Monthly Archives: May 2008

  • The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – Powell and Pressburger (UK 1943) Roger Liversey; Deborah Kerr

    Adrin Neatrour writes: Retro crit: cinema of obsessive desire, this is a film of pure expressive form that uses camera sets props and costumes to create a world characterised by the dark obsessive marriage of sex and death. With his ability to create mood ideas associations and drama through purely filmic means, Powell equals Visconti at his best. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – Powell and Pressburger (UK 1943)  Roger Liversey; Deborah Kerr

    Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle  Ticket Price £4-00

    Retro crit:  cinema of obsessive desire
    The apparent central concern (the one about which most commentators on the movie talk) of Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (LDCB) is the demise of the old fashioned world of the professional soldier’s code of honour and decency. This notion is probably a comforting mythic recasting of history and as a recurrent film theme it’s better handled by Renoir in La Grande Illusion than by Powell and Pressburger.  However probing past its narrative form which is interestingly structured as a series of fragments, but actually weak in its cohesion, this is a film of pure expressive form that uses camera sets props and costumes to create a world characterised by the dark obsessive marriage of sex and death. With his ability to create mood ideas associations and drama through purely filmic means, Powell equals Visconti at his best.   

    The three lead female roles – Edith Barbara and Angela are all played by Deborah Kerr whose face and features in all her manifestations become the obsessive object of desire for protagonist Clive Wynne-Candy, career army officer. 

     As in Peeping Tom, Powell’s camera and his mis en scene work to engage the  audience’s collusion in the process of sexual fixation. The camera seeks out the innocent female object with keen eye of the bird of prey for its quarry drawing the subjectivity of the viewer into the shot.  The tracking of the camera into Deborah Kerr brings her affective innocence into the dominion of our gaze where we scrutinize her performance for signs of vulnerability. As indeed does Candy.   In LDCB, Deborah Kerr remains one pace outside of the male world, enclosed in her own bubble of femininity.  Later in Peeping Tom, Powell will create circuits of intensity in which the female through violence and murder will be  transposed as an object of the lens into the male ambit of dominion.  Nevertheless in LDCB there is one scene exploiting Deborah Kerr’s image in her Barbara incarnation that is as extreme as any in Peeping Tom where she is subjected to the most shocking of deterritorialisations and reconfigured as pure victim, the forcible transportation of the female into the male domain.   The militiant culture that offers to the female death as the final solution.   

    The opening shot of Deborah Kerr sees her as ‘Edith incarnation’ in Berlin 1902.  She is seated opposite Candy as the camera tracks in on the two shot.  Both parties are talking in matter of fact manner; she giving him information about a certain German officer and Candy seeking elucidation on various points.  The setting is neutral as is the positioning of Edith and Candy.  But we cannot hear anything that is being said because their conversation is overshadowed by Edith’s hat.  She is wearing a white bonnet  in the middle of which pinned out like a specimen prepared for anatomical dissection, is a black raven.   A dead very black raven.  Is this woman a witch or sorcerer?   That  LDCB is shot in Technicolor accentuates the startling explicit image of a woman wearing a dead bird.   It is difficult to follow the thread of Edith and Candy’s talk because we are fixated upon this extraordinary appurtenance completely circumscribes our perception of Edith and  colours the way in which we view and understand the rest of the film.    It is seizure by the animal, an act of bewitchment by the female; a movement into myth and fairy tale. The moment with the hat is the moment where everything in the film changes.  From this point the film is endowed with  a psychic resonance of the realm of  the sorcerer.

    The defining moment in the relationship between Barbara and Candy takes place after her death.  Death the moment of appropriation. Candy takes Krettschmar-Schuldorff (more about the political aspect of  KS and his marriage to Edith later) into his den and inner sanctum  The room is his trophy room and Powell has carefully documented throughout the film that Candy shoots big game and has the heads mounted and brought home.  On the  main structural wall the animals he has shot seem to be alive   in their nobility as they protrude intrude and swell out into the room: lion, tiger, rhino, elephant. It seems to be part of his purpose in life to kill beautiful creatures.  Over the fireplace plumb in the middle of this assemblage of death hangs the portrait of Barbara, the dead wife.  The shot leaves the viewer speechless.   Like the totemic bird on the hat, the dead woman’s portrait in the trophy room completely short circuits the faculties.  You can neither see nor hear what is happening in the room,  only physically absorb the shot.  As it is viewed and its implications register, the viewers again are trapped as collusive agents.  Through its deep field of vision the shot becomes a  pure time event for the audience who cannot escape the flood of associations triggered both by the internal dynamics of the film and the external points of reference from their own lives.  There is no escape from what we are seeing and the ironic position of the audience is heightened by the fact that  Candy seems totally unaware of the meaning of his actions, which oblivion compounds our complicity.  The film renews its energy as a dark elliptical fairytale carved out of time that moves from the dead raven on the hat to the dead woman on the wall.

    (Unfortunately the projector broke down 15/20 minutes form the end of the film so I DID NOT SEE THE END.  I don’t know if there is a similar shot/scene involving the image of Angela.) 

    The camera work is central to the structure of the film and the way in which Powell defines time in the world of LDCB.  The camera movement is integral to the context of the sets and the Technicolor medium both of which create a detached high intensity world.  The sets have a phantasmagorical quality.  In particular the Turkish Bath set and the German military gymnasium both of which are settings the cue key camera movements that define the concept of time in LDCB. 

    The Turkish bath sets are built as pure Hollywood sybaritic fantasy.  The textures are soft and coloured by alluring pinks and blues.   The  set’s structure comprises cubicles built around a long central pool which seems to breathe steam and a heady cocktail of vapours.  From  the first,  the pool has a magnetic faerie allure. It is into this water that Candy falls during his confrontation with the young upstart when the pool is revealed to be the fountain of eternal life.  It is indeed comprised of magical qualities that restore youth to all who take its waters. As Candy falls in the pool camera tracks him as he swims along under the water simultaneously transforming space into time. It is the old grizzled rotund 60 year old Candy who enters the top of the pool;  the figure who emerges at the other end is the young officer of 40 years earlier who has just returned from South Africa and is on his way to Berlin.  In one moment the scene is set for a fairy tale in which time is the essential element.

    The camera movement in the military gymnasium is an equally powerful statement..  It is the setting for the dual between Candy and KS.  The gym has an  otherworldly quality in its coloration and spacial dimensions.  Moulded out of a light blue wash it suggests the idea of infinite space.  The dual sequence is simply constructed in long and medium shots with the focus on the necessary brisk pace of the preliminary ritual.  As the two opponents take guard and prepare to ‘attaque’ there is suddenly a great sweeping camera movement swinging the lens vertically up high into the ceiling for an overhead shot that pauses for a moment to take in the two tiny figures below still on guard in infinite space before resuming its headlong flight out of the gym finally coming to a stop hovering high in the sky over the roof of the building which twinkles in the darkness of the early winter morn.  The perspective is cosmic and the movement suggests  a switch into cosmic perspective and faerie time. in which anything is possible including time splitting up into different dimensions.  What happens?   The opponents become brothers and there is a reordering of  life as Edith chooses to marry KS.   But in a sense there is a fusion suggested.  In the same way as Deborah Kerr is the fusion of three woman,  so Candy and KS become fused as one split identity operating in different dimensions.   

    When critics summarise or talk about LDCB they usually mention that the film was nearly banned by Churchill because of the sympathetic portrayal of the main German character, KS.  In fact these critics miss the point.( let alone the idea that Candy and KS become fused bidimensional identities)  True, the script treats KS as a discrete individual and not as a raving German military stereotype. So Pressberger makes the uncomfortable political point that many Germans including ex-army officers, did oppose Hitler. But the film is much much more radical than this.  It is this deeper radical element buried at the heart of the film that prompted the authorities to want to ban it.  After their dual it is KS who marries Edith and they have two sons.  In his last conversation with Candy,  KS reveals that although he and Edith opposed Nazism and Hitler their sons had become fanatical fervent Nazis.  At this time in 1942 in Britain, this was a  bombshell idea to place in a film script.  The implication was that the Germans weren’t Nazi because of their German-ness. The Germans became Nazi through the social and political matrix of forces unleashed in their country. Pressburger was telling his British audience that being English or even half English offered no immunity from this disease.  No amount of English ‘decency’ (and Edith, on the surface at least,  is a very decent woman) could necessarily protect either us or the Germans from the political sicknesses of the age.  At a time when British propaganda was belting out the message of the intrinsic good qualities of Englishness, Pressberger and Powell’s refusal to submit to biocultural comforting British propaganda in a film intended for popular consumption must have been viewed as treacherous and unpatriotic.

    LDCB is a fairy tale implanted into the psycho-sexual war zone.  It has an overt message that seems to be saying something about the nature of war and the British character. Implanted under the skin the tegument of the film is a covert film, abetted by stunning use of décor and creative camera work, which drives deep into the dark sexual recesses of the warrior sees into the military ethos which gives birth to the death machine.  LDCB is not what it seems to be. Even if you don’t get it, its wake leaves behind a wash of psychic disturbance.
    adrin neatrour
    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Lust Caution, directed by Ang Lee, 2007

    Sex, War by Tom Jennings.
    Film review published in Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 8, May 2008

    Lust Caution, directed by Ang Lee, 2007

    [film review published in Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 8, May 2008]

    Sex, War by Tom Jennings

    Chinese genre chameleon Lee follows gay cowboy tragedy Brokeback Mountain (2005) with another epic of transgressive desire in the espionage thriller Lust, Caution – both expanded from short stories by strong women (E. Annie Proulx, Eileen Chang) struggling against convention. Trumping the former’s contrast of the constraints of cultural rootedness and middle-class mobility in shaping sensual expression,* the doomed romance here resonates with epochal historical significance – referencing ideological, cultural, and national conflict inextricably complicating individual vicissitudes of gender role, performance and identity. Again, universal themes are conjured from highly specific contexts (the Second World War Japanese occupation of China) and characters (newcomer Tang Wei as student Wong Chia Chi erotically ensnaring for assassination purposes collaborationist secret police chief, veteran Tony Leung’s Mr Yee) through immaculate structure, design, acting and cinematography.
    So, our Hong Kong college theatre ensemble graduates from patriotic productions to plotting a strike at the puppet state in the person of its chief enforcer. As bait, Wong insinuates herself into Mrs Yee’s circle, honing the simulation of upper-class mores and inching closer to intimacy with the quarry while her most dissolute comrade initiates her in the sexual athleticism necessary to complete her task. Despite the amateurism they nearly succeed but the set-up fails, and three years later Wong is aimlessly ensconced in her impoverished Shanghai family. Yee’s glittering career is also established there, and the rest of her troupe – now under Maoist direction – make contact to continue the plan. However, the ensuing passionate affair develops a life of its own as the group’s cadre commander defers the payoff in favour of gathering further intelligence. When the crunch finally comes, Wong’s attachment leads her to warn Yee, who escapes and has the conspirators executed.

    This lustfully cautionary tale escalates from the traditional Chinese scandal of private yearnings disrupting the public cultivation of respectable decorum. Yet whereas suffocating strictures of conformism bolster the status quo, the unruly desire exemplified by sexuality and its discontents may be deployed subversively in the gaps between the minutiae of custom and surface appearance. But with seductive tension mounting towards ecstatic release, Wong’s initial motivation to play a part in liberating her social world from oppression is undone by the exquisite bodily intensity experienced in the liaison – having subsumed her entire existence in perfecting its foreplay and consummation. Lee underscores the contradictions with magnificent explicit sex scenes, convincingly depicting both protagonists’ anguished, aggressive, will-to-connect forcefully overflowing other agendas. Foregrounding the fundamental obstinacy of bodily urgency to socialisation, Lust, Caution’s melodramatic sublation of sex and death illustrates the fatal naiveté of instrumentally linking libidinal logic to conscious, rational projects – whether mundanely personal, cynically self-interested, or those their adherents imagine to be wholly collectively worthy.

    * see my comments on Brokeback Mountain in ‘Cowboys and Injuries’ (www.starandshadow.org.uk).

    www.variant.org.uk

    www.freedompress.org.uk

    www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

  • Stop-Loss – Kimberley Pierce – USA 2008

    adrin neatrour writes: Film as text message
    Stop-Loss – Kimberley Pierce – USA 2008  – Ryan Phillippe  Channing Tatum  Abbie Cornish
    Viewed: The Empire Cinema – Newcastle upon Tyne
     Ticket: £6-80

    Film as text message

    Kimberley Pierce is a filmmaker who’s lost her way and ended up tied to Hollywood’s apron strings.  Her first film directed in 1999 Boys Don’t Cry, exploiting the fine edge of Hilary Swank acting presence, showed that she had the skill and understanding to fashion an intense world out of the contradictions of contemporary blue collar culture.   Stop-Loss (S-L) creates nothing resembling a world and with MTV as the main credited production company, it evidences as a film the combined depth of the text message and an MTV promo.

    ‘Stop-Loss’ is the clause in the contract American soldiers sign when they enlist. It’s a clause which gives the US armed forces the right to compel military personnel to extend their service beyond the time for which they originally signed.  During war it’s a means of ensuring good soldiers have to undertake further tours of duty – even against their will.  Pierce believes in particular in relation to the Iraq and Afghan wars, that this one sided clause is a heinous affront and denial of rights. Her film is made is response to her feelings about this issue.  The problem is that film (or for that matter the novel or poetry) is generally not employed to its most powerful or persuasive effect when it is reduced to being a vehicle for an issue; when used as a mere vehicle, a simple conduit for a message.  And Kimberley Pierce has one main message here and that is that the Stop-Loss clause is a violation of fairness and justice.

    The message is delivered amidst the emotively acted machinations of a conventional soap drama.  Buddies fall in and fall out with each other against a background concern that connects the vicious experience of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to the final price paid in damage to the bodies and  minds of the young working class men who do the fighting.   

    But there are a large number of films that equate the  waging of war with a destructive effect on individual character personality and psychic equilibrium.  The strongest of these films relate the experience and shock of the soldier to the political and socially structured responses that are endemic in the culture.   S-L fails to achieve this connection not because the constituent elements are absent, the set piece of the public  returning home parade/jamboree is a case in point; but  the style of the filming never allows for these socio cultural elements to be observed.  Altman’s Nashville is powerful because the public aspect of the political element is never overtly interpreted but presented to the viewer as something to observe. IN S-L. the scenario, the camera and editing are always busy interpreting what is happening, and underscoring the visuals with emotionally charged music.  Much of S-L is filmed through close-up shots of the faces of the players which lends the film a reactive soap opera feel: emotions and emoting responses displace understanding as the film’s focus point.  The face replaces the body, surface replaces depth of field.

    In depriving the viewer of observational means to see into characters Pierce resorts to ‘devices’ that are intent on making us understand what the characters are experiencing. The use flashbacks is inelegantly crude: Brandon – protagonist – sitting on the dive board stares into the Motel pool and sees his buddy in the depths.  The flashback seems to be used to try and construct meaning in the film where the film script in itself is unable to.  Likewise to express the meaning of damaged young men Pierce and her fellow scenarist Mark Richard   resort to the device of contrived incident mostly in the form of violent outbursts by the characters.  Again it is a crude method of making the point but one that is not necessarily effective in engaging the viewer in understanding. Perhaps because mindless violence is now the currency of most mainstream movies.

    Finally I was interested to see that the cinematographer on S-L was Chris Menges. This film and veteran cinematographer of Killing Fields, the Mission, and Dirty Pretty Things would have been handy to have had on board  for the shooting of the ambush fire fight sequence.  It seems like a typical Hollywood match: the veteran cinemat and the tyro director(KP has only directed two films); but was Menges Pierce’s choice or the studios? I am certain that Menges is a model of discrete advice but his presence as key production presence raises the question to what extent the look of the film, which is sort of his department, dictated the delivery of the film.  It raises the general point that overall ( the need for marketing short hand) the director probably gets more than their share of public credit in a product that is very often a team effort.
    adrin neatrour
    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 
    Stop-Loss – Kimberley Pierce – USA 2008  – Ryan Phillippe  Channing Tatum  Abbie Cornish
    Viewed: The Empire Cinema – Newcastle upon Tyne
     Ticket: £6-80

    Film as text message

    Kimberley Pierce is a filmmaker who’s lost her way and ended up tied to Hollywood’s apron strings.  Her first film directed in 1999 Boys Don’t Cry, exploiting the fine edge of Hilary Swank acting presence, showed that she had the skill and understanding to fashion an intense world out of the contradictions of contemporary blue collar culture.   Stop-Loss (S-L) creates nothing resembling a world and with MTV as the main credited production company, it evidences as a film the combined depth of the text message and an MTV promo.

    ‘Stop-Loss’ is the clause in the contract American soldiers sign when they enlist. It’s a clause which gives the US armed forces the right to compel military personnel to extend their service beyond the time for which they originally signed.  During war it’s a means of ensuring good soldiers have to undertake further tours of duty – even against their will.  Pierce believes in particular in relation to the Iraq and Afghan wars, that this one sided clause is a heinous affront and denial of rights. Her film is made is response to her feelings about this issue.  The problem is that film (or for that matter the novel or poetry) is generally not employed to its most powerful or persuasive effect when it is reduced to being a vehicle for an issue; when used as a mere vehicle, a simple conduit for a message.  And Kimberley Pierce has one main message here and that is that the Stop-Loss clause is a violation of fairness and justice.

    The message is delivered amidst the emotively acted machinations of a conventional soap drama.  Buddies fall in and fall out with each other against a background concern that connects the vicious experience of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to the final price paid in damage to the bodies and  minds of the young working class men who do the fighting.   

    But there are a large number of films that equate the  waging of war with a destructive effect on individual character personality and psychic equilibrium.  The strongest of these films relate the experience and shock of the soldier to the political and socially structured responses that are endemic in the culture.   S-L fails to achieve this connection not because the constituent elements are absent, the set piece of the public  returning home parade/jamboree is a case in point; but  the style of the filming never allows for these socio cultural elements to be observed.  Altman’s Nashville is powerful because the public aspect of the political element is never overtly interpreted but presented to the viewer as something to observe. IN S-L. the scenario, the camera and editing are always busy interpreting what is happening, and underscoring the visuals with emotionally charged music.  Much of S-L is filmed through close-up shots of the faces of the players which lends the film a reactive soap opera feel: emotions and emoting responses displace understanding as the film’s focus point.  The face replaces the body, surface replaces depth of field.

    In depriving the viewer of observational means to see into characters Pierce resorts to ‘devices’ that are intent on making us understand what the characters are experiencing. The use flashbacks is inelegantly crude: Brandon – protagonist – sitting on the dive board stares into the Motel pool and sees his buddy in the depths.  The flashback seems to be used to try and construct meaning in the film where the film script in itself is unable to.  Likewise to express the meaning of damaged young men Pierce and her fellow scenarist Mark Richard   resort to the device of contrived incident mostly in the form of violent outbursts by the characters.  Again it is a crude method of making the point but one that is not necessarily effective in engaging the viewer in understanding. Perhaps because mindless violence is now the currency of most mainstream movies.

    Finally I was interested to see that the cinematographer on S-L was Chris Menges. This film and veteran cinematographer of Killing Fields, the Mission, and Dirty Pretty Things would have been handy to have had on board  for the shooting of the ambush fire fight sequence.  It seems like a typical Hollywood match: the veteran cinemat and the tyro director(KP has only directed two films); but was Menges Pierce’s choice or the studios? I am certain that Menges is a model of discrete advice but his presence as key production presence raises the question to what extent the look of the film, which is sort of his department, dictated the delivery of the film.  It raises the general point that overall ( the need for marketing short hand) the director probably gets more than their share of public credit in a product that is very often a team effort.
    adrin neatrour
    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk