Star & Shadow

Late night with the Devil – 2024

Directed and written by Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes

Company logos seen at the beginning – IFC Films, Shudder, Image Nation Abu Dhabi, VicScreen, AGC Studios, Good Fiend Films, Future Pictures, Spooky Pictures, Cinetic Media….  I think I got them all.

On walking in to the film, I spoke about the film we were going to see with the woman at the box office.  She said she hasn’t seen it yet but imagines it to be something like 1992s ‘Ghostwatch’.  That wasn’t something I saw until a couple of years ago.  At the time I was too busy robbing, running and getting high to watch TV.  I understand it has cultural significance for many but with my general dislike of the cheesiness of British chat shows and having been exposed to decades of many great additions to the found footage genre, I find it cheap and obvious.  I also find Ghost Watch to be a complete failure in the area of being scary.  Saying that, ‘Late night with the devil’ isn’t scary eitherand I loved it.

‘Ghostwatch’ is fictional TV pretending it is reality.  ‘Late night with the devil’ is fiction emulating reality and there is a difference.  With late night with the devil you don’t have to buy in to the premise you are watching real TV.  It starts with the most number of studio and production company logos I’ve seen before any film, ever.  I’m amazed it turned out as well as it did with so many companies behind it.  It starts with quite a long narrated introduction to the history of the show and its presenter, which is a bit annoying as it is tell rather than show but it is expedient to get to the night of the show in question.  The night is Halloween 1977.  It is the 6^th year of the late night talk show, ‘Night Owls’ and the show host is ‘Jack Delroy’.  It’s also sweeps and ‘Night Owls’ is losing traction in it TV slot, ‘Jack Delroy’s’ contract is nearly up and the show is on the edge of cancellation.  Something drastic is needed to drive up ratings and attract sponsorship.  The audience is full of folk in Halloween garb, there’s a guest who’s a psychic and another who is a sceptic.  The sceptic is really annoying.  Which is a shame because I’m a sceptic and the character put’s us in a bad light.  After these 2 characters are introduced to us there is another of those tell rather than show segments about a devil worshipping, suicide cult with one survivor, a little girl named ‘Lilly’. Again I forgive it for expediency and the film does roll by at a brisk 93 minutes.  The ‘Lilly’ is now a young woman and is taken in by a parapsychologist.  Both these characters come on to the show to ramp up the weirdness.  Lilly, the girl who survives the cult is really interesting to watch.  She is always looking directly at the camera and talks to Jack in way that she knows everything about him. She often has this smile that says I have been waiting for this and it’s going to be so much fun.  Not for everyone else on set but definitely for ‘Lilly’.

The real star of the show though, is the show.  The film captures the period and style of a 70s late night talk show and exaggerates it.  The magnificent brightly coloured set design.  The warm up/side kick character who introduces and supports Jack and is somewhat put upon.  The sleazy show runner bullying everyone who wasn’t Jack.  The show’s in house band.  Playing just the right numbers before each guest is introduced and between ad breaks.  Also all the on-set and in studio smoking of cigarettes and cigars.  Also ‘Jack’s’ wife died of lung cancer but she didn’t smoke.  All in all the person I saw it with and me had a hoot watching this.  The style and the caricatures of the late night cast were so much fun to watch.  A thumbs up from me.

Whakapai

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World   Radu Jude (ROM; 2023) Ilinka Manolache

Viewed Film Forum NYC 18^th March 2024; ticket $14

one fast lady

In the opening sequence of Jude’s ‘Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World…’ (DNETM) we see protagonist Angela awakened by her alarm, getting up, walking out of frame to visit the toilet returning naked into frame and getting dressed. We see a core and quintessentially human aspect of life represented in her slow movements out of sleep, out of her nakedness into her clothes. These few moments at the start of Angela’s day are simply a prelude to her entrapment in a life as a slave of turbocharged capitalism subject to the accelerating forces of economic materialism.

Jude is using film to expose in particular the squalor of existence in contemporary Romania, but in general laying bare the ugly reality of life and work in the 21^st century global economy dominated by a small number of huge companies. But like Godard, Jude makes films to have fun, unconstrained by the ridiculous production demands of story spectacle and spookies. He just has something to say. Jude’s DNETM is scripted from a particular political space, a space of joyously seeing through the bullshit lies and hypocrisy characteristic of this society.

Jude’s film unequivocally depicts life in post communist Romania where the diktat of Capitalism shapes people’s daily experiences penetrating their psychic responses to society and the world around them; the substitution of the hammer and sickle by Coca Cola et al, the sudden destabilising collapse of Romanian notional ‘collective’ ownership and its replacement by ‘Corporate’ entities.

Life mutilation death – everything’s a racket.

DNETM has a structure that in writing is complex to describe. But film’s strength as a medium is the possibility of using its resources: juxtaposition, insertion, superimposition, split image and track, montage, text etc. to create the transmission of homogenous communication, to suggest linkage and understanding by simple manipulation of these inputs. DNETM’s structure intercuts the main story of Angela’s day (shot in black and white, with a look suggestive of a comic strip) in which she is working on a ‘safety at work video’ being made by a Bucharest film production company; with a 1981 Romanian movie (shot in soft colour suggesting a feminine aura) about a woman taxi driver (also called Angela); and with protagonist Angela’s ‘TikTok’ alter ego as misogynist Andrew Tate. These sections are further intercut with Jude’s own collection of quotes and a montage comprising the memorial crosses of some of the hundreds killed in car crashes on one specific road in Romania.  

Before thinking about Jude’s use of the parallel stories of the two Angelas, it’s interesting to look at the contrast between his scripting of Katia in ‘Bad Luck Banging’ and Angela’s scenario in DNETM. In ‘Bad Luck..’ Katia walks through Bucharest. She walks, one foot in front of another. Her walk is permeated by her anxiety and interspersed with taking and making mobile calls. It’s not an easy walk because she has been summoned to attend the school where she teaches to explain her behaviour. But it’s a walk for all that; the pace is human and the life in the city is seen and experienced, allowing her to interact with the streets and the people. Cut to DNETM. No one walks. Life has accelerated. Angela drives. Everyone drives. The car has become a crucible in which the drivers are subjected to concentrated alchemical forces that transform them into human ‘gold’ for their masters. The roads and highways Angela navigates become vectors of intensity in which passage is characterised by the alternation of juddering advance and ferocious acceleration. Driving is dehumanised. It’s a Hobbesian war of all against all, a parody of Capitalism itself.   To drive is an endless battle with the road other vehicles other drivers the weather and fatigue; for Angela it’s punctuated by the casual vicious sexist snarls spat at her out by male drivers as they pull up alongside her in the traffic.

The other distinct difference between the experience of Jude’s two female leads, Katia and Angela, is that throughout Bad Luck Banging, Katia is engaged in a constant dialogue/debate about her behaviour and how she should be seen and judged. For Angela there’s no debate. She may rebel against it in internalised violent self hating, but her position of one of complete menial subservience, she exists to either obey or engage in demeaning but self aware protective self censorship. Angela retains an essential humanity despite having the shit kicked out of her, but it’s difficult to see how she can avoid slipping down into the black hole of Bucharest’s engained sexism and its drug of self induced nihilistic indifference.

Back to cars for a moment. Except for Jude’s long last shot, in the main part of the film the force field of the automobile dominates Jude’s black and white visuals. DNETM is a sort of road movie. Road movies in the American tradition usually have something to do with ego, with a testing of the absolute limits of self as an experiential subject. Predictably US road films usually end with death, as the protagonists run out of road and there is no where left for ego to go. In contrast Iranian road movies are characterised as extensions of the self, the automobile used as a device for reaching out to and finding others, an expanding of the boundaries of ego. Jude’s movie is the antithesis of this.  Fuelled by demented Capitalism drivers are trapped in a self referential nightmare where they experience the phantoms and spectres of their own distorted anxiety and terror.  

The intercutting by Jude of an 1981 Romanian movie about a woman taxi driver gives the contrast. Jude is no apologist for Ceausescu’s regime, its oppression and its gratuitous acts of destruction, but in this period Romania had not moved into the stage of late capitalist acceleration. The car had not become a trap. In this section for its female driver Angela, her car, the taxi, is simply a means to make a living. She is subjected to casual male sexism, but the sexist comments aren’t screamed obscenities. They are more suggestive and in a form that can at least broker dialogue. The pace of the human interactions, of the movement of the taxi about the city, are shot in mellow colour signifying a gentler more forgiving emotional and physical environment than the present day black and white comic strip. The language in the 1981 movie is mediated by observation and dialogue; in the main section of DNETM language is mostly reduced to manipulation or particularly in the TikTok alter ago section, to expressive destructive misogynist violence.

My feeling is that Jude overloads his film, there is too much content, content that is overly repetitive and in repetition loses cogency. His constant stream of ‘quotes’ sometimes indicate a desire to show off his cleverness. But these are personal judgements. It may be that this excess of content is related to Jude’s intention to subject his audience to an ‘experience’ in the film itself. This is exemplified in the long last shot of some perhaps 25 minute duration (?), in which a man in a wheelchair accompanied by his family, is filmed recounting his industrial injury for the work safety video. Of course as the subject and his family are put through the mill, we see that the filming is a dishonest manipulative fraudulent exercise. The man in the wheelchair is a poor innocent sap ripe for exploitation. So during this section, which is rather scrappily played out, the audience is subjected to a similar long enervating experience to that of the group being filmed.

Like it or not we get to understand something of what it is like to be screwed in Romania today.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perfect Days     Wim Wenders (2023; Ger/Jap)  Koji Yakusho

viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 27 Feb 2024; Ticket £11.75

 No pun intended

To begin at the ending. Third shot from the end of ‘Perfect Days’ is a long close up of protagonist Hirayama’s face seen through the reflecting images on the windscreen of his little cleaning van as he drives through Tokyo.  In the shot his face goes through a number of different acted out contortions as if wanting to express in this one take a condensed accelerated series of facial images representing the spectrum of both the emotions and aging.  The shot is overlaid with Nina Simone singing ‘Feeling Good’ recorded in 1965, the last of the classic 60’s and 70’s tracks featured throughout the film. The Simone song, like the other tracks represent Wenders’ abandonment of exposition for the sake of exploitation, music used as a direct line into the vein of the audience experience to manipulate their experience of the film, and ‘Feel Good.’  Feel Good just like Wenders.  

Wenders’ decision to make ‘Perfect Days’ seems closely related to his well known admiration for Japanese film maker Ozu about whom he made a circumspect documentary in 1985.  Ozu’s films are what could be called quiet propositions.  The scenarios mostly comprise long takes in which we see the action from a particular position.  Ozu’s narratives, such as  in Tokyo Story, whilst they have dynamic traction seem less central to the films than their structure and the ordering of the shifting and instable social relations that underlie the scripts.  Ozu’s particular way of shooting his films use the seen to reveal the unseen, what is seen by the camera points to the unseen, the emotional substrate underlying the surface of life.  There is no manipulation, no judgement, no direct representation of meaning, simply exposition. A series of shots that ask the audience to move beyond the presenting lucidity of the image.

Wenders’ opening focuses on his central character Hirayama and the round of actions and activities that comprise the way that he lives.  His getting up in the morning routine, starting his little van and setting out for his work as an itinerant cleaner of public lavatories.  Nodding in Ozu’s direction  ‘Perfect Days’ through Hirayama’s daily round shows something both of contemporary urban Tokyo and the way people live in this city; the small dramatic subplot involving Hirayama’s runaway niece opens up something about his past his character and the forces that might underlie his choice of a particular way of life. 

But as the film develops its momentum the weight of the material shifts from the dilation of the richness in the detail of the everyday to the contraction of the film into emotional impoverishment, the reduction of the material to a sentimental nostalgia.  In the opening section of the film when Hirayama sets off to work he puts one of his tapes into the van’s cassette deck which blasts out the 60’s hit by the Animals ‘ The House of the Rising Sun.’  As his film progresses Wenders increasingly features Hirayama playing his music, almost exclusively the sort of British and American tracks that are redolent and characteristic of a certain spirit of the 1960s’ – Brown Eyed Girl, Dock of the Bay, Sunny Afternoon and of course Perfect Day.

As the music plays it has an increasingly dominating effect that exerts emotive control over ‘Perfect Days’.  The music becomes overwhelming.  It is as if Wenders’ intention is to pitch us back into a mythic era when the sun shone on the top ten hits and the voices carried a message of hope.  A golden time that of course that never was but in which we might like to lose ourselves if we accept to drink from the director’s golden but addled chalice.  As one character comments: “Why can’t things just stay the same…?”   As a line from Wenders’ script it isn’t just  nostalgia that takes over and dominates the scenario, it is in particular, Wenders’ nostalgia. 

In some respects ‘Perfect Days’ is a shadowy film.  Interpolated throughout the film are self contained sequences depicting the purely optical: fusions of the reflection and refraction of shadow: the play of light and darkness.  These sequences may depict Hirayama’s vision but in themselves are a core element of the Japanese aesthetic, the transient and the natural.  But as discrete clips detached from the natural world these shadow sequences lose their aesthetic validity, the essential imminence of the world.  They are not seen; they are viewed.  Perhaps one ‘shadow sequence’ might have had a particular strong effect.  Repeated a number of times throughout the film they become devices to represent an idea to Western audiences, a shadow of the actual.  And there is another shadow that interpenetrates the film: the shadow of Wenders.

What seems to be happening in ‘Perfect Days’ is that Wenders (perhaps in a perfect daze)  has surreptitiously inserted himself as the main character in the film.  As the film develops scene by scene Wenders substitutes himself for Hirayama until in that final shot with Nina Simone singing ‘Feeling Good’ there is no Hirayama left only his outer form.  Hirayama’s essence has been sucked out completely devoured by the shadow of Wenders who so disguised proceeds to regale and seduce us with his yearnings for simpler times. ‘Perfect Days’ becomes by default a psychic vampire movie.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

The Zone of Interest   Jonathon Glazer (UK/Pol; 2023) Christian Friedel, Sandra Hueller

viewed 13 Feb 2024 Tyneside Cinema; ticket £11.75

tricks of the trade

Following a long durational shot of a dark blank screen, we hear the sound of bird song as the film’s opening images depict a series of riverside shots of an idyllic summer’s day. An ordinary family, mother father and their young children are enjoying a leisurely picnic before heading back home. We are in the world of normality.

Home we discover is Commandant Hoess’ house situated hard by the wall of Auschwitz l where he lives with his wife Hedwig and their five children.

Jonathon Glazer has chosen to make a film about Auschwitz some 80 years on from its existence. Auschwitz is the site of mass murder. If its invocation comprises no more than a background for situational melodrama or if it’s exploited as an exercise in intellectual or artistic posturing, then you join the legions of those who profit from the betrayal of the dead.

Film makers (and of course by extension those using other media) laying claim to the good faith of their Auschwitz project need courage knowledge and a commitment to truth, even if it’s difficult or inconvenient to represent. At this point when research histories and accounts of Auschwitz have generated multiple layers of analyses insights and explanations relating to the Nazi’s industrialisation of death, there should be some compelling moral imperative driving the movie, perhaps something urgent to say.

‘The Zone of Interest’ (“The Zone’) comes across as a project grounded in Hannah Arendt’s account of the Eichmann trial in 1961. It looks like Glazer has taken Arendt’s oft cited phrase about Eichmann as representing “…the banality of evil” and used this idea as the basis of his scenario. Arendt’s concept of the banality of bureaucratic evil has in itself has been subject to very critical review. Be that as it may, the idea that many people whilst perpetrating murderous atrocities are quite able  to lead parallel ‘normal’ lives is now a sociological trope: the compartmentalisation of roles. Glazer doesn’t take his script beyond this idea with which we are now well familiar from Nazi Germany (Goebbels) through to multiple exemplars in the American wars in Vietnam Afghanistan etc. ‘The Zone’ takes its cue from a borrowed concept, one element of Arendt’s characterisation of Eichmann. Without holding it out to further inspection, Glazer is satisfied to express repetition of idea rather than conceptual urgency. And in these times we need urgency, not self satisfaction.

Locked into a concept that may well be played out, Jonathan Glazer’s film aims no higher than the cool rendering of the banality of evil. Film as a putative enactment of the home life of Hoess and his wife Hedwig in the ‘death camp’ location. Tastefully shot, a mapping rather than a narrative, ‘The Zone’ communicates as a walk through installation complete with little courtesy stops to allow the audience to assimilate the co-existence of both everyday life and murderous evil in the course of the house’s daily routine. Alongside the river visits, the celebration of birthdays, the planning of holidays, housewives’ gossip we pause to see Hoess order his new more efficient gas chambers and Hedwig indulge her venal greed in acquiring the expensive possessions of those Jews murdered and incinerated by her husband.

Glazer marks his film with particular signifiers of authenticity: the dialogue is in German, and the furniture clothing and other meticulous detailing are all evidential of ‘the period’. These outer signs are of course central to the representational but not to moral claims of ‘The Zone’. They obviously work as standard filmic accoutrements, as does the soundtrack representing the constancy of the evil emanating from the Auschwitz l. The issue is that the more effort filmmakers concentrate on representational authenticity, the greater the work that is needed to imprint a moral core in the material. When image is dominant in a stream of communication it crowds out anything other than the simplest message. Advertisers know that after a series of beautiful shots designed to fill out and engender positive associative connections, all that is needed to condition the audience’s consciousness is a one word strap line: Apple – Samsung – Toyota. When compelling images have associative connections or qualities making a claim on truth they overwhelm the capacity of mind to question. Authenticity of image in itself can induce a moral deficit which as Glazer’s film progressed became more evident.

Glazer’s script relating to the authenticity of his characters has one highly questionable moment. It’s known that Hoess (perhaps from his autobiography which I haven’t read) had a least one Jewish lover from Auschwitz: the film duly but obliquely documents this. But there is also one similar oblique scene suggesting that Hedwig was partial to take on sex with her Polish house gardeners. This suggestion is at odds both with everything we are shown about Hedwig (“They call me the Queen of Auschwitz”) her beliefs and behaviour, and with the self image of Nazi wives. It does not ring true; it lacks palpable credibility. The script has moved out of the realm of period re-enactment into the realm of acting out contemporary social mores. Hedwig’s moment feels like Glazer’s sop to the feminist sensibilities of contemporary audiences. The scene is a statement that he is ‘cool’ about sexual equality to the extent of retrofixing Hedwig with her own ‘date’ so she is not outdone by her husband’s infidelity. This ‘false’ event suggests that one of Glazer’s prime concerns is to add lustre to his own self image, to ingratiate himself with the audience by flattering them with anachronistic sensibilities.

‘The Zone’ is intercut with a number of sequences presented in an other worldly colourisation, in contradistinction to the flat realism of the main shoot.   These sequences depict in contradistinction to the evil of the main characters, the compassion of a young woman trying to hide apples in the environs of the camp so that they may be found by starving workers. The sequences are mute but overlaid with voice over telling the story of Hansel and Gretel, a fairy tale with a gruesome but just ending. The logic for employing such a stylistic differentiation in these cutaway sequences isn’t clear. The effect is similar to the pool shots in Glazer’s ‘Under the Skin’, but different in that those shots were a continuity of the action, whereas the ‘little girl’ story lies outside ‘the installation’ scenario. In both cases the edited effects are a resort to spectacle. This works well on its own terms in ‘Under the Skin’, but in ‘The Zone’ came across as a debasement of integrity.   Glazer has chosen to prioritize the spectacle of image over the claims of compassion and understanding, form over content, design over intent, overwhelming the viewers’ attention with visual display. Consequently these colourised sequences function like an advert for something or other than no one really understands, but which somehow stake a claim on the audience’s attention to being important.

At the end of ‘The Zone’ Glazer intercuts his last shots of Hoess leaving the ‘final solution conference’, with scenes from today at the Auschwitz Museum. We see a series of shots: its gas chamber and its contemporary display cabinets piled high with the detritus of mass murder: suitcases shoes etc. We see local Polish women engaged in the cleaning of these spaces. The intention of inserting these contemporary shots of Auschwitz is unclear. If Glazer had only shown the Auschwitz display cabinets evidencing ‘The Horror’, these shots would have pasted into ‘The Zone’ the actuality of what was happening behind the camp walls. ‘The Zone of Interest’ that we saw outside Hoess’ house was the screened off reality of the warped psyches of the participants which conditioned and defined them. Filming Auschwitz with the women cleaners at work loads the shots with alternative meanings. Is Glazer making a feminist comment that women’s work is never done? That Polish women had moved from being cleaners in the Nazi Hoess household to being cleaners in the Auschwitz museum, from serving the Germans to serving the remains of the Jews? Is Glazer pointing to the ironic consequences of Auschwitz becoming a site of mass tourism where the press of visitors gazing on all that remains of Hoess’ kingdom of genocide need an army of cleaners to sweep up after them? Both these ideas, even if unintended, are implicit readings of the shots. But perhaps this section of ‘The Zone’ was simply Glazer’s solution to the ending to his film.   Perhaps he felt the need to sign off ‘The Zone’ with a token contemporary, but ambiguous reference to Auschwitz today, thereby indicating that he was in a cool but unspecific post-modernist way, alert to all possible readings of the death camp.

With or without the cleaners the shots of the Auschwitz seem the inevitable place to finish for a film that embraces itself as an arts project rather than a moral project. A walk through movie that is ultimately vacuous but exploits tasteful authentic period repro, spectacle and ambiguity to convince some audiences that they have experienced a rare insight into the ‘banality of evil’.

An Auschwitz film today either has to propose another way of seeing or extend the material out into the world as it is now. ‘The Zone of Interest’ does neither of these. Revisiting familiar ground Glazer has filled out ‘The Zone’ with clever tricks of the trade, his film echoing the banality of evil with the banality of film making.  

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

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Scum       Alan Clarke writer – Roy Minton (UK; 1979; 15) Ray Winston, Mick Ford, Julian Firth, John Blundell

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 8^th Feb 2024; ticket £7.00

raw porridge

Alan Clarke’s ‘Scum’ feels like the result of a close collaboration with writer Roy Minton. It’s a situational drama that was one of the last in a line of social realist plays commissioned by the BBC. These productions such as Loach’s ‘Cathy Come Home’ were produced periodically through the ‘60s and 70’s and undercut the comforting messages usually projected about British Society and its institutions. Viewers were presented different perspectives of the forces at work in our culture so that the vacuous policy rationales of the governing bureaucracies were exposed through the scarifying experiences of the people who were the objects of state intervention.

Of course ‘Scum’ as commissioned by the BBC was banned from transmission and not aired by them until some 8 years later. As an act of defiance and protest the Clarke/ Minton team proceeded to garner finance and make a feature film with a script that was slightly different from the BBC play but encoded with the same working premise: the corruption of prison institutions where relations based on force engender not just the abuse of power but the cynical abuse of power. Interestingly the successors to the British social realist movement were in some ways satirical TV shows such as ‘Spitting Image’ in which the actions words and intentions of ruling elites were exposed for their hypocracy and seen by the audience through puppetry’s magnifying glass, these distorted images of the politicians seemed to signal the diseased nature of their souls.

‘Scum’ has a core singularity of logic. The script is a mathematical equation expressing the whole of the Borstal regime as the sum of its relations of violence. The disturbing intra-trainee relations of dominance as first suffered by Carlin and then correspondingly exploited by him as the new ‘Daddy’; the taxing of the small vulnerable, the vicious racism and the rape are recorded by Clarke’s unblinking camera and linked by Minton’s script to the ethos of fear and intimidation governing the behaviour of the staff towards the inmates. Each new arrival greeted with a vicious slap to the face accompanied by the warning that there is more where that came from if there is any stepping out of line. And of course the whole system of fear is underpinned by the implementation of the ‘rule book’ by the Borstal governor so that it reinforces and abets the savagery of the system by imposing arbitrary punishment for any alleged infraction. The Governor’s overarching objective is to use the objectification of force to contain the institution so that to an outside observer the prison looks like it is running along on the smooth wheels of rectified justice: those compliant with their sentences learn useful lessons; the non compliant are made to learn. All anyone learns is that in a closed system based on sadism and brutality there is no justice: only survival for the stronger, disaster for the weaker.

Minton’s script is founded in research of Borstal experience. Some might argue that the film is to some extent a parody, meaning that it takes the extreme end of the Borstal experience spectrum as its exclusive material. But of course since the making of ‘Scum’ which coincided with the abolition of the Borstal system, more sinister and disturbing accounts have emerged about the running and management of these institutions which the more deeply implicate the staff not just in running and maintaining regimes of terror but in direct sexual exploitation of ‘the boys’. “Who’s the daddy?” The use of the inmates by the staff for their own sexual gratification was a place that even the condensation of Minton’s script didn’t visit.

In a sense more disturbing than the depiction of violence as the medium of control was the cynicism that was the psychic handmaiden of the Borstal regime. The gap that existed between the idealised expressed order of the rules and objectives of the the regime, and the actual manner in which the place was run, was filled by cynicism.

And like the violence the cynicism was top down filtration, the well spring being the Governor. The justification of the terrible transgressions by the staff: punishing victims, their sanctioning rape theft vicious beatings, was accompanied by claims that these were character building, chances for lessons to be learnt etc. rather than admittance that this was the system. The lead player in the gratuitous use of officialese is the helmsman, the Borstal Governor whose recourse to cynical justification for his ‘punishment’ of trainees put on report, was an exercise in plausible deniabilty and practiced political manipulation that set the example for staff and trainees alike.

The centrality of cynicism depicted in ‘Scum’ to the psychic structure of Borstal puts the script at the forefront of exposing the political response systems as they have developed during the later years of the last century and the subsequent the arrival of social media. Of course cynicism has always been at the expressive core of political institutions and bureaucracy. It lay at the heart of the colonial mentality in particular in the 1920’s and 30’s. But it was often hidden: newspapers and other news outlets, radio and TV normally drew a veil over the underlying duplicity of statements by principal state actors. But first satirical programmes opened up this mainline artery leading to the dishonest heart of governance and today with the scepticism induced by social media dialogue, suspicion of cynicism is a rife element in political debate. A feeling reinforced by interviews with today’s politicians who on TV and radio, defending their particular policies sound ever more familiar, ever more kin to the Minton’s Governor in ‘Scum’.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poor Things   Yorgos Lanthimos (UK; 2023) Emma Stone, Ramy Youssef; Willem Defoe

viewed Tyneside Cinema 13 Jan 2024; ticket £11.75

Duck Soup

Poor Things   Yorgos Lanthimos (UK; 2023) Emma Stone, Ramy Youssef; Willem Defoe

viewed Tyneside Cinema 13 Jan 2024; ticket £11.75

Duck Soup

In making ‘Poor Things’ Yorgos Lanthimos has directed a film that expresses a key feature of the times, the spectacle of narcissism. ‘Poor Things’ is a persuasive pervasive spectacle woven into the very stuff of contemporary experience – the self absorbing nature of today’s lifestyles, exemplified by social media in which the private transmutes into the public. Lanthimos’ film exploits the commodification of the self but has abandoned the critical edge that characterised earlier work such as the ‘The Killing of the Sacred Deer’.     

For Lanthimos the settings of his scenarios have always played a significant and/or prominent part in the design of his movies.  In ‘The Killing of the Sacred Deer’ the spaces representing contemporary USA are signifiers of his thematic concerns. The manner in which he filmed the suburbs, the hospital, home interiors were intrinsic to his satiric theme of the intrinsic impersonality of this culture. We are shown the emptied out spaces, vacuous and devoid of meaning in which the black comedy of an ‘all American’ ritual death is played out.  The fusion of setting and theme was central to the concept underlying the ‘Sacred Deer’ script.  

With his production of ‘The Favourite’ Lanthimos exploits relations in an historical context to play out some tropes of today’s oppositional gender politics. The drama takes place in an English Country House and its environs. But despite, or perhaps because of Lanthimos’ camera work with its long internal tracks and his use of wide angle distorting fish eyed lens, the setting never amounts to more than a backdrop. It serves simply as an authentic looking feed into the anachronistic script. The long galleries the wainscoted chambers the high ceiling salons play no part in the psychic dynamic of the film. His three principal characters are as detached from the film’s setting as a visiting tourist. The featured Country Pile has high background value, prominence but not significance.

Like ‘The Favourite’, Lanthimos’ ‘Poor Things’ is a retro-temporal piece. It uses a vaguely depicted nineteenth century as a canvas upon which to project its female protagonist Bella’s proto-feminist career.   Unlike ‘The Favourite’ in ‘Poor Things’  Lanthimos fuses theme and sets but not in a manner in which they offset each other critically, but rather so that they work togather to uncritically support the conceits of the times. The sets are shop windows, display areas characteristic of a film that empties itself out as spectacle. As in department stores or adverts for fancy soap, the sets exist solely to promote the product on the centre stage; product which in this case is Bella. Bella – woman commodified as a feminist icon.

In the manner of a large number of contemporary films ‘Poor Things’ scenario comprises one thing after another. The scenes follow on from each other with quick fire delivery. A product of Baxter’s experiments, Bella has been implanted with the brain of her own in utero child. As Bella matures she decides to move out of Baxter’s house (which is also his lab and surgery where he conducts Dr Moreau type experimentation – it would seem by and large with happier results) going off with libertine Duncan to various ports of call before ditching him and ending up in a Parisian brothel.   Using similar camera techniques as in ‘The Favourite’ the fish eye lens zooms and tracks, each of these locations is a showcase for advertising Bella’s development from naïve child to self loving woman. In a culture of narcissism spectacle has a particular rationale in its justification and legitimation of the individual.

In ‘Poor Things’ narcissism and spectacle are inextricably linked as dominant forces within the contemporary matrix. Both narcissism and spectacle work to blur differentiation between the public and the private sphere. Through the projection of social media life can be lived out as a sort of spectacle where the self exists in a social matrix where things have value only in relation to the attention they attract. The price paid for the primacy of attention is the reduction of life to the simplistic criteria of one dimensionality. And Lanthimos’ characters in ‘Poor Things’ all flaunt their uni-dimensional cartoon type representations. As such we can have no investment in them other than as types, in a similar way to characters in superhero movies.

As a quest movie scripted in the key of narcissism, ‘Poor Things’ shares some striking features with David Finch’s ‘The Killer’. Both movies feature self obsessed protagonists who canter through their respective scripts experiencing only self vindication and the validation of success: their brilliant careers. Without self doubts or serious obstacles the scripts of these respective movies celebrate an unconditional triumphalism. In ‘Poor Things’ Lanthimos’ scenario vindicates the arrogance of narcissism and and celebrates a world in which hubris has no consequences.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

 

 

 

 

Letter from an Unknown Woman   Max Ophuls (USA; 1948) Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan

viewed 1st Jan 2024 on BBC 2

and the dead speak to the living

Based on a Stephan Zweig novel, Max Ophuls ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’ is a ‘love’ film that penetrates into the core of obsessive desire. Ophuls whilst not staying true to the nature of Zweig’s uncompromising male protagonist, nevertheless delivers a movie that picks up the story’s initial proposition of fateful infatuation and follows it through to its logical conclusion: the bliss of death.

Ophuls ‘Letter from…’ scenario formulates time for Lisa as a series of crystallised events. Most films encompassing passion or love render the experience as a series of naturalistic events, each with their own particular resonance, events that are bound within a strict passage of time. Ophuls recalibrates sequential time as emotional time, time as crystallised by the emotions. Outside the intensities of the experience of being in direct contact with Stefan the object of her worship, Lisa’s days and nights slip into the void of inexistence.

Told by Lisa’s voice over as she reads the eponymous letter she has sent to Stefan, her whole life from girl to death bed has been lived only for the moments of her several meetings with him. Whilst with Stefan, Lisa is in ecstasy; removed from his presence, she is as one of the dead, mechanically going through the motions of being alive. The letter is her last expressive gesture, testament to the clarity of her rapture in suffering the ‘Passion of Lisa’.

Time for Lisa has been compressed into the singularity of a vision, a vision of love becoming worship, that for her ‘splits’ time forever. Her experience is the opposite of an epiphany. Epiphany is an experience in time that changes everything so that life and perception open up new vistas taking the individual on new paths through an ever unravelling renewed world. Lisa’s moment of vision, the vision of Stefan as the ultimate object of her love/worship entraps her in a beatific quasi religious moment that never expands never develops. The vision of Stefan simply reduces her life to the infinite quest of trying to renew repeat replicate or recapture that singular moment. She is trapped in a time crystal. To some extent her life takes on a form similar to that of a heroine addict or a person who has had an intense numinous experience. What is yearned for, desired above all else is to achieve the moment once again, a repetition, to capture the same rapturous intensity of that first experience. The heroine addict seeks to repeat the glorious sensation of the first hit; the feeling of being charged with the numinous, drives a need to re-experience this elation, by prayer by flagellation to remove all obstacles imagined or real, to arrive at this goal.

There is no logic in Lisa’s total infatuation. There are few clues as to its source. Lisa has experienced instantaneously some ego shattering truth. It’s a vision which like a cancer will grow within her and eventually overwhelm her. There is no why; there is only the spectacle of a self consumed by an internalised daemon. In another form, in another context, with another kind of vision she might have been a saint.  

Ophuls creates for Lisa the necessary filmic vehicle for the experience of her life. ‘Letter from…’ is structured purely about her crystallised moments and realisations. Her whole life compacted into her moments, her experiences of and with Stefan. The first rapture occurs when she is a girl. Stefan, a concert pianist, moves into an apartment in the same building. Stricken by his presence and the world his presence creates, she watches him from afar, listens to him playing, secretly enters his home. Like a spy she watches secreting her passion never interacting with him except one delirious moment where she holds open the entrance door for Stefan: he oblivious she consumed.   Growing up marriage childbirth all pass by as in a grey void. Orphuls’ film expands and fills out the scenario with Lisa’s brief episodes with the object of her worship. The one night stand which makes her pregnant; her abandonment of her husband as she glimpses Stefan at the opera and makes one last effort to re-experience the rapture. And of course, the final chapter her final letter: the statement of her idealised love/worship of this indifferent being unaware of her until the letter which like cupid’s arrow pierces him.  

So as Lisa’s life time isn’t a continuum a series of events, but rather a number of crystallised moments. Ironically in relation to Stefan whose life has been ‘one thing after another’ her letter becomes a defining event in his life. (Orphuls script deviates radically here from the Stefan Zweig story which ends on a colder note). After reading Lisa’s letter, Stefan’s life also crystallises into a life / death decision: he changes his mind about running away from the challenge of Lisa’s husband, and accepts the duel.

Opus shooting of ‘Letter from…’ underpins the emotionally episodic nature of Lisa’s life. Lisa’s actual life is an internality, Ophuls contrasts this by filming the context of her life in Vienna as a vivid externality. The street scenes, the detailing of interiors and exteriors are caught in movement using tracks and cranes linking the   bustle and immanency of life to Lisa’s immobility. Much of the filming of Lisa is in these sort of wide shots which allow the viewer to make the linkages between Lisa and the world in which she moves. The psychological weakness in the filming comprises the over long close-ups of Lisa as she hovers close by Stefan under the spell of her own enchantment. Joan Fontaine simply runs out facial expressions for her to adopt in the presence of her ‘God’.

The scripted voice over device serves the dramatic realisation of the story superbly well: the dead communicating to the living. It is certain that Billy Wilder will have seen Orphuls film. When ‘Letter from…’ was released Wilder was engaged in preparing the script for Sunset Boulevard and Orphals use of the voice over device may well have fed into his scripting of this film which of course begins with the dead man in the swimming pool introducing himself in voice over and taking us into the movie.

adrin neatrour 

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre   Tobe Hooper (USA; 1974) Marilyn Burns

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle, 7 Dec 2023. Ticket £7

training manual

Seeing Hooper’s ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ for the second time made me think about the role played by films both in shaping the psychic atmosphere of the times and eliciting individuated psychological responses to movie imagery.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is about ‘force.’  ‘Force’ defined by Simone Weil as the power that turns anyone who is subjected to it into ‘a thing’. Force  “…exercised to its limit turns man into a thing; in the most literal sense it makes a corpse out of him. Force has been exercised. Someone was here, the next minute there is nobody.”

The mythologies and writings of many religions such as the Christian Book of Revelation and the Norse Ragnarok all describe in graphic detail what will happen when the world comes to an end, the end of days the time when human life is destroyed. The religio-mythical accounts all premise the aetiology of such events as within the fold of a superhuman agency. It may be that in the judgemental logic of the ‘Book of Revelation’ human sinfulness brings on God’s wrath, but it is God’s decision to visit fire and brimstone upon mankind. In other mythic variations of the destruction theme, it is the Gods or other pre-human titans that lay waste to the earth, with human extinction almost being collateral damage. The common theme is that it is the Gods who dispose.

Cut to post 1945 – it’s man who disposes . The development of atomic and nuclear weapons has led to the exponential increase in the destructive capacity of human weaponry. Weapons of mass destruction are now widely proliferated, and if used would not only totally flatten their actual targets but through the ensuant fall out of radiation would kill most of us as well as poison a broad spectrum of life on the planet. It is no longer religio-mythic texts that feed our imaginations with literalist descriptions of apocalypse rather it is the movies filled out with their digitally generated images of devastation that connect into the synaptic pathways of the human psyche. Films such as ‘Batman, Dark Knight Rises’ and the ‘Terminator Franchise’ (in particular Terminator 2: Judgement Day) create expectations of complete annihilation. In their violent playout of opposing forces (good and evil) they have chiselled the runes of annihilation into our collective consciousness. A form of popular mass entertainment has become a significant channel for habituating if not inuring its audiences to the idea of becoming ‘things’. When interviewed for news programmes, the default response of most survivors of disaster situations is to compare their experience of devastation to something they’ve seen in the movies. They are witness to the strength of a conditioning effect working through the imagery of the movie industry.

Looking at film’s influence in response to violence perpetrated at an individual level, Tobe Hooper’s ‘Chainsaw Massacre’ brings into clear relief the issue of the desensitisation of viewers to the use of ‘force’ in engaging in acts of graphic cruelty. ‘Texas Chainsaw’ is a film that celebrates the infliction of pain and death by the powerful upon the powerless. The percept underlying Hooper’s movie is that the purpose of individual power is to exert it pitilessly in the subjugation of body and mind of a victim, subjugation often to the point of killing them, rendering them dead things. In this respect ‘Texas Chainsaw’ is a different sort of proposition to previous films in the Horror genre such as the earlier Hammer movies or Italian produced horror films.

The Hammer and Italian horror movies of the 1950s and ‘60s in the main had gothic story lines revolving round vampires, ghosts, demented doctors, witches etc. However gruesome the fate of the innocent victims might be, the deaths depicted in these films were mechanical in as much as the characters’ motives for killing had a scripted rationality by dint of them being vampires necrophiliacs or schizo-surgeons etc. The perpetrators of evil in these films were driven men and women. They were possessed by their particular need but took no intrinsic pleasure from what they had to do in order to satisfy it.  

In the ‘Horror’ genre of this era (1960’s) the ‘Dread’ lay partly in the actual situation – vampires needing the blood of the living – the idea of the ‘victim’ and the manner in which the action was filmed. The thrill for the audience was usually the setting up and the consequent stalking of the unsuspecting victim. This was intensified by well established cinematic tricks – switching camera point of view and representation – and using music and sound effects to amplify tension before the victim – too late – turns screams and is summarily dispatched. A knife a blow a bite: the end’s quick. The post operative shot will often feature the prone bloody body, before the scenario moves onto its next phase. ‘Texas Chainsaw’ is different: the violence is sadistic. it is opportunist and is perpetrated outside any evident rationale. Force is used for pleasure. The murder of the first woman, Pam, introduces a cruelty that sets it apart from the aforementioned horror movies and other preceding genre productions.

Pam is caught by the ‘bone man’ in the ‘bone house’. He lifts her up bodily off her feet and carries her over to a rail where he impales her on a butcher’s hook. These ‘S’ hooks are normally used to hang the dead animals in slaughter houses. We hear the woman’s screams of pain as the weight of her own body drives the hook deeper and deeper into her flesh delivering her to a slow agonising death. The presentation of killing by means of the torture of impalement immediately marks out Hooper’s film as entering different psychic relationship with its audience: Hooper is inviting the audience to witness force perpetrated for the enjoyment of extended physical suffering. As’boneman’ rams her down on the hook it’s like a magic trick of transformation: in the blink of an eye for the audience she ceases to be a living being she becomes ‘dead meat’.

This trick is compounded later in the film by Sally’s ordeal. Sally is eventually captured by ‘the bonemen’. She is bound strapped down, subjected to batterings and lacerations and the terror of being a helpless victim. Hooper develops the scene to a point where sitting opposite her at the other end of the table her tormentors take a break. For a moment they draw back from her. The men watch as Sally in visceral terror screams gasps howls overtaken by the fear and horror of what’s happening. The response of the men to Sally’s pain is an increasing unalloyed amusement and pleasure. The more pain Sally shows the funnier they find it, until they’re all collapsing in uncontrollable laughter. This is an extended scene of some minutes duration; so long I started to find it unbearable as some of the audience identifying with the merciless reduction of Sally to ‘thing’ status, started to join in the laughter.

What’s new (as far as I know to mainstream and Hollywood movies) and different in ‘Texas Chainsaw’ and what was to become a feature of subsequent ‘Slasher’ movies was the implied invitation to take vicarious open pleasure in the pain and suffering of others.  To glorify force like it’s a a magic trick, turn some one into a ‘thing’ and the audience will for the most part side with the power. The underlying rationale of Hooper’s film lies in its open celebration of cruelty as spectacle. It comes with permission to openly gaze upon the infliction of pain by the party with power upon the weak.

It is a significant feature of Hooper’s script that the motivation of ‘the bone house men’ is undetermined. The scripts of the aforementioned Hammer and Italian films were always contained within a motivational schema that gave them both a form and a carapace of justifiable rationality. Hopper’s ‘bonemen’ lack any such clear purpose. They are isolated beings, driven by a psychopathic enjoyment of slaughter and death.   Enjoyment of killing for its own sake which is aroused whenever the opportunity arises and someone is lured into their isolated sanctum.

The socio-cultural undertow of American psychopathy realised in ‘Texas Chainsaw’ is now celebrated on by lone gunman mass killings that characterise daily life in the USA. The intoxification of force that’s seen in the cold calculation of these mass killers is well documented: taking aim with their semiautomatic M16s (now a favourite of illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank) they coldly select their live targets and shoot them, one after another moving with calculated deliberation through the killing zone of choice. Whatever their motivation, whether it’s to play ‘God’, to wreak revenge for their real or imagined pain etc. the force is with them. They take it upon themselves to turn the living into corpes. The isolation and psychopathy at work in America probably engender a feed back loop between the type of cultural output represented by Hooper’s film and the increasing phenomena of mass murders by lone gunmen.

Most disturbing is Hooper’s gratification in the the pain of others. The sense in which Texas Chainsaw gives license to enjoyment of torture, albeit disguising this permission in what might be innocently described as an over-the-top Horror romp. But the hook is the hook, and the unrestrained rollicking laughter of ‘bonemen’ tormenters opens up a vista of the psychic legitimation of allowable cruelty, at the level of individual psychology giving notice that it’s good fun to inflict hurt, in fact it is a prerogative and affirmative of power. To express real power you have to use force to inflict death or physical pain on the opposing body, to turn it into a thing at your disposal.

If I had been one of the American trainers of torturers at Guantanamo or Bagram I would have had mandatory screenings of Texas Chainsaw Massacre for my trainees every night for the duration of the course as part of the de-sensitisation programme, a primer as to how to turn people into dead things.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Long Farewell   Kira Muratova (USSR; 1971)   Zinaida Sharko; Oleg Vladimirsky

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 3 Dec 2023; ticket: £7

to see

Kira Muratova’s ‘The Long Farewell’ centres on a relationship that is rarely covered in the movies, namely the relationship between mother and adolescent son. Aside from the caricature relationships centred about crude representations generated by crime genre films such as Raoal Walsh’s Cagney film ‘White Heat’ and various other similarly structured scripts featuring Mothers as family crime bosses, this relationship has been almost completely outside the interests of producers and directors, most of whom have been male.

And yet many women, for different reasons are locked into the emotional investment endemic in bringing up sons to be young men. As a woman director, Muratova has taken this cross gender / cross generation dyad as subject of ‘The Long Farewell’ and invested in a script that avoids the sensational and obvious types of filmic manipulation. Rather Muratova invites the audience to absorb the emotional orbits of both Yevgeniya and her son Sasha, employing a scenario based on perceptions rather than images. The perceptions are mediated through a series of situations: graveyard, train journeys, visits, home, work, public events. Situations in which the viewer absorbs the shifting dynamics between mother and maturing son as their relationship shifts from the stage of the comfortable dependency of childhood to a new shifting basis of uncertainty and instability.  

Muratova’s ‘The Long Farewell’ is a neo-realist film in the tradition of directors such as De Sica and Rossellini, who likewise carved out a series of films that were less about presenting action and story line, rather more about inventing a Cinema of thought.

Early commentators connected neo-realist movies to a concern with social content. But this linkage overdetermines the role of content in these films which were in fact structured around the intentions and concerns by De Sica et al to make another form of Cinema. A Cinema that was not locked into action images and the play out of narrative but rather to create a new kind of constructed reality that was elliptical, wavering, working in blocs with deliberately weak connections. Neo-realism ethos didn’t reproduce or represent the real, but rather aimed at the real, always ambiguous always asking its audience to decipher what was going on.  Asking the audience to engage in an act of seeing, to accept the invitation to be part of the thought processes of the film.

Muratova’s film is about process not about outcome and the film is shot and edited in a cinematic style that enables the audience to be witness to the fluctuations of mood that play out between mother and son as the emotional balance between them undergoes a significant shift. The shooting is defined by wide shots comprising long takes that encompass optical situations that allow the viewer to see what is going on. The climactic optical situation takes place in auditorium of a theatre where Yevgena arriving late and drunk finds someone occupying her seat. Despite being given chances to settle the situation she is overwhelmed by her frustrations and fears; in this ridiculous situation she is overwhelmed by her powerlessness and she erupts in a spectacle of public fury. As her increasing anger renders her more and more out of control, it is only the intervention of Sasha that rescues her from what looks like a moment of inevitable shame and humiliation. And it is through this optical situation that we see that the fulcrum of love has come to rest at a point where now it is the son who now has responsibility to look after the mother.

This is of course not an end point; a end realisation. We have witnessed a shift in a point of time. From the nature and structure of Muratova’s movie is clear that her script is a strip of action; the time covered in the film a poised moment in the flow of life from past to present to future. The present is amenable for us to witness but the past and the future are veiled vistas. If we come away from the film affected by what we have seen, it is not because we have been manipulated by the torque of the scenario; it is because we feel we have been in close proximity to the complexity of the human situation which we know all to well from our own lives.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

Apocalypse Now       Francis Ford Coppola (USA; 1979) Martin Sheen; Marlon Brando

 

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 9 Nov 23; ticket: £7

The spectacle of everyday America

After reading Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ my feeling is that though there are elements of the novella incorporated into Coppola’s scenario, the script owes more to Hollywood Westerns such as Ford’s ‘The Searchers’ which has the theme of a search and find mission, plus a number of other such genre movies where a lone cowboy or cowboys track down ‘a baddie.’

I saw this film first when it opened and it made a big impression. I was blown away by the visual impact of the set piece spectacles, a scenario exploiting the idea of America sucked into the darkest vent of hopeless destructive nihilism. On re-seeing Coppola’s movie I immediately understood the effect that ‘Apocalyse Now’s’ opening sequence had on me both in establishing the mood of the film and colouring the film’s atmospherics. The opening sequence is not so much defined by its visuals but by the sound track which emotionally overwhelms the audience: Jim Morrison lead singer of ‘The Doors’ gives a scarring performance of his song, ‘The End.’

“This is the end….My only friend…the end…Lost in a wilderness of pain….

And all the children are insane….Kill…kill….kill…” The lyrics, often improvised live by Morrison stretched out on acid, become a primal scream that sweeps up into itself all the dirt of a culture locked into death.

The power of Morrison’s voice, the initial slow restrained tempo building towards chaos, the sparse instrumentation that locates close to an Indian raga, lends the sound a cosmic etherial dynamic, all combine to engender a state of mind open to the apocalyptic vision, a revelation of suburban America’s ‘End of days’.

‘The End’ bookends Coppola’s film, both opening and closing the movie. It is the first and the last: initially priming state of mind for what is to come; at the end signing off its audience with an interpretive confirmation of the thematic play out of what they have seen.

After the first spectacle of Willard’s burst of self directed rage in his hotel room, the scenario charts his up-river journey to find and kill Kurtz, a special forces operative who has gone native. The trip is a series of set pieces, the filming anchored in the images of the war: the massacre of a Vietcong village from the air by attack helicopters, the obscenity of the entertainment industry flown into the war zone, the vison of war seen as a ‘Son et Lumiere’ experience under the influence of drugs. America encapsulated as – guns – sex – drugs – and rock n roll – America on an acid high fucking the world. For what?

‘Apocalypse Now’ at this level is silent about the: ‘For What?’. Second viewing impressed that this a film about the USA, the Vietnam war is a backdrop. The ‘For What’ invites the idea that as Jim Morrison suggests that the USA is an idea on the verge of tearing itself apart but instead in an act of psychic transference rips other countries apart.

As he sails upstream Willard becomes obsessed with Kurtz as he reads his dossier and then writings. Willard is consumed by his throughts about Kurtz, not about the war and the types of decisions that brought both men to where they are, to Vietnam. Willard presents as an increasingly empty figure, the empty American, a sort of tourist gazing at the externalities of life but unable to see what is happening.

Kurtz is the central figure for both Conrad and Coppola but Conrad is careful that whilst describing Kurtz’ qualities as a man, not to actually quote any of his writings. Coppola has Brando playing Kurtz, and as part of the deal Brando is allowed to write and deliver his own end monologue: ‘The Horror’. In the course of his speech Kurtz tells a story: about how a group of Vietcong hacked the arms of the little village children after they had been vacinated by the Americans. Kurtz with crystal clarity understands this moral cruelty. The Vietcong’s ability to go through with this horror, was a mark of their superiority, a statement of their moral certitude: their knowledge of the need to destroy the enemy and anything tainted with him. But Kurtz’ speech has a strange anomalous section. Kurtz continues with this claim that, “…if he (Kurtz) commanded ten divisions of such men…our troubles here would be over very quickly…”

The issue with this statement is the phrase: ‘our troubles’. To whom does the ‘our’ refer. Presumably to ‘us Americans’. Despite, ‘the Horror; the Horror’… the horror caused by the American decision to fight the Vietnamese war, Kurtz for all his fine understanding and personal qualities simply wants the Americans to win the war. The why and to what purpose to win might serve, is left as a conceptual vacuum, a vacuum into which ‘Apocalpse Now’ is also subsumed. There is also a contradiction here in that the Vietcong could behave as they did towards these children because they totally believed in the rightiousness of thier cause, this is what motivated their resistance to the Yanks. There was no such primary belief amongst US soldiers in Vietnam. They were fighting as part of the generation who listened to Jim Morrison. They were fighting in the darkness of their own bankrupt society.

With the fall of Saigon happening the year before shooting for ‘Apocalypse Now’ began, the USA had experienced a humiliating total defeat at all levels: political military and most pertinently psychic.  Nothing of this brutal actuality feeds into Coppola’s script, which takes place in the vacuum of the film making world, rendering the movie just another spectacular Western but without any of the moral baggage of the best of this genre.

Conrad’s story works because Marlow comes away understanding something about where his journey has taken him, into certain realms of metaphorical darkness. By contrast, I came away from Coppola’s film with the feeling that as Willard returns downstream having killed Kurtz, that all he has understood is that to solve America’s problems,what you have to do is to kill another American.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk