Sam Burcher Is in Hollywood for the North American premier of My Way, just one film in a week of stunning new films shown at the American French Film Festival, October 29-November 3, 2024.

And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain…..These are the opening lines from one of the world’s most memorable songs. Lyrics forged from darkness, a heroic lyrical and melodic representation of the dark night of the human soul before the light of a new dawn. Over time, My Way has has been covered by artists as diverse as Nina Simone, Sid Vicious, the Gypsy Kings, and, of course, the grandfather of them all Frank Sinatra. For many his version is the definitive one, which he recorded in one take in 1968. 

What is a man, what has he got? ….This song came at a critical juncture for Sinatra, who was reeling from his divorce from the beautiful actress Ava Gardner. As we learn, one night she simply exits the restaurant in which they were dining to run off with her bull fighter lover. So great was Sinatra’s rejection that, tired after thirty years of touring and recording, he abruptly quit show business. This film explains how a French song restored his life and career and became Sinatra’s comeback theme tune.

My friend, I’ll say it clear, i’ll state my case…. My Way explores the story of how a young Canadian singer/songwriter Paul Anka first heard the original version of this song with French lyrics in France. He dreamt of rewriting the lyrics in English for his friend and hero Frank Sinatra, who affectionately called him “Kiddo.” Anka's English words would became Sinatra’s and many others forthright confession, an admission of a universal state of being, of which we can be certain. 

The film’s directors Thierry Teston and Lisa Azuelos have succeeded in their good intention to reclaim the song for everyone, especially for women. We watch two singing Nina’s - Nina Simone and Nina Hagen - utilising My Way at different, but pivotal points of global social change in the compelling expression of personal freedom. The song has allowed many more women to speak up for themselves and be heard. An exuberant Teston told me ,“It’s a song for everyone. When people listen to it on the train in the morning, they feel powerful.” 

My Way has its own unique narrative by Jane Fonda, whose voice personifies the history and evolution of the song. She is perfectly cast as the Narrator for many reasons: she is a self-confessed Francophile, a peace activist who was living and working in Paris with her husband, the French actor Roger Vadim when the song was recorded in 1968, a troubled year for soldiers in America and students n France. In the context of this intriguing musical documentary, and more broadly for The American And French Film Festival, My Way exemplifies what France can bring to America and what America can bring to France. 

I’ve lived a life that’s full. I travelled each and every highway..Throughout the film we discover intimate details about the song’s composition and musical structure. We learn about its acoustic origins in Paris with Jacques Revaux, Gilles Thibault and Claude Francois, the gifted French writers who created it. Then, we travel to Las Vegas where Anka honed the American version and presented it to his hero. We understand the lyrics as a poetic recitation performed again and again, which never becomes boring. Over 4,000 artists have covered the song and each subsequent incarnation sets My Way on a free and eternal path.

To think I did all that, and may I say not in a shy way….My Way has become a gift for all ages and backgrounds. And, like the song, the film works across a diversity of cultures. It exposes the darker shades of violence erupting around the song and its meaningful choice at the funeral of a courageous leader rubbed out for his beliefs.

But, there is plenty of humour here too. Footage of Sid Vicious’s outrageous version of My Way along with the sharp insights from Malcolm McClaren are laugh out loud funny. An appearance by David Bowie is a welcome sight and we find out how My Way inspired his own anthem with similar qualities.

And more, much more than this, I did it my way… This film concedes that the lyrics may have a hint of narcissism. But, perhaps deliberately, overlooks the interpretation of My Way as a song of self-will run riot. Some critics have claimed it fails to encourage the listener to hand control over their life to a spiritual higher power. Whether they know it or not, the film makers flip this criticism on its head by concentrating on the joyful notions of self-empowerment, self expression and transformation. And, for the billions of us, including myself who align with the sentiments presented here, this film is an engaging celebration of the soundtrack to our lives.

Now in its 28th year, The American And French Film Festival (TAFFF), is a beacon of light for those who love French film in LA. TAFFF continues its focus on education, and to date has invited 38,000 school children to the premiers, sparking curiosity and new perspectives on film. This year a combination of 59 films and television series contended for the TAFFF awards. The Festival commenced with the highly acclaimed film Emilia Pérez, directed by Jacques Audiard, the official French entry for the Oscars presented in collaboration with Netflix. 

October 2024

St Ives is a pretty coastal village in Cornwall with deep roots in the emergence of Marine Art, Troika Pottery and Crysede Textiles.

St Ives Museum

St Ives Museum started in 1926 on the founding principle of, “Gathering up the fragments lest they be lost.” This was at a time when the town was on the cusp of change; the fishing and mining industries were all but dying out. Decades of overfishing in Cornwall coupled with the closure of the tin mines meant the outflow of minerals into the sea which had once provided a rich food source for pilchards was no more.

The fishing season would begin in August with a cry across the town of Hevva! signalling that a shoal of silvery pilchards was in sight. The Seine net used to catch them was so vast (350m) that forty men were required to carry it down from the lofts to the big red boat waiting in the harbour to ‘shoot” it into the sea. Once caught the haul of pilchards was transferred into smaller tuck nets and taken to shore in boats called dippers.

It was the famous Victorian novelist and travel writer Wilkie Collins who introduced avid readers to the thrills of Cornish folklore in his Rambles Beyond Railways; Notes in Cornwall Taken A Foot, published in 1851. Collins, who was also a keen collector of statistics, records that in 1850 St Ives exported 22,000 barrels of pilchards, known as hogheads, each containing up to 3,000 fish.

With high demand from France and Spain, the pilchard trade was labour intensive demanding large numbers of the town’s population. Women and their eldest daughters, known as salt maidens, worked side by side to salt and stack layers of fish, up to four feet high, in twelve hour shifts for a few pence per hour. The salting process took around five weeks during which time the pilchards were pressed under great weights to extract their oil.

St Ives Museum was a pilchard packing factory in the 1840’s, and today retains a detailed history of the Cornish pilchard industry told through artefacts and visual stories. In 1847, the total exports from Cornwall was 122 million fish, which cause the storytellers to reflect on man’s greed, rather than man’s need. However, It is unlikely the hardworking townsfolk of St Ives could have envisaged that a part of their crowded, noisy and smelly workplace would be dedicated to preserving the stories of their rich cultural imprint. 

Capturing the Light

The Museum’s personable curator Andy Smith and his fact-toting deputy Peter Garrett are on a mission to tell the true story of St Ives’s transformation from a small fishing village into an internationally known artists colony. They are ably assisted by Cornish Art Historian and author David Tovey. A number of his superb personal collection of oil paintings make up the Museum’s current exhibition Capturing the Light 1885-1914. His book, Pioneers of St Ives Art at Home and Abroad 1889-1914 is a richly illustrated companion to it. 

This is the second in a cycle of four exhibitions at St Ives Museum which documents the emergence and evolution of the colony as it has never been seen before. Far too often, the well-funded art establishments date its beginning to the mid-20th Century. But, as many of the glorious light infused paintings here demonstrate, its origins go further back in time. 

Last years exhibition Discovering St Ives 1830-1890, won the Cornish Exhibition of the Year (small museum). This year, Capturing the Light celebrates the heyday of the marine artists who travelled from as far afield as Australia, Canada and America to paint the wonderfully wild scenery and magnificent light en plein air.

The arrival of the railways in 1877 had made access to rural areas easier. Turner’s visit to St Ives yielded preparatory sketches of the area, but no finished pieces. Whistler arrived in the spring of 1884 with the Camden Town Impressionist Walter Sickert, and the Australian born marine painter Mortimer Mempes in tow. Whistler produced several gentle oils of beach scenes from his vantage point above St Ives Bay. 

But, it was the French painter Emile-Louis Vernier who put St Ives on the international art map. Inexorably drawn to the light, he completed around ninety paintings here between 1884-1887. When he returned to Paris with his paintings, two were exhibited at the Paris Salon. His poignant images of blue oceans and skies, red sailing boats, and calling lighthouses drew keen attention to the little fishing village.

Read more: Notes on St Ives

September 6th 2024

The destruction of a group of magnificent London Plane trees in London's Bloomsbury district to make way for another office block is imminent. One local resident gives this passionate arguement for the trees to be saved.

The trees are sacred.

They are thirteen in number

Beneath these boughs walked the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., there he walked on his path to the Baptist Church.

It was in Bloomsbury that he delivered his sermon, the first on British soil. That walk he walked in the cool of October 1961. Desecrate these trees and you desecrate the walk to his inspirational sermon. Remember, but seven years later, he was assassinated.

In seven years, a passing moment, and see all that he achieved. Seven seasons of bloom, seven seasons of autumn leaves, seven seasons of summer blaze, and seven seasons of dreams.

Beneath these same boughs walked the Bloomsbury Set. A collection of the brightest minds, of writers, philosophers, economists and artists. Men from Cambridge, women from Kings College: Virgina Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, EM Forester, Vanessa Bell and Lytton Strachey. 

Here, they painted circles, lived in squares, and loved in triangles

In the Bloomsbury air, softened by the Plane trees' exhalation, and from those lungs a realisation permeated, the arts be revered, the creativity of Bloomsbury held in the highest, and from there, the warmth, compassion emanated - be it written, painted or spoken.

To them, we owe a celebration of their influence on Literature, Aesthetics, Criticism and Economics.

They changed minds and attitudes. They made a radical difference towards Feminism, Pacifism, and Sexuality.

These thirteen trees need to be held in memory of these individuals.

These creative men and women, who each individually, and collectively, walked, talked, and breathed beneath their boughs.

Here, they brushed the silvered trunks with an open palm; they walked upon the undulating form, a path given by roots nourished with our same Bloomsbury soil. 

These are the trees that then take acrid combustible fumes and convert to our cleansing oxygen.

It is their exhale that we now inhale.

Let their place be preserved and their continued growth be one of jubilation.

No chainsaws.

No desecration of these memories, no desecration to the values of the individuals that prescribed a better way of living and loving.

Let them stand.

The fate of the trees will be decided at the High Courts of Justice, Monahan v. Camden on 10th September 2024.

June 2024

If you are visiting the Royal Academy for the Summer Exhibition, you may as well enjoy Flaming June, the incandescent oil painting made by Lord Frederic Septimus Leighton in 1895. A lithe woman sleeps in a dress of gloriously vivid saffron. Her form curls in a circular pose on a draped couch, one foot rests on the floor. Her ankle length hair falls in waves over her flushed youthful face. Behind her, sun rays shimmer over the Mediterranean and perhaps the strong scent of the overhanging oleander flowers have intoxicated her. A peaceful, yet powerful radiance emanates from her relaxed figure. A peep of a nipple, a long luscious thigh and a well rounded buttock all visible though her diaphanous slip.

That Flaming June drowses under a flower known for its toxic effects is perhaps a realisation of the connection between sleep and death. In any case, it can be viewed as an example of the Victorian preoccupation with the myth of Briar Rose, and other passive Sleeping Beauties in need of awakening. Whether one ascribes erotic, imaginative, literal or visual connotations to the subject, it is certain that Lord Leighton (1830-1896) blended the best of high renaissance art to his popular muse. She is Michelangelo’s Night made for the Medici chapel in Florence and the stylised flame haired females of the Pre-Raphaelites rolled into one.

Like her creator, Flaming June has travelled far and wide. She was owned by the London Graphic magazine which put her on the cover of the 1895 Christmas edition. Then, after a ten year loan to the Ashmolean in Oxford in 1900, she disappeared for decades. She was eventually discovered concealed in a box behind a chimney in Battersea in1962 by a builder who sold her only for the value of her ornate frame. There is a rumour that when he was a young man the avid pre-Raphaelite collector, and music and theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber spotted her in a Battersea junk shop for £50. But his grandmother refused to loan him the money to purchase her.

For the last 60 years Flaming June has lived at the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico. She is  part of the European collection made by Luis A Ferre when Pre-Raphaelite art had fallen out of favour. After the major London galleries refused to purchase her, he whisked her off to the Caribbean in 1963 for a nominal sum. Now, Flaming June has returned home, and is on loan to the Royal Academy from February 2023 where she will stay until January 2024. This is a happy homecoming for a work by Lord Leighton, the President of the Royal Academy for eighteen years from 1878.

When Flaming June was first exhibited publicly at the 1895 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition she caused a sensation. It’s fiery presence prompted Samuel Courtauld to call it, “The most wonderful painting in existence.“  It has since become one of the most reproduced images in the world. One of the preparatory studies of the head of Flaming June was discovered at West Horlsey Place, the country house of the Duchess of Roxburghe, the great aunt of Bamber Gasgoine. The former host of University Challenge unexpectedly inherited the drawing in 2015, which had been hung discretely behind a bedroom door. 

Today, most of Leighton’s drawings, paintings and sculptures are on permanent show at his studio and house museum at 12 Holland Park Road, a must visit. Leighton House in London is crammed with a lavish collection of richly coloured tiles and textiles gathered from his travels in North Africa and the Middle East. He followed the footsteps of his close friend George Frederick Watts to his Little Holland House studio on nearby Melbury Road. Leighton assembled his awe-inspiring house over many years, where he lived alone. Eight other Royal Academicians were inspired by Watts and Leighton to build studio houses in the area, an artist’s colony known as the Holland Park Circle. Only Leighton’s house remains. 

He made his first submission Cimabue to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1855.This epic painting, five metres long and two metres high, depicts a procession of the Madonna made by Leighton in Rome. On the first day of the exhibition Queen Victoria was persuaded by Prince Albert to buy it. From that moment on Leighton was considered the great hope for British art and he took full advantage of his opportunity to promote art for art sake from within the establishment of the RA. Leighton died devoted to art and his last words expressed his love for the Academy, He lies in St Paul’s Cathedral next to the architect Sir Christopher Wren.

2nd April 2024 

The two women in the front row

are twins with dyed red hair.

They turned up for the wrong film - 

thought they were seeing My Week With Marilyn,

but it’s The Deep Blue Sea by Rattigan.

I start to relax.

Everyone coughs and whispers.

The trailers finish,

the film starts

with white letters, fire crackers

in London - Somers Town -

where curtains are drawn

over bomb-site windows.

She counts her bracelets

with awkward elegance.

Her fingers mean so much,

because they touch 

survivors.

Excitement and fear

in cluttered pubs.

Alcohol breaks down inhibitions,

until love has permission: red nails on white flesh,

tongues and petticoats,

pills to overdose,

an emetic to restore equilibrium.

The luxury of health, 

and taking it for granted.

Long lean legs and cigarettes.

Let’s smoke and lose the memory.

Pearls and black snakeskin -

symmetry.

Passion flowers, 

passion people -

safety.

Green velvet trees.

A sailor went to sea.

Nicotine depression.

Sex without obsession.

Words and Artwork by Sam Burcher

17th November 2023

In his 1952 memoir, the Poet Laureate John Masefield describes the gardens at St Pancras Old Church as, “The churchyard of romance.” This recollection indicates his awareness of the many poets and writers who, over the years, have wandered there. To mention William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Thomas Chatterton, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Aidan Dun is to name but a few.

In Masefield’s lifetime, just as in mine, there was a need to make a distinction between two churches with similar names in close proximity, to avoid confusion. One is St Pancras Parish Church built in 1822, which backs on to WB Yeats’s old building in Bloomsbury. And the other, St Pancras Old Church, set in a cemetery garden lined with magnificent London Planes, a stone’s throw from Kings Cross and St Pancras Stations.

It was the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, once a junior architect, who was charged with re-designing StPancras Gardens in 1865. A magnificent Ash, now sadly fallen, was named The Hardy Tree by Aidan Dun, a contemporary poet known as The Bard of Kings Cross. The tree stood at the west of the churchyard under which Hardy unceremoniously dumped the scores of gravestones displaced for the expansion of the burgeoning Midland Railways, where they rest today.

Probably the most romantic story surrounding the old church is that of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who happened upon the teenage Mary Godwin, later Mary Shelley the author of Frankenstein, as she mourned at the graveside of her mother, the prima-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The young lovers famously eloped causing a scandal from which Mary, her father William Godwin, who was already under scrutiny for his radical publications and Shelley, still married to his first wife, would never fully recover from.  

A tragic tale is that of the young poet Thomas Chatterton who fell into a freshly dug grave whilst walking in St Pancras Gardens. His friend who hauled him out said he was glad to resurrect a genius. Chatterton replied that the grave had been troubling him for some while now. Three days later, on the 24th August 1770, Chatterton committed suicide by drinking arsenic. He was just 17 years and 9 months old. 

Another teenager associated with St Pancras is Saint Pancras himself. He was a 14 year old orphan beheaded in Rome in 303AD by the Emperor Diocletian for his intractable Christian beliefs. Pancras, whose name translates as ‘the one who holds everything,’ is the patron saint of children, jobs and health. The cult of St Pancras was spread by the monk Augustine who arrived on the murky shores of Kent with relics from the tomb of the young martyr from Rome. His mission was the successful conversion of King Ethelbert to Christianity around 600AD.

Originally thought to be built on the site of a Celtic shrine or even a Roman place of worship, cogent clues are embedded in the fabric of the church. A 6th Century altar stone, silver artefacts and remnants of Roman tiles were recovered by builders replacing the Norman bell tower in 1847. It is believed these relics were hastily secreted during the Civil Wars before Cromwell’s troops arrived to convert the church into barracks and to rest the horses. 

Tomb Raiders, Footpads and Duals

During the 1700s a dark side to St Pancras was beginning to energe. The churchyard was plagued by a gang of bodysnatchers known as The Resurrectionists. The gang’s headquarters in Battlebridge, later known as Kings Cross, was close enough for them to watch the burials and “fish’ the fresh stream of bodies. The dug up cadavers were sold on to medical schools for surgical dissection. Eventually, a team of fierce dogs were trained to guard the grounds and let loose at night to deter the tomb robbers.

Read more: St Pancras Old Church and The Great Poets

August 29th, 2023

This year marks the 100 year anniversary of a prestigious poetry speaking contest at Oxford in which my grandmother Diana Homer was a prizewinning speaker.

In the spring of 1923 the future Poet Laureate John Masefield made an announcement to The Times that he would be holding a verse speaking contest at Oxford. Masefield was an orphan sent away to sea at thirteen by an aunt who disapproved of his compulsive reading. A distressed seaman abroad and almost shipwrecked, he used his awe-inspiring voyages to inform much of his early writing, including Salt Water Ballads (1902) and Dauber (1913). Now, his plan was to discover a raft of beautiful speakers passionate about poetry to create a mainstream tradition for its performance.

As the principal organisers of the contest, John Masefield and his wife Constance sought help from their circle at Oxford. Gilbert Murray, the Regis Professor of Greek, George Gordon, a Professor of English Literature, Sir Herbert Warren, the President of Magdalen, and two winners of the Newdigate Prize: Laurence Binyon and Heathcote Garrod, a Professor of Poetry, all agreed to act as judges. George Gordon named the two day festival The Oxford Recitations, and gave the opening speech at The Examination Schools on July 26th 1923.

Over five hundred contestants entered, exceeding all expectations. But, after hearing the first dozen or so speakers, Masefield wondered had he made a mistake in pushing for the contest, when a young woman began to speak in a way that made him hold his breath. He later recalled, “I had heard nothing like it. What I had not imagined was the power of such speech upon an audience, which sat as if in a trance.”

A recital by Diana Homer, the daughter of the Unitarian Minister F.A.Homer, would have a similar effect upon John Masefield. Diana was my grandmother, then a teenager drawn to Oxford with a headful of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton set by the judges as test poems in the syllabus, which had been mailed ahead of the competition. She would be a constant winner in the women’s division until 1929. More about that later.

On the whole, the first year of the Recitations revealed impressive talent and application. Each judge selected two favourites from amongst the trained speakers, talented amateurs, up and coming actors and students competing in the ballad, lyric, dramatic and narrative classes to battle it out in the Oxford Prize Class Finals. Highly coveted silver and bronze medals were awarded to the first and second place men and women with prizes of around £200 in today’s money for the exceptional speakers.

The contest took place at the Schools from morning until late in the evening. Door stewards ensured the recitals went undisturbed and prevented the audience from questioning the judges about their decisions, or from asking them for autographs. Clapping was restrained during the day in case exams were taking place elsewhere in the building. But, on Finals night, the crowd was roused into rip-roaring song, ending with a resounding, “Three cheers for Mr and Mrs Masefield!”

A Choir of Nightingales

John Masefield was guided by the revolutionary impules of WB Yeats, whose lecture in Lincoln’s Inn on new ways of speaking poetry he attended as a young man in 1901. Yeats’s methods, with his emphasis on the vowels and the beats, was a step towards realising the poet’s intention, but also a challenge to the stuffy Victorian drawing room approach to recitation. Masefield became a regular visitor to the Monday evening gatherings for poets, writers and painters held in what he described as, "the most interesting rooms in London" in which Yeats overwintered every year between 1895-1919.

By 1924, Masefield had resolved the earlier problems of his contestants shrieking, whispering, going prone or falling off the stage. A third day was added and most speakers were displaying the poems with their voices rather than outlandish gestures. He declared the effect of probably the best speakers in these islands gathered together was that of, “A choir of nightingales.” The excitement and delight of the poetry touched all present with a new feeling for poetry and a new understanding of the principle of speaking it

Read more: The Oxford Recitations

February 2023

The Painted Rocks 

I spy chipmunks scampering over the rocks on the road to Tafroute. It’s been so long since I saw this striped, squirrel-like creature that for a second it’s hard to remember its name. Back in the 1970’s, chipmunks were caged pets in schools and households across Britain. But roaming free in Morocco, they are released from the karma of captivity. I comfort myself with this thought as we speed towards the Rocher Peinture, a group of brightly coloured granite boulders strewn intermittently amid the desert plains of the Anti-Atlas Mountains. 

The largest rock is the size of a small hillock, and resembles a strong, muscular organ, rather like a giant heart or a lolling tongue. The land artist Jean Verame (1939-) originally painted it a deep azure blue ( left) in the mid -1980’s, but time has weathered its surface to a lighter cerulean (below right). Smaller rocks washed in bubblegum pink and acid green squat like unfamiliar blobs in the landscape. There is spacious desert as far as the eye can see, periodically interrupted by the bright protuberances. It looks and feels like a film set, especially when my lover walks off into the distance, a lone figure in the landscape. As I hang back at the big blue rock, I have a premonition he will soon walk away and not turn back.

A big full moon is strung over the Anti-Atlas as I pick out the Hotel Salama in the middle of Tafraoute's main square. For me the sign is an easy spot as it pokes above the low rise shops and businesses nestling under the looming mountains.The hotel breakfast bar serves particularly good coffee, the butter is excellent, and there is an egg. Later, we barter for blankets and shoes, and when I express how good it is to see the mountains from the town, a small group of traders complain the mountains get in their way!

The sheer beauty of Morocco’s physical geography abounds from the deserts of the Anti-Atlas to the snow striated Atlas Mountains. As the road winds from one place to another, a varied palette of stones create swirly textile-like patterns across the undulating hills, producing a breathtaking variety of ever-changing landscapes. A mountain in the shape of giant tagine cooking pot rises up to the sky along the way. On the ground, pebbles and larger stones have been arranged in piles by the roadside to communicate a myriad of messages; no entry, a place of prayer, a boundary marking the road’s edge, a sheer drop, and other possible alerts left by and for travellers and nomads. The hooded cloaks of the sun wizened men of the Maghreb seem to mimic the mountain peaks. And, late in the day, these pixie-like men sit in groups to appreciate the mountains, which all too soon will block out the rays of the evening sun.

Read more: Notes on Morocco Part II