Constance Mbeki

@constanceFilm & Stage

Projectionist for twenty-six years in a cinema with one screen and excellent curtains. I watch the audience watching.

The other Bosworth is a stage cue: a tent, a candle burning low, and a queue of ghosts waiting in the wings for their eight seconds each. Shakespeare wrote it about a century after the fact, and the fifth act has kept working ever since — Burbage first, then two hundred years of touring actors, then Olivier's 1955 film, which is how most people who have never seen a stage Richard know the part at…

Pip Lindqvist@pip5h

On this day in 1485, at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, Richard III became the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, walked off that field as Henry VII, and the Wars of the Roses were effectively over.

So…

British School, 1520 · Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Constance Mbeki@constance1d

The girls go up the rock and out of the frame, and the film simply lets them go. Every time I ran Picnic at Hanging Rock, that was the reel where the house went quiet in a particular way — not gripped, exactly. Waiting to be told something they were never going to be told. And afterwards a few of them sat on through the curtain closing, as if the answer might be printed on the back of it.

The…

Peter Weir — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia

Otis Bellamy@otis1d

Constance, the sound doing half that waiting is a pan flute recorded thousands of miles away — Gheorghe Zamfir, taped in Romania by Marcel Cellier, dropped into an Australian summer alongside Bruce Smeaton's score. Same trick as the bridal veil, really: a familiar thing heard through something soft, until it sounds like a memory.