Star & Shadow

  • The Old Oak   Ken Loach; script Paul Laverty

    The Old Oak   Ken Loach; script Paul Laverty (UK; 2023) Dave Turner, Ebla Mari

    viewed Tyneside Cinema 2nd Oct 2023; ticket £11.75

    watch the birdie

    Set in a small ex-mining town in North East England Loach and Laverty’s film begins with the idea of unseen forces. In the opening sequence of ‘The Old Oak’ we see a workman removing the ‘For Sale’ signs hanging over a couple of properties in a run down terrace. Some of the residents question the workman. From his replies they understand what’s going on. People who already have had their town stripped of its industry and employment are now experiencing the final nail in their coffin as they witness property, houses in their own streets bought up by anonymous foreign investors and reduced to junk value. Unseen forces ruthlessly extracting the last remnants of value out of a community that has been left to rot down.

    Ken Loach/Laverty films are always vehicles for their beliefs about social justice. But their films are all the better when their beliefs are underpinned and served by ideas derived from the nature of the actual forces enfolded into the machinations of contemporary life. My feeling is that they only rarely achieve this synthesis leaving many of their films as simplistic playouts of moral social themes that unravel as expressions of sentimentality embued with nostalgia for past certainties.

    One recent noticeable product of this partnership was: ‘Sorry we missed you…’ which probed the situation of a low income family in which both parents were employed in high pressure service industries: Rickie working as a contracted out zero hours delivery driver, and his wife, Abbie, as a peripatetic care worker. The film as it develops is characterised by the malevolent influences of omnipresent but distanced agents: the unseen managers with demands completely removed from the reality of the work; the mobile phones which jingle and jangle their nerves, controlling the pace of the day and making ever increasing demands on their capabilities; and of course the unseen psychic force that is ever present in their life: fear. Fear that the financial house of cards on which their family’s viability is based might at any time collapse. ‘Sorry we missed you’ works because of the tension between its protagonists and the unseen.

    After its opening sequence, ‘The Old Oak’ in contrast to ‘Sorry I missed you…’ moves into the mode of presence, that is to say ‘seen’ oppositons glazed with concomitant sentimentality.

    The unannounced arrival in the town of a group of Syrian refugees who have been allocated housing in the depopulated terraces of the town is the catalyst provoking division in the community. The latter were of course not consulted, never informed, but had to deal pre-emptorily with the situation of in-comers whose sudden appearance is yet another confirmation of their powerlessness and emasculation. The Syrians are another reason for the anger and resentment felt by some of the inhabitants, which they direct not at the hidden agents of the decision, but at the pawns in the game, the refugees.

    The plotting of Loach’s film focuses on the development of both: the relationship between TJ, a local man, a ‘good man’ the publican of The Old Oak, and Yara, the young woman Syrian incomer; and the charting of the conflict between the pro and anti-refugee factions in the town.   These script lines are brought together with TJ’s decision to develop the pub as an inclusive social centre for newcomers and original inhabitants. Both these strands of the script are characterised by a certain mechanicality, straight line scripting and a reluctance to develop significant events inserted into the film’s scenario.

    The oppositional elements between those supportive of the refugees and those resentful of them are characterised by presence. We see the two sides of the town that are in opposition. But the script fails to deliver the tensions of presence, rather it delivers moments of confrontation, but doesn’t even always develop these moments with any weight. For instance inserted into the scenario is a nasty vicious assault on a Syrian schoolboy. But the attack on the young boy, graphically shown, is not developed by the script: its documented but then glossed over, by-passed, finally forgotten, slipping out of the film’s arc of consciousness. The feeling is that Loach/Laverty were reluctant to examine the type of specific physical jeopody to which refugees can be exposed, in particular if they are young. For the most part the oppositional scenes between TJ and the regulars resolve in the script as harangues shouting matches that blow themselves out. There is of course the act of sabotage by the resentful locals but even this seems to beg the question as to why the grudge that triggered the act had not had its place in the scripted clashes between TJ and the ‘regulars.’

    Yara rather than developing as a medium for introducing unseen elements into scenario is made into an instrument of sentimentality, a touchstone for nostalgia, rather than an individual in her own right. She’s ultimately a Disneyfied character, a sort of fairy godmother. Like most Disney creations Yara feels de-contextualised, as Laverty’s script has taken taken most of the Syrian out of her, the which vacuum is not remedied by the constant references to her father’s plight. Yara registers as a deus ex-machina, sprinkling fairy dust over TJ’s pub transforming it from a static pumpkin into a moving community carriage. It’s fairy tale posing as faux social realism a feeling compounded by the penultimate scene where on news of Yara’s father’s death the whole town graduates towards her house to pay their respects. Again it reminded me of those Disney films in which when one of the central animal characters dies, all the creatures of the forest foregather to mourn.

    The admix of unashamed filmic sentimentality nostalgia and social concern is the core driving vision of Loach and Laverty’s work. But whether these two strands can coalesce effectively or whether they simply cancel each other out leaving the scripts as dull husks, is a moot question.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

     

     

     

     

     

  • M   Fritz Lang

    M   Fritz Lang (Ger 1931 script Thea von Harbou) Peter Lorre; Otto Wernicke

    Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 1st Oct 2023; ticket: £7.

    Retrocrit: from procedure to process

    Although M is described as a film about the serial killer of little girls, Lang’s movie comes across as something more than this. German playwrights Brecht and Wedekind had already established murder as a type of ‘idea’, murder as a relevant motif for probing the underbelly of society’s moral structure. The abandoned the mutant the criminals and the insane, collectively could be seen as a crazed mirror through which the distorted social and moral values of industrial capitalism could the better be discerned.  

    Outcastes were twisted parodies of the institutions that feared and despised them, and from which they were banned. The slaughter of the innocent little girls is never represented as anything other than horrific but is never exploited for melodrama charge. Lang’s bold stripped filmic statements need no emotional intensifiers. Lang creates precursive images of violent death: the shadows, shadow play, the child’s balloon caught in telephone wires; Hans (Lorre as M) walking calmly by with his little victim Elsie. Shots that cut to the quick of murders that are never seen because Lang and von Harbou have woven the horror of the act on the ordinary loom of life: the everyday bustle, the daily round of chores the city’s shops and pavements.

    M’s scenario is socially contextualised. Just as the English crime thriller often had a generic upper class setting, Lang and von Harbou’s movie is set within the world of ordinary working class people. The opening shot comprising a long crane of the tenement courtyard with children playing a song game whose words call up the child murderer, introduces a place where children occupy a different world from adults, chaperoned and vulnerable. It’s a culture of hard knocks where children are left to fend for themselves – a recognisable feature of all European countries at this time. The victims are working class, as is Hans who preys on them. Hans understands the weaknesses to which they are exposed and how easily they are lured, The formal juxtaposed linkages between the shots that express class experience, and the actions of the murderer suggest a Brechtian ethos working and guiding M which shapes and carries Lang’s film foreword to its next stage of development.

     

    The usurpation of power by the underworld. The victory of the gangsters.

     

    As the procedure of the police investigation stalls and their activity interferes with criminal enterprise, the gangsters take on the task of tracking down M. When M was being made in 1930 Germany was experiencing the huge surge in Nazi popularity culminating in their triumph in the 1930 elections. The characteristic features of their irresistible rise were violent mob anti Semitism and the Nazi pack organisation.   The Nazis understood how to exploit the fears of the ‘little people’ unradicalised working class men and woman. And as a parallel psychic track, M’s script might be read as Lang and von Harbou’s analogy of the rise of Hitler, the unleashing of class anger against a specific loathed object. The gangsters and crooks take over.   Riding on the back of the innocence and fear of the working class, Hitler’s gang organise and justify taking power and justice into their own hands. Of course I have no idea if this was in the mind of the script writers, but the material was there in Berlin all around them.

    The key moment in this analogous parallelism is the chalk branding of Hans with the M sign on the back of his coat, so that he will be recognised as the Murderer. The crude M eerily pre-empts the Star of David and Juden badge that a few years later the Nazi’s obliged all Jews to wear. So that they would bare witness on their bodies the sign of their stigma. This moment of the marking of M is a stunning coup de film that precisely points to the dialectic that works through the film. From this moment the film’s logic is turned upside down and it is this anti-theatrical logic which drives the final sections of the scenario.

    In the first section of the film, Hans is perpetrator and hunter. From the moment of his branding, everything changes, he becomes victim and hunted. It is a measure of Lang’s insight as a director that he understood so clearly how to use the resources of film to create a pivotal moment from which we start to see everything differently, to invoke a different order of understanding. Lang and von Harbou have already shown how society has begun break down panicked by the hunt for the child sex killer, who could be anybody. But it is in the mock court scene where Hans is tried by the gangsters that the reality of mob rule is played out.

    Legal institutions have developed over centuries to protect everyone and to ensure that all are treated equally. The accused have to be tried by due process which includes evaluation of fitness to plead. The mob sweeps this all away. Whatever you are Jew or Child Killer you have only the right to be sentenced to death for what you are. There is a moment of pure Brechtian theatre as Lang’s camera pans from the serried rows of gangsters baying for Hans blood to Hans himself, alone cowered against a wooden partition. But who will speak for me, Hans asks? The camera pans upwards now and reveals behind him, on a raised level, one of the gangsters . He leans towards Hans and says: that’s my job. In this shot immediate physical threat is resolved with high farce, violence contrasts with an absurdist philosophical detachment.   Extraordinary! Pure Brecht.

    The criminal attorney conducts himself with composure and makes an eloquent defence of Hans. He shows the mob that terrible though Hans may be, the man is simply not responsible for his actions. Hans cannot be guilty of murder. Of course this plea will not make the slightest difference to the rabble who want blood. The interaction, the intercutting between the calm figure for the defence and the ferocity of the mob, heightens the viewers understanding of the issues in play; we understand at last that a case can be made that Hans is not responsible for his actions. However much his acts have disturbed and horrified us, we cannot easily find him guilty of murder. And surely the screams by mobs of Nazis and proto Nazis calling for the death of Jews a few years later will have stuck in the mind of some who saw M in 1931.  

    And finally Lang’s final resolution: his shot of the High Court where we can only presume that before which Hans has been tried and found guilty of the murders. At first the frame contains only the symbolic elements of the Court: the three monumental judgement seats situate on a raised dais. Breaking the tension of the frame, three judges enter; they take their seats and then each taking a black cap, places it their head. The shot cuts to black and the end of the film very quickly, allowing just enough time to see and take in the action. Lang and von Harbou are surely suggesting that gang law will soon become incorporated into state law.

    In this Brechtian parable we see the dialectic forces at work shaping the film and informing our understanding of what is happening. We are lead first to be overwhelmed by antagonism and fear of Hans; but these feelings are at least challenged by the change in the script’s perspective that Hans is himself a victim and needs protection from the judgement of the mob, the vectors of hate and revenge, who exploit him for their own purposes.

    Lang also sets a filmic dialectic to work in M. The interplayed tension between image and sound is a characteristic of M as film experience, But for a number of sequences Lang uses no sound, or at least only the most sparing of sound effects. Most of the film is played out with sound where the fury of dialogue works to lead and define the images. But a number of sequences Lang plays MOS, mit aus sound: mute. It is an effective device.  

    When Lang like some nineteenth century magician removes the sound (like the rabbit disappeared from the hat you wonder where it has gone) it is as if a hole has opened up in reality.   The viewer is caste down into this hole as if experiencing a dream. As if Lang is saying at one level, all this life is a dream….but dream as it may be, we can still make sense of it. Lang sets us adrift in an underworld where film and dream coalesce and into these silent images we pour ourselves. I am reminded of the mute newsreels we shall see of the second world war. So in silence we watch: the panic of the crowd, the anger of the gangsters, the animal fear of Hans, the police hunt, the silence as Elsie walks away with Hans.   Silence frames these sequences. Silence frames us as we without voice cannot speak, silence frames life and our powerlessness to act to save what needs to be saved. Many things we watch in and with silence, in particular evil.

    With his use of the silent moments Lang confirms his status not just as both a evoker of dreams but also as filmmaker who is a moralist, or perhaps an amoralist.

    Adrin Neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Afire   Christian Petzold 

    Afire   Christian Petzold   (Ger; 2023)   Thomas Schubert; Paula Bier

    viewed Tyneside Cinema 12 Sept 2023; ticket £11.75

    damp squib

    Christian Petzold’s ‘Afire’ is a typical contemporary movie that tries to be about everything and ends up being about nothing, an empty vessel that rings out hollow.

    ‘Afire’ feels like a bad joke, but a bad joke that is mistold and so loses the point that it is even a joke, leaving the audience simply lost in banality. At the core of the bad joke is the use Petzold’s script makes of the forest fires raging about his setting of a Baltic seaside town. Initially the fires are seen as a background element suggesting perhaps that the scenario will exploit them as an encroaching universalistic phenomenon that will develop into a catastrophic overwhelming effect that defines the movie. But the fire line taken by Petzold is to reduce the presence of the burning forest to a particular simple device. By which I mean that the inferno instead of representing a force of nature, is co-opted by the script as a means of ensuring his two lovers come to ‘tragic’ end, their charred bodies found in the middle of the forest, entwined in a death embrace. It’s Petzold’s way of signing them off as a camp re-enactment of a referenced similar event in Pompeii.

    For the most part the plot doesn’t even even cohere on its own terms, and the script feels like an unsuccessful and desperate effort to rescue a failed idea; though what the original idea may have been is anyone’s guess. Besides exploiting film as a bad joke at the expense of the environment it’s difficult to see that Petzold was doing in making this film. Surely he can’t have made ‘Afire’ simply because the tax credits and production money was easily obtainable by the shoot taking place in a remote and seldom utilised part of Germany? Perish the thought, much too cynical.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • The Lobster       Yorgos Lanthimos

    The Lobster       Yorgos Lanthimos (Euro co–prod; 2015) Colin Farrell; Rachel Weisz

    viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 7th Sept 2023; ticket £7

    The Lobster Quadrille

    Dancing or shall we say the dance, features prominently in both Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and in ‘The Lobster’. Like ‘Alice’ Lanthimos’ film is based on a proposition. It’s a proposition in which the relational expectations of the everyday are undermined and replaced with an otherworldly semantic logic. I don’t know whether Lanthimos has read Carroll but there is no doubt that ‘The Lobster’ not only appears to assimilate some critical elements of Wonderland’s situational humour but in addition aligns Carroll’s logic to a cruel Swiftian moral compass.

    ‘Tis the voice of the Lobster’ I heard him declare,

    ‘You have baked me too brown I must sugar my hair.’

    As a duck with its eyelids so he with his nose

    Rims his belt and his buttons and turns out his nose.

    Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books were at one level parodies, albeit affectionately expressed, of Victorian England’s child rearing nostrums with their strange morally uplifting certainties. Swift was the arch satirist, author of ‘Gulliver’ a sardonic critique of human nature and the scathing vicious ‘A Modest Proposal’.  Lanthimos like Carroll and Swift begins his film with a narrative device that involves arrival in a parallel universe. Thus in the first section of ‘The Lobster’ his ‘hotel/institution’ is located in a ‘Wonderland’ of his own devising, but loaded with a biting Swiftian satirical critique.

    The target of ‘The Lobster’ is the 20th century’s obsession with coupledom.   The tyranny of ‘the couple’. The feeling that in not being part of a twosome and all the conceptual baggage that goes with it, children home comfortable life style etc individuals pale into an inexistence – or worse. Protagonist David deserted by his wife is taken to : The Hotel. The Hotel is a sort of Ministry of Marriage whose particular concern is to match up its individual guests as couples. Special rules apply in this place, absurd strictures governing all aspects of life: comportment dress code sex relationships activity. The Swiftian thrust into the darkness devised by Lanthimos is that the ‘residents’ have 45 days to ‘partner up’ or be turned into an animal of their own choosing. David choses to become a lobster if he doesn’t make the grade. The principle in-house Hotel activities – the nightly dance for instance – revolve about finding a mate within the 45 day window. The main external activity is tracking down and hunting (Again Lewis Carroll’s ‘Hunting of the Snark may have been a suggestive influence here) ‘the loners’. These are hotel guests who have escaped, gone over the wall (rather than be zoomorphed) and hang out in the local woods. The idea is to hunt for these renegades, tranquillize them and haul them back in order for them to undergo ‘their transformation’.

    ‘The Lobster’ is a film of two parts.

    The first part is built about the rituals and the mission of the Hotel. It pulls on an acting style in which the characters, although retaining an individuality are invested in the logic of their situation; and a script, which in the Carrollian tradition honours the logic of the Hotel’s existential demands, building them into the autonomic response cues of the roles, and feeding the actors with lines representative of the logic of their positions.

    The second part of ‘The Lobster ‘tells the story of David’s escape from ‘The Hotel’, after presumably deciding he didn’t want to become a lobster. David makes his escape from the structured life of ‘The Hotel’ by fleeing into the woods where the loners hang out. At this point Lanthimos parts company with both Carroll and Swift. Both these authors contain their protagonists within the respective worlds in which they find themselves – Gulliver experiences a number of worlds but the action all takes place within them. Carroll’s narrative simply records Alice’s strange encounters as she endeavours to find her way back home.

    My feeling is that the second part of the movie, doesn’t work, it falls apart when the action moves into the trees, losing cogency and the tensions endemic to the space of ‘the Hotel’. ‘The Lobster’ becomes crabby and uninteresting. The problem is that the style and nature of the structured relations have become so firmly established, that outside the bounds of ‘The Hotel’, in an oppositional setting, the controlling proposition loses focus, the film becomes fuzzy, lacking clarity in what it is doing. And this lack of clarity engenders a fall off in audience interest.

    The proposition entails that the characters presented in ‘the Lobster’ are ciphers. They represent and express certain positions in relation to both the hotel and to each other. We are interested in them because of their positional criticality and their cognitive responses; we do not care about them. Like the pieces of a chess set what matters is where they are on the board, their attributes and powers, their relationship to the other pieces; they do not generate emotional resonance.

    Much of the second part of the film simply drifts. Lanthimos indulges his vague notions of the loner community’s struggle against ‘the Hotel’ and the arbitrary (but sometimes amusing) trips to the City. But central to these two narrative strands is the developing relationship and bonding between David (who is short sighted) and the short sighted woman. As the film flips into muddled oppositional incoherence, the problem is that this developing relationship cannot hold the film together. It is uninteresting because Lanthimos cannot re-calibrate his script so that the relationship in itself and the attempt to destroy it, matter.

    However the script does re-focus itself in the final scene in which the proposition re-establishes itself triumphantly and the script moves to test its central thesis to destruction. The short sighted woman, now blinded. escapes with her lover David to the City. In the final shot, locked in his internalised psychic struggle with ‘the Hotel’s’ precept of Coupledom, we see David, in front of a mirror in the toilet of a coffee shop, brace himself and prepare to gouge out his eyes with a steak knife. Lanthimos cuts the scene and ends the film before there is any outcome as to whether David will follow the inexorable logic of mutilation in order to be conjoined in blindness with his new partner.

    The unevenness that characterises the two parts of ‘The Lobster’ is apparent even in Lanthimos’s filming. The shots that make up the forest scenes in the second part of ‘The Lobster’ lack conviction and intentionality of frame. They are a mess of foliage that struggles to locate the presence of the characters. This contrasts with the shooting of The Hotel section, where Lanthimos’ framing, camera movement are integral to the script and lead deeper into heart of the proposition. ‘The Killing of the Sacred Deer’ an earlier film is testament to Lanthimos’ ability to exploit particular framings of the situational architecture of contemporary interiors and exteriors as part of his filmic exposition.

    This ability of Lanthimos is also most intensely seen in the final section of ‘The Lobster’ which intercuts between David with the steak knife in the aforementioned washroom and his blinded woman partner who is seated at a window table of the coffee shop. In the background through the window we see that the coffee shop is located beside a huge truck stop with a busy highway in the far background. We watch through the window as the trucks like huge mechanical animals slowly manoeuvre back and forth against the light. There is something ominous and indifferent in this view which the blind lady cannot see. It’s like a real life Lobster Quadrille.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Scrapper     Charlotte Regan   (UK; 2023)

    Scrapper     Charlotte Regan   (UK; 2023) Lola Campbell, Alin Uzun

    viewed Tyneside Cinema 31st August 2023; ticket £11.75

    “It’s a scrapper!”

    Charlotte Regan’s ‘Scrapper’ portends to be a film about a child, 12 year old Georgie who has been brought up by her mother. The situation is that after Georgie’s mum dies, she manages to continue living by herself in their family home on an East End Estate. Then she’s suddenly confronted with the re-appearance of her dad Jason, who abandoned her when she was a baby and whom she has never known.

    There is a significant roll call of movies with children at the heart of their script: Truffaut’s 400 Coups, Bresson’s Mouchette, Clio Bernard’s The Selfish Giant, all of these directors work to locate us in the world of child. We see something of what the child sees, the scripts open up alien vistas out of kilter with the way things are normally understood by adults. But Regan’s movie is not about a child. Regan’s protagonist, 12 year old Georgie is a transposed adult woman and the film is about adult relationships.

    ‘Scrapper’ opens with a sequence of Georgie hoovering, doing the housework. The film closes with Georgie and dad Jason becoming friends, the final shot shows them walking off hand in hand into the sunset.

    The film seems to actually chronicle the subsuming of Georgie into her mother’s persona scripting the reconciliation of what had been failed relationship. Georgie’s presentation as a child by Regan doesn’t work. Dressing her up in an old football top and leaving her hair dangling in a pigtail is simple window dressing, it can’t disguise what’s in the shop. Georgie in poise attitude and dialogue is a contemporary woman; there is no vision of the child, no entry into the parallel space of the seeing of the unformed mind.

    Consequently this is a film in which the Regan’s script is unable to set any real tensions into play. In the films of Bresson Bernard and Truffaut that centre on the child, the scripts work in a particular way by engendering critical tensions between the worlds as experienced and acted on by the child protagonists, and the realities of the grown up world. Tensions that are endemic in the mismatch between the formed and the unformed psyche, the attached and unattached consciousness; perhaps the types of tensions that play out today in the kind of knife crime committed by children.

    But Georgie is not a child: she enters the film as a preformed adult without emotional or psychic tensions between her and the world. Without tensions ‘Scrapper’ becomes a dead movie, dull beyond distraction offering the viewer only the slow play out of what turns into the closure of a faux-romantic relationship.   

    This narrative trope is reinforced by the care taken by Regan over the art direction of ‘Scrapper’. Much has been made of Regan’s design, in particular the colourisation of ‘Scrapper’, it’s candy coloured gloss suggesting her film as a contemporary ‘Disney’ style fairy-tale, a ballad of a returning Prince rescuing a Princess. With the transformative technology of digital editing systems, Regan’s colouring mimics the type of look used by films such ‘Barbie’ and foisted on us by adverts whose creators of course aim to lure us into associating their products with a make believe wish fulfilment. Regan’s adoption of this look, which she justifies as giving up-lift to the usual down beat depiction of Working Class life, seems to me disingenuous: as if subsuming working class life into the world of MacDonalds and late capitalist consumerist projections makes everything better.

    If the film says anything at this point it’s that all relationships have become infantilised, but it is not clear that Regan intended her film to be such a sophisticated parody of contemporary life.

    Regan’s problems in understanding the issues implicit in building scripts centred about the child may stem from her script which replaces content with form. Given that there are no structural tensions built into the scenario Regan has opted to give her film an interpolated form. The action is regularly interrupted by regularly cutting away to a series of characters who are scripted to give an opinion or make a judgement about what has been going on in Georgie’s life.

    Like as if I write: “Macdonald’s I’m loving it.”

    Her notion was perhaps to create a form of visual interchange that would serve to energise ‘Scrapper’. This sort of structural device is well exercised in current cinema adverts and the Macdonald’s ad before Regan’s movie was certainly a case in point. But what works for a two minute ad doesn’t transfer to a feature film; the more   these tricksy devices were repeated the less they delivered. Regan seems to have believed she could make her film work by gimmicks rather than understanding the forces her idea might release.

    There is little left to say. The scenario is monopaced, and overlong. It’s easy to see that some sequences in ‘Scrapper’ have been over-extended so that the film can collapse over the finishing line of ‘feature film length’ demanded by the ‘Money’. The script is plodding, mostly badly written. When I saw the film at the Tyneside, the sound was strange, in particular the dialogue tracks. It may have been the cinema’s system but Georgie’s voice in particular had a peculiar hyper real quality.

    There were 6 people in the cinema, a large 300 seat auditorium.   It felt like they were present to witness the death of cinema if films like this keep getting made. I don’t know what meaning Regan intended to be understood by her title ‘Scrapper’, but before I saw this film I had always understood it to be a colourful term used by second hand car salesmen to describe a vehicle that had been sold to a punter which should have been scrapped. ‘It’s a scrapper’.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

     

     

     

     

     

      

     

     

     

     

  • Barbie     Greta Gerwig (2023; USA;)

    Barbie     Greta Gerwig (2023; USA;) Margot Robbie; Ryan Gosling

    viewed Tyneside Cinema 7 Aug 2023; ticket: £6

    Display function

    Barbie is the most successful film release this year, grossing $1B+, and as Siegried Kracauer notes: ‘… success like this is a sign of a successful sociological experiment, showing that its constituent elements have been blended in such a way as to correspond to the needs of a mass audience.’

    I have never owned a Barbie, but I have seen them displayed in toyshop windows, and wondered at these dolls in their pertly dressed outfits and pinched in bodies. Greta Gerwig’s script which plays out as one long spoof, kicks off with a cod ‘2001’ derivative sequence showing little girls located in a primal landscape playing with trad baby dollies, before the trumpets of Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra sound out announcing the new age of Barbie.

    From this section it’s observable that there are differences in the types of play mediated by these two types of toy dolls. The little girls engage with their trad dollies in a number of ways, as well as dressing and tending to them, children cuddle embrace protect hold them close to their bodies: the little baby dollies invite touch invoking a physical relationship. These baby dolls trigger the impulse to ‘care for’, to ‘look after’. The Barbies are to some extent coat-hangars: model doll-women who can be affectively dressed in all manner of different costumes and mantels. They don’t invite physical engagement or intimacy, they exist as types to be transformed by their apparel into different exemplary models that exist for displaying what they are.

    My feeling is that contrary to the notion peddled by Gerwig’s script that Barbie dolls are enablers, helping little girls to achieve the lives of their dreams, rather Barbies invoke the idea of life as ‘display’. Barbie dolls are accurate representations of a culture of ‘display’ and Gerwig’s scenario mainlines straight into veins of a culture of spectacle.

    The transition from baby dolls to Barbie dolls is in some respects witness to a system moving from trust to control. The transition from baby dolls to Barbie dolls is one marker of the social movement from a collective culture to an individualist display culture based on the currency of attention.

    A few days after seeing the movie, travelling on the Metro in Newcastle, the carriage doors swished open and a large group of young 14-15 years old girls bundled in jiving laughing decked out in full display kit. All wore high cut leisure shorts and sleeveless tops; they all had nail extensions protruding at least 2cm beyond the finger tip, and their eyes were dramatised by long thick up-curled black false eyelashes. They looked like real life Barbies. The costume and prosthetic effects on display were statements, the look as a projection of social values as refined by 10 years of iphones and social media. The young girls were presenting as spectacles, exo-shows designed to be looked at displayed appraised by their peers. The image machine at work and at play.

    Barbie is a drama played out by actors but in effect it’s an animation with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Gerwig’s ‘toons’. Nevertheless like the girls on the Metro, display image and control are central to the film’s pretension and its claim on the mass market. The Barbie’s LA based cool street look (face – body – wrap) is designed for exhibition and exhibition value depends on beautiful looks or a contrived representation of ‘look’, a sort of commodified identity signing off on both the components parts and the whole statement of who you want to be. Like an advert for ‘Coke’ or a two hour movie about Barbie Dolls, ‘being’ becomes display. Consumer societies have developed as societies of spectacle, where the desired effect is ‘attention’, for which read: competition for attention. Given the imperative of the exhibition ethos everyone wants to be in the picture and with the ubiquity of the smart phone everyone’s on display everyone’s in the photo. Gerwig understands that in the transposed nature of capitalist consumer ethos the underlying driver motivating social interactions is: ‘attention’ – that’s the pay off. Social competition is for attention rather than power (Which is not to say they are not linked). The mass appeal of ‘Barbie’ is built firmly on the psychological foundation of this social fact.

    The other characterising element of Gerwig’s script is confusion. Gerwig has produced her own alt Marxist dialectic that reads: thesis; antithesis; confusion. Confusion replacing synthesis may actually be a better outcome predictor of change than Marx’ socio-historical take on Hegel. Confusion and diffusion as the basis of the narrative for mass entertainment has the huge advantage of being a mish mash of oppositions that cannot possibly offend anyone. With it’s Disneyfied logic Gerwig’s scenario sets up all manner of oppositions: male/female; capitalist/ communal; real world/unreal world; life /death. Her oppositions are all resolved by way of unclear or even incomprehensible compromises as the script opts for philosophical fudge and sludge. Which of course is exactly as it should be in a film catering for the needs of a mass audience where it is better that embarrassing questions sink into the abyss of confusion, leaving the audience gaze firmly fixed on the surface.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Gummo     Harmony Korine   ( USA; 1997)  

    Gummo     Harmony Korine   ( USA; 1997)   Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, Chloe Sevigny, Linda Manz

    viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 23 July 2023; ticket:£7

    and another american dream

    Looking at the year in which Korine made ‘Gummo’ I remembered that Michael Haneka had made his first version of ‘Funny Games’ in that same year, 1997.  Haneka’s film, had its metaphysical roots in Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, an artistic testament pointing to the need for violent physical actions and determinations to break through the audience’s carapace against ‘reality’: a kick in the balls to wake up.

    Haneka’s movie is a brutal assault on the American middle class consumer. The original Funny Games was shot and made in Germany, but it was clear that the intended target of the eviscerating satire was the ‘home’ of consumerism, the USA.  To make this clear Haneka re-made Funny Games shot for shot in 2008, this version filmed and located in America.  The films achieved their effect by sabotaging standard Hollywood script protocols using the mind scrambling device of complete inversion of the power relations between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ characters, and writing the dialogue so that the bad guys were scripted all the vicious triumphant violence and got all the best ‘one liners’.  There is no ‘Dirty Harry’ play out.

    What Haneka shows in ‘Funny Games’ is that Middle Class America is defined by occupation of space without any real claim on it (hence their love of hotels and the imitation of hotel style interiors) and the propensity of this class to define themselves by the products they choose to buy.  Haneka’s middle class family are sort of interlopers, with an incorporeal claim on the space in which they live; with aplomb and certitude they possess great wealth of material matter, but lack awareness of what they actually have, represents.  Time to call in the avenging angels.

    I have talked about Haneka’s movie because for me it suggests a way into thinking about what Korine was doing in making ‘Gummo’.  It’s set in the poor white community of Xenia, among the people regarded as ‘white trash’ by those who consider themselves socially superior.  Korine’s ‘Gummo’ represents the people who are the antithesis of the family in ‘Funny Games’, but have a certain phantom relationship, in as much as the lives of the poor whites can be seen as a strangely distorted sometimes warped shadow of  mainstream middle class culture.

    At the heart of ‘Gummo’ is the idea of the fragility of life.  This is an idea for the most part alien to the Middle Class ethos.  Perhaps this explains the resistance of the wealthy in industrialised and post-industrial populations, to accept the inescapable reality of encroaching climate change.  They don’t understand their relationship to what is happening.  ‘Gummo’ opens with a voice over by Solomon (the film’s main adolescent lead) spoken over grainy images (super 8 or VHS) of the passage of a tornedo through Xenia.  Solomon tells what he saw of the death and destruction left in its trail.  Nature can wipe you out any time.  It’s a moral perspective.

    And Korine’s ‘Gummo’ is a film made with moral intent.  His use of violence is an intrinsic part of the film’s design; violence that is allowed to play out to its aesthetic moral and logical conclusions.  A design that makes a claim on many of his scenes as spectacles of cruelty. The sometimes demented, sometimes coldly inflicted, nature of the violence, is (as in Heneka’s Funny Games) intended to cut straight through the viewers’ resistance to get through to the moral quick of the perception that I believe guides and drives Korine’s movie.  As per Haneka’s observations in ‘Funny Games’, the middling classes walk through life seeing nothing, without understanding the complex relations upon which their comfortable lives are built.  They possess, without ever having to fight for their possession. Their claim on wealth is by right of inheritance, an inheritance that they have forgotten was itself won by acts of applied violence.  Haneka’s middle class couple have been able to write even the possibility of violence, out of their life scripts; for the most part, they’re able to envelope their well protected privileged lives in the stultifying justificatory re-assuring blandishments of corporate speak.  They have the magic pass for getting through life.

    Korine’s underclass possess no such magic pass.  The conditions and experiences of any underclass are generally shaped by a high level of physicality.  It is a culture that revolves closely about the body:  health housing proximity social relations are all primary physical experiences. And this closeness to body engenders a sort of primary honesty that mediates the way people live and transmits to the children.  There is (at least until social workers come along) nothing to hide.  The violence in ‘Gummo’ both in the adult world and in the world of children expresses something of this honesty and something of the core physicality of the world as experienced. 

    Middle Class parents work hard to socialise their children in accord with standards of behaviour in which violence cruelty and antisocial tendencies are traits, tendencies, inclinations, to be suppressed, transmuted into more socially acceptible and progressive  impulses. But there can be an honesty in violence as a prime response.  And there no doubt that children can readily take to violence and cruelty, both for their own sake and to gain advantage for themselves.  It may be that many children (but not necessarily all children) are self centred, lack empathy, and struggle to understand the suffering of others. I think it is certainly true that causing hurt and pain can be a particular way that some children use to explore experiment and exploit their relations with the world.  Solomon and his friend kill cats.  They kill cats for money to buy glue and visit a local whore. It’s an instrumental act on their part: more or less neglected and penniless, they kill cats.  As children they kill honestly and without remorse: like children they know it’s wrong but they lack the inhibiting conditioning or empathic ability to cause them to stop.  And for this reason the film, in the form of Korine’s script does not judge them.  It observes them and how they live, as does the viewer.

    It might be a criticism of Korine that he is exploiting underclass American culture for his own ends as a film maker. To make a sensationalist film.  The film’s setting is not his background.  He is not ideologically driven (as say was Pasolini) in any obvious manner.  He makes ‘Gummo’ to assert himself as a film maker.  Difficult charge to answer, we don’t have access to his thinking.  However he says that what he shows in ‘Gummo’ is an America that is more or less hidden, unexplored in the dynamic of film.   There are some documentaries, but nothing that uses the resources of drama to probe the psychic realities of marginalised life.   But this aspect of America, the derelict communities abandoned by the post industrial world are an enduring part of this society and a necessary element in understanding how America works.  They are the cannon fodder.  In some ways Korines world and his characters, in particular the children are the wasted heirs of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.  And of course the Solomon’s of America are the boots on the ground of the American army, the front line of Vietnam and Iraq, togather with the blacks they are the backbone of the country’s projection of power.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • The Samurai             Jean-Pierre Melville 

    The Samurai             Jean-Pierre Melville   (Fr; 1967) Alain Delon. Francois Périer; Nathalie Delonviewed Star and Shadow Cinema 2nd July 2023; ticket: £7

    the way of the camera

    Melville’s ‘The Samurai’ is in some respects a walk through experience. The plot is derived from a neo-noir template following the familiar twists and turns of the noir genre. The key point in the movie being the script’s volte face when the hired killer has to turn his gun onto the people who originally hired him. A old complication: you sometimes have to bite the hand that fed you. The script features many familiar and well loved tropes: the loner anti-hero, an adoring moll, the sudden eruption of man with gun into a room (as per Chandler’s dictum that if things get little slow and uneventful, insert a man with a gun into a room – everything changes), a watertight alibi and a pernickety meticulous cop determined to get his man and of course ‘The Samurai’ the hired killer in the form of Delon. In the long durational wide shot that opens the film, at first we don’t see him; we hear his caged bird chirping and at last notice cigarette smoke wafting above the sofa which is back to the camera. When ‘Jeff’ pushes himself up from his prone position we barely make him out in the low light as he walks over to the front door, dons coat and carefully adjusts his hat before going out. The opening sequence is an introduction to the man who in some respects is inexistent. An idea.

    With all it’s stylistic gloss the film belongs to Delon as ‘Jef’ who literally walks through the film occasionally breaking into a run, his brusque walk and angular movements highlighting the pursuit scene set in the Paris metro. The part was conceived and written for Delon who functions as a noirish phantom with signature trench coat and a fedora hat moving like the spectral ghost of movies past through the scenario with invariant expression invariant stance and invariant silhouette, doing the necessary to keep the story moving.

    What makes the film more than a cinematic work-out is Melville’s understanding of the role of the camera in shaping the audience’s perception of his film. Cinema differs from theatre in that through placement the camera can represent oppositional points of view. To put it simply (and it is certainly more complex than this) the camera can be subjective or objective in its placement and in the implication of what it ‘sees. The ‘subjective’ camera is the classic ‘point of view’ shot where the camera is so placed as to stand for what the subject is seeing/experiencing.   The audience are also aware that what they are seeing in the shot is what the subject is seeing. By contrast the ‘objective’ shot records what is happening from the point of view of what is sometimes called a privileged observer (though who they are and how this can be manipulated is part of the craft of film composition). Filmic tensions are easily manipulated by creating uncertainty confusion etc in the viewer as to what point of view they being shown.

    ‘Le Samourai’ works superbly well because Melville’s shooting script instructs the camera to be exclusively objective. We never see a ‘Jef’ point of view. ‘Jef’ is the object of our gaze. A sort of specimin. We stare at and into him but he gives nothing back. He is an object entity, like a man from Mars or perhaps a Samurai. He is an unreadable affect image. When he ‘kisses’ his moll, who is putting her life on the line for him, we see he shows no trace of emotion: the embrace no more than a mechanical gesture.  Throughout the film whether he is killing, loving, on the run, under cross examination or dying he is the perfect Samurai, presenting to the camera to the watching audience the same baby faced blank immobility. He is an entity dominated by an ethos of service to murder. Melville’s understanding of the nature of his camera and Delon’s affect image combine to produce a film that is a realisation of ideas, all process but cool and engaging.

    ‘Le Samourai’ is a witty piece of film making. In effect it’s an homage to Hollywood’s golden era of gangster movies with their wonderful scripts derived from writers such as Chandler Cain Hammet et al. ‘The Samurai’ works as a parody, a playful parody of the tropes that play out in the genre. The humour lies in Melville’s realisation that the scaffold of the ‘Noir’ genre, with its oppositions and tensions could sustain and deliver a film that although it was shot quite differently from the Hollywood model and in a setting outside its original purlieu of the USA, it could still deliver almost as an abstract transcendentance, a statement about finality and futility.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Masculin-Féminin     J-L Godard

    Masculin-Féminin     J-L Godard (Fr; 1966) Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya

    viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 18 June 2023; ticket: £7

    lest we forget

    As per Godard it’s not the romancing that counts but the social constructs that define and delimit it’s possibilities. As romance goes the relationship between Paul (a romantic young idealist) and Madelaine (a wannabe popstar) is cool, as in it’s a cool relationship with, as in the words of the Jerome Kern/Dorothy Fields song, A Fine Romance “…with no kisses…” The kissing being replaced by a detached dialogue that probes sex life expectations and political attitudes.

    The relationship is a device for probing the facts of life of the times in the mid twentieth century.

    In ‘Alphaville’ Godard’s scripting exhibited a prescience about the way in which computers were to develop. What Godard understood about computers was not just their inevitable transition into machines that would have the capacity to take over and control all aspects of our society; computers would also imprint their algorithmically contrived language upon human consciousness; our own thinking would inevitably start to align itself with machine communication, turning us into proto automatons. We were going to end up ‘brainwashed’, with our minds invaded by the computer virus and be unable to think in any other way. In ‘Masculin-Féminin’ Godard has also seen into the future. His scenario probes another nascent feature of control technology which was also going to transform the way we live and interact: the opinion poll. The opinion pole as the harbinger of the data driven society.

    At mid point in the film Paul abandons his interest in politics and gets a job with a polling company. Paul’s job is to gather peoples responses to questions about their personal life sexuality and their buying preferences. Godard sees that the forces starting to operate in the social matrix of the mid’60’s are steadily working against and undermining the political and the communal. The real arguments about the division of power wealth and class inequality are in process of being overwhelmed by the burgeoning imperative for everyone to consume…. more and more and more…and for these patterns of consumption to start to define us.

    As the apparatus of capitalism gives consumers the goods they are incited to desire: the car, the TV, the holiday, the clothing, the music, all considerations surrounding how and why and at what cost these things are produced become irrelevant. Everything belongs in the domain of possession. The people are addicted to Coca Cola. But at the same time as this marriage to consumption takes place, something else also happens that marks a change the social psyche: the arrival of the pollsters.

    Where once we might have been defined by class and politics, we are now defined by the data that is collected about us. The pollsters back in the 60’s with their questionnaires and clip-boards were the start of a process where over time we have all become agglomerations of our possessions. Of course there is a feed back loop between the objective and subjective, in which our own self identity and the identity of others are increasingly moulded by the data relating to the way we live. We become what we consume, what we watch, the music we listen to. In 1966 Godard was witnessing and documenting what he understood to be the beginning of an atomised fragmented society defined by patterns of individualistic consumption and the end of community. The pollsters were the start of the data driven society that now with the internet and its ‘likes’ cookies, personalised ads, and tracking, has reached a point of satiation and satiety.

    In his later films I think Godard understood that ‘1968’ and all that had been a final act desperate of resistance against the overwhelming pressure of the capitalist driven forces of consumption, completely remoulding the social sphere as an apolitical realm. His films following 1968 can be understood as acts of defiance and analysis.

    ‘Masculin-Féminin’ is not so much a narrative rather a series of clips pinpointing events in the course of ‘a perhaps’ relationship. Intercut between these sections are clips depicting defining images of the times: the shops the billboards the neon signs and brightly lit boulevards of Paris. Intra-cut into the clips are short sharp depictions of the violence witnessed without surprise and ‘coolly’ by the protagonists, almost complete indifference. These violent actions epitomise the savagery of the times spontaneous sudden destructive actions that characterise a psychotic individualised society fed on images of death and wars of cruelty and murder.

    The era of Vietnam war: the war that runs through Godard’s films as a reference to the ultimate expression of US Corporate and Military Industrial hegemony and to remind the audience that this war was not something that could be forgotten. However much Europe and the politicians might find it convenient real politique to ignore and forget.   It was a cruel criminal war in which the might of the USA attempted to crush a country which was diametrically opposed to capitalism. It was a cruel and criminal war to which Europe for the most part turned a blind eye. Europe was to happy up to a point to allow its youth a luxury of gestural opposition but for the most part Europe simply wanting to get on and join the big fat party of consumer excess and life style celebration that was the necessary correlate of the murder in Vietnam.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

     

     

  • The Dam  Ali Cherri and Neptune Frost   Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams

      

     

    The Dam     Ali Cherri (2019 Sudan – Euro finance) Maher el Khair

    viewed at Losing the Plot 10 June 23; ticket £5

    Neptune Frost     Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams (2022; Rwanda + US/Eur finance)

    viewed at Losing the Plot 11 June 23; ticket £5

    out of Africa…?

    Two films seen at the Star and Shadow’s ‘Losing the Plot’, both with African settings, both written by non Africans, though Neptune frost has a Rwandan co-director, Anisia Uzeyman (who also is credited with the cinematography). Ali Cherri is a Lebanese artist; Saul Williams a New York poet rapper music-artist.

    With directors such as Diop Mambéty, Sembene, Sissako, Lacote we have African directors making films in Africa, depicting African situations and issues. So when artists/filmmakers enter the continent to make films with African players that depict Africa the question is to what extent are they playing out their own imported scenarios and using the African actors and settings simply as a legitimising backcloth against which they can endorse or give a spurious legitimacy to their own outlooks and ideas. Sometimes ‘outsiders’ can bring a fresh dynamic vision to new areas of concern; sometimes they simply exploit novel settings to foist their own preconceived notions upon situations they do not understand.

    There is one other point to consider in relation to the co-directors of Neptune Frost: Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman. The latter is Rwandan born and described on-line as an international actor playwright and director. The ‘international’ tag of the description has a putative implication about the self image of Uzeyman who is married to her co-director Saul Williams and lives in LA. But these are perhaps unfair observations. More to the point about the claim by ‘Neptune Frost’ to be an African film is that the script was written by Saul Williams. ‘Neptune Frost’ is a film in structure and content that has been formed by the writer, who has then co-directed his own script. The film comes across as being at least 75% Williams.  In particular the dialogue and the faux sci-fi thematic is strongly marked out as being part of the substance of the body of his work over the past 25 years. It’s a New York film characterised by the concerns (legitimate in their own right) of black African Amerikans. Williams owns the Neptune Frost script. The rest of the movie is scissors and paste.

    Ali Cherri’s movie ‘The Dam’ has a primal authenticity, both actual and psychic. Because the film has core concerns in relation to the forces working through the social and psychic interplay of inequality, to a certain extent these issues might be depicted anywhere (in this particular ‘The Dam’ reminded me of Mark Jenkin’s ‘Bait’: the setting was perfect but the issues underlying the script would have fitted other places other times). Again in the case of ‘The Dam’ Cherri’s concerns are all the stronger for being set in Sudan, at a location by the river Nile. Cherri’s script foregoes the use of classical narrative connections.  It is an associative scenario. The film is structured around an oppositional contrivance: the 2019 popular uprisings (relayed through television pictures) in Khartoum against al-Bashir (which led to the military coup that toppled him), set against the men labouring at a mud brick works situate on the banks of the Nile beneath the Merowe Dam, from which his film takes its title.

    The making of the mud bricks is done entirely by hand. Hard back breaking work that has a physical language that references Pharaohic times, ‘the dawn of civilisation’. The process is covered in detail by Cherri: the shaping drying stacking firing. Cherri’s opening comprises a wide shot of an antediluvian desert valley (reminiscent of Monument Valley). A man on a motor cycle, Maher, rides across the vista. He is one of the ‘brick’workers. As the film develops we understand that Maher rides out regularly to a remote hidden gorge where he is constructing a huge mud human effigy. It’s a vast figure, with its own wood scaffolding, that he builds and moulds with the skills used in his work.

    This effigy is the product of Maher’s mind. His psychic response to a primal urgent unbearable need to externalise the monstrous forces that are consuming him, as if all the evil forces abroad in the world could be contained, compressed in this figure. But of course as a product of the intensity of his need to create this figure (which like the biblical Adam, like the Golem, is made of mud) it comes alive with an awful vividity its terrible aspects working burrowing through Maher’s consciousness bestowing on him deluded but awesome and chaotic powers of destruction. He experiences delirium that mimics the experiences of Sudan itself, like the Merowe Dam that both bestows and takes away life, contains and unpredictably unleashes its waters according to its own hidden deathly logic. In the end a Biblical torrent of rain destroys Maher’s effigy, dissolving it back to the liquid mud from whence it came, the liquid mud from which all life came. And as the sluice gates of the dam open once again, the huge pipes spewing out millions of litres of water, there is a sweeping away of all before it, the mud and Maher himself who swims away with the current.

    Cherri’s ‘The Dam’ presents as an allegorical tryst which contrasts the collective action of people to change the political regime with Maher’s individualised need to fashion a psychic response to his situation, his urge to fashion a symbolic structure that represents the terror he lives with. It’s a projection that can only consume him and allow him to embrace his own self destruction. A fate which given the consequences of the conflict in Sudan today between the two opposing war lords, also seems to have overtaken the optimistic projections of the collective. In a sense the collective and the individual response though very different in form both flow from the same well spring of injustice oppression and the daily threat of annihilation.

    William’s and Uzeyman’s Nepture Frost, shot in Rwanda feels like an opportunist projection of New York/ US black culture onto the screen of Africa. Perhaps taking cue from Bowie’s Ziggy, William’s has fostered a script, inspired by the mining of coltan, revolving about a cyber sci-fi conceit, that allows the characters to travel through space and time. It comes across as one thing after another, a script that serves no other purpose other than to get from one music video set up to another. The music is fine; the interlinking dialogue by contrast is clunky. What might work in the context of rap, spat out in conviction, when spoken as ‘lines’ comes across as po faced gnomic utterances so tricked out with meaning as to be meaningless: metaphysical gobbledegook. As image is piled on image – masks – extreme make up – magical realist stuff – shimmering graphics – the feeling is of an exploitation of Africana exploiting the exotica of Africa to express an Afro-American not an African rap sheet.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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