Monthly Archives: September 2008

  • Billy Liar John Schlessinger UK 1963

    adrin neatrour writes:Machine gun dreams: a moral taleBilly Liar   John Schlessinger   UK  1963; Tom Courtenay ; Julie Christie
    Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 18-09-08  Ticket price: £4-00
     
    adrin neatrour writes: a body without organs – a moral tale

    retrocrit
    Billy Liar (BL) is usually described as a movie about a habitual dreamer fantasist called Billy Fisher.  Billy the young man with ambitions to be a writer trapped in a small Northern industrial town.  The usual explanation of the film is that Billy gets away from his actual reality by escaping into a world of his own imaginative longings.

    But Billy doesn’t escape reality through his fantasial life; his fantasies in fact bind him more tightly to the reality he wants to put behind him.  Each indulgence in his imaginings commits him the more deeply to what he opposes.  And each indulgence increases the need to feed the habit of escape that is no escape.  The device of fantasy Billy uses as a means of escape is actually the path to deeper entrapment. Billy is a dreamer: a body without an organ: a pure psychic effect.

    Billy is usually described as a ‘dreamer’ without however the nature of his dreams being examined.  The core of BL is Schlessinger’s (JS) filmic realisation of  Billy’s  dreams and JS’s understanding of the context of the fantasy. Billy’s fantasies don’t centre on pleasure but on power.   There are two main motif’s in Billy’s fantasy sequences: the obliteration of his enemies; and Billy as dictator: the leader of a  military machine.  As in the case of Hitler, who is certainly parodied here by JS, the powerless often have their psyches colonised by the very forces that they perceive as constructing their personal humiliation. The warped internalisation of the very forces that are seen as destroying the self, has ironic and often unpleasant consequences.

    Set in the encompassing thrall of a small Lancashire industrial town, Billy’s fantasies of death and militaristic power point not so much to Billy as dreamer but to Billy as a frozen entity.  A Billy who is frozen into the  economic and social matrix of a  culture defined by mechanical hierarchical relationships.  A culture where the machine form defines all the  areas of social interactions: life and death, family and work.  It is a culture in terminal decline captured at the point in time where the machine will start to breakdown to be replaced by cultural form based less on constrained cohesive relations and more on organic/desire relationships.   Where failure will be a personal rather than a collective responsibility.

     Billy appears not as a young man escaping through fantasy but as a young man whose fantasies reveal that he is actually a psychic projection of  the encompassing mechanistic regulatory system.  His fantasy world doesn’t oppose the machine; rather it seeks to control the machine and thereby is of course controlled by it.  Lacking the resources to build an opposing fantasial apparatus Billy simply appropriates the machine’s hierarchic and mechanical form for his own ends and  satisfactions.  People are reduced to puppets under his control and those who oppose are exterminated.  The concentration camp and the execution squad, the logical extension of Billy’s imaginings, are the frozen products of a society built on mechanised life and death.

     
    BL  is not structured on plot but rather on state of mind:  the frozen fantasy.   The film comprises a series of strips of action, triggers that fire Billy’s subjectivities.  The action strips are located in different parts of the social/economic machine but the fantasial responses from Billy indicate an internal time mechanism in which the hands on the clock are immobile.  In a sense it is replication of the state of mind of Adolf Hitler whose pent up frustrations during eight years in Vienna taught him ( according to Mein Kampf) everything he knew.  The years in Vienna, a hierarchical mechanical apparatus taught Hitler to hate and project the sclerotic forms of the Austro-Hungarian empire onto a solution of  the Jewish question.  Hitler frozen into his fantasies carried forewards his fantastic hatred into an eventual programme of mass murder.  JS’s Billy has similar artistic ambitions to Hitler ( Billy wants to write) but like Hitler suffers from an internalisation of the very institutions that humiliate him.  An internalisation that sabotages both development of ability and vision.   

    Billy fails to see that he is living in a form of social organisation that is in its death throws.  The sequence which comprises the opening of the first supermarket is a filmic tour de force, but it works to indicate the development of a new form of social contract based on desire rather than mechanical obedience.  Billy sees nothing of this.  Death riddles his psyche boring through outer carapace of the film like the worm with a message.  Billy himself works in the the death industry, his gran is dying and some of the most effectively shot sequences in BL take place in the municipal grave yard as death itself watches over life.  Eventually Billy offered the chance of life by the charged vital ( but irrelevant ) presence of Julie Christie, chooses death. There was never any other alternative and JS remains true to moral intent and purpose rather than giving way to a faked ignoble open or ‘happy’ ending. 
    adrin neatrrour
    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • California Dreaming (Nesfarsit) – Cristian Nemescu – 2007 Romania: Jamie Elman; Maria Dimilescu

    Adrin Neatrour writes: The English title of the film points to a marketing idea. The Romanian title of the film points to the idea of time: but the film’s natural ambit is really: situation – the train that does not move.

    California Dreaming (Nesfarsit) – Cristian Nemescu – 2007 Romania:  Jamie Elman; Maria Dimilescu
    Viewed Tyneside Cinema July 31 08 Ticket price £6-80 

    The English title of the film points to a marketing idea.  The Romanian title of the film points to the idea of time: but the film’s natural ambit is really:  situation – the train that does not move.

    California Dreaming (CD) opens with a black and white time shift sequence that takes us back more than 50 years to the end of the WWll.  We witness the effects of a bombing raid on Bucharest from the interior of a tenement bock where the inhabitants flee in panic as the bombs are dropping. On its own terms it’s a stunning opening series of shots characterised by choreographed craning camera movement.   The awful reality of falling ordinance presents through an almost animation like realisation of the action, with its visual representation of an unexploded bomb, the menacing dull metallic sheen of its casing transfixing the eye,  smashing through the roof of the building and tumbling down the  building’s stairs in pursuit of a young boy.   It’s a helter-skelter sequence in which the bomb finally settles in its resting place without exploding.  Like a fat unfertilised egg the device sets up the idea of history as a time bomb:  an archaeologically layered event waiting to be dug up.   By something or some one.  This opening sequence sits in the film as an interwoven metaphor pervading the unravelling situation. As the film progresses its purpose is to interconnect the represented present to the past from which it has flowed. It is not just the waiting of the train that is endless; so too are the consequences of history: Endless.

    Only it doesn’t work.  The metaphorical device of the bomb, stylishly realised though it is, is not meshed into the structure of the film.  In effect the body of the film comprises a situation that has as its mainspring its own powerful logic: immobility. The  insertion of  primal historical dimension adds nothing to this situation.  If any thing the time element undermines the integrity of the film by adding an irrelevant plane of immanence. In CD the time element is otiose.  The historical sequences are good looking cinema, a demonstration of set piece choreographic competence.  But layered  into the action it only serves as an exemplifier, a fashionable nod or acknowledgement of the workings of history, particularly in Eastern Europe.

    The situation in CD is a simple proposition: in 1999 a military train in transit to Serbia as part of the NATO  engagement in the Balkan regional conflict, is refused passage through a section of the track by a relatively minor but powerful railway official who says that the train does not have the correct authorisation. Lacking the right clearance and stymied by the local bureaucrat, the train is shunted into a siding and decoupled from its locomotive.  With its complement of US and Roumanian guards the train waits in the sweltering heat for the necessary clearance from uninterested ministers in Bucharest who shuffle the papers from one office to another.  

    CD posits a situation where a number of expressive oppositions are brought into play.  The moving and the still; the organic and the inorganic, the peasant and the urban, the military machine and the social matrix, male and female, power and powerlessness.  The interest in the situation lies in how the film exploits and develops the machinations latent in its oppositions and brings into play expressive exemplars of the forces that it has created.  I think CD is compromised by its overarching use of film clichés to express resolve and dissolve its prime elements. The consequence is that it is no more than a rehash and retread of familiar material. 

    Nemescu’s script celebrates the infectious parochial pomposity of local politicians against the utilitarian outlook of the military; the obstinacy of the peasant opposing centralised bureaucracy.  But Nemescu is unable to do more than draw on a population of stock characters already well plumbed by directors of an earlier generation such as Milos Forman.  Nemescu’s failure is that he is unable to add any real further development to these oppositions.  He is content to set up narrative dynamics in which simple juxtapostioning of stereotypes types automatically releases tensions and milks the possibilities of  the humour of juxtaposition.  I think it is Nemescu’s inability to ring changes in stereotypes that comprises the film’s failure.  The US major in charge of the train squad, the mayor, the young girls, the US soldiers,  the striking workers amount to nothing more than stock characters.  The situation as it was set up has the potential for moving into veins of subjectivity that could have explored wilder counter intuitive veins of character. But these furrows have been left fallow.

    They may have been left fallow because of the two key oppositions are selected to  dominate the film.  Firstly the love story.   The male and the female characters: the  opposition of the aspirations of the small town girl and the boredom of the foreign soldier, is milked for its evident commercial weight.  This short relationship instigated by Monica the local 17 year old beauty between herself and the soldier, comes out of a long line of East European films that celebrate the seductive power of dream relationships.  The subplot adds little if nothing to this genre of relationship, except that, shot in 2007 the sex scene leaves little to the imagination.  Otherwise it’s the tired story of: country girl seduces foreign soldier boy in pursuit of her desire to escape.   They fuck then go their separate ways: he returns to his real girl and she a little wiser and eventually back to the guy who really cares for her (as a person).  Wresting something new from this tired scenario requires special skills that are not evident here.

    The other key opposition is between the railway official and the US major.  Which is where the time/historical factor rears up and interpenetrates the  film’s situational narrative.   The film, in this opposition invokes history as a causative device. CD wants to connect the minor official’s action in stopping the train to his hatred of Americans.  Because his father was killed in an American bombing raid on Bucharest at the end of WWll.  This mark on  the warp of history leads 50 years later to an act of revenge.  I think that as an a narrative idea this overdetermines history as a driving force.  After so much ‘history’ in Roumania the Communist coup,  the dictatorship of Ceausescu  the hardships of  the restoration of capitalism, to select for purposes of revenge, a Nato train half of whose guards are American, and  to delay it , feels ike weak linkage.   A limp wrested attempt to implicate history.  As a character it also demeans the role of the railway official, lessening his interest as an agent and reducing him to a pawn of psychological mechanisms. The implication of history doesn’t necessarily deepen character: it can render character the more opaque. If for instance the railway official had harboured a rage and a fury at NATO intervention in geographic zones where they understood nothing of history, then the character comes alive.  Screwing him into a reactive act of revenge deadens him and does little service to actual historical memory.

    Lastly the film is laboriously overlong.  One of the reasons it felt so long was what starts in CD as a joke, the ritual of translation carried out with intentional misrepresentation, becomes a pedantic need of Nemescu’s to repeat ad infinitum. In the end it is an idea that only serves to extend the film long beyond its situational premise. In itself California Dreaming becomes: Endless.
    adrin neatrour
    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

        

     

    California Dreaming (Nesfarsit) – Cristian Nemescu – 2007 Romania:  Jamie Elman; Maria Dimilescu
    Viewed Tyneside Cinema July 31 08 Ticket price £6-80 

    The English title of the film points to a marketing idea.  The Romanian title of the film points to the idea of time: but the film’s natural ambit is really:  situation – the train that does not move.

    California Dreaming (CD) opens with a black and white time shift sequence that takes us back more than 50 years to the end of the WWll.  We witness the effects of a bombing raid on Bucharest from the interior of a tenement bock where the inhabitants flee in panic as the bombs are dropping. On its own terms it’s a stunning opening series of shots characterised by choreographed craning camera movement.   The awful reality of falling ordinance presents through an almost animation like realisation of the action, with its visual representation of an unexploded bomb, the menacing dull metallic sheen of its casing transfixing the eye,  smashing through the roof of the building and tumbling down the  building’s stairs in pursuit of a young boy.   It’s a helter-skelter sequence in which the bomb finally settles in its resting place without exploding.  Like a fat unfertilised egg the device sets up the idea of history as a time bomb:  an archaeologically layered event waiting to be dug up.   By something or some one.  This opening sequence sits in the film as an interwoven metaphor pervading the unravelling situation. As the film progresses its purpose is to interconnect the represented present to the past from which it has flowed. It is not just the waiting of the train that is endless; so too are the consequences of history: Endless.

    Only it doesn’t work.  The metaphorical device of the bomb, stylishly realised though it is, is not meshed into the structure of the film.  In effect the body of the film comprises a situation that has as its mainspring its own powerful logic: immobility. The  insertion of  primal historical dimension adds nothing to this situation.  If any thing the time element undermines the integrity of the film by adding an irrelevant plane of immanence. In CD the time element is otiose.  The historical sequences are good looking cinema, a demonstration of set piece choreographic competence.  But layered  into the action it only serves as an exemplifier, a fashionable nod or acknowledgement of the workings of history, particularly in Eastern Europe.

    The situation in CD is a simple proposition: in 1999 a military train in transit to Serbia as part of the NATO  engagement in the Balkan regional conflict, is refused passage through a section of the track by a relatively minor but powerful railway official who says that the train does not have the correct authorisation. Lacking the right clearance and stymied by the local bureaucrat, the train is shunted into a siding and decoupled from its locomotive.  With its complement of US and Roumanian guards the train waits in the sweltering heat for the necessary clearance from uninterested ministers in Bucharest who shuffle the papers from one office to another.  

    CD posits a situation where a number of expressive oppositions are brought into play.  The moving and the still; the organic and the inorganic, the peasant and the urban, the military machine and the social matrix, male and female, power and powerlessness.  The interest in the situation lies in how the film exploits and develops the machinations latent in its oppositions and brings into play expressive exemplars of the forces that it has created.  I think CD is compromised by its overarching use of film clichés to express resolve and dissolve its prime elements. The consequence is that it is no more than a rehash and retread of familiar material. 

    Nemescu’s script celebrates the infectious parochial pomposity of local politicians against the utilitarian outlook of the military; the obstinacy of the peasant opposing centralised bureaucracy.  But Nemescu is unable to do more than draw on a population of stock characters already well plumbed by directors of an earlier generation such as Milos Forman.  Nemescu’s failure is that he is unable to add any real further development to these oppositions.  He is content to set up narrative dynamics in which simple juxtapostioning of stereotypes types automatically releases tensions and milks the possibilities of  the humour of juxtaposition.  I think it is Nemescu’s inability to ring changes in stereotypes that comprises the film’s failure.  The US major in charge of the train squad, the mayor, the young girls, the US soldiers,  the striking workers amount to nothing more than stock characters.  The situation as it was set up has the potential for moving into veins of subjectivity that could have explored wilder counter intuitive veins of character. But these furrows have been left fallow.

    They may have been left fallow because of the two key oppositions are selected to  dominate the film.  Firstly the love story.   The male and the female characters: the  opposition of the aspirations of the small town girl and the boredom of the foreign soldier, is milked for its evident commercial weight.  This short relationship instigated by Monica the local 17 year old beauty between herself and the soldier, comes out of a long line of East European films that celebrate the seductive power of dream relationships.  The subplot adds little if nothing to this genre of relationship, except that, shot in 2007 the sex scene leaves little to the imagination.  Otherwise it’s the tired story of: country girl seduces foreign soldier boy in pursuit of her desire to escape.   They fuck then go their separate ways: he returns to his real girl and she a little wiser and eventually back to the guy who really cares for her (as a person).  Wresting something new from this tired scenario requires special skills that are not evident here.

    The other key opposition is between the railway official and the US major.  Which is where the time/historical factor rears up and interpenetrates the  film’s situational narrative.   The film, in this opposition invokes history as a causative device. CD wants to connect the minor official’s action in stopping the train to his hatred of Americans.  Because his father was killed in an American bombing raid on Bucharest at the end of WWll.  This mark on  the warp of history leads 50 years later to an act of revenge.  I think that as an a narrative idea this overdetermines history as a driving force.  After so much ‘history’ in Roumania the Communist coup,  the dictatorship of Ceausescu  the hardships of  the restoration of capitalism, to select for purposes of revenge, a Nato train half of whose guards are American, and  to delay it , feels ike weak linkage.   A limp wrested attempt to implicate history.  As a character it also demeans the role of the railway official, lessening his interest as an agent and reducing him to a pawn of psychological mechanisms. The implication of history doesn’t necessarily deepen character: it can render character the more opaque. If for instance the railway official had harboured a rage and a fury at NATO intervention in geographic zones where they understood nothing of history, then the character comes alive.  Screwing him into a reactive act of revenge deadens him and does little service to actual historical memory.

    Lastly the film is laboriously overlong.  One of the reasons it felt so long was what starts in CD as a joke, the ritual of translation carried out with intentional misrepresentation, becomes a pedantic need of Nemescu’s to repeat ad infinitum. In the end it is an idea that only serves to extend the film long beyond its situational premise. In itself California Dreaming becomes: Endless.
    adrin neatrour
    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

        

     

    California Dreaming (Nesfarsit) – Cristian Nemescu – 2007 Romania:  Jamie Elman; Maria Dimilescu
    Viewed Tyneside Cinema July 31 08 Ticket price £6-80 

    The English title of the film points to a marketing idea.  The Romanian title of the film points to the idea of time: but the film’s natural ambit is really:  situation – the train that does not move.

    California Dreaming (CD) opens with a black and white time shift sequence that takes us back more than 50 years to the end of the WWll.  We witness the effects of a bombing raid on Bucharest from the interior of a tenement bock where the inhabitants flee in panic as the bombs are dropping. On its own terms it’s a stunning opening series of shots characterised by choreographed craning camera movement.   The awful reality of falling ordinance presents through an almost animation like realisation of the action, with its visual representation of an unexploded bomb, the menacing dull metallic sheen of its casing transfixing the eye,  smashing through the roof of the building and tumbling down the  building’s stairs in pursuit of a young boy.   It’s a helter-skelter sequence in which the bomb finally settles in its resting place without exploding.  Like a fat unfertilised egg the device sets up the idea of history as a time bomb:  an archaeologically layered event waiting to be dug up.   By something or some one.  This opening sequence sits in the film as an interwoven metaphor pervading the unravelling situation. As the film progresses its purpose is to interconnect the represented present to the past from which it has flowed. It is not just the waiting of the train that is endless; so too are the consequences of history: Endless.

    Only it doesn’t work.  The metaphorical device of the bomb, stylishly realised though it is, is not meshed into the structure of the film.  In effect the body of the film comprises a situation that has as its mainspring its own powerful logic: immobility. The  insertion of  primal historical dimension adds nothing to this situation.  If any thing the time element undermines the integrity of the film by adding an irrelevant plane of immanence. In CD the time element is otiose.  The historical sequences are good looking cinema, a demonstration of set piece choreographic competence.  But layered  into the action it only serves as an exemplifier, a fashionable nod or acknowledgement of the workings of history, particularly in Eastern Europe.

    The situation in CD is a simple proposition: in 1999 a military train in transit to Serbia as part of the NATO  engagement in the Balkan regional conflict, is refused passage through a section of the track by a relatively minor but powerful railway official who says that the train does not have the correct authorisation. Lacking the right clearance and stymied by the local bureaucrat, the train is shunted into a siding and decoupled from its locomotive.  With its complement of US and Roumanian guards the train waits in the sweltering heat for the necessary clearance from uninterested ministers in Bucharest who shuffle the papers from one office to another.  

    CD posits a situation where a number of expressive oppositions are brought into play.  The moving and the still; the organic and the inorganic, the peasant and the urban, the military machine and the social matrix, male and female, power and powerlessness.  The interest in the situation lies in how the film exploits and develops the machinations latent in its oppositions and brings into play expressive exemplars of the forces that it has created.  I think CD is compromised by its overarching use of film clichés to express resolve and dissolve its prime elements. The consequence is that it is no more than a rehash and retread of familiar material. 

    Nemescu’s script celebrates the infectious parochial pomposity of local politicians against the utilitarian outlook of the military; the obstinacy of the peasant opposing centralised bureaucracy.  But Nemescu is unable to do more than draw on a population of stock characters already well plumbed by directors of an earlier generation such as Milos Forman.  Nemescu’s failure is that he is unable to add any real further development to these oppositions.  He is content to set up narrative dynamics in which simple juxtapostioning of stereotypes types automatically releases tensions and milks the possibilities of  the humour of juxtaposition.  I think it is Nemescu’s inability to ring changes in stereotypes that comprises the film’s failure.  The US major in charge of the train squad, the mayor, the young girls, the US soldiers,  the striking workers amount to nothing more than stock characters.  The situation as it was set up has the potential for moving into veins of subjectivity that could have explored wilder counter intuitive veins of character. But these furrows have been left fallow.

    They may have been left fallow because of the two key oppositions are selected to  dominate the film.  Firstly the love story.   The male and the female characters: the  opposition of the aspirations of the small town girl and the boredom of the foreign soldier, is milked for its evident commercial weight.  This short relationship instigated by Monica the local 17 year old beauty between herself and the soldier, comes out of a long line of East European films that celebrate the seductive power of dream relationships.  The subplot adds little if nothing to this genre of relationship, except that, shot in 2007 the sex scene leaves little to the imagination.  Otherwise it’s the tired story of: country girl seduces foreign soldier boy in pursuit of her desire to escape.   They fuck then go their separate ways: he returns to his real girl and she a little wiser and eventually back to the guy who really cares for her (as a person).  Wresting something new from this tired scenario requires special skills that are not evident here.

    The other key opposition is between the railway official and the US major.  Which is where the time/historical factor rears up and interpenetrates the  film’s situational narrative.   The film, in this opposition invokes history as a causative device. CD wants to connect the minor official’s action in stopping the train to his hatred of Americans.  Because his father was killed in an American bombing raid on Bucharest at the end of WWll.  This mark on  the warp of history leads 50 years later to an act of revenge.  I think that as an a narrative idea this overdetermines history as a driving force.  After so much ‘history’ in Roumania the Communist coup,  the dictatorship of Ceausescu  the hardships of  the restoration of capitalism, to select for purposes of revenge, a Nato train half of whose guards are American, and  to delay it , feels ike weak linkage.   A limp wrested attempt to implicate history.  As a character it also demeans the role of the railway official, lessening his interest as an agent and reducing him to a pawn of psychological mechanisms. The implication of history doesn’t necessarily deepen character: it can render character the more opaque. If for instance the railway official had harboured a rage and a fury at NATO intervention in geographic zones where they understood nothing of history, then the character comes alive.  Screwing him into a reactive act of revenge deadens him and does little service to actual historical memory.

    Lastly the film is laboriously overlong.  One of the reasons it felt so long was what starts in CD as a joke, the ritual of translation carried out with intentional misrepresentation, becomes a pedantic need of Nemescu’s to repeat ad infinitum. In the end it is an idea that only serves to extend the film long beyond its situational premise. In itself California Dreaming becomes: Endless.
    adrin neatrour
    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

        

     

    California Dreaming (Nesfarsit) – Cristian Nemescu – 2007 Romania:  Jamie Elman; Maria Dimilescu
    Viewed Tyneside Cinema July 31 08 Ticket price £6-80 

    The English title of the film points to a marketing idea.  The Romanian title of the film points to the idea of time: but the film’s natural ambit is really:  situation – the train that does not move.

    California Dreaming (CD) opens with a black and white time shift sequence that takes us back more than 50 years to the end of the WWll.  We witness the effects of a bombing raid on Bucharest from the interior of a tenement bock where the inhabitants flee in panic as the bombs are dropping. On its own terms it’s a stunning opening series of shots characterised by choreographed craning camera movement.   The awful reality of falling ordinance presents through an almost animation like realisation of the action, with its visual representation of an unexploded bomb, the menacing dull metallic sheen of its casing transfixing the eye,  smashing through the roof of the building and tumbling down the  building’s stairs in pursuit of a young boy.   It’s a helter-skelter sequence in which the bomb finally settles in its resting place without exploding.  Like a fat unfertilised egg the device sets up the idea of history as a time bomb:  an archaeologically layered event waiting to be dug up.   By something or some one.  This opening sequence sits in the film as an interwoven metaphor pervading the unravelling situation. As the film progresses its purpose is to interconnect the represented present to the past from which it has flowed. It is not just the waiting of the train that is endless; so too are the consequences of history: Endless.

    Only it doesn’t work.  The metaphorical device of the bomb, stylishly realised though it is, is not meshed into the structure of the film.  In effect the body of the film comprises a situation that has as its mainspring its own powerful logic: immobility. The  insertion of  primal historical dimension adds nothing to this situation.  If any thing the time element undermines the integrity of the film by adding an irrelevant plane of immanence. In CD the time element is otiose.  The historical sequences are good looking cinema, a demonstration of set piece choreographic competence.  But layered  into the action it only serves as an exemplifier, a fashionable nod or acknowledgement of the workings of history, particularly in Eastern Europe.

    The situation in CD is a simple proposition: in 1999 a military train in transit to Serbia as part of the NATO  engagement in the Balkan regional conflict, is refused passage through a section of the track by a relatively minor but powerful railway official who says that the train does not have the correct authorisation. Lacking the right clearance and stymied by the local bureaucrat, the train is shunted into a siding and decoupled from its locomotive.  With its complement of US and Roumanian guards the train waits in the sweltering heat for the necessary clearance from uninterested ministers in Bucharest who shuffle the papers from one office to another.  

    CD posits a situation where a number of expressive oppositions are brought into play.  The moving and the still; the organic and the inorganic, the peasant and the urban, the military machine and the social matrix, male and female, power and powerlessness.  The interest in the situation lies in how the film exploits and develops the machinations latent in its oppositions and brings into play expressive exemplars of the forces that it has created.  I think CD is compromised by its overarching use of film clichés to express resolve and dissolve its prime elements. The consequence is that it is no more than a rehash and retread of familiar material. 

    Nemescu’s script celebrates the infectious parochial pomposity of local politicians against the utilitarian outlook of the military; the obstinacy of the peasant opposing centralised bureaucracy.  But Nemescu is unable to do more than draw on a population of stock characters already well plumbed by directors of an earlier generation such as Milos Forman.  Nemescu’s failure is that he is unable to add any real further development to these oppositions.  He is content to set up narrative dynamics in which simple juxtapostioning of stereotypes types automatically releases tensions and milks the possibilities of  the humour of juxtaposition.  I think it is Nemescu’s inability to ring changes in stereotypes that comprises the film’s failure.  The US major in charge of the train squad, the mayor, the young girls, the US soldiers,  the striking workers amount to nothing more than stock characters.  The situation as it was set up has the potential for moving into veins of subjectivity that could have explored wilder counter intuitive veins of character. But these furrows have been left fallow.

    They may have been left fallow because of the two key oppositions are selected to  dominate the film.  Firstly the love story.   The male and the female characters: the  opposition of the aspirations of the small town girl and the boredom of the foreign soldier, is milked for its evident commercial weight.  This short relationship instigated by Monica the local 17 year old beauty between herself and the soldier, comes out of a long line of East European films that celebrate the seductive power of dream relationships.  The subplot adds little if nothing to this genre of relationship, except that, shot in 2007 the sex scene leaves little to the imagination.  Otherwise it’s the tired story of: country girl seduces foreign soldier boy in pursuit of her desire to escape.   They fuck then go their separate ways: he returns to his real girl and she a little wiser and eventually back to the guy who really cares for her (as a person).  Wresting something new from this tired scenario requires special skills that are not evident here.

    The other key opposition is between the railway official and the US major.  Which is where the time/historical factor rears up and interpenetrates the  film’s situational narrative.   The film, in this opposition invokes history as a causative device. CD wants to connect the minor official’s action in stopping the train to his hatred of Americans.  Because his father was killed in an American bombing raid on Bucharest at the end of WWll.  This mark on  the warp of history leads 50 years later to an act of revenge.  I think that as an a narrative idea this overdetermines history as a driving force.  After so much ‘history’ in Roumania the Communist coup,  the dictatorship of Ceausescu  the hardships of  the restoration of capitalism, to select for purposes of revenge, a Nato train half of whose guards are American, and  to delay it , feels ike weak linkage.   A limp wrested attempt to implicate history.  As a character it also demeans the role of the railway official, lessening his interest as an agent and reducing him to a pawn of psychological mechanisms. The implication of history doesn’t necessarily deepen character: it can render character the more opaque. If for instance the railway official had harboured a rage and a fury at NATO intervention in geographic zones where they understood nothing of history, then the character comes alive.  Screwing him into a reactive act of revenge deadens him and does little service to actual historical memory.

    Lastly the film is laboriously overlong.  One of the reasons it felt so long was what starts in CD as a joke, the ritual of translation carried out with intentional misrepresentation, becomes a pedantic need of Nemescu’s to repeat ad infinitum. In the end it is an idea that only serves to extend the film long beyond its situational premise. In itself California Dreaming becomes: Endless.
    adrin neatrour
    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Man on Wire – James Marsh – UK 2008 Doc

    adrin neatrour writes: Fiction passing for fact or fact passing as fiction?
    Man on Wire – James Marsh – UK 2008  Doc (with dramatic reconstructions)
    Viewed Tyneside Cinema 16 August 08;  Ticket:  £6-80

    Fiction passing for fact or fact passing as fiction?

    Marsh’s Man on Wire (MoW) is interesting in that it poses heuristic questions concerning the nature of the documentary tag.  Of course it isn’t the first film to sell itself on its documentary status but leave open issues pertaining to the validity of its claims to be factive.  MoW opens up the debate as to what constitutes a documentary film?  After viewing MoW with its archly crafted dramatic story and  finessed style I was left asking if it had any more claim to documentary status than films like Dam Busters or The Great Escape. 

    Like the Dam Busters and The Great Escape, MoW  is about an Event.  It is event filmed as a pure discrete occurrence which is set in a time stream that comprises a deeply mythologised past and closed off future.  Marsh apparently got the idea to make a film about Philippe Petit’s (PP) epic wire walk across  the Twin Towers of WTC, after hearing PP on Desert Island Discs.  (Desert Island Discs is a staid BBC radio show, a vehicle that allows celebrities to select the music they’d take with them to a desert isle.)  Marsh in putting together MoW has in many ways modelled the film on the Desert Island Disc ethos.  Celebrities on DiD are interviewed in an uncomplicated manner, and unchallenged are allowed to be ‘celebrities’.   Likewise  MoW  permits PP to present his take on the Event, his heroics undisturbed by any awkward questions.  MoW celebrates the crossing as an event preserved in aspic drawing an iconic and decontextualised image of Petit, decontaminated from the forces of life and time.  The  film is constructed so as to present a unidimensional and consistent picture of PP.  PP is given a concentrated form as pure heroic image.  Like John Wayne, Bogart or those propaganda biographies of Stalin.  And yet life itself is never like this.  Even in MoW, with its carefully composed and edited contributions from friends companions and colleagues, there is a discernible darker shadow that lurks behind PP.

    The Event, the wire walk, is transposed into a sort of mythological Great Time by allowing PP to present the crossing as a occurrence that was destined to happen from  his earliest days.   Destiny and the hero.  It is a common feature of myth that the subject is preordained to achieve their fame by signs that can be read in their childhood.  By the child shall you know the man (or woman).  Hercules is an obvious example but people like Houdini were also quick to claim childhood provenance. MoW encompasses time within the heroic fold of destiny. In an early sequence we see PP, as a boy at the dentist reading in a magazine about the proposal to build the Twin Towers.,  PP claims to have been imaginatively fired by what he read on that day, and at that moment somehow knew that these proposed gargantuan structures would one day play a defining role in his life.

    And yet right from its opening, MoW seems to need to distort unwelcome facts and to bend them to the film’s project of mythologizing PP.  The sequence at the dentist appears to be falsely presented.   According to WikiPedia, PP read the article on a visit to the dentist in 1968 when he was about 19 years old, an adolescent (PP was born 13 August 1948) .  In the film’s reconstruction PP is represented as being a boy, certainly not an adolescent. This type of misrepresentation is grist to the mill for Hollywood film biopic vehicles that claim to be a dramas; but for a movie vehicle claiming to be a documentary it simply poses the question as to what terms and conditions are in play in regard to the validity of the product?  And what is the relationship of the validity of the material in a film to its claim for documentary status?  And how the intentions (as they reveal themselves on screen) of the film maker relate to the claim to documentary status?  The answer of course may be that like the wire they are highly elastic and that, for instance  misrepresentation of fact is no bar at all to documentary status. All that matters is that you intend to make a film and claim that it is documentary: either as a marketing ploy or because you believe it to be so.   
     
     Marsh uses much of the first part of the film creating the myth of PP.  PP’s childhood is structured as a hallowed pathway leading to the Event.  In re-constructed sequences we see soft focus recreations of PP learning to walk the wire and evidencing the necessary personal philosophy, firmness of purpose and purity of intention that will be necessary to meet the demands and strictures of the Event.  The key to the nature of the film is Marsh’s decision to represent PP as a mythic image.  The consequence of this decision is to decontextualise PP and construct his persona strictly according to the needs of the Film.  

    MoW tells nothing of PP’s past, his family parents or geography.  All these are subsumed into the halo effect of the Event.  PP emerges from nowhere, stands alone and proceeds through the success of Event into a future that is nowhere.   Marsh exploits  PP  as a celebrity frozen in celestial space and time, like the figures in the great constellations of the night sky.   We are not informed in any certain manner about how PP earned his living.  We see ( in reconstruction) that he busked the streets in Paris with his act: but did he make enough from this to fund the Twin Towers walk?  His financial affairs about which there are legitimate questions of interest are left unprobed.  PP is a figment of the celebrity heavens and nothing sordid or earthbound, the money or the rent, is permitted to sully him.   We see PP, throughout the film interviewed in 2007, 33 years after the Great Event.  We find him frozen in time, defined only by this one action, the Event.  Nothing has changed, we have the same folksy quasi superman philosophy, a man who has learned to wear his media mask with ease.   As if he were a prisoner of the Event, and 33 years have passed in this prison.  PP has grown older ( more slowly than some), but nothing else seems to have happened.  

    Marsh has made a film according to the old rules:  you tell the audience what is going to happen: they see it happen; and then they are told it has happened.  MoW is like the classic film of the man slipping on the banana skin.  Marsh has carefully stylised MoW to give it a contemporary feel.  He exploits the convention of tastefully filming the respondents with high key lighting against black or greatly dimmed settings to decontextualise their inputs. The interviewees feel like people playing themselves, taking on pre-agreed roles  in describing the Event. It feels as if they have been well rehearsed (or possibly edited by Marsh) in the course of their responses.  They only exist in relation to the Event not in relation to PP the man. They avoid or are edited by Marsh, so that it appears they avoid, really talking about PP as a person rather than as the projection of the film.  Two of the respondents – the ex girl friend Annie and Jean- Louis, intimate some deeper psychic reservations and ambiguities that caused them to disassociate themselves from PP.  But they remain covert, guarded intimations that are not allowed to disturb the polished reflective surface of  PP the celebrity. It feels like we are experiencing the careful construction of a lie, the filmic reduction of life to myth.

     Marsh appears very confident about the film he wants to make.  However there are odd signs of a latent insecurity.  The use of date and time intertitles.  These titles, which are typically used to lend a spurious authenticity to dramatic reconstructions may appear either as title cards or superimpositions informing the viewer, for instance, that a particular establishment shot represents:  New York –   4th January 1974 –  09:21.  This technique is now so hack and incorporated into spoof and mockumentaries it is often avoided.  In particular what should be avoided is specificity in relation to the minute hand of time.  But Marsh uses this device on a couple of occasions in reconstructing the Twin Towers preparations.  On both occasions it was unnecessary since minute by minute planning was not the order of the day (as it might be in a heist).  

    Another sign of Marsh’s insecurity with the material is his decision to reconstruct the sex scene as a mock humorous silent movie. The humour in the sequence being reinforced by shooting (or editing) at 18 fps and projecting at 25 fps creating out of the action, funny jerky movements.  What happened is that after the sky walk the conquering hero PP was propositioned by a young woman – nymph(ette). In terms of Marsh’s mythic recasting of PP this is perfect.  All earthly women desire the seed of the hero.  PP as the hero gets his lay.  But there are indications in the interviews that this tryst was a turning point: a time when everything changed and old relations fell apart. Instead of celebrating the success with his friends and supporters he went and fucked a strange woman.  A God-Hero can do as he pleases.  Perhaps it was the final straw, the final act of arrogance perpetrated on his team by PP.  PP is allowed to get away with explaining what happened with a shrug of the shoulders.  This is his privilege.  But Marsh takes things a step further.  In filming the sequence as an opera bouffe,  he reduces it to a silent comedy.  In pandering to the viewer’s prurience MoW effectively minimalises the importance of what happened in personal terms and effectively folds the seduction and sex scene into the mythic.  A filmic act of displacement.

    The film often seems to fall short creatively. For instance, the score is undemanding and emotionally honed to induce in the audience a certain compliance with PP’s iconic status.  The music at one point seems to me indicative of creative bankruptcy when Marsh for the film’s highlight, the Event, the Walk Between the Towers chooses to regale us with Satie’s Gymnopedie ( the usual one that is all the adverts and all the films) .   To exploit such an overworked piece of music belies either insecurity or lack of imagination. But that’s show business folks!

    Man on Wire (MoW) celebrates an extraordinary event with a very ordinary film, a sort of standardised glossy re-enactment and recapitulation of the event that asks no questions and gets no answers in an exercise in stylistic misdirection.  Ultimately it is not in principle distinguishable from a regular biopic such as Reach for the Sky or Bonnie and Clyde.  All the news that fits, all the material the fits the film.

    Of course MoW has been very popular, popular because it is built on an extraordinary event which the public want to believe in.   People enjoy believing the myth and Marsh has made a popular film fictionalising  the situation surrounding the Event, fashioning of the Event a feature film of crass simplicity and little integrity.  I might conclude that it falls into a category of degraded documentaries.  However I think MoW raises deeper questions about our confidence in our abilities to discriminate.  The category or even genre of documentary panders to the conceit that we can tell the real from the fake and fact from fiction.  In the world of endless manipulation of image and information our facilities are increasingly unable to make these distinctions.  But the sake of our self esteem and self image we cling to the idea embedded in the word ‘documentary’ as a sort of protective shibboleth.
    adrin neatrour
    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk