale, almost insignificant event. The story is simplicity itself: a married middle-aged woman is tempted to have an affair with a married man, but in the end they decide not to consummate their passion and he leaves for Africa. Why would such a simple, even trivial plot become so effective? Here are some ideas.

• This is a genuine women’s film. It is shown from the point of view of the woman. When Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) waits for Alec Harvey outside the hospital, we see him running down the steps just as the woman would see it. The film seems to be inside her; we recognise and comprehend her feeling when she is sitting in the train that everyone is looking at her as an adulterer.
• Celia Johnson’s face is not perfection; that makes her performance all the more convincing.
• There are expressionist touches to the film that heighten the drama: the shadows on the walls of the station corridors, the endless noise of the trains rushing through the station, Johnson’s dishevelled state when she becomes overwhelmed by passion.
• Laura Jesson’s husband is played by Cyril Raymond, and it is one of the great character actor cameos. When Laura Jesson realises there is a spark of passion about her encounter with another man, she reveals all to her husband: “I met a stranger and had lunch with him and then went to the pictures with him”. Her husband, busy with the crossword, says only “That’s nice, dear.” Her husband is well-meaning but lacking any insight.
• Jane says the moral of the story is, what do you expect from a woman who has nothing to do all day? There may be some truth in this, but it’s a very common-sense response to a film about passion.
• The male role, Dr Jennings, played by Trevor Howard, is not depicted in anything like the detail of Celia's Johnson's part - his wife is never seen. Nonetheless, he is shown as a sensitive man, rather than a lothario. We could imagine (and other characters in the film confirm it) from his good looks and dress that he could be easy to fall in love with. 
• But most of all it is a study of loss of reputation. What happens with Dr jennings doesn’t really matter; it is the Laura Jesson’s look ofpenic when she is recognised having a champagne lunch with her would-be partner. Her face is utterly, powerfully convincing.
• Finally, those trains! The endless sound of express trains in the background, like the searing passion in Laura Jesson’s heart.

Feast and Fast at the Fitzwilliam: A dog's breakfast?

Is this an exhibition (full title is Feast and Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800) on “the art of food”? Not really. It is more, as director Luke Syson states in the Foreword, “the story of food in Cambridge, Britain and Europe between 1500 and 1800” in a visual display – not at all the same thing. The exhibition is the result of a partnership between the Museum and the University History Faculty, which explains (although doesn't justify) the intensely didactic tone of the catalogue. The result is a hotchpotch, spectacularly good in places, but indigestible as a whole, for example, "Eating in early modern Europe was a performance in which the diners were both audience and actors." 

The Introduction makes bold claims for the exhibition. This is not just “who ate what when … This new interdisciplinary history of food has become a rich and important field through which topics such as religion, class, gender, globalisation and the ‘everyday’ can be explored through food and integrated into wider historical perspectives”. [p8] That’s quite a theme! Because food is ephemeral, the exhibition concentrates on “visual and material culture relating to food”.  In other words, there may be some art, but the link to food is the main point. And what links! There is a recreation of a Baroque feasting table of around 1650, with a full-size swan gracing it. 

As for fasting, you might as well call the exhibition “Feast and Plate”, or “Feast and China” rather than "Feast and Fast" – there is a handful of objects relating to fasting, but the presence of fasting in the title as more for alliteration than for a description of the exhibition as a whole.

Moreover, from the very first sentence of the catalogue, about the Neapolitan cuccagna, or triumphal arch made of cheeses and other foods, you can see the exhibition is based on quite specialised knowledge - and it is made quite clear that this is text for teaching you. Melissa Calaresu (clearly Italian from her name) has written on aspects of Neapolitan food history, and there is a strong injection of detailed knowledge whenever objects relating to Naples and Cambridge are mentioned.

Given that the exercise is written by academics, it’s perhaps not surprising the catalogue is full of academic-speak. Few concessions are made for ordinary gallery-goers. Twenty-four contributors are credited for the many entries, which are grouped into eight main sections (although trying to tackle such a vast subject will always result in gaps). The argument continues in several of the footnotes (but you don’t know in advance which of the footnotes contain additional material). Examples of overly academic writing include:

The ever-present need for food dictated the rhythms of life for people in early modern Europe, and knowledge of the ways of nature was essential to produce enough food for the perpetuation of humanity.  (p11)

I assume “ways of nature” means “knowing how to grow things”, while “the perpetuation of humanity” means "to keep you and your family alive". Nobody then or now produces food for the perpetuation of humanity. 

Whether as potent metaphor or simply representing itself, the familiar qualities of food helped to domesticate the unknowable forces behind the mysteries of nature. [p12]

 One engraving [Bosse, Taste, c1638] has a dog in the foreground, described as follows: “the dog’s stylisation as at once both fat and thin, luxurious furry head combined with bony hindquarters, would seem to enshrine the struggle between indulgence and restraint – the bestiality of gluttony versus the civility of the human experience” [p17]. I’m not sure how a dog, or any part of a dog, represents “the civility of human experience”. I have a dog, and I love it, but it is canine, not human.

The challenge of the exhibition is its sheer range. One or two objects introduce a vast topic, such as the slave trade, or food theft, but then the viewers are swept off to something entirely new. An indication of the vast ambition of the exhibition is seen in part one: “food cycles and systems”. It contains sections on The Four Humours, the Five Senses, the four elements, and the four seasons. We have already broken the boundaries of food. And if these, why not other groups? Why not the Twelve Months, which is included in the exhibits, for example in a Book of Hours, and is described in the introduction to this section as part of the iconographic tradition of depicting the months, for example, a baker making bread in December. I see less connection, however, between food and the Four Humours, or the Five Senses. Here, as elsewhere, the catalogue is reduced to a simple exercise of “where can I find a link to food in all this?” Three of a series of prints on the Four Elements mention food, while one (Fire) does not. Where does that get us? 

There is a magnificent embroidery of Arcadia from 17th-century England – and, surprise, surprise, it includes animals, which can be construed as food! Beyond that, all that is stated is that “both the embroidery, with its varied threads and stitches, and the composition are complex”.

Despite the seemingly all-embracing topic, there are still many items in the exhibition that seem to me to have little relation to food. Jacob van Ruisdael’s Panoramic view on the Amstel is just that, a landscape, albeit with some windmills, which would enable the inclusion of most 17th-century Dutch landscapes.

There are very interesting sections on individual foods, such as the pineapple and ginger, and some good points on how food was brought to the table, (sugar), and finally, some magnificent recreations of floral decorations: a confectioner’s shop window, a sugar banquet, and a baroque feast. But silver plate from Cambridge colleges, and eighteenth-century candlesticks, while readily available for display, do not advance our knowledge of food much further. How people ate in Cambridge colleges in the eighteenth century is always going to be of limited interest in the history of Food. You could describe the Cambridge plate an opportunistic way to fill the exhibition with some readily available artwork that usually gathers dust in the archives. That plate tells you little about food but quite a bit about silversmithing.   And as for the image below, just what is that woman telling us? Is she contemptuous of the vast display of ingredients in front of her, or full of anticipation?               

Is this the kind of exhibition the Fitzwilliam should be doing? Ambition is good, and the exhibition suggests the vast range of topics that can be considered under the heading of “food”. Moreover, the the mainstream premier-league museums such as the National Gallery will stick much more to fine art. This exhibition resembles some recent thematic British Museum shows more than purely art-historical exhibitions. But if it means that the common viewer has to struggle through an academic survey of a vast topic, and one that wasn’t primarily designed for general consumption, then the result is, in a word, indigestion.

Looking at Barcelona with fresh eyes

Barcelona is one of the great cities of the world  - at least, so the Internet claims. More specifically, it is admired for the built environment. Certainly there were crowds outside the Modernista palaces in the centre, like the one above. I’ve been to Barcelona several times, mainly to the centre, Monjuic, and Gracia, but never reflected much about it. Even more disgracefully, I have not yet seen some of the major sites. Of course, I have the books about the city (Robert Hughes, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto) but reading about and actually seeing a city are two different things. Perhaps there is a value in recording first impressions of the city - even though I've been there many times.

So after a day of walking so much that we had blisters, we took the tourist bus and saw the city as a visitor. We went once round the extended city – not the medieval centre (you wouldn’t get a bus around that), but Sagrada Familia, the Hospital of St Pau, and the Monastery of Pedralba, all buildings that I had heard of but not yet seen, for the simple reason that they are some distance out from the city centre. Of course, the bus only goes past these buildings (and doesn't even go past the entrance of the Park Guell or attempt the vertiginous climb to Tibidabo), but a bus tour does give some idea of the layout of the city - and in Barcelona's case, the hills surrounding it. Much of the present-day city is built on serious slopes; the bus was struggling on some of the inclines. The bus also takes you past other landmarks such as the football ground.

Even without reading about the city, any visitor will recognise at least four main zones. First, the medieval centre, with narrow streets barely wide enough to take a small car. This centre is remarkably unchanged; it seems to be built on top of the Roman city, on the basis of the excavations visible in the local museum. 

Next, the much larger-scale, regularly planned, central squares and monument-sized buildings (the Generali Insurance building is typical, imposing from any angle, ostentatious and bloated, but memorable). This is where many of the luxury shops are found and, not by chance, some of the best Modernista buildings. This is the largely 19th- and early 20th-century zone, such as Eixample, a series of rectilinear blocks with little to distinguish individual streets.

Similarly uniform, although built to a much less lavish scale, are the blocks of working-class apartments in Barcaloneta. 

Further out from the centre, there are vast swaithes of post-1945 apartment blocks, with occasional traces alongside of the earlier villas with their own gardens, with the resulting very messy appearance of different styles and heights beside each other. The area of Gràcia, where I was staying, was full of these flats. It looked like the flats were around six storeys in the residential streets, and up to nine storeys along the bigger thoroughfares. For many (most?) inhabitants of Barcelona, this is everyday reality: flats and traffic. Without the palm trees, it could be anywhere. 

What does this very superficial tour reveal? The very dense concentration of buildings, and then the traffic. Barcelona has several large multiple-lane one-way streets in the centre, with mopeds and scooters, cars and buses engaged in what seems an endless race. Crossing the road is not for the faint-hearted and would not be easy outside the pedestrian crossings.

Barcelona is clearly a very crowded city, lacking in green open spaces in the main urban area. There were a few positive initiatives, for example urban gardens from reclaimed housing land (above).

The life of the city is seen at its best in some very animated squares often next to wonderful covered markets, where high-quality food was available. In the markets, wonderful displays of food.

The squares, although lacking green, usually had trees and were surrounded on four sides by high buildings. The people living in the surrounding buildings were clearly tolerating a high level of noise from the busy activity around. In summary, there is a pell-mell feel to much of the city, with rich and poor, lavish and run-down, often jumbled up. Outside the commercial centre, there seems to be a motley collection of small shops, offices and workshops, usually with graffiti on every available wall or door. Someone told me that while commercial property is cheap to rent, the licences for selling food are very expensive, so perhaps many of these small shops are handed down over generations within a family. 

What is distinctive about Barcelona? It gives the impression of being more visibly socially mixed than, say, London, with its clear distinction between the City and the West End, and lack of a medieval centre. A fancy restaurant, a run-down corner shop, and a simple bread shop may appear within a few doors of each other. In some way the medieval crowdedness has extended to the surrounding areas like Gràcia. For me, that small bread shop in the photo sums up Barcelona: a medieval feel persisting in a 20th-century urban layout.