Voyages Through Time: Rose of Nevada

 

Today I caught up with the movie Rose of Nevada.  I came away with that familiar feeling  with movies of this genre,  that a coherent meaning was obscured  from view. As  a consequence it was difficult to find sympathy for the characters and their relationships in each time frame. Without some kind of signpost we find ourselves using much of our mental and emotional resources just to piece together and grasp a narrative. 

I found myself finally able to accept this technique, but by then my feeling was disinterested detachment from character, and I looked more at the surface techniques, including the extraordinary realism around the storm. It is the kind of movie, such as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer or Memento, where time slicing is a vital part of the narrative. So, a second viewing becomes more enlightening and the experience becomes richer.

Such  films that fragment time ask us  to do significant intellectual work, but there is usually an emotional anchor that keeps us invested while we solve the puzzle.

 In Memento, it is Leonard's desperate search for meaning; in Oppenheimer, it is Oppenheimer's moral and psychological journey. Even when the chronology is fragmented, the emotional trajectory remains relatively clear.

Rose of Nevada seems less interested in such emotional identification. It works around atmosphere, memory and place. The characters often feel like discrete, disconnected figures in a folk tale or legend rather than fully developed psychological individuals. That may be intentional, but it comes at a cost. We expend  energy simply trying to establish "where" and "when" they are. For me at least, not a lot left over for  empathy.

So, "disinterested detachment" sums up my initial response. Maybe this mirrors the way the film is crafted?  I have learned after viewing (I tend not to read reviews before seeing a movie)  that the movie was shot without sound, and all the sounds – voices as well as all else, were dubbed in afterwards. Oddly distant dialogue, the slightly unreal soundscape, and the fragmented timescales all placed  a layer of distance between me and what was in front of me.

The storm sequence is perhaps the clearest exception to this direction of trvel in the film. Here, narrative uncertainty becomes irrelevant in these isolated action snapshots. The sea, the boat, the weather, the physical peril—these are immediate and comprehensible. Here, the technique adds to  the experience rather than obscuring it. I found these sequences, and the business of catching, gutting and storing the fish,  among the most compelling for exactly that reason.

So yes, a second viewing of Rose of Nevada  is for the best, though I think there is an important distinction with Rose of Nevada compared, say, to a  second viewing of Memento. Here, a second viewing (I haven’t tried it yet) should reveal how meticulously the narrative has been constructed. We expect the  puzzle pieces to click together, because that is the story, and the story lose ambiguity and brings a clarity by its end. With Rose of Nevada, I am not entirely sure that a second viewing would lead to that kind of resolution. Rather, it would just help me to stop worrying about the puzzle and attend to other things: the imagery, the sound design, the symbolism, the sense of Cornwall as a place haunted by its own past. And all that.

So , thinking on awhile, Rose of Nevada  has something in  common with modernist literature than with puzzle-box cinema. For example, reading The Waste Land for a second time – or even umpteen times -  does not necessarily “solve” it; instead, once we are  less anxious about understanding every reference, we begin to notice patterns, echoes and moods. The experience deepens without becoming entirely transparent.

That raises the question of what kind of satisfaction a film owes its audience. I suppose over these years of looking at  traditions around  modernism through art cinema and modernist poetry, we know that ambiguity and uncertainty are watchwords. But for me anyway,  ambiguity works best when there is still something solid to hold onto—character, emotion, theme, image, or story.

So for me,  Rose of Nevada is too ambiguous. It asks  too much of the audience before it has earned an emotional investment. It’s not just me saying  "I didn't understand it."  The film’s  artistic method and  ambitions compete with, rather than support, its human drama.

I will see it again: I am confident my opinion will shift, like those gutted fish on the trawler's deck!

 

Alone on a Wide Wide Sea

I have just read "Alone on a Wide Wide Sea" by Michael Morpurgo, prompted by the enthusiasm of my Granddaughter. A children’s adventure novel certainly, but beneath that it is really a meditation on exile, memory, loss, survival, and the sea as both destroyer and redeemer.

Morpurgo’s novel draws on the real history of post-war British child migration schemes that sent thousands of children to Australia, often with terrible consequences.

The novel is divided into two linked journeys.

The first half tells the story of Arthur Hobhouse, an orphaned boy separated from his sister Kitty after the Second World War and shipped to Australia as part of a child migration programme. He arrives believing he is being given a new life, but instead finds exploitation and brutality on an isolated farm in the outback. 

Arthur survives through friendship and resilience. Morpurgo drives the narrative forward, describing a series of Arthur's life-events which captivate the imagination, and links us seamlessly to the second half.

The second half shifts to Arthur’s daughter Allie, who undertakes a solo voyage from Australia back to England. I will avoid spoilers, tempted as I am to share some magical moments which permeate this narrative. Suffice it to say that Allie's journey becomes both literal and spiritual: an attempt to reconnect broken family lines across oceans and generations.

What makes the book linger in the mind is not merely the plot, but its atmosphere of immense distances — emotional as much as geographical.

Morpurgo uses images of horizons, empty oceans, birds, stars, and weather. The title itself comes from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the albatross motif consciously echoes that poem, which is a feature of the story. The sea becomes almost metaphysical: indifferent, beautiful, terrifying, and yet somehow healing too.

In this novel, the story of healing is sublimely told.

I reflect on two themes here: the story of the Cospatrick disaster which I researched with colleagues in 2024 for our local history group. And then my recent reflections on the life of H.W. "Bill" Tilman, whose many sailing adventures included the ocean around Cape Horn and the Atlantic, traversed also by Allie and described so dramatically and engagingly.

This story also belongs to the larger emotional history of British emigration — especially the severing of family ties through oceanic distance. The Cospatrick tragedy represented the Victorian age of migration: long sea passages, uncertain futures, and the terrible vulnerability of emigrants once they crossed the horizon. [ More about the Cospatrick is here ]

Here is a clip from a 1991 talk for the Wychwoods Local History Society. It is a moving account of the fate of one individual child at journey's end. 

There are several particularly striking parallels for those post-war journeys undertaken by Arthur in the novel: conditions in the 1870s, of course, were vastly different from those on post-WW2  vessels, but children were still travelling into the unknown with little agency over their fate, the sea functioning simultaneously as pathway and threat, the emotional violence of permanent separation from homeland and kin.

Memory preserved through small personal relics — in this novel, Arthur's talismanic key; in emigrant histories often letters, or keepsakes, discovered through research and enquiry over time.

In both the Cospatrick story and Morpurgo’s novel, one senses how migration was often narrated publicly as opportunity, while privately it could feel like abandonment, rupture, or exile, or worse.

Albeit in simpler language, Morpurgo writes about the the sea almost in the older literary tradition of, say,  Joseph Conrad  rather than modern children’s fiction. The sea is not merely scenery; it forms character and challenges assumptions. And we can see this operating in the stories of Tilman's expeditions, certainly.

Another interesting aspect  is how the novel treats memory across generations. Arthur’s memories are fragmentary and damaged — he barely trusts them himself by the end. Allie effectively becomes the historian of her father’s life, working with her family to trace her family story, piecing together identity through , travel, testimony, and objects. This resembles the work of local history societies in miniature such as ours: recovering broken human narratives from traces left behind.

Morpurgo’s prose is deceptively simple. Sure, we can classify him only as a children’s author, but books like this work because they understand that children’s literature of this quality can carry adult historical themes with skill and panache.

Two Small Figures: a History of Introspection

 

Here we are with some thoughts around two images I encountered over  half-century apart.  I came across the first image in  1967, when I was doing  German literature  at school. The course included Alfred Andersch’s novel Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund, in which the work of Ernst Barlach, his Lesender Klosterschüler — the Reading Monk — was a central image and important symbol. My copy of the book had the photo of the carving. I wrote about this here : Der Lesender Klosterschüler

The second encounter came recently, while revisiting the BBC documentary series Art That Made Us, which opens with the Anglo‑Saxon “Spong Man,” discovered in Norfolk. I enjoyed the co-incidence that  Norfolk was my domicile for many years, and that earlier blog piece on Barlach had been written there. The BBC documentary’s brief glimpse of the Spong Man prompted me to think some more about the clear and instinctive parallels which these figures present.

Two Figures, Two Worlds

At first glance, the Spong Man and Barlach’s Reading Monk belong to entirely different cultural universes. One is a small clay figure from the 5th or 6th century, found on top of  a cremation urn in an early Anglo‑Saxon cemetery. The other is a modernist sculpture carved in 1930, shaped by the artistic and political tensions of interwar Germany. Yet both are seated human figures gathered into themselves, their postures expressing a timeless interiority, in spite of the 1,500 years between their creation.

The Spong Man was unearthed at Spong Hill, Norfolk — the largest early Anglo‑Saxon cremation cemetery known in England. Its date places it in the turbulent period following the end of Roman rule New migrant communities were establishing themselves and religious life was a mixture of ancestral practices and emerging influences.

The posture is simple: elbows on knees, hands raised to the cheeks. Whether guardian, mourner, or ancestral presence, the figure conveys a moment of inward attention. The rough modelling does not disguise – but actually enhances -  the emotional clarity. It expresses a  capacity to turn inward to find solace  in times of uncertainty.

Ernst Barlach’s Lesender Klosterschüler belongs to a very different moment of transition. Created in 1930, it reflects the spiritual searching and political unease of the Weimar years. Barlach’s simplified forms and inward‑turned figures stood in opposition to the rising ideological rigidity of the period. His work was later denounced as “degenerate,” removed from public spaces, and in some cases destroyed.

In Andersch’s novel, the Reading Monk becomes a focal point for the moral imagination. Each character sees something different in the figure — spiritual inheritance, intellectual freedom, resistance to oppression. The sculpture’s bowed head and gathered posture represent an enduring stillnes. More about this is in my earlier notes in  : Der Lesender Klosterschüler

Despite their differences, both sculptures rely on posture as the primary means of expression. Their inwardness is conveyed not through facial detail but through the geometry of the body: the Spong Man forms a compact loop of thought, the limbs enclosing the head. The Reading Monk forms a downward arc, the robe and bowed head creating a sheltered space of concentration.

Both figures simplify the human form to reveal an interior life. Each came into being at at time of cultural instability — one after the collapse of Roman Britain, the other on the eve of totalitarianism.

Notes:

The comparative observations on posture and inwardness draw on  publicly available information from:

- Norfolk Museums Service for archaeological information on Spong Hill

- The British Museum (which holds the Spong Man) for basic object detail

- The Ernst Barlach Stiftung (Foundation) for biographical and catalogue information on Barlach