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2009-07-29T09:42:00.005+01:00

Film Reviews

RESPONSE

2009-07-29T09:41:00.001+01:00

14 Mins 2009

Whilst out walking in Newcastle Sarah, a woman in her late fifties is approached by a young man, Jamil. As their encounter unfolds, urgent questions are posed about the consequences of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

CREDITS

CAST
SARAH : CAROLE LUBY
JAMIL : WILLIAM EL-GARDI

CREW
CAMERA : MAT FLEMING
SOUND : CHRISTO WALLERS
EDITOR : ROBERT HARGREAVES
MUSIC : CATH AND PHIL TYLER
WRITTEN PRODUCED DIRECTED : ADRIN NEATROUR

SPONSERED BY : THE STAR AND SHADOW CINEMA

Click titles below to read review

2008-08-24T13:56:00.000+01:00

Blissfully Yours

2008-08-24T13:55:00.002+01:00

Blissfully Yours - Apichatpong Weersethakul - Thailand 2002

Viewed ICA cinema 2; 20 - 03 - 05; ticket £6-50

natural arousals

Apichatpong’s film is an inflowing from another world. A world where there exists a vision of an opening up of bodies to nature in a way that almost inexpressible in the West. Perhaps because ‘nature’ ‘the natural world’ has become for Westerners, if not merely a cartoon backdrop to be exploited, then a metaphore or allegory relating to our own condition rather than place in itself.

In Western cinema/literature, nature is often caste in the role of an allegorical hand maiden, with appropriate signification as hand baggage. Woods, forests, rivers sea shore often enjoy a cameo role - a moment of idyll in a film - a break out from the motivational lines of force driving the characters to the appointed and scripted ends. Sometimes in films like Elvira Madagan nature is used to poignantly offset the machinations of the social machine, or in survivalist Hollywood scripts nature ends up caste in an adversorial role.

Blissfully Yours starts in the town. A quest to solve the problems of the town, trying to sort out the papers of an illegal immigrant. All the usual hassles you get in static unyielding environments governed by beaurocracy. Then suddenly the film takes off. Apichatpong takes to the wing with his camera and flies away from the square static ungiving urban environment. In a series of sensuous languorous tracking shots filmed from the rear window of the car we watch as if on the magic carpet of some magician. the road behind us uncoil like a snake or a tongue or a stiffening penis. In the view from the rear window we leave behind not just the concerns and fixations of the town but move into a new time dimension governed by a different set of beats rhythms and fluxes.

The natural environment of Apichatpong is neither an idyllic nor allegorical place. It is a place where a different governmental order is at work, and in Blissfully Yours the woods and streams and vallies of Western Thailand are place where three characters Min, Rooug and Orn give themselves to this order. They don’t cease to have problems or identities, the subjective world doesn’t change. Simply these things now have different expressive context in which they have another dimension of value. Nor is the forest a place where story has any part to play - this is not a Western style film where the woods are a certain kind of narrative setting for ‘things to happen’. Narrative doesn’t develop in this natural domain. Experience does.

The forest is a place of flow: flow of images and sounds - sometime working together sometimes independently. Water wind the sounds of birds and other animals the flow of life - the ants. In the presence of this fluidity - raked with turbulance, for there is no flow without random occassional congestion and spasm - the three characters Min, Rooug and Orn (I think that two of them were played by non actors) adjust to the flows joining their own fluxes, tears body fluids semen skin urine thoughts so that the roar that is happening about them is happening in them. Nothing essential changes - there are not any answers either to Rooug’s or Min’s problems(some answers to the slight narrative questions[with a political resonance] posed by the characters are given as text during the end titles which is a warm and humane touch; not essential in the context of what we have seen) - the scenario becomes one flow with a multitude of tracks and notes.

In the last sequence of the film Rooug lying at Min’s side by the forest stream her fingers drift to the fly of his shorts open the buttons to reveal his cock. Her delicate lazy movement at last arouses him. The lightness of her finger touch uncoils him as he slowly swells up, flows through multiple forms, a snake transforming to a flower becoming an exotic snail a rich fruit and finally a cock. In its own time another final flowing before we go and know that we can take nothing with us. The forest is one of those machines - you leave everything behind.

adrin neatrour 25 03 05

Cairo Station

2008-08-24T13:55:00.001+01:00

Cairo Station - Youssef Chahine – Egypt 1958 78 mins Fariq Shawqi; Hind Rostrom
Viewed Lumiere Cinema London 12 May 2007 ticket price £6-00

Retrocrit

Coming off the rails
Chahine’s movie is a melodrama in an adapted neo-realist form that has an assemblage of concerns sustained by a circuitry of social tensions. The concerns and tensions realised are embedded naturally into the film’s setting at the very junction of life in 1950’s Egypt – Cairo Station – a crucible for the contradictions and strains experienced by a rapidly changing society whose population is exposed for the first time to completely novel external stimuli imported from the West. The exposure takes place within a deeply conservative religious social matrix which at this moment is without coherent response beyond conditioned distrust. Individuals are left free to make their own responses and precarious adjustments to the new psychic demands of Westernism.

The focus of the action revolves around two groups: the male porters in Cairo central station and the women soft drink vendors who sell their drinks illicitly without a license directly to passengers on the trains. These groups operate within the setting of Cairo station which location is the core of the film, a direct visual referent to the movement and upheavals of people, transforming their lives creating new possibilities new dangers for Egyptians. The locomotives themselves, hissing blowing extracting power out of coal and steam, are the engines of change. Wrenching the peasants from the land and transporting the middles classes to new fields of desire and delight. The rail tracks criss-cross multiply and divide lead to and from everywhere diverting directing attracting and expelling. For the bourgeoisie these tracks are empowering allowing them the better to exploit and multiply new opportunities. Chahine’s main focus is to chronicle the new constant of endless movement of people from the country to the town, the relentless pressure of the periphery upon the centre.

One of these pressures is exemplified in the unbridled public appearance and behaviour of the women vendors. In their work none of them wear scarves and they are possessed of a primal sensuality that is typical of their class status and age group throughout Europe but atypical in rural Egypt from where they originate. It is an image however that one suspects that has been imported into this culture through foreign influences – European and American films - projecting public images of woman at odds with traditional Islamic beliefs. These women of Cairo Station are earthy and coarse flaunting their bodies playfully as they make their way through the trains selling soft drinks. There is one scene in particular that is telling. The main woman character having boarded a train in the station, ends up dancing in one of the carriages as a travelling American bebop group let rip. Her dance is unabashedly and unashamedly modern western and physical, and close to the male foreigners emphasises her female anatomy. In Italy or France it might be accepted: but in an Islamic country it is endemically problematic. Chahine has wired this scene into his film because it is the point at which the relentless outer movement of people finally communicates itself to resonates and intensifies in the female body. And it is at this point, the issue of female sexuality, where the Western form of the modern would comes off the rails in Egypt. The dance ends when her boyfriend, one of the porters, sees what she is doing, chases and catches her, and gives her a good beating.

It is this same vendor’s displayed femininity that triggers the main chain of events in the film. One of the characters a recent immigrant who is lame and works at the station selling newspapers covers the walls of the hut where he lives with Western style pin-ups. This masturbatory environment is paralleled by his obsession with a sex slaying case that has blanket coverage in the newspapers: a young woman’s severed body has been found in a trunk by the railway. The lame news seller latches onto the soft drink vendor, whose physicality overwhelms him and whose life becomes reduced to his desire to possess her in the same way that he possesses his pin-up girls. Unable to persuade her to return his ‘love’ because ‘she’ plans to marry one of the porters, his obsessive masturbatory urges overcome him and he sets out to trap and kill her as a way of completion and actualising his fascination with the dead woman in the trunk who is now psychically fused with his frustrated object of desire. The cripple’s plan miscarries. He stabs the wrong women and is eventually chased and trapped outside the station shed on the very tracks that have led him to Cairo.

At this moment when the killer is disarmed and captured - the film’s final sequence - Chahine as director/ writer orchestrates an extraordinary ending to the action so that the film becomes both a provocation to and a manifesto of modernism. The killer is not arrested and taken away by the police. It’s the emergency psychiatric services that have been alerted and who apprehend him, strapping him into a straight jacket before bundling him away. Chahine refuses to see his killer as a simple perpetrator of wrong as would almost certainly be the case in a Western film. Chanhine refuses to demonise the newspaper seller; to cover him with the mantel of evil; the killer is a victim of forces that have deranged him. And it is important to note that throughout the film the lame seller is never simplistically villainised; in Chahine’s treatment of him there is always a residual affective sympathy. Chahine’s statement is the prescient observation that in a real and meaningful sense in the coming maelstrom of change in Egypt it would have to be understood that all were victims, the quick and the dead.

adrin neatrour

Kill Bill 2

2008-08-24T13:52:00.000+01:00

Kill Bill 2 - directed by Quentin Tarantino - 2004 - USA

Uma Thurman - David Carradine

The cosmos is the source not only of all energy but also of course of the ultimate joke, if there’s anyone who can stick around long enough to laugh.

At the point where the world’s human society needs a certain relative sobriety as it knocks on the door of oblivion, the cosmos sends Dubya to jolly along the eschatological machinery. On an average day, Dubya with his pinched face expressions depicting endless varieties of suburban bewilderment, hams through the force fed words cooked up by the back stage writing team. As performance its par for the Pres part in an Austin Powers film romp about the White House, alternatively Bush would not have been out of place in Dr.Strangelove, in fact it sometimes looks like he studied the Peter Sellars performance in the Pres role and so perfected the craft of welding technology to stupidity.

And Tarantino? After watching KB 2, I see him as part of the same cosmic joke as George W. It’s not really a question of whether it’s good or bad president or film (though I thought it was a boring ponderously scripted mono-paced film) but, of how comfortable you feel with sound of your own laughter. In terms of plastic art KB 2 is true comic book homage to the culture that spawned the Dubya presidency. (Carradine towards the end of KB 2 gives one of his tedious talks, this one about Superman’s nature, to Beatrice which seems to almost send her asleep despite the fact she is being well paid to stay awake) Dubya culture has at its centre the core beliefs that: you kill people you don’t like or who don’t show respect and after you’ve killed them it’s like they never existed; the sanctity of the family; the real belief that we don’t actually have bodies - because the body is a source of limitation embarrassment discomfort and dysfunction so it is better replaced by systems of circuitry, centrally programmed and held together by a tightly sutured integuments.

When the body is functioning correctly as a series of circuits it is as if it were without organs. The final element of the Dubya/ Tarantino belief system is that: time is a sort of the black hole in the political subsystem without any real inconvenient reference flow like past present and future. Time is something that is simply manipulated to foster credulity. One outcome of this approach to time is that as a consequence consequentiality takes a particular direction like light in a dark star. Other people’s actions against you will have consequences for them, but your actions against others have no consequences for you.

The Dubya and Tarentino belief system is as effective a shield as that possessed by any of the American super heroes in that it protects the user experiencing any effect whatsoever from the results of their own behaviour. At the more superficial level the belief system insulates the user from the anxiety of imagining that any enemy - to whom they are alerted - might be able to better them. But the significance of the belief system is really at the psychic level so that the experiences such as of killing people, stomping on people’s eyeballs, being threatened with death, have absolutely no effect on one’s capacity to be a loving caring mommy, which is the most important thing you can be. The reason for this is that body and brain are separate wiring systems, and within the brain the emotional and rational killing systems comprise different circuits and there is no interface or interfeed.

Occasionally there might be some bleed through as in KB 2 when Beatrice comes back home to Bill and BB. However competently wired up individuals such as Beatrice can cope with this sort of minor stress by fixing gaze upon the darling faces of children.

Tarantino’s response to the current ideological need of the American political system is to deliver a mythological tale where the heroine is not a loner in the absolute sense of the term. In the older myths the one (almost always a he) who was called upon to defend the homeland was an isolated psychic entity.

One who was apart from others and society through the experience of death and killing. Even the good killer was something of a sociopath, made dirty by the experience of killing. Killers were of few words. The world of women and family, children was not the world of the hero who worked with death.

But this sort mythic image seems increasingly out of kilter with the evolving needs of American imperium: an imperium in which both men and women are front line pawns. A different sort of mythic wiring system needed to be designed so that the offered prospects of service to America, whatever its form, could offer the recruits a cognitive ideology that permitted them to enjoy both the killing and their families, without blinking. Both worlds were OK, and in no wise essentially contradictory because it is a world without consequences for the right actors. Also the children are in no wise effected as long as things look right. So mummy can kill daddy, but as long as mommy’s well groomed and her hair’s nice the daughter doesn’t miss daddy. General grooming, use of the right products and a finely tuned suburban fashion antennae are all part of the ideological kit, all part of the wiring.

That’s about it. Tarentino is now busy constructing the myths required by the American empire to bind the populace into the new wired up belief system that you can have everything at no real personal cost. Tarentino might try to contend that KB 2 is simply a tongue in cheek strip of American Gothic, but the cosmic delivery system often works most effectively in joke mode, particularly when large numbers of people don’t get the joke: Bush for President! Anyone?

I am sure that Tarantino et al had fun (another important ideological concept of the Empire) whilst making KB 2 but I think that as film maker he seems to have lost the flair to do it. The use of filmic patina the black and white sequences only reinforces obvious function of these sequences to effect a retro ‘40s noir heroic reading. His camera is also big into texture - skin plaster, wall, wood but my feeling is that this prominence of texture is no more than a device to give a real feel to the unreal. The film plods through predictable locations stocked with predictable characters such as the psychopathic crazy loner, the old kung fu master with big stick to beat students. All the clichés are here - Bill himself as a latter day Charlie of angel fame -but both the shooting and the script are laborious overwrought and overdeliberate as they are in poorest examples of the Gothic revenge genre.

The lines handed out to Carradine in particular are the worst, mainly because he has a lot of them and his scripting reminded me of the loud mouthed self important flatulent producers that you meet at media parties: their only interest is themselves. All the dialogue, Thurman’s VO included, had the same archeness of writing and delivery. Somehow I imagined that at one time Tarentino was capable of deft use of words, but that was perhaps when he was telling stories, now he is peddling ideologies.

adrin neatrour 2nd May 2004

The Silence between two Thoughts

2008-08-24T13:50:00.002+01:00

The Silence between two Thoughts - Babak Payami - Iran - 2003

The Other Cinema - London 12 June 04

In Iran they imprison filmmakers for making films and censure and ban their films. The mullahs confiscated the negative of Babak Payami’s film but he pieced it together from scraps and virtual slithers garnered from one light colour rushes tape and captured fragments.(I remember when the US abandoned their Iranian embassy in 1979 after the Islamic revolution the CIA station shredded all its secret files and the revolutionary guards spent 5 years reconstituting these shards of intelligence back to their complete and revealing substantial form) Payami’s restored film in a battered and desaturated print shimmers through the projector an assertion of life over death, voice over silence.

Two thoughts - they can only be life and death. The village has been overwhelmed by a regime, a curse of death which advances as a polyevaporative force sucking out the moisture from life, leaching the water from the earth. The camera becomes one with the relentless creep of this spreading dryness tracking and panning with the process of desiccation.

The village has been duped or tricked in to accepting the religious authority of a prophet called Hadji. The belief system postpones the execution of a virgin so that she may first be deflowered and with hymen broken caste down to hell. The executioner, the film’s protagonist stays his hand. “But where is it written ?” he asks of Hadji. There is no answer. Only silence. Perhaps it is written in the sand. The executioner becomes silence. His brain is dried out by the aridity of a theology that can equates hymeneal blood with the blood that is death. “...where is it written? There is no reply. He is turned to stone. Like the crumbling walls and cracking surfaces. Dry and silenced. Tongue tied. No answer to the riddle of the virgin. Tongue tied. He has no words to say no. He has no lines of escape. When theological or ideological babble sequester the working of mind silence is the price that is paid. In the dryness of the silence death comes and leads the way forward through the half light into darkness. The riddle of the virgin is necessary.

As the film moves over the psychotic landscape from face to wall to earth the dryness lays over the village like a spell in a fairy tale. Like the impenetrable vegetative growth that surrounds Sleeping Beauty. The impenetrable babble of dried out theology covers everything. This is a film of dust. As with Marx and with fairy tales situations change because of they are unable to contain the forces of their own inherent contradictions. It is possible to awake from the dream. The numinous quality of water and women force open our eyes. In their wild dance at the end of their pilgrimage the village women release a sweated energy which smashes the circuitry of dryness and takes possession of the film. In the sequence after the dance of the women there is the moment of water. A moment of magic which breaks the spell of dryness. We awake from the spell. The young virgin prisoner stands in front of a fathomless dark container of crystal clear water. At this point only an action can destroy the silence not words. Her hands break the surface of the water immersing completely combining with the fluid. At once the curse is banished the weight lifted. Too late for those trapped in silence. Afterwards it is not possible to know if anything has changed, we cannot see that far but dryness has experienced the power of water to germinate and purify.

Adrin Neatrour 21 June 04

Bamako

2008-08-24T13:50:00.001+01:00

Bamako – Abderrahmane Sissako – 2006 – Mali France Belgium
Viewed Star and Shadow Newcastle – 22 April 07 Ticket price £4-00

There is an Africa of anger and an Africa of surfaces

The setting for Bamako, also the capital city of Mali, is a humble domestic courtyard where people get on with the business of living; within this courtyard Western economic institutions are on trial for their amoral business dealings with Africa. The business of the trial and a business of life proceed interpenetrating and weaving through each other. Both present a surface to the viewer, but the nature of the surfaces presented by the trial and by life are different.

In the expressive setting for Bamako Sissako has invented a kind of visual pun, in that a court of law is contained within a courtyard( the pun also works in French which is the vehicular language of the film) And of course this pun also points to Bamako’s playful cosmological inversion in which the lesser contains the greater so that the majesty of the law in all its vastness can be folded into the smallness of a Bamako back court in all its nominal insignificance. It a sort of quantum Carolean logic which Alice would understand. All the grand institutions – the World Bank – corporate capitalism – globalisation – amount to so much the less than the lives contained in this ordinary domestic backyard. However much these lives are exploited by the workings of corporate greed and Western avarice there is not one iota of doubt that the dignity and worth of the lives in the yard have more value than the absent and abstract forces that seek to rob them. And that the values they represent of humanity life and warmth will outlive the cold meanness of those who would deprive them of the means to live their lives.

Bamako works on the senses and on the intellect using the sound and picture inputs as different strata within the film. The trial with all its accounts represents a surface of reality, what is seen when anger and the consequences of Western economic policies finally come to the surface: after the shipwreck the bodies and the flotsam and jetsam. Intellectually Sissako conducts the trial in the form of summoned voices that detail the disasters that the last 20 years of Reagonite driven aid and global financial ideologies have visited upon almost the whole of Africa. The words are those of ordinary Africans and despite the formal nature of their utterance the voices in their warmth and urgency tell us directly why Africans are being driven from Africa: it’s the economy stupid. The Europeans or rather ordinary European citizens whether in Spain France Italy or the UK stand first aghast and then with anger and resentment at what they see as the unstoppable tide of economic migrants flowing across the Atlantic and the Med towards the chimera of European employment and riches. What we don’t comprehend or perhaps don’t want to comprehend are the forces that have been unleashed in Africa that have brought about this situation. It was not always like this. The implementation of a World Bank lending regime that links loans to the opening up of markets and infrastructure services (water transport education) to predatory globalisation practices of private enterprise and corporate capitalism; the debt burden, from unequal and often leveraged loan agreements, despite Geldoff and Blair, Africa still repays a huge proportion of its income to the West. The consequence is a continent that is impoverished, an impoverishment that is growing, a tragedy that is deepening. The migrants who turn up on our doorsteps are there because of us, what is done by the economic systems that give us our daily bread and feed our desire. So in Bamako it’s Africans themselves who tell it as it is; it’s their story and we should listen shouldn’t we don’t we do we?

If it’s the everyday quality of the African witnesses that make the audio stratum more than a polemic, the picture stratum of Bamako comprises an altogether other dimension of the film creating a specifically optical experience. What we see is primarily the surface of Africa: like the surface of the moon beautiful. Western filmmakers don’t film this face of Africa; they usually shoot Africa as a colourful exotic backdrop to their action image movies. To film surface you need a camera that is not restless; a camera that is allowed to stop and observe what is there accessible to the eye. In Bamako Sissoko is not particularly interested in what lies under the surface. There are enough pictures of suffering Africa; there is enough soap opera grimacing. Sissoko avoids images that make immediate direct appeal to the emotions that create a world of feeling with which the viewer would be called to empathise. Images used in this way would have been crude reinforcers of the audio stratum. There are in Bamako some strips of action: about a man in the courtyard dwellings who is very ill, the club singer, but they are shot as part of the ongoing stream of life, they are observed from the outside with no permission implied to come inside these stories; no affective invitation. The visual stratum of the film is filled out with attention to surfaces and textures that are filmed with a primal protean sensuality. This is Africa! This is Africa! Not America nor Europe: only in Africa these surfaces across which I take you as across a continent of light texture and touch. Africa that is most vibrantly warm and whose energy vibrates through light. Sissoko composes his visual stratum out of texture and surface: painted walls – the walls saturated colours that bleed onto the screen; adobe interiors – dark spaces built from the earth of the continent; black skin – silken voluptuous absorbing human; textiles – patterns colours alive as animals or plants. Take the surface that’s what’s here.

This is Africa its surface is as real a statement as the surface of the earth seen from space. It tells its own story. In one sense there is only surface in life: the rest is supposition or projection. It’s a philosophical proposition. As are the final verdicts of the trial: that it is not Africa that owes to the West and its financial institutions, but these institutions that owe something to humanity.

adrin neatrour

The Fog of War

2008-08-24T13:49:00.002+01:00

The Fog of War - Errol Morris 2003 USA

Seen Tyneside Cinema Newcastle UK

I think that the Fog of Film is a good alternative title for this movie. Film technically becomes fogged if exposed to light before going through the gate of the camera; artistically film gets fogged when the marketing intentions of the film makers delimits or distorts the light they can throw on the subject.

At the core of this film there is a deeply ingrained dishonesty, in which the film’s structure and presentation confer a protective halo over the person of Robert McNamara (US secretary of Defense 1961-67). Whatever ‘mistakes’ McNamara admits to on camera such as the US declaration of war on North Vietnam and the subsequent carpet bombing of Vietnamese civilian populations, the film as vehicle transposes and elides these acts and omissions into mistakes, understandable mistakes rather than the consequence of deeper malaise in an empire out of control. The interview of McNamara’s with its artsy framing, tasteful background, continuous jump cuts, slick computer graphics and archive footage represents the triumph of style over substance.

The USA as a deeply conservative and conformist consumer society has developed a culture that validates and evaluates reality through appraisal of image. The concerns of the makers of visual products are often to control and validate outer expressive gestures tokens and signs at the cost of disregarding inner meaning. This predominant concern with image and style at the expense of a concern to seek out the truth is particularly disturbing in documentary film about such a key figure in the development of US foreign policy. But it is perhaps an inevitable concomitant of the featurisation of documentary films which now pitch in the market of the large corporations to attract investment, either at the production or distribution end of the process. The fog of film.

In Errol Morris’ film some of McNamara’s insights about what was happening in Vietnam have salience for the American Empire’s contemporary foreign policy, but he doesn’t talk about the internal driving mechanism of policy - long term industry and military perspective. He doesn’t want to, and he’s a man who only talks about what he wants to, on his terms. Like a written or unwritten contract. But the result is that the overwhelming impression left of McNamara, is of McNamara as image. The old senator, the Avatar who has achieved wisdom, the survivor who has a message for us from the past. This image however is communicated not just through the form of the film - the intercut interview - the settings - the cutting - but through its structure. The Fog of War is structured as “Ten Lessons and an Epilogue” which leads the viewer of the film towards a quasi pedagogique reading with strong religious overtones. This structure gives to McNamara an aura of the wise one and induces an inclination towards reverence, an inclination reinforced by the soundtrack.

It was the Philip Glass score that alerted me to the nature of this film as a marketing device selling Robert McNamara rather than an instrument trying to seek truth. Glass’ piece is a very classy contemporary score, restrained almost to a fault, mixing interesting percussive effects with moody modal sequenciations. Like the music accompanying certain kinds of adverts it is designed to make the selling proposition easy to swallow. The music evens out the film providing a consistent emotional tonality to the roller coaster ride of events punctuated by assassination wars deaths and bombings. The music works to unify the film in the same way that McNamara’s life is unified by his implicit claim to have attained wisdom as a reward for surviving. The selling proposition in Fog of War is that this is a classy piece of film making about a classy subject matter, Robert McNamara one of the erstwhile rulers of the planet. Meet the Avatar. Once he was a cold murderous Secretary of State for defense in love with mass bombing as a solution as long as was efficient; the bombs sent by his hand were responsible for mass destruction and killing mainly of Vietnamese but others as well. Now he is still cold but old and wise. Old and wise.

The pedagogique structure of the film, with its use of twee title cards informs us that he has attained the wisdom of age and has ten lessons and (of course) an epilogue to impart. Most of this wisdom amounts to no more than the specious knowledge contained in self help books sold at supermarkets checkouts - ten steps to enlightenment. McNamara’s wisdom amounts to turkey truisms dressed up in the fancy dress of the statesman: Truisms such as: never say never; you can’t believe all you see…etc. Morris might well reply that his objective was to reveal the vacuity and empty nature of McNamara’s wisdom by allowing the viewer to see and judge. But the structure of the film,. its score, its lesson structure, its artsy framing of McNamara with classy light paneled background, all these conspire to frame McNamara as a glossy image for reassuring consumption. Like a reassuring public service announcement for the benefits of growing old.

In relation to this last point and the idea that perhaps Errol Morris was really giving us the viewers the material we needed to make up our minds, I began to worry about all those little jump cuts in the master interviews. They are the sort of cuts, the ones we take for granted these days where continuity is no longer an induced state of mind but an illusion. In TV documentaries the situation is that if the guy under interview hums haws stops or digresses whatever, they cut out whatever they don’t like to keep the pace up, to rock and roll with the meat of the story. To cover obvious jumps in continuity, filmed interviews used to employ a device called the ‘cut away’ in order to literally cut away from the subject to another image, such as the interviewer nodding, and then cut back to the subject. This presents the illusion of a continuous stream of sense. Few film makers now bother with this laborious device, they just jump the cut; what we see is a funny little dissolve or a blip in the picture. Given that this convention is accepted, the effect is the same: to make the subject(in this case McNamara) appear fluid and controlled in intelligence: more fluent and focused than people in general are able to speak… erm…ummmm….long silence(prompt). All the little hesitations, all those signs of the fallibility of age, lapses of memory, all losing of the thread of thought, the meaningless digressions, are in effect censored. The point is that there were a lot of these jump cuts. I don’t know what or how much lies on the cutting room floor; I can only hazard a guess based on the observation that at times in the interview there were scarce 10 seconds passed without the characteristic little blip of the jump cut. The end result of this approach is McNamara is rendered by the Fog of War as an image: cut out all the crap and you’re left with the image of McNamara as a fallible but articulate old man who has attained wisdom in his old age. The trouble with such a filmic approach is that it starts to say less and less about the subject - McNamara in this case - than it does about the conceit of the film maker.

Robert McNamara tells how before accepting the post of Secretary for Defense he insisted to Robert Kennedy that he write his own contract. I can’t imagine that he insisted on a similar contract arrangement with Errol Morris. But perhaps he didn’t need to; because it was evident that Morris was going to make a high gloss film based on marketing led production values. Given the evident nature of the intended film, whatever the form of final product Robert McNamara knew that Robert McNamara’s image could only be enhanced as the subject of such a product.

Adrin Neatrour 8 July 04

Eyes Wide Open

2008-08-24T13:49:00.001+01:00

Eyes Wide Open – Jan open screening at the Star and Shadow featuring Filmmakers:
Craig Wilson; Mat Fleming; Brian ? ; Conor Lawless; Brighid Mulley. Irit Batsry; Tina Gharavi; Bill Ormond; David Aspinal, the Koreshi Brothers; Adrin Neatour; Unknown German Film Maker(UGFM)

Seen at Star and Shadow Cinema 24 Jan 08. Cost of entry – free for contributing film makers; non contributors: £4 and £3

Seeing’s believing

The Jan open screening was remarkable for the broad range of material screened and the extent to which the viewings were testimony to a state of affairs in which film rages across the landscape as a force that that is alive and vibrant.

The films viewed ranged in type from the tactile explorings of Brigid Mulley’s Fibres, the visual humour of Brian ?’s level crossing gates to Adrin Neatrour’s political statement, Echolalia. There was also material from other times so to speak, or at least from the ‘80s including the agitprop of Bill Ormond piece, a film in grand style about a grass roots movement in Newcastle opposing the extension into a public park of the city’s football stadium; Craig Wilson’s architypal punk video, Dead Boards,. In the homage section there were two films: Tina Gharavi’s Two Lighthouses remembering the poetry of Julia Darling and Irit Batsry’s 1989 video of Joanna Peled’s remarkable performance of the 4th sentence of Joyce’s Molly Bloom soliloquy . Most of the films screened were about film as a type of seeing: the filmmakers made use of film as an expressive form choosing to use possibility of film because it was the only medium which could tell what they saw – using the verb ‘to see’ in its wide sense to embrace perception understanding and ordering of reality as well as the pure visual faculty.

Conor Lawless’ Midio Vampyros Lesbos uses acquired footage which he modifies through his own software. In his film the picture and sound were run through a programme so that the individual notes in the Bach fugue triggered a picture in the looped footage of the same durational value as the note. On viewing the film engendered a mild disoriented state. I struggled to piece together what was happening. It was a pure film field in which mind experienced a certain sort of assault on its processing capabilities. But there was no other intention other than effect. As such it was like a media film lab experiment and the subject/partipant knowing the intention of the film was pure effect, could open up to the stream of images and sound allowing the effect to permeate and infiltrate consciouness. Nothing was being sold; there were no arrows of desire. And Conor’s film was a trip. A pure optical sound experience that took all those firing neurons in your head and momentarily tripped and scattered them in different configurations.

The last film exhibited was shot and projected on super 8 and made by in the early 80’s by an unnamed german film maker (UGFM)working in France. The scale of buildings used to say something about their importance and also focused attention on their specific function: church and mosque. law courts and legislative builidings, palaces theatres and cinemas. The contemporary built environment is characterised by a giantism whose only rationalisation is the economics of intense land use. We struggle still, even given our familiarity with these spaces to cope with these forms of modern architectural expression. Modern urban projects create environments to which we don’t know how to react, spaces which we don’t know how to describe and in which we still don’t know how to move our bodies, Spaces which dwarf us and render us temporarily mute and paralysed. We can’t easily possess these spaces. They tend to take possession of us. Graffiti and film are two modes of confronting(there are others) what is happening: graffiti by claiming ownership of place, film through its ability to be a force for understanding what is happening. In film we can move through them with or without a shopping trolley with or without trying to mutiliate them. As Deleuze notes they are not so much narratives as pure optical / sound settings. That is how we can approach them with our minds and bodies.

The UGFM’s film is not in itself original but the film realises a particular vision of this world of concrete steel and cardboard. Many of the settings and cityscapes captured have become familiar through contemporary film content: the Autoroutes, the vast housing projects, the rebuilt concrete town centres with their ramps and walkways, the shopping malls. These images are easily usable as visual clichés, but the fact that they can utilised as lazy short hand images or cheaply won metaphors is no barrier to their incorporation in forms other than the cliché: as poetry or as building blocks or sets of statements. Their use by the mind and the eye of the UGFM to reach into reality with a primal urge to make an utterance: in this case an utterance in filmic form that exploits the melding soft dyes of colour super 8 to express something that only film could express with this intensity of realisation. The manner in which the human form is both absorbed alienated entrapped and bewitched and set to abrupt cosmic scale in these modern built environments. The UGFM;s film perhaps not in itself original in the choice of its component parts, but it is an intense self validating response to contemporary settings and situations.

adrin neatrour

Lost in Translation

2008-08-24T13:48:00.001+01:00

A little way into Lost in Translation (LIT) as Bill Murray was going through his paces, he reminded me of an old news item I’d seen in the early ‘90’s. An item actually so long ago I can no longer remember if it was real or if I dreamt it. Whatever - in this memory George Bush senior is visiting China and is shown round a high tech factory. In wide shot, we see a picture of him as he enters a room full of Chinese technicians. As his Chinese hosts gesture and explain what’s happening, Bush peers out anxiously at the scene. In the close-up that follows the master shot we see his face clearly and that it divides into two expressive halves. In the lower section his lips are bared back into a rictus, a forced smile which suggests an attempt at the sort of expressive control demanded by convention and protocol, to show that he is engaged and interested in what he is looking at. But in the upper section of his face his eyes have this look of a threatened incomprehension. He doesn’t get what’s happening, he doesn’t understand all these funny little fellahs agitating around his knees. Or, perhaps old George was thinking of the ordeal that lies ahead in the evening to come. The 39 course Chinese banquet where he will have to ingest matter that possesses few of the qualities that Americans normally associate with food. Food that can choke you.

As with George Bush so with Bill Murray, LIT is a litmus paper from Hollywood marking the psychic chemistry underlying the basis of US foreign policy. Aggressive incomprehension. OK some people need no introduction or reminder of this psychic reality but it is worth pausing to think about the nature of the writer director of LIT, Sofia(wisdom-sic)Coppola. As evidenced here her work is representative of the experience and ambitions of a totally assimilated ‘second generation’ American. Her father’s films drew on his innate cultural experience and still had a residual italianate character. Daddy’s films, Hollywood in form, were invested with and exploited Italian American cultural experience. By the time we get to Sofia, this world hjas slipped off the map. Even in its superficial trappings, it is abandoned territory. With Sofia the new sensibility is of the shopping mall and the hotel room. Her film, and as writer director of LIT it is her film, gazes upon a world which she can shoot, she can buy sell and possess momentarily but which otherwise interests her very little.

At heart LIT is a travelogue tricked out with a couple of running gags. Gags such as - hey! Japan is weird - and we keep having this bunch of stuff happen - like its really funny you know - the thing is the japs - how d’ya know what’s going on - in their heads - you know. The second gag revolves round the portals of communication from home: like - like Bill - keeps getting these calls and fax right up his ass - stuff from his wife - like he can’t relate to it - in this weird Tokyo shit just doesn’t make any sense.

Intentioned or not the film depicts the brutal banality underlying US relations with other cultures. Minds brainwashed by suburban monogamy and homogeneity the American psyche is unable to comprehend the other. Unless strangeness is artfully arranged( Like flowers -hey the Japs are into that stuff) to accommodate their gaze the American feels trapped in a menacing and threatening environment. The response of LIT to ‘this other’ is at two levels.

At the level at which the film itself was conceived, the script written and developed, shot and edited - the response of LIT in structure and form is to target the Japs and the Jap culture as the butt of the joke. Deterritorialised within the vehicular language of Hollywood film scripting, the Japanese and their culture are characatured and ridiculed as being rigid frantic and utterly bizarre like Monte Python TV. The internal response contained within the film is that the two characters Bill and Scarlet(I’m sticking with their real names) being sensitive souls, in the face of this otherness, retreat to the sanctity and sanity of the hotel/asylum. They hide in the ensuite bedrooms and the American bar where they find comfort amidst the familiar and reassuring trappings of American corporate culture - a cultural milieu in which I suspect Sofia also finds comfort in times of stress.

In this comfort zone you can watch goofy Jap TV to confirm how right you are to be where you are. In the hotel room, Scarlet and Bill find each other and in each others company address some of life’s problems. Strange to note that as we watched Bill (or was it Scarlet?) channel hop the TV a scene from La Dolce Vita appears on channel and we see Anita Eckberg and a cat on screen. So Sofia has been to the video store or maybe raided Dad’s video collection to check out Italian neo-realism. Is this some sort of acknowledgement of LIT’s pedigree, a nod to the masters - a statement of her ambition?

Then I wondered if she had also checked out French new wave. A disconcerting thought occurred to me as I pondered other potential intellectual markers. I wondered if somewhere in the conceptual bowels of Lost In Translation there lurked Sofia’s attempt at an homage to Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour? A frisson of anticipation took hold of me when Scarlet got on a train to leave Tokyo during a travelogue section of the film. I wondered where she was going. Is she going to Hiroshima? So she and Bill can talk about important things back in the hotel room? To my relief Sofia wisely avoided sending her protagonist to Hiroshima. Sofia settled for sending her to the safety of Kyoto where Scarlet indulges some harmless Temple watching and spies a coffee-table wedding of a beautiful Japanese couple.

Actually Scarlet’s character even in terms of the films limited ambition to aim no higher than Bill’s amusingly receding hairline, is mildly disappointing. As a recently graduated philosophy student she is not allowed mention of a philosopher and confines herself to bobo questions to Bill relating to the great unknown - the American suburban marriage and its progress through time to the arrival of kids.

In sum LIT is a terrible movie but a dark parable. I don’t think anything is lost in translation its all there if you need any more dark Hollywood parables.

Adrin Neatrour Jan 2004

A History of Violence

2008-08-24T13:46:00.000+01:00

A History of Violence - David Cronenberg USA 2005 - Viggo Mortensen

Empty form

I think that David Cronenberg’s (DC) movie demonstrates – QED – the bankruptcy of the mainstream forms of Hollywood film making. A History of Violence is built around a back story that has been used many times before. It’s the story of the man -Tom - with the past - when he was called Joe - which comes back to haunt him. The film proceeds to fill out the machinations of the plot line with a series of graphically violent encounters as the protagonist Tom struggles to square his present reality with Joe, himself of yesteryear. It’s not that either the idea or the story do not have interesting possibilities. Rather it’s the way the film is structured round a series of violent set pieces that reduces the movie to the level of yet another parody. A History of Violence is tricked out with a stylistic hyper real look with regular measured doses of sex and violence and has made box office. But it is evidential testimony for the proposition that film based on narrative action image is now running on empty and that any attempt to make such films that do anything other than pander to the debased currency of entertainment is either the result of dishonesty or self deception.

The film is built up on a skeletal framework of five epically composed episodes of extreme violence connected by the narrative of the suburban man whose past is provoked into finding him. This key idea is a Jackle and Hyde schizo story in reverse, with suburbia as a drug induced state of catatonia, that is only relieved by engaging in acts of violence. Violence is the antidote that overcomes censorious inertia. Violence is a suppressed mode of behaviour that stems from a state of mind characteristic of earlier consciousness. America realised as a prepubescent repressive culture.

To highlight the shizo awakening DC employs his usual hyer-real stylised mis-en-scene. The film looks like its shot on HD with separation of foreground and backgrounds suggesting dis-association. This effect is reinforced by the set construction and of wide angle lens all working effect sense of distortion and proportion. Complementing the settings the action adopts a highly stylised and graphically expressed representations of violence. But for violence to work in this situation at any level beyond that of fantasy entertainment, the violence has to have some moral basis that grounds it within the fabric of the film. But moral basis there is not.

In the violence DC renders in all the usual vivid heightened details such as: a knife driven right through a hand, a neck crushed under the heel of a shoe so that the jugular blood shoots out, brains slurping out of a shot blasted skull. The overall effect is parody but even on its own terms within the movie the parody does not maintain a consistent moral line. This is evidenced in the first sequence of the film which shows the aftermath of the violent murderous robbery of a small motel by psychopathic killers. Before the leaving the scene of the crime one of the hoods is surprised by a little girl. The hood and the girl look at each other: we see the hood takes his gun aim and fire it from point blank range at the little girl. Cut. We do not see the little girl. Unlike the other scenes of violence we do not see what the bullet from this gun does to her body: DC cuts and switches the action. DC might say that he is working with a convention in which only ‘the badies’ get hurt. But in which case why have the little girl in the script? It is a moral failing that defines and typifies the film. Graphic violence is central to A History of Violence: it is the very premise of its structure. Throughout the film our retinas gaze on images of blood mangled flesh and crumpled bodies. Yet the most ‘shocking’ violence in the film is omitted. DC pulls away from it. He suddenly becomes reticent and shy as if he cannot allow himself to admit the full force of his own filmic logic. The scene is suppressed; perhaps even unshot. DC in making A History of Violence is caught up in the schizo contradictions of the culture as much as his subjects. Lacking any moral stature the film becomes just another exercise in style another vacuous violent exploitation flic. Empty parody without substance without life. A film for the dead like the zombie gangsters that inhabit its frames, but collapsed and without meaning.

The last shots of the Stall family having diner together is perhaps the low point of the film. This sequence, in which wife and son know the truth about Tom/Joe is shot without dialogue. We see the whole family eating around the table and cut to a series of close ups in which the faces reflect a sort of gross disturbance. DC seems to say that the horror of the knowing of truth has permeated their bodies their spirit, and results in the affect of this realisation streaming out of their sensory expressive organs. The visual effect acheived by DC is as if the actors are pissing with their faces, or about to be sick. As a coda it is at least in tune with the rest of the film: an overblown stylised affectation.

adrin neatrour

The Qeros

2008-08-24T13:45:00.000+01:00

The Qeros, directed John Cohen Doc 50 minutes. 1977

Shown at Side Cinema Sunday 6th November 2003.

A floating film about a floating world high up in the Peruvian Andies. A political film about gravity and what happens when you come down. Simply shot powerfully voiced record of a way of life that seems doomed to extinction as ruthless market forces gather in, like sheep, the last of the stray ecomonically free tribal groups.

The film is a journey that starts high in the mountains, miles up above man and ends down in the town with man. The opening shots look down on the clouds like the old gods and then reveal a stone landscape where the people and their animals float across the screen. Like the stone everything is hard, like the stone there is little artifice. Cohen does not make a faked sentimental picture of these people. They are as other people: some are arseholes, some fucked up. Death hunger and illness are tightly woven into life but the people endure though their culture which gives resiliance and resolve. The physical and the mental. Then gravity the elementary force exerts its pressure as the film moves forward and leaves the floating plain falling down the side of the mountain - first into the jungle.

The rain forest is vital to the indians as a source of seed for their maize crop. But they don’t like the rain forest because it stifles them entraps them chokes them pinions them, with its folliage liens and tubers. The film’s descent stops at the town of Cuzco. Cuzco is the fall. Outside the gates of Eden. The future. It is what lies in store for the Runi. In Cuzco we see the actualisation of the political and social process that reduces the Indian to the level of beasts of burdon, lumpen proletariat carrying huge loads for remote economic forces. Where once the Indian used the llama to as a pack animal, now they themselves take on this role. The loads are of extrardinary dimensions: huge unwieldy shapes strapped to their backs so that they look like exotic insects, beetles with huge carapaces. And these loads, pinion them and press them down.

The indians of Cuzco are not of the air. They do not float; they stagger through the streets heads bent and bodies doubled over. The Runi of Qeros walk lightly, heads upright parading wonderful colourful hats . In Qeros the Indians carry their own loads. They do not carry other peoples cargo. Their llamas carry the loads of corn up the mountains, but not more than 50 pounds. Neatly stashed and trim, the llamas carry easy; it looks a reasonable load, more reasonable than the the burdons that the Indians have to carry in Cuzco. The film floats because the Runi Indians are at the moment free of burdons; they do not have to lump cargo that belong to other people's econonmic interests. They survive where they are and on what they have, with tradition and ingenuity and their piercing flutes. Flutes that play notes that are light and etherial and which bear no relation to the heavy melodic despotism of the commercialised Spanish music. This is music as energy and being. The sounds owe nothing to world of products or any rules governing artistic form or content. The sounds the Runi make are of the air and travel though the thin atmosphere going where they please.

Despite the hardship of life the Runi have a freedom which also lets their spirit soar and a freedom to move without burdons. And this lightness is something you carry away when the film is over: perhaps you are glad that you don’t have carry the huge loads of the enslaved Indians; and you yearn to experience life above the clouds. I can still here the flutes, breathy atonal piping.

Adrin Neantrour 2003

more about John Cohen can be found at www.johncohenworks.com

The King

2008-08-24T13:44:00.001+01:00

The King - USA 2006 - USA -James Marsh; Gael Garcia Bernal, Pell James, John Hurt

Viewed Tyneside Cinema - Newcastle; 8 June 2006; ticket price £6-00

weirder And wheirder and whearhder

I was trying to understand why exactly this film left me so profoundly dissatisfied, and why being left in such a state bothered me.

There is now a well documented style of film-making, mostly but not exclusively comprising American film makers, that comprises ‘the Weird genre’. This genre was of course signposted by film noir and 50’s horror movies, and the path further trailed by David Lynch. The trouble is that as a genre most of the examples lead nowhere. Most of the films are trapped in a circularity of logic and they develop as a litany of caricatured poses and attitudes. Their banal content leads to a deadening of their dramatic form.

Of course all genres in their structural form are salient products of their culture. The Western in the course of its history moves from embracing the loner as a hero, to questioning his role and function. The scifi films of the 50’s with their plots that parallel the political paranoia of the era. Weird movies reflect societies where values of consumerist capitalism create characters who, beyond a surface performance of conformity, have little social cohesion, and who as individuals are released into a notional freedom driven by the desires of an object and product based culture. My problem with Weird lies in the fact that unlike the Horror Film, this genre draws heavily on the social matrix, but similar to the horror film, it has little to offer except an escalation of effect as the substance of its form. So the Weird as genre takes up the idea of a particular form of socially determined isolation, but is unable to develop it any way other than a circuit of amplification. It is the filmmaker’s lack of ambition to do anything other than devise gestes of amplification that grounds this movie genre in banality. This is the source of my frustration with James Marsh’s film.

One of the salient features of ‘Weird’ is to employ a narrative form that comprises a strip of action in which a character (or characters) experiences or provokes a chain of weird linked events. In ‘Weird’ the general rule is that no character in the movie is aware of the weird because most of the central characters are woven into the same level of perception. The characters may say: “That’s weird!” the comment is usually reserved for the ordinary. The weirdness of the characters is for the viewers gaze to observe and understand. In these genre movies ‘weird’ is a shorthand for personality types who have found a line of retreat or escape from society. Their retreat does not alienate them from the culture: rather their psychic response is of an unbalanced but exaggerated conformance to certain dimensions of the commercial/political culture. This is a trait they share as a defensive response with the exploited subjects of Colonial regimes. So in Weird movies, a common personality feature of the characters is, that figures of iconic status from the movies or from rock n roll/ pop culture, provide derivative models for character assemblage. The feeling you get in Weird is that character is a function of an egregious random assembly from the drifting flotsom of mass communications. A core central feature of the weird personality type is an inherent unpredictability caused by disintegration of the assemblage which disintegration is oftem key to the unravelling of the narrative.

In ‘Weird ’ the face of the protagonist is often the key geste of the narrative. In The King, Bernal plays Elvis - the eponymous lead - with an invariant fixed look that is dominated by the fixed set and tone of his eyes - the outer socket musculature of his eye socket is relaxed but the eyes have a glowering quality caused by hardening of the inner eye socket muscles. This look, an attitudinal affect, dominates the film. It works as a non reactive mask through which the film’s events of increasing violence flow without emotive registration. Bernal’s role is allowed an occasional lapse into a rictus: a tensing of the jaw muscles to form a smile or half laugh for the sake of social easement so that some level of interaction can be imputed to Elvis by the other characters.

The plots of Weird films, and ‘the King’ is typical in this respect, normally rely on a single device or motif to drive a concatenation of events which are either weird in themselves or to which the characters have weird reactions. The structure of the King takes the form of an escalation of the weird events and responses leading to a final act of destruction followed by an unresolved last sequence about which there are few doubts as to outcome. The weakness of ‘the King’ is that to explain the events that it depicts, the only referential logic is the dynamic of escalation demanded by the form of the film. This is often the case with Horror films but these usually allow total suspension of belief and work hard to parody both themselves and nature of our fears. ‘The King’ like other Weird movies, doesn’t want us to suspend belief, rather the opposite: great care is taken to evoke a realistic mis-en scene. However within the classical structure of film created reality director Marsh wants to evoke a simplistic belief that the world is weird, particularly America. But it is over the simplicity of this thesis that the film stumbles and finally trips.

‘The King’ is typical of its genre in that the scenario is a series of weird events linked by the central weird character. ‘Weird’ films are often hyper-real in style, but the King hovers somewhere between an expressive mode of realism and hyperrealism. The characteristic feature of ‘The King’ is that everything is subservient to the dominant concept of weird. The passage of time, constancy of character, ideas suggested by the script are all ditched in the rapid progress through the linkage of weird events. Director James Marsh seems particularly lost when trying to build any coherence of time in ‘The King’. Despite the fact that the film is built on a time line, and there is a pregnancy(incestuous) and other critical time based references in the film, the director simply gives up any attempt at control over temporal issues, the action image drives time. Time in fact hardly exists in the film: there is neither emotional time, nor spacial time or movement time. Instead there are simply a string of events that take place without any time reference. So states of mind, the mother’s perception of her daughter who has engaged on an incestuous affair, the pregnancy are all reduced to the banality of the manufacture of the escalation of events.

The locus for Weird movies such as ‘the King’ tends to be USA. But it is as a country that is more a psychic geographical place rather than a specific location. The Weird is of course a cultural product, and it’s interesting as a type of film about the world’s culturally dominant force. But characteristic films such as ‘the King’ are decontextualised, dehistoricised and depoliticised. The individual is king and controls everything within the contorted bounds set by the gentre. ‘The King’ left its mark on me asan empoverished strain of endeavor that contributes little beyond its membership of a particular class of movies.

adrin neatrour 10 July 06

Golf on TV

2008-08-24T13:43:00.002+01:00

Golf on TV - what you see what you don't

Were an uninitiated observer – say from the planet Mars –to watch a round of golf being played by two men at the Masters, would that observer understand that what he was watching was in fact a sporting contest? To judge by the intoned whispered BBC commentary you might think that what was taking place was some kind of religious ceremony.

After watching some play at the Masters 07 on TV I thought a little about what I had observed. Looking at the golf on TV with a naïve eye what seems to be happening is that small groups of men are walking round a large park. Sometimes large crowds are watching them. The men are not in any particular hurry. They stroll over the ground never breaking out of a certain relaxed stride. They are all smartly dressed in the sort of casual clothes you buy at a shopping mall. Some of the men carry large bags full of clubs; the men who use the clubs walk unencumbered. They stop from time to time and take a golf club out of its bag and strike a small white ball lying on the ground. They keep hitting their ball until they eventually get it into a little hole that has been drilled into a very smooth sward of grass. At this point they collect the ball and begin the process all over again.

Looked at from a certain point of view golf seems not so much a sport as rather a particular sort of statement endorsing a particular sort of life style: the suburban life style. It comes across as a ritualised expression of suburban etiquette, a carefully played out enactment of how suburban people should interact with each other.
Sport(in the modern sense of the word) is something else.

Sport is an activity in which individuals engage in rule bound opposition and competition. What is striking about golf is that these characteristics are minimalised. The players are not in head to head contest as in running or swimming events: the players do not square up to each other like gladiators such as wrestlers or tennis players or the team games such a football and cricket: the players do not contest for mastery of a bounded terrain – in the sense that they can manipulate the play area aggressively to the disadvantage of their opponent – as witness sports such as snooker or croquet. Golf might be thought to resemble sports such as discuss or gymnastics where opponents neither contest shoulder to shoulder nor face to face. But these sort of sports are characterised by taking place in a closely contained area, a pit, where all the contestants are bound together within a circle of competitive intensity. These sports also a in general characterised by explosive action of short duration. Golf shares few of these qualities.

In golf the action, the execution of a shot may be explosive (or not as the case may be – putting is a gentle touch stroke). But the game is a series of events taking place over the duration of about three hours during which the men walk through 18 holes laid out in a park, which is a diligently maintained space that represents the triumph of land management – landscape – over nature. The characteristic feature of the sport is that the contestants spend most of their time within the bounds of the game simply strolling engaging each other in occasional pleasantries and always behaving towards each other with the utmost decorum,

On the surface there are few signs that this is a contest – even at the top level of the professional game. The men walk from hole to hole: each plays his own game and tries to get his own ball home. There is little sense of urgency or of competition. You might if you did not know better suppose that what you were watching was some sort of charming male ritual, perhaps connected with fertility or even the church…..

At this point we have to take account of the suburban housing estate. In England and the US it is probably no accident that golf courses and the game itself developed and increased in popularity with the spread of suburbia. In the typical well to do suburban estate the houses are ideally all detached, set back from the street and fronted by tidy manicured gardens whose characteristic feature is either a smooth sward of lawn or gravel, bordered with flower or herbaceous beds. Where the houses face each other there is a broad road between them, or where, as in modern developments broad roads are too much a luxury even for the upper middle income brackets, the houses are set at angle to each other so that none directly overlooks another. To the untrained uninitiated eye the houses all look somewhat similar. The cars parked in the drives mostly look new and gleaming and if you catch the dwellers on their non work days they wear smart casual clothes purchased at the a local shopping mall. You might think that was it. Groups of similar looking structures occupied by groups of similar looking people who are minding their owe business. The estate design minimises sound spill between the units and sight lines between the houses do not facilitate easy visual monitoring between the units. This isn’t a community in the traditional sense but community in its modern incarnation: a group of people brought together because they all share a defining trait in common: in this case the people are brought into community by their shared ability to buy into a neighbourhood that has a high price tag. A community that has as a consequence of its elective nature, an innate sense of social status.

But these status conscious inhabitants are generally highly intra competitive. Underneath the surface of the monochrome estate there are often intense rivalries taking place between individual units for claims to public acknowledgment of status within the community. Competition in suburban communities tends to be understated – barely admitted to. Victory does not go to those who flaunt conspicuous consumption or their wealth. Victory goes to the understated display related to life style. Ostentation and vulgar symbols of wealth earn fewer status points than having the right expensive but conservative car, holiday in the right places, send children to the right schools, belong to the right clubs. Nothing announcers these signifiers as competition, but covertly (occasionally overtly) there is a competing ethos once you live there and understand what is going on.

Seen in the context of the suburban life style I begin to understand golf as a sporting contest, understated in form but real in substance. Golf is an extension of the suburban estate ethos, a life style that has adopted golf as its preferred form of sporting expression. From the outside of the estate you really see very little, what is happening is a closed off utterance. You see a group of unexceptional large brick houses, you see two guys watering the lawn. On the golf course the competition is not face to face, there is no overt agonistic display. no triumphant rictus or fist, no verbal aggression. It is closed utterance. But competitive it is, as two men walk a golf course in each others affective company, interacting politely and each taking it turn to play their ball. Just as competition exists on the suburban estate across all sorts muted indicators that are familiar and accessible to the urban anthropologist rather than to the sport’s fan.

What we have on the estate is a situation in which competition is incorporated into the life style itself, unstated but always present to the extent that it is a constant frame of reference for the inhabitants who have deeply internalised the rules of their status competition. By extension there is a similar ethos in golf as the preferred form of recreation of suburbia. It embodies a form of competition that is not directly visible, being a product of a lifestyle that in itself is intensely competitive whilst at the same time taking pains to deny that there is any competition (We’re all very friendly here!) In golf with its handicap system everyone should end up with more or less the same score; the real competition is mediated through a series of social and individuals testings which coalesce into pressure situations in which the individual has to demonstrate to his opponent that he can pass muster. Golf is not so much won or lost as a match but as a test of character, a test of showing that you are a person of sufficient self control to be a worthy game playing inhabitant of suburbia. It’s a pressure thing about control under pressure.

Even at the pro level golf is not a game played with a raw visceral self. Its played with a mask. Sports often reveal an undisguised and naked aspect or face of the individual. Defeat and victory release strong emotive forces that tear the social mask away from the individual. In golf the test seems to be whether one can keep the mask on all the time. To walk from tee to tee from ball to ball from green to green as if nothing very much was happening. To stroll across the park exchanging pleasantries and coded barbed comments without reacting to being in the game. Golf mimics the rituals of the estates from which it recruits. At the barb-b-q or Christmas party the overriding concern in interaction is with face. To grin smile and nod and laugh at the right cues and to be prepared to defend one’s status with appropriate gesture or form of words should it be subtly threatened undermining of one’s status. Golf like suburban life is played with a false self. A self that is construct of status and the primacy of self image. A round of golf like the company dinner party is ultimately a test of the robust nature of this false self, and the true object of the game as it has developed in its suburban ritual, even at the highest professional level, is to maintain this false self at a high level of operative efficiency.

This analysis shows golf to be a highly unusual sport in particular at the professional level where code of conduct is highly enforced (other sports of course have this – snooker for instance, but snooker players operate in a pit where the competition is direct and aggressively intended towards the opponent and where interaction with the opponent is not a necessary feature of the competition). The professional golfer are all very nice people who would be welcome as residents in any up market suburban housing enclave. For the professionals the self of emotions fears and desires is reined in and kept under control. They play with the mask an idealised self constructed out of suburban norms and value systems and this self regimented in the etiquette of middle class niceties is what we see in professional competition on the golf course.
It is no surprise then to understand that the golf course is also a special type of recruiting environment, able to inform the examiners if the applicant is one of us – able to sustain appearances under pressure able to perform with a false constructed self.

At this point I haven’t mentioned that the TV coverage of the Masters, and indeed all golf coverage fully accords with the mores of the game. The live from the course commentary delivered hushed tones in the reassuring rounded tones of middle England. The voices are respectful of everyone: the players, the organisation, the spectators and comply fully with the etiquette of the formal dinner party. The coverage and commentary are in relation to current TV and media norms in a sort of time warp, adopting a style and tone of reverence that are of an era when the media knew its place – as servants. It is interesting that the anchor studio role of Gary Lineker was criticised in many quarters – in particular it is said by the Masters organisers who didn’t like his style. Lineker’s attitude was in fact entirely traditional. His problem both in accent and tone was that he looks and sounds like that phenomenon known to all exclusive estates, an arrives who didn’t make the appropriate expressive moves and gestures to cover up his provenance. His crime was the old fashioned social faux pas of not having the decency to cover up or at least make his origins (working class footballer) acceptable unobtrusive.

As a final note on a point already alluded to, the golf course is a certain type of park. It is a high maintenance environment (one that is increasingly perceived in arid regions as destructive of environment on account of its demand for copious quantities of water) that is certainly a reflection of the idealised suburban world which supports it. It reflects a suburban view of nature: it has all the constituent parts of the natural world: shrubs, trees, plants, flowers and grasses(of which few people know the names). But this swath of nature is benignly ordered trimmed strimmed and managed. It is a non threatening environment and is part of the order of things that exist for the enjoyment of life style.

adrin neatrour

Crimson Gold

2008-08-24T13:43:00.001+01:00

Crimson Gold - Directed by Jafar Panahi

Iran 2002

Script by Kiarostami

The film opens with a revelation which encapsulates both the film’s structure structure and content: the opening credits - white on black - fade and the black shifts to one side to reveal we have been looking at the back of a shopkeeper who is being robbed. The camera remains at one fixed point throughout the long robbery sequence until at the end it tilts up as the robber Hussain calmly shoots himself. As it is at the end so it is at the beginning: both the film and Hussein travel the full circle,

The film is a continuous internal dialogue with Tehran as experienced through the cracked screen of Hussein’s motorbike. Crimson Gold depicts Tehran as a city that looks like ‘nowhere’ inhabited by people who don’t exist. Jafar Panahi and Kiarostami have a vision of Tehran as schizoid society unable to move, trapped in contradictions between repression and desire. And a society stalled by this conundrum is doomed to go round in circles going nowhere always on the same plane alwaays returning to where it began. In tune with this gyrating monotonous endless rhythm Hussein bikes round the highways of Tehran at night delivering pizza to the rich. The pizza itself, of course being round American style food delivered in plane square boxes. The Pizza is food that in itself contains opposing messages: the desired and the forbidden; to the poor it is just a meal; to the wealthy a social statement.

From a circle there can be no escape unless first you realise that you are in a circle. The performance of Hussein lies at the heart of Crimson Gold. It is performance of few words that grows in stature and nobility as inarticulately he moves foreward to irrevocably smash the circle - and at the same time within the temporal format of the film confirming its existence.

Hussein circles Tehran in his nightly work delivering food to the rich, and prowls round the wedding ring in the shop that he will never be able to afford. The night scenes are shot like affirmations of the idea of eternal recurrence. The eternity trap in which you will deliver Pizza for ever or until you die knocked off your motorbike. The Tehran streets unending necklaces of street lights; the dark citadels of the rich where the pizza is delivered. Hussein like the warrior he is, knows this terain as a familiar battlefield. Streets fast and dangerous and the experiences in the closed apartments batter against his seemingly imperturbable being. Each of the night deliveries made by Hussein opens up a crack in Iranian society casting momentary light on the dark disturbed regions of this culture experienced and filmed like an underworld. A dream like underworld.

And then there is day when the netherworld slips away and the dream ends. And Hussein still on the bike still looking through the crack in the screen is locked into his own contradiction. He has been set up to marry - an honourable marriage to his best friends sister whom he respects. But for Hussein there is something not right. He should not marry it will continue to drivew his life out of his control, perhaps he has seen too much. We don’t know and it doesn’t matter there is no reason for us to specifically understand. It is not our business nor is it the film’s business. The film’s business is that the unwanted business of the marriage is instinctively employed by Hussein to break the circle. The ring breaks the circle.

The wedding ring foreshadowed from the start of the film is not wanted: the bride to be does not want it, Hussein does not want it for itself. The ring is that gap between desired and forbidden and the unattainable. The ring is unattainable because of its grossly expensive price, forbidden also because it is part of a world in which the Husseins of this world simply do not exist.

The logic that Hussein comes to is to break the schizoid vicuous circle by having the ring. He undertakes an armed robbery to have the ring he desires, not for itself, but for its intrinsic value as something that he is not allowed to have. The robbery is amateur in conception and execution. For Hussein it is clear that it doesn’t matter whether this robbery is sucessful or unsucessful. What matters is to say no; what matters is that to take control. He is redeemed by his action. The robbery ends in fiasco: Hussein shoots himself. The film comes the full circle but the existential knot is cut.

The film is sometimes like a fusion between the style of Alphaville and the content Taxi Driver, but without the Taxi Driver’s self indulgence and fake Hollywood bravura - simply staying true to the situation of the individual in the dark recesses of city society.

The Return

2008-08-24T13:42:00.000+01:00

The Return - Andrei Zvyagintsev Russia 2003

Tyneside Cinema - 10th July 2004

The Return starts as an apparent vehicle for a mythic narrative - perhaps something like the story of Abraham and Isaac - but hesitates before settling on a narrative style that draws its inspiration from the Hollywood genre relating to dysfunctional one parent families. Russian mythic cinema pales into the American suburban vision. But whilst it is Hollywood that seems to determine the style and look of the film, mythic thematic undertow still pulls at the historical sinews the Return pointing up Zvyagintsev’s entrapment in an irreconcilable opposition between the film ethos of Russia and made in the USA. The director ultimately abandons his film as an impossibility and resorts to completing it in the form of a travelogue with a soap opera story bolted on. Finally the Return is consumed in the banalities released by its own contradiction: there is nothing in the film to think about and nothing in the film to look at. You wait for it to pass in your time.

The film is witness to a sell out by Russian cinema to the stylistic cannons of Hollywood. It’s a sell out that doesn’t go to plan as the film ends up feeling like a British lottery funded movie. A feature of the typical Hollywood product is the characters in the scenario are without significant contextual grounding(and in this Hollywood is true to the American context of immigration - the idea of starting a new life). Instead of context we have ‘situation’. Situation replaces context: this works for Hollywood’s American consumer society where the characters in any given situation come linked to assemblies and circuits of signifiers(often commercial products; language forms; typecast blue and white collar types {the detective, the single high powered business woman} and discourses{age, gender, back story}) This interplay of signifiers culled from visual retinal and audio cues enables the audience to place the characters in any given Hollywood film in a relevant psychic setting. The signifiers feed readability into the situation.

In the Return there is a single mum who has two boys and who looks after them with the help of her mother. They live something like a middle class lifestyle - not comfortable by American standards - but the kids do possess things like fishing rods and reels. In a Hollywood film we could read this(perhaps as an essentially good battling suburban mum). But the Return’s setting, somewhere in Russia( opening Armenian music). In modeling himself on an opening typical of Hollywood genres Zvyagintsev feeds us a situation without context but also without the sort of signifiers Hollywood uses to ground the action. The audience struggle to place or locate any of his characters who thereby are doomed, not in any mythic manner, but artistically never to engage us at any but the most superficial level - the machination of plot.

If the film is supposed to be set in the domain of myth then I think it fails lamentably though there are the ingredients set in place to make me believe that this might have been the intention of the original scenario. The film opens with water. The idea of water. It moves then to a tower that rises high over the sea with the gang of boys hurling themselves from its height, calling up a sacrificial image, Inca step pyramids etc. The film moves quickly to its liminal event, sudden almost like Pasolini, the return of the father. An entrance that has a mythic resonance as the father demands that his two sons come away with him. The breath of Abraham or even Laius. But it is not to be. The mythic subtext does not sustain itself. It switches and focuses on becoming a cutesy contemporary children’s film, with the rebellion of one of the sons occupying the central holding space of the scenario. The film switches from myth to faciality with the rebellious son’s face taking the camera’s prime attention: His grimaces, his sulks, his defiance. Caught up in the demands of a scenario centering on the children’s demands The Return has no where to go and lapses into a travelogue with soap opera plot and dialogue, to the accompaniment of mega doses of rain which is nothing more than rain. By the time we arrive at the climax of the film which centres on another huge tower built in the middle of a small island somewhere in Russia, any resonance of its early mythic symbolism is totally absent.

Part of what diminishes the film is its camera work which follows the Hollywood pattern of being agitated and dedicated to movement for its own sake for fear that unless the camera moves the audience will suffer restlessness. There are examples of long sequences where the focus is pulled during shots to resolve the one who is speaking. The focus pulling in the film serves no purpose other than the literal function of focusing on he who speaks. A kind of passe literalism. The camera tracks to no clear purpose other than to show it can go round corners. The purpose of the camera work other than to demonstrate that the film maker can set up a track is never clear. Early in the film the two brothers race each other back from the sea tower to their house - in fact its a chase that turns into a race back to mother. Now obviously great planning went into this long sequence which contains a lot of fast moving tracks. But the sequence doesn’t work to move the audience any deeper into the film. It just seems like a Hollywood set piece. The race in and for itself its own justification - a situation within a situation, a piece of film slipping into another piece of film. It probably inhibits any chance of the film developing mythically: the overactive camera work works against the establishment of mythic development, at least in the way Zvyganitsev shoots it. But perhaps this wasn’t his intention.

Perhaps his intention was to make a Hollywood calling card with a recognisable American theme of the estranged and vanished pop returning back to take his sons on a camping trip and to show them the things they will never have been able to learn off their mother and her mother. In this case the focus pulls, the twitching tracking camera that can’t stay still are all his way of showing Hollywood that he speaks their language. He also knows that the film must look good so that for the most part exteriors should be shot as if the film were a travelogue, and there should be plenty of rain. Not for metaphysical reasons but for plot development, to keep the picture moving and to show that you can handle rain machines even Russian ones. As we are talking Hollywood not myth its the plot which will have to have a twist. Not character. And where there are children and adults together, it’s Hollywood’s rule(occasionally flaunted) that the kids win no matter what. The kids should be cute and perspicacious seeing through the world of the adult - in particular if he is a man. The man on the other hand should have no realistic understanding of kids, be mostly concerned with getting the kids to see or do things his way, and when all else fails in communication resort to violence threreby revealing his character. And so on and so forth.

The dialogue in The Return follows the Hollywood approved pattern of grumpy dad, smart kids. So perhaps Zvyagintsev is marking his card. The trouble is that the Russian actors who all look OK, in particular Mum of whom we see little but who has a Jocasta quality, don’t seem comfortable with their words. The way pop and his younger son deliver their lines it felt to me that there was a gap between the delivery of the lines and the accompanying expressive faciality. Even though I don’t understand Russian there was an alternating current driving the acting that swung from a stilted quality which then overcompensated by swinging through the pendulum to an overblown melodramatic delivery. Certainly not the stuff dreams are made of.

A last note. The cast was overpopulated. There was no reason for having two sons in the script; it crowded the stage and added nothing to the dimensionality of the father son relationship. The two sons simply functioned as one but in a manner that was much less interesting than if there had been just one juvenile psyche to answer the alternating push and pull of compliance and rebellion. Splitting the roles instead of unifying them deprived the film of its dynamic. The energy was dissipated and ultimately the film was unable to sustain interest in a three sided relationship that never had any possibility of resolution between its discrete parts.

Hiroshima Mon Amour

2008-08-24T13:41:00.002+01:00

One of Resnais’ protagonists is French from Nevers, staying at the New Hiroshima Hotel in Hiroshima whilst working as an actress making a movie about peace; the other is an architect from Hiroshima having an affair with her whilst his wife is away. There is no story as such - only a strip of action. Two people come together in this town 13 years after it was blasted by the atomic bomb.

The concern of Resnais (R ) is to probe into the mechanisms of deterritorialised memory. The first section of the film probes how memory when detached from its locus in the personal becomes the basis of new kinds of activities or even industries. The Auschwitz industry, the Hiroshima industry, industries based on the endless mechanical replay of atrocity footage, industries based on a certain assumptions about the nature of memory.

The opening sequence of HMA intercuts images of post bomb survivors with images of the couple entwined in bed: the interweaving of their arms and legs the sensuous patina of their skins providing ironic counterpoint to the burnt blistered twisted torsos of the victims. Resnais assembled this opening montage to shock. But not to shock with the intention of creating in the viewer pornographic retinal excitement. To shock in order to provoke us to think. To think about the nature of the victim imagery and how it is actually internalised by the watcher. The voices of the lovers intoning Duras’ singular script are laid over the visuals: she says, today I went to the museum, he replies, there is no museum; she says, I’ve seen everything, he replies you’ve seen nothing. Image generated consciousness cannot replace memory. In actual memory there is some essence that is generically somatic.

The opening sequence with visuals accompanied by a sound world of voices invokes the idea that mostly we do not have memory of terrible events; we only have received images derived from terrible events. We can respond by saying that from those images this was a terrible event. But how we incorporate these pictures into our beings or into our psyches is neither straight forward rational nor predictable. In the current state of an informational world overloaded with images competing to be part of our memories, R’s film uses images to question the validity of image as a source of derived memory of events. R has grasped the type of distortion that takes place when actual images of atrocity are exploited for their inherent potential to create a bank of memories representative of events for those who did not experience them. The intention and rationale of such a bank may be that these image derived experiences will act in the future as an atrocity prophylactic. In fact the detachment of the images from their anchoring in consciousness simply opens the door to manifold manipulations and banality. It is a short step to the ‘See it all Hiroshima Bus Tour’, and the souvenir shop. Detached from the individual minds and psyches of those who suffered such experiences, events as museum experiences, offer to the visitor’s gaze a series of emotional charges empty of primary signification and open to exploitation and manipulation. There is no evidence that individuals experiencing emotional arousal in the face of such stimuli connect with such stimuli in the prophylactic manner intended. There is no evidence that these institutions actually work to prevent further outrage.

By 1959 R has become aware that human memory has become subject to new and changed forms of appropriation. In a society characterised by control, memory is now something that is manufactured by the powerful forces of vested interest and large corporations. History becomes a theme park, part of the heritage industry. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are tourist destinations which people visit. When they visit they are presented with a certain account of the past. It is not that these accounts are certain types of constructs that is of concern. Everything said is probably true. Rather it’s that museum presentations, as public relations exercises will be mounted in such a way that certain types of questions cannot be asked of the event and that certain kinds of contradictions inherent in the events will be excised. The attraction will concentrate on exhibits arranged in a simple and emotionally charged form. They claim to promote understanding, but will guilefully suggest a single reading of the past and present of which the atrocity is the link. A visit to a tourist atrocity attraction will usually provide only an emotional account of an event; it will not address simple and real questions of why. Why questions don’t have easy answers, require context and lines of enquiry. Tourists demand an experience and in response to this demand they are given images that overwhelm and flatten leaving them emotionally drained and either oversensitised or insensate. Images manipulate us, use us and refer only to themselves. Suffering can only be suffering; death can only be death. Why? is too uncomfortable as a question and draws us into examination of ourselves.

In the age of mass communication memory is now a battleground. What dictates what we remember how we remember and why we remember? Resnais in Hiroshima Mon Amour is asking the questions and responding by pointing to the difference between human personal memory and the manufactured.

The second strand in the film develops the obverse story of the woman, opening out into the her remembered experience in Nevers as an ajudged wartime collaborator who is ritually humiliated and punished for loving a German soldier. Again we have to refer to memory and its linkage to the archive footage. We have all seen the footage of the Liberation of France in’44. If we haven’t it’s of HMA. At the core of this footage, after the tiumphant parade of the GI’s through the cheering crowds, comes the next bit of action: the moment of calling the guilty to account. And at this point in the archive memory movie we always see the fury of the woman as takes they take their revenge on sex. It’s like a ritualised response which has its roots in very early primitive European culture, the cult of the sacrifice of the young virgins - Iphigenia. The French vented their fury on the young girls who fucked the Bosch instead of fighting them. They are caste down by the female avenging furies, they are beaten, have their heads shaved and their brats taken from them. In the movies the presentation of righteous indignation complete with gloating male commentary tells the story and underlines its moral. There is no place for personal memory. And those who might have personal memory - of a young German boy - have no right to such memories. They only have a right to see themselves in the image of their shame. As sinners punished they see their role played out over and over again in the newsreel. The actress with her Japanese lover, the other enemy, calls up for him her personal memories in defiance of the images that control her past. This strand of the film with her personal memory actualised in flashbacks that are melodramatically realised, is less taut than the Hiroshima thread but critical to completing the thesis of R’s film.

From his experience in making documentary films, R realised that we were entering a completely new era in the relationship between individuals and the projected images amongst which they lived and believed. Images purporting to be actual were both defining of events and defining of the people caught up in those events.

The young woman has a collective memory of an event of which she as a young woman played a part. Her situation is that although she has images that are personal they do not reconcile with what happened to her. Memory cannot connect with event. She herself is deterritorialised from Nevers, alienated from herself as a child. This strand of HMA feels less at ease with itself than the Hiroshima strand because R the melodramatic nature of the images of the forbidden lovers sits less happily with the formal concerns of the film, and it is during these sequences that the film seems to waver in intensity. But for the film to be complete the two sides of the coin of memory need to be addressed. As the generalised somatic memory is distorted by its own images so personal memory with its own images can be distorted and twisted by the general.

Dogville

2008-08-24T13:41:00.001+01:00

Dogville is film as machine, a well oiled machine designed to process Nicole Kidman. The machine is heavily larded with John Hurts voice over explaining in detail the sociopathic mechanisms inherent in the design and function of the mechanism( at times it seems he’ll never shut up) Each section of the machine is introduced by an often tongue in cheek title card. We watch the Dogville machine at work adopting its stray dog raw material, shaping it, masticating it and finally trying to destroy it before itself being destroyed by the consequences of its own actions: simultaneously we hear the voice of machine minder sardonically calling our attention to the ever mutating mechanisms of desire that are at work. As machine film Dogville is a parody of the Hollywood movie factory where dreams and delusions and fake states of mind roll off the production line. Dogville as a referential work takes up on one film which is an essential component of Hollywood’s gospel of idealised americana: Our Town. It’s a long time since I saw Our Town, but I instantly recognised its characteristic features: the stock american small town characters of a certain era(1930’s), the cadence of its spoken home-spun words, the set. Sam Wood’s film, shot in a studio built town is a machine(larded by the voice of Frank Craven[whom, unlike Hurt, we do see as a character] ) built on simple socially constructed mechanisms that function as a endorsement of the values and behaviour of real America. The fable that Our Town spins is that there is no real discrepant gap between values and action in this, the real America. Out of this referent with its carefully built and painted sets, camera set ups and artfully contrived lighting all seamlessly edited, comes Dogville like the anti-matter machine with its highly charged strangely named particles of energy - such as hand held digital camera and jump cut. All the action takes place in the crucible of the set which is simply made up of spaces marked out in white chalk which are sparsely littered with emblematic and economically employed theatrical props. Our Town was a big production set that mimicked reality. Its characteristic quality is opaqueness: it comprises of closed spaces characterised by walls doors and other obstacles to lines of vision. The set in Dogsville is open: the light(there is much commentary on light and its nature in the film) passes through and exposes all the set. The action is transparent. In Dogville the translucent set functions as a glass housing for the machine that unchains the dog of desire and examines its effect on smalltown. The overlaid pastiche of stock characters, stock situations and a carefully parodied script produce in the glass crucible of Dogville, a bestialisation of the town. Its nature and the nature of its desire, cock shit and meanness, is open to the light. There is no redemption for the characters who fail to see(or in the case of Tom who understands too late) that they are the components of a desire machine. In case it might seem there is a saving Grace in Dogville, in the form of a canonisation of Nicole Kidman as sainted product, Von Trier, after allowing Nicole and her dad a little philosophical babbling, closes the story grand guignole Hollywood style, with an apocalyptic Old Testament revenge ending. As if it were the destiny of all such machines to destroy themselves. Dogville is moral film literal in purpose and in detail. Each section of the machine has a function and that function can only be understood by seeing each process. Machine films that don’t skip processes can only work through time and generally(I’m sure there are exceptions put I can’t think of any) employ the classical unities and continuities to make them intelligible as machines. Dogville is a wonderful machine but with one irritation the over elaborated dog-matic Voice Over. Perhaps it is part of the dogma to rub the audience’s nose in the shit.

adrin neatrour - 7 March 2004

Elephant

2008-08-24T13:40:00.001+01:00

ELEPHANT - Gus Van Sant - USA 2003

Elephant is a very dry film. Like a dream permeated by a mood of dryness. Movement down long corridors connecting dry people with dry space. Only once does moistness obtrude into the film(the group vomiting in the lavatories is an evacuation moistness) when we glimpse in a brief shower scene, a kiss shared between the killers. We can see that they are very wet. But we are not part of their wetness, its something we see as part of the ritual of the killers, their decision to shower, to become moist. But that’s it. The rest of the movie is dry as dry as the water in the drinking fountains located at strategic points in the long corridors of corporate America.

As befits a dry film the core of Elephant is its structure. Its structure takes the form of a number of long tracking shots - the film comprises of about 30 (? - didn’t count) long tracking takes mostly shot from behind an individual or group - as the camera follows its characters across the school campus and though the internal space of the school.

The formal structure issues from Van Sant’s perception of the shared cultural features of American psycho geography. The corridors, with their rooms off, linking specialised zoned spaces, such as refectory library sports hall, could be anywhere in America. This is America: whether you work for the City, Hospital, School, College Corporation or Government: this is the geography that constrains life. Its dry.

At first when thinking about the film I found it difficult to see beyond structure. It was all structure. I think that contained within the film’s structure is the idea of ‘re-enactment’ as ethos. Dramatised re-enactment is, after all, a form of ritual: sometimes empty of sometimes replete with emotive involvement. One ritual associated with serious crime is the staged re-enactment of the event by the police. This often involves retracing the victim’s passage to their fate. Police re-enactments are played by non professional actors(often police personnel) who are asked to take on the various roles required by the situation. Members of the public who believe that they might have been in the area traversed by a victim are asked to be present.

One justification (though by no means the only one) for these police simulations is to stimulate the public into recalling things they have forgotten. To jog memory. Typically these re-enactments are depersonalised walk throughs, dry runs, in which nothing hot takes place. The police video recording of these events does not run to music cues or spot effects. Of course the TV crime industry has picked up on these re-enactments and filled them out with hot material such as dialogue and music. Even though filled out, the sparse personal detail released about victims results more in audience sympathy than involvement. The viewing response remains one of detachment. The TV dramatisations retain the character of their police model a high level of detachment and impersonalisation. As the audience already know the outcome narrative tension is low but spacio temporal tension can be exploited. As with the police re-runs, the purported justification of TV recreations is to shake down viewer memory for information about the victim, perpetrator or the crime, etc. But the TV re-enactments also feel like they evoke a collective response to the event. These films are like machines that produce a mechanical reaction of collective horror. Elephant does not do this. In Elephant my response was to be reminded of the normality of the action. The re-enactment, the walk throughs the unending corridors and spaces produced an effect of depersonalised normalisation of the massacre. It didn’t trivialise or minimalise let alone desensitize. It reminded me that in this sort of environment this is the sort of thing that can happen. Even the music - such as the Beethoven Sonata - richly emotive and redolent of Western individual values is dislocated and removed from the events that unfold: the music is like the background to another movie and its emotional charge negated in the context of Elephants re-staged walk throughs. Elephant’s audience have to remember that familiar anaesthetised institutions ferment their own wide awake fantasies.

In structure the film works to richly suggestive effect. The long super real trance like tracking shots one of which opens the film, start exterior to the school and lead us into the school building and enable us to understand American culture as a psycho-geometric setting. The school’s box like interior which with its long connecting corridors and passage ways, cross junctions and 90* intersecting rooms, represent an institutionalised tunnel vision, an angular geometric experience like the rat mazes of psychology departments.

American psychogeography - Elephant’s tracking recreates the living - movement of the institutions of suburban American. From the interior, the vastness of the monolithic buildings controls angle of vision and at the same time excites movement which permits a person to enter a space similar to the one they have left. The environment engenders a continual molecular agitation as the rigidity of suburban sprawled space engulfs being. In the suburbs with their endless monotonous lines of evenly spaced boulevard lawn fronted housing, public space is mostly an interior organised grid that channels through a vast area. People shop, work or go to school/college in vast buildings whose vista is a straight line leading to a dead-end. Passage ways of unending interstitial corridors linking spacial zones.

Part of the justification of elephant’s structure is that these same vistas have a parallel existence in the virtual space time matrix of computer games. In these the psycho-geography of the suburbs is exploited to create the compulsive experiential movement imagery of the kill-or-be-killed game scenario. Replicated and intensified graphically, examples of this world typically comprise tracking shots down narrowing vistas, 90* intersections, zoned space, no-man’s land, enclosed chambers, narrow passageways. These architectural features are exploited for lurk zones, blind spots, misframing possibilities, both to reveal enemies and wild aggressive monsters and to mount ambushes and surprise attacks in which you the player kill or be killed.

The strongest point in Elephant is this layering of the real and the virtual as a movement experience. Its weakness seems to me that although beautifully shot with lots of young people catching the eye and a resonant emotive film score, it is a little thin. Rather dry. Its a bit dead. Like a beautifully lit shot track of a corpse on the slab in the morgue: the stainless steel glints; the marble purrs; and the body has a silky sheen. But the body would be more interesting if alive. Also I think Elephant deviates when it got slow-mo artsy - was Van Sant trying to hint at eternal recurrence a la Exterminating Angel. But what he does do is see something in the American way that few others either see or want to depict.

adrin neatrour Feb 2004

Zatoichi

2008-08-24T13:38:00.000+01:00

Zatoichi - Takashi Kitano - Japan 2003

Takashi’s film starts where it should have finished with Takashi remembering that what film does best is movement: shifting consciousness across many levels of perception through movement.

Zatoichi closes with an unabashed rhythmic celebration of the film itself. A hip hop Hollywood dance routine that’s full of life and movement as the caste insinuate themselves into the choreography and we see everyone, the good the bad and the ugly, let rip in the music. In comparison the rest of the film is static. As actor/director Zatoichi is Takashi’s homage to Kabuki - Japanese popular theatre in which stock characters wearing heavy make-up and mask mix theatrical overstatement with rude farce and melodrama. Kabuki tells traditional stories told in a specific theatrical tradition and mode - different to but not dissimilar from pantomime. Film homage always risks dieing on its feet. Something to do with film and formal respect being a potentially ponderous combination. And in Zatoichi the Kabuki theatric form isn’t really shifted or structurally unravelled. There is immobility at the centre of the movie. The framing of the action, the shot-reaction shot sequences, the tracks and cranes are all heavy handed. The camera is not looking for anything. Its dead. the boundaries and interstitial zones marking potential areas of development and concern are unexplored. Except.

Except for some brief almost glossed over sequences in Zatoichi where the camera looks at peasants as they work the fields and then prepare for what looks like some sort of fertility festival(large life sized corn dollies in evidence). In these truncated moments we glimpse the possibility of a film energised by rhythms and tempos of the earth. But these trail off to become no more than cinematic gesture.

In Zatoichi what we have is a deadened outer theatrical form which gives us the retinal layered theatric experience of watching: actors playing yakuza gangsters in kimonos and dressing gowns(fancy dress) - some of them engagingly bald - hacking each other to death at regular interludes to gratify the needs of a revenge driven back story. It’s regurgitated reimported spaghetti Western with a catch all fake set which in long shot (except for the bridge which is quintessentially Japanese) suggests the plywood back lots of Hollywood Western.

If it wasn’t for the detail that this was Takashi’s film I would let it pass as not my kind of movie. But coming out of a director who has demonstrated flare sensibility and insight into the potential of filmic forms, Zatoichi needed further thought.

Even on its own terms the oppositions that it set in place are not interesting in themselves. The blind man who ‘sees’ everything is not interesting as it deprives him of his nature de-natures him. And the boy who chooses to be a geisha and the old gang boss who poses as a pot boy(usual suspect) are simply formal requisites of the narrative, purely mechanical theatric devices and treated as such.

Although Takashi as the blind warrior masseur has a winsome charm of a smile and the camera likes him and his haircut(well so it should) the character is caught in a major dilemma. Unlike - Clint Eastwood films for instance - Zatoichi can’t do eyes, because the character is blind. As the film fails to locate any affective replacement for the eye, the film’s protagonist mechanically dissolves as the film progresses - interest in him dissipates. And the idea of playing the blind man by having his eyes closed doesn’t work: the theatrical ‘play’ inherent in this idea allows does not compensate for its lack of filmic conceit.

Coming out of the film left me with the thought that Takashi needs to improve his massage technique. The massage he gives to the woman in the film was as unconvincing as his ability to massage the life out of costumes.

Zatoichi will probably make the money but leaves me wondering if this was the driving reason behind the film.

adrin neatrour - 21 March 2004.

Targets

2008-08-24T13:37:00.000+01:00

Targets - Peter Bogdanovich - USA 1967

Side cinema 21 March 2004

Seeing Targets at the Side Cinema last Sunday made me want to visit Peter Bogdanovich and talk to him. It was made at a critical time and place: America in hightail engagement in the Vietnam War; the assassinations of JFK and MLK. Targets comes out of a society where after 35 years of the talkies and Hollywood global dominance, 15 years drip feed TV, the psycho-reality of the movie has invaded everyday streamed consciousness so that Americans (they first but quickly joined by the rest of the world) are starting to see and interpret actuality through the disjointed and distorting nature of the filmed image. And also at this point our society is about to incorporate the computer and its programme into psychic functioning.

The critical moment in Targets defining both the film and its concerns is when the killer types out a note written to himself which reads something like: ”It is now 11:40 in the morning. My wife is about to get up and when she comes over to give me a kiss I will shoot her and then I will shoot my other......then it will all happen.” In this typewritten note killer is writing his own software, programming his mind to carry through a series of actions almost as if he were a prototype video game. Targets at this level is a philosophical investigation into the nature of killing. Belying the apparent visceral nature of its subject matter it is cerebral film looking at the controlling aspects of mind. What Bogdanovich locates at the centre of his film is the idea of programming; the idea of individuals overcome by multiple circuitries of intensifying stimuli - the movies -TV - the suburbs- the family - constructing a simple override programme that resolves his situation with maximum economy. Targets is a film, a cerebral investigative examination of the idea of self programming. In the past evil may have inhabited us, taken possession of us or manipulated our actions and thoughts. Today we do it ourselves: we write our own programmes. Interestingly, Targets close film contemporary is Kubrick’s 2001 which also has a central preoccupation with computers and programming but is a very different take on the issue.

In form Targets has a neo-realist feel. We see it from the killer’s point of view. The settings are nondescript: drawn from anywhere any place-ville: the suburban house, the hotel, the gas storage tank. There is no architecture of set, in fact the reverse. The final setting of the drive-in movie lot is a deconstructed exhibition space, emptied of everything except essence – the huge screen. The film is restrained in its use of expressive resources: the roles are played out neutrally by the actors with little emotive gesturing, the script pared back, the scenes mostly shot wide or medium in long takes with spare use of the close up. This stark economy strips the film back to its working parts allowing clear uncluttered sighting of the critical intersection point that is the target of the film - the programming soft ware that develops from the meeting of the proliferating promiscuous and incestuous gun culture - with - the absorption of individuals into the movie scripts,

In the gun store two old codgers (Mutt n Jeff) sell lethal hardware, guns as if they were ball hammers, and bullets like they were nails. The reality of the gun is not so much that it’s a tool for killing (it does do that) but rather it’s a cool tool to engender radical change of scene. At a point where for whatever uninteresting reason an individual feels hemmed in, terminally bored, angry, trapped etc. There is recourse to the scenario mapped out by the movies. Pick up the gun, aim and shoot; everything is changed. It’s a machine for radically altering everything. And as you squeeze the trigger, no matter who you hit: the foreigner, the wife or passing stranger you are the one in control. You come to power with power. In an atomising society: each is alone. In the movie there is only individual destiny. To close his loop Bogdanavich calls on his protagonist (brilliantly played by Tim O’Kelly) to shoot and kill the audience from within the cinema screen itself. This is Bogdanovich saying directly without metaphor, analogy, or any sort of circumlocution, pointing to what is in the movie screen and saying - killer. The killer is literally in the screen; who is not seen because our senses are overwhelmed by the sensual experience of watching. These images upon which we gaze, line us up in their sights and one by one corrupt us and pick us off. Just like the sniper shoots the audience in the cars watching The Terror. Interwoven with the snipers story is the Boris Karloff story. This is told as the story of the old movie star who is tired with his film image, bored with the repetition and cliché of film and so determines to retire. Before retiring he agrees to attend a screening of his film The Terror at the drive -in and meet the fans. Karloff looks into the nature of the film image and perceives that it is empty and vacuous and that it has sucked the life out of him. It is Karloff’s tired form that clinches the denouement.

Bogdanovitch takes his film to its logical conclusion. This is not a film about killing people it is a film about programming and how image works in the programme. The ending called down upon Tim O’Kelly is to be defeated by multiplicity of imagery. Emerging from within the screen he is overwhelmed by the merged images in his head of the real and virtual Boris Karloff. Confused by the moving images that he can’t reconcile he is reduced to a catatonic immobile state. His destiny a little like the sort of psychosis induced experimentally in laboratory rats when exposed to conflicting stimuli. They break down we break down he breaks.

Stylistically Targets feels like a B sci-fi movie of the ‘50s and 60s. These films often used the subterfuge of a fantastical script device to record the underlying paranoia in US society. The in-part politically induced social fear of invasive alien forces and the in-part culturally bound fear of living on and feeding on land that had been stolen from its rightful users. Targets does away with any pretext that the alien forces might be anywhere else but in the here and now. The force at work is the programming manufactured distributed and retailed in the USA and exported world wide.

Adrin Neatrour 26 March 2004

Shock Corridor

2008-08-24T13:36:00.000+01:00

Peter Breck, Constance Towers.
Viewed on 16mm print at Side Cinema, Newcastle June 6 2004 by Adrin Neatrour

The overt story here is that a newspaper reporter - Peter Breck - goes undercover into a mental hospital to find out who murdered man called Sloan who had been a patient in the hospital. The purpose of the reporter’s quest is to win ‘the Prize’. In Shock Corridor the Prize is not ‘an apple from the tree of life’ or ‘water from the well of youth’, but ‘the Pullizter’ America’s most prestigious award for outstanding investigative jounalism. The story from its opening fake psychiatric session, in which Breck is being coached by a psychiatrist friend to play the part of an incestuou s brother who is fixated at an early age on his sister’s ‘braids ‘ (Goldilocks), has a distorted mythic/fairy tale like structure - the architypal quest. Donning the mantel of insanity the reporter has to pass into and through the rings of hell in order that he may return to claim his Prize. The trophy he covets is public acclaim and recognition of himself as hero. Breck is a loner in the Hollywood tradition of the individual driven to achieve his goal but caste by Fuller into the quasi mythic realm of fairytale the story is given a psychic twist that jolts it into dimension that undermines its Hollywood format. The film is a journey into the madness of America, a Dantesque descent. A film in which America is a lunatic asylum in which the victims of communist witch hunts, race and the military industrial interests are opponents of social mechanisms that conspire to destroy their minds. However its most powerful visual component is the specific use made of superimpositions of the ‘Beatrice image’ in the form of Cathy, Breck’s girl friend who poses as his sister. As Breck lies on his hospital cot at night his demon conjures the presence of Cathy beside him and the sequences are burnt through with a radioactive element of incestuous eroticism. The pretext for Breck’s forced hospitalisation is the claim by his girlfriend Cathy that she is his sister and that he has incestuous designs on her. Cathy -the sister/ girl friend stripper, madonna/ whore role is played out with high octane carnal charge by Constance Towers. In Breck’s dreams she appears in superimposition hot and close to his body. Her image in these sequences is suspended in space and time and like x-rays burn into Brecks consciousness brazenly flaunting the sexual contradictions of a culture that has two dominant female roles - virgin and slut. A culture which not only expects women to perform both parts in the appropriate setting, but which in the filmic world of the American male imagination has no other roles for women. Certainly Fuller’s depiction of Breck’s splitting male ego, is as a schizoid response to these inherent contradictions, the double bind Breck experiences in trying to contain these two polar ideas within the persona of Cathy. The end result of the process for Breck is violence and catatonia - total emotive investment (confusion of you/me) followed by complete emotional withdrawal(total immobility). Fuller in his powerful use of erogenous superimposition points directly to the decontextualised nature of the female and the price paid for this process. As Breck moves through the rings of hell he encounters America as machine that destroys its finest minds at the point where they experience the contradictions which like fault lines lie just beneath the surface of this society. The inherent tensions between phantom recognition of equality and engrained racial oppression, between the coercive military imperative to build an empire of death and the individual conscience, between state certainty of its invincablility and individual confusion. These inherent and multiplying oppositions between the ideal and the actual create chasms of insanity into which those unable to internally resolve the flow of contradictions, disappear. The most brilliant sequence depicting this process is the ‘race riot’. In this section the hospitalised young black civil rights champion takes on the mask of a Klu Klux Klan leader and incites the inmates into a lynching mob against the only other black patient. Introducing this sequence are a number of archive/ documentary shots of what I think was a New Guinea village. The figures in this sequence are dressed in their extraordinary constumes and as a presage of what is to come act as prefatory images to the lynching sequence giving context to situations in which peoples are both broken up in and by space and time and exist eternally through time in memory. People who have lost everything can still remember what they once were. Even shards of reliquary documentary footage have this power. Breck’s descent into the circles of madness is motivated solely by the prospect of attaining his pure self ordained intrumental ends. A fairy tale architype terminally distorted by Hollywood scripting: the enthronement of the individual success. Breck is fixated on finding out who murdered Sloan - who Sloan was matters not; all that is important to Breck is the instrument of his death. Breck’s fixation on his own personal desire to get the Prize, leads him to purely exploitative relationships with his respondents. The inmates only exist to supply him with the leads that he needs to take him to Sloan who takes him to ‘the Prize’. Overwhelmed by his desire he cannot hear their voices. He is deaf to their real story told in their real voice as his cynically manoeuvres and manipulates the patients to get the information that he needs. Uninterested in what they tell him he leaves them who desperately need voice, without voice. Finally having squeezed them for facts he abandons them ever more deeply embedded in their schizoid states than when he first encounters them. Betrayed. For Breck the final sum of the totality of contradictions and betrayals experienced within the insane asylum is the loss of his own voice. He who uncoupled the stories of the voices that spoke to him from what he wanted to hear (in the tradition of poetic justice) pays physically with the price of his own voice. The detachment of the means of expression from the actuality experienced conducts Breck into a state of muteness. As the doctor of charge of the hospital says: “ It’s tragic: he’s the first Pullitzer Prize winner who’s a schizophrenic mute.” At the heart of the film lies a deluge of truly Biblical proportion as Breck hallucinates that the asylum has been overwhelmed by the realm of water: a realm that at once cleanses and is a reminder not to forget. The section is fine piece of film, it succeeds in having the intensity of eschatological prophecy, it feels like the end of the world. The sequence is suberbly shot and crafted using post production superimposition of lightening to direct Olympian bells and bolts intimately and directly at the crazed Breck. The use of supereimposition of lightening with an erotically charged personal intensity mirrors the earlier images of Cathy, in fact they are like the return of the female furies, conjured by Breck, who after driving him insane with their body now return in the form of pure electrical presence to turn his body to immobile stone. This Flood in total seems to be part of the deeper circuity of the film that channels the film into phases of forgetting and remembering, remembering and forgetting, forgetting to remember and remembering to forget. The characters forget and remember what has happened to them, they forget and remember who and what they are. Shock Corridor seems to have as the primal charge coursing through its circuitry the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence. All this remembering and forgetting all these cosmic reminders are the destiny of the damned forever to repeat the experience of history. Shock Corridor is framed within its opening and closing shots. The film opens with a caption on which is written a quote from Euripides: “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” The film closes with a caption on which is written a quote from Euripides: “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.”

Adrin Neatrour June2004

There Will Be Blood

2008-08-24T13:35:00.002+01:00

There Will Be Blood – Paul Anderson – USA – 2007 Daniel Day-Lewis, Dillon Freasier, Paul Dano, Kevin J O’Connor
Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 30 June 08 Ticket: £6-80

Film as installation: first there was drive in now we got walk through movies.

There Will Be Blood (TWBB) is a Hollywood gloss on Upton Sinclair’s big novel, Oil! One of the most politically radical of America’s 20th century writers, Oil! is written on a broad historical canvas taking in the Great War, the Russian revolution and the tide of socialism in Europe and setting it against labour and political strife in the oil fields of Southern California.

Oil! Chapter X11 The Monastery: ‘It had become clear to him that the present system could not go on forever – the resources and wealth of the Country carried off by the greediest. And when you asked who was going to change the system there was only one possible answer – the great mass of workers who had learned that wealth was produced by toil.’

Anderson’s solution as to how to film Oil! is to replace Marx with Freud, to deflect the shaping of the narrative away from political concerns inwards into psycho familial dynamics. Upton Sinclair’s observations that chiliastic religious fervour de-energised and deflected American labourers from more pointed class concerns is taken up by Anderson, but then twisted and deformed to serve his own purposes in providing TWBB with a final gothic tableau: the death of Eli bludgeoned to death by Daniel Plainview in private bowling ally of his mansion. In TWBB religion justifies the final cryptic setting for this contemporary take on American Gothic involving the oil business - fire – murder – blood.

Anderson has styled TWBB as modern American Gothic, and it is Gothic script which provides the only opening title of the film, the date 1898 (white on black field) which opens up the first of Anderson’s photo tableaux. Sinclair’s novel is not stylistically gothic. Rather it is informal and conversational in form and politically didactic in content. Anderson’s solution to the transposition of the written to the filmic is to make of the film a series walk through photo installations, a set of tableaux as beloved of nineteenth century artists or current practitioners such as Bill Viola

So TWBB opens with the silver mine installation (birth) and proceeds through a series of linked set-ups, the business meeting (sharp practice), buying the farm to exploit the mineral wealth below its surface (underhand mendacity); the oil well blow out (the demonstration of the forces of nature), the dismissal of the son (rejection), the murder of the false brother (Cain and Abel), the humiliation of Daniel at the Temple by Eli (shame and humiliation) and the final tableau, Daniel’s slaying of the Preacher Eli ( Death: revenge on God and his two faced priests on earth) The tableaux are spread over time, each temporal sequence introduced with the date in Gothic.

It is the camera work that indicates that what we are watching has been conceived as a photo installation. The film is characterised by a large number of long tracking shots that take us through each of the tableaux. I wondered at first what the tracks were accomplishing: they didn’t seem to have an obvious purpose either moral or instrumental. In fact the tracking shots in TWBB are a simulated replication of the effect the audience would get if they were walking through a photo installation. The film is simply an installation in film form. The big production value centrepiece of TWBB the Biblical column of fire caused by the oil blow out reminded me of one of Viola’s walk through installations that featured a cascade of water. The hyperrealisation of natural phenomena, overdetermines response of the viewer to create awe (Fear and Awe) without engaging the question of meaning. Anderson has adapted Oil! as a walk through installation. TWBB has been made to fill out the gaze of the audience as it moves through the film. TWBB is filmed to be cool and to satisfy all consuming but ephemeral vapid ambulatory curiosity. It has not been written and shot for audience engagement with either context issues or emotions.

To complete the installation effect, two other characteristics of the film production are fully articulated. The sound design concept is central to the walk through experience. From the opening establishment shot of mountains accompanied by a crescending siren effect TWBB is only rarely (for instance when cutting to the deaf mute point of view) without a sound accompaniment that fills out and points to the angle of the gaze; and meaning that the gaze should construe. The score literally presses down and in and onto the film. With the its surround technology the sound is an active physical presence that preempts audience reaction to the visual stimuli. By turns it is ominous, the biosuggestive, cosmic and of course weird. The object of the sound concept is the colonisation of the viewers understanding, or at least the denial to mind of coherent response to the offered stimuli. Like the adverts on TV the sound track to TWBB is an enforcer; it is not a deepener of insight or reflection.

In similar manner, the mis-en-scene, sets and costumes. are designed to fill out the gaze’s field of vision with confirmations of authenticity. Attention to detail, another aspect of photo installation work, ensures all the detailing of the sets has a hyper real perfection so that nothing interferes with the smoothen path of the spectator’s trail through the film. Anderson’s objective is total immersion in the encounters with the installations mediated by the richness of the interiors and costumes of the turn of the nineteenth century. TWBB is populated by a series of players whose screen persona is characterised by a sort of Biblical patina invested with fake mythological persona. DDL looked at times like a gremlin sorcerer out of the Lord of the Rings.

The fragmented temporal structure serves Anderson’s purposes by being coherently inchoate. TWBB time fragments intrerconnect but not in a way that compels specific readings; rather in such a way that the individual viewer can construct there own understandings as to what has happened. Anderson\s replacement of Sinclair’s out front Marxism with back door Freudianism results in subjectivities determining meaning. The viewer instead of looking at the failure of organised labour in the US, instead can muse on the meaning the death of Eli in the bowling alley or the deafness of HW. In Anderson’s recourse to ever more heavy handed symbolism, an increasing vacuity and emptiness characterises the film. By the final credits I had a feeling that I had been watching a shell of a movie in which the core of the drama was missing: as indeed was the case. I left the cinema saying to myself, not Oil! but So What!

adrin neatrour

The Yacoubian Building

2008-08-24T13:35:00.001+01:00

The Yacoubian Building – Marwan Hamad Egypt 2007 - Nour el Sherif; Adel Eman; Hend Sabri
Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 6 Jan 08
Ticket price:£4-00

The riddle of the Sphinx - Reflections on the most expensive Egyptian film ever.

The opening title sequence with its grainy soft focus macro shots of the stone cladding of the Yacoubian building followed by a sequence (probably pasted in directly from the novel)in which a warmly toned voice explains the history of the building, intimate a film form that might comprise of some particular characteristics: a closely observing camera, a sensibility that understands ambiguity and a film that engenders time as a dimension. The Yacoubian Building(YB) is a overlong grossly inflated soap opera better suited to afternoon TV.

TB looks like a typical example of what happens when one from of expression –a novel is interpreted in another form of expression – in this case a film. What happens is that the film makers unable to find expressive equivalent filmic modes for novelistic internal dialogue and musing subjectivities reduce the adapted book to a series of externalised operatic melodramas.

Featuring a large apartment block as the axis around which a multiplicity of plots revolve is of course a classic film genre that exploits a certain culture of congestion as a vehicle for generating a universe characterised by parallel and interconnected stories. The interstitial areas of lobby, elevator and landing are the key promiscuous locations. Films in this genre include Grand Hotel and Airport : both of which are characterised by a dull mechanical mediocrity. YB doesn’t break the mould.

Marwan Hamad makes no attempt to endow his film with any real sense of place or time. The Yacoubian building is an extraordinary piece of adaptive social engineering with its different levels of habitation. The core of the apartment building is inhabited and used by a solid affluent middle class. Coexisting above them in sublet tiny store rooms is a shanty town of the disinherited, living in conditions of high compression. The YB seems unable to explore any of the intensities or circuitries of this arrangement: the curious spacial juxtaposition is represented simply as a film image, a curiosity of time and place: something for us as sort of privileged tourists, to gaze upon. The active force moulding and shaping the spacial elements in YB is the convention of the American soap opera. Rooms exist not to absorb or extrude but to admit and discharge. Doors incessantly open and close, their only function being to accelerate the action cuts. Cairo and the Yacoubian building are used as picture ‘fill’ operating at the same level as a pub in a soap opera such as the Rovers Return in Coronation Street. There is little sense made of the building itself or its apartments or the city in which it is located. Cairo as a metropolis is used either to staged romantic affect as in the film’s final shot of the newly married couple walking at dawn down the middle of the street: or it is used as a series of bland establishment shots. It never has a role as part of the film. Hamad fails to allow the Yacoubian building or Cairo to make any claim on our imaginations.

As the Yacoubian Building lacks any spacial dimension there is also a lacking in the perception of the passage of time. The characters never observe, nor are they observed: they simple simply exist in perpetual action time for the sake of the story lines in which they are embroiled. The dimension of time which YB’s opening sequence suggests is a defining force in play, is disregarded at once, Hamad happy with a token opening gesture. The rest of the film is played out in the temporal anarchy the characterises most of the Hollywood action image output, a form increasingly mimicked and copied. Time is subservient to action cuts. There is no time stream in the film. Rather there is a stream of action. Time becomes meaningless and impossible to reconstruct or understand. Simply put: one thing leads to another. That’s all there is. Chains of events are compressed or etiolated( more rarely) according to the demand for action. Action shot through the lens of highly agitated cameras: craning swooping panning tracking hand held and angled, but never still. The camera movement is effected not for reasons underlying the meaning of the shot or of the film but to disarm the viewer of any awareness of subjective time. The camera movement in constantly engaging the eye with a stream of events, disengages the viewer from the stream of time. YB then, is a series plots and subplots that claim our attention not for what they represent but simply as a mechanical series of events and how they end.

There are claims that YB is a courageous film because it tackles taboo subjects in Egypt and the Arab world- taboo subjects such a homosexuality and terrorism. I can’t really accept this point of view. The homosexual subject, the newspaper journalist is a trite stereotype, represented in the script as a crude amoral exploiter of simple peasant men. He is shown as having little personal morality, living a life dedicated to his own pleasures. In what is the lowest point in the movie (and there are a few low ones notably in the becoming terrorist story) there is clumsy imbecilic flashback sequence involving the character which blames his parents for his homosexuality! In the penultimate sequence he is murdered with expert dispatch by one of his pick-ups. The event evokes no sense of loss within the film’s own conventions. In that the moral stance of the film in relation to the homosexual character simply panders to the most prejudiced bands of attitude and opinion both in the Moslem and the Christian world YB is not a film that tackles homosexuality in the media. Just the opposite. The plot line which describes ‘becoming a terrorist’, is likewise reliant on an automotive mechanicality for its concatenation of events leading to outcome. Just as having ‘bad parents’ makes a man homosexual: so being socially deprived and discriminated against leads to a boy becoming a ‘jihadi’. Like the homosexuality theory it’s crass and untrue neither necessary nor sufficient but certainly uninteresting.

The disturbing aspect of YB is its total adoption of Hollywood forms to try and explain the historical social situation of Egypt. That Hamad thinks he can make his film work in this fashion is either testimony to his ambition (he wants demonstrate he can make feature films in Hollywood or Europe) or to his deluded state of mind. The potpourri of characters and events strung together without reference to place or time, not only fails to speak of Egypt or Egyptians; it is an act of cultural colonialism allowing American forms to define the state of affairs in this Arab country. As such YB, as the most expensive Egyptian feature film ever made, is not a pointer to the future but part of the present problem.

adrin neatrour