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A House of Dynamite Kathryn Bigalow (2025; USA)  Ensemble piece that includes as players:  Idris Elba. Rebecca Furguson

 Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there

OK! This is serious stuff, we’re talking assured mutual destruction the nuclear winter the end of life on earth as we know it but….

…something in Kathryn Bigalow’s ‘A House of Dynamite’ is lacking.   Her film has an empty centre, there’s a hole in the scenario where meaning and tension seep out leaving her ensemble of actors looking like they’re going through the motions of being busy busy in their bunkers responding to the nuclear attack situation: Bigalow’s drama becomes abstracted rather than real.

The proposition which governs the scenario is that an unknown country has launched a nuclear missile at the USA aimed at Chicago.  The film’s structure centres around the ‘final minutes’ time window of this nuclear attack as experienced from different American defence and executive perspectives.  The script takes up its story when there are some 18 minutes to ground zero.  The film opens with the scene in the Washington monitoring hub, moves onto the missile defence, the military response centre finally ending up with the chief executive, the President, flying in a helicopter to his safe place, who must decide how the USA is going to respond.  As the scenario moves to each of the locations, the countdown clock is wound back to allow each setting to play out its own ‘drama’. 

Bigalow’s script bigs up on the human side of the action.  Many of the settings  are realised as shots full of crowded movement centred about screens that dominate the spaces whilst the countdown clock ticks away the minutes and seconds left until impact.  Within the crowded frames the scenario focuses on particular individuals who are split in their attention between the looming disaster unfolding before them and immediate concerns in their private lives.  

Rooms are not just rooms…

…but the way in which these private concerns are realised is the problem with House of Dynamite. The various rooms/locations in which the drama of the countdown plays out are not just spaces:  they are a states of mind; states of mind that are all encompassing.  To be in the room is to be enclosed in a state of mind.

Bigalow’s script wants to show us the ‘human’ side of her characters, the individual the personal. In order to do so she makes the decision to move her film away from the clock, out of the confines of the monitoring rooms into specific places of the personal world.  Her movie leaves the collective state of mind in the room and embraces a distant personal literality.  The Washington incident room’s manager is worrying about her sick child, so the script literally cuts away to shows us her little boy at the doctors; likewise we’re shown see the Secretary of State’s daughter being cute in Chicago, the President’s wife out on safari in Africa. 

The consequence is that the inherent tensions of the film collapse. The proposition, the core of the movie, becomes distant and less urgent.  

The clock ticks down nobody’s watching.

  

The count down image is tethered to the respective spaces; the clock has no existence outside the room.  Each time Bigalow moves outside room the clock vanishes and it becomes progressively more difficult to re-establish its ominous presence as it ticks down towards mass death.  The parallel cutting between the rooms that engender their own state of mind and the littoral location of the  personal stories rather than allowing the images to intensify by playing off each other, has the opposite effect.  It dulls the senses, renders the approaching catastrophe as an increasingly abstract proposition.  

The clock vanishes.

The  shortcomings of Bigalow’s movie are epitomised in the final scene in which the President is being flown to a safe space accompanied only by the man with the nuclear codes.  He decides to call his wife who’s on Safari in Africa watching baby elephants.  At this point in House of Dynamite, baby elephants seem more interesting than the President.  Before he can really explain the nature of the problem to her – that he has to decide whether or not to end the world – the connection between them is cut.  No more baby elephants and Mr President turns his mind to figuring out the conundrum:  whether to let the strike on Chicago go unanswered; or order a full retaliatory strike against the possible enemies China or Russia.   But no matter what kind of face Idris Elba pulls no matter how much he writhes about in his chair, he looks no more than an overwrought academic wrestling with some abstruse philosophical argument, and House of Dynamite splutters and peters out with the damp squid of an anti-climax.  And as the President pales into indecision he starts to come across a little like President Obama in his second term: “…The man who wasn’t there….”

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

Damnation Bella Tarr (Hung, 1984) Miklos Szekely, Vali Kerekes

viewer 4^th Oct 2025 dvd

all tomorrow’s rain

 Tarr’s Damnation opens with a wide shot of industrial desolation.   We hear atmospheric music accompanied by an invariant industrial clatter, as buckets of coal dangling from wires suspended from multiple pylons, are transported endlessly through the blasted landscape.  Diagonally moving through frame from right to left they appear from nowhere on their way to a distant nowhere.  The  opening shot of Tarr’s ‘Damnation’ in its very longevity establishes both a desolate actuality and a state of mind.  It’s an image that re-appears throughout the film as leitmotif for….. …ineluctable emptiness…..

The mesmeric nihilism of the long first shot sets up a mood that pre-empts the rest of the movie, whose thematic composition adds little to the first 10 minute opener.  Tarr’s movie is shot in high contrast black and white designed to draw the viewer into the darkness of its psychic vision.  The imprinted aesthetic of bleakness soaks into the viewer (and on screen there is rain aplenty) folds over the protagonist ‘Karrer’ as he pursues the woman  who’s the object of his obsession.  She’s a singer (‘…she’s a witch, a swamp…’). In her persona she’s strongly reminiscent of Nico (of Velvet Underground fame and also had a long solo career) who in the 1970’s  established herself as the embodiment of Gothic Existentialism: “What costume shall the poor girl wear To all tomorrow’s parties? “  Does ‘Damnation’ take us any further than Nico’s lament?

Besides the almost ever present image of the despair blighted Karrer, Tarr’s movie is packed with the tropes of unmitigated hopelessness.  Some visual: the incessant downpouring of rain, the stray dogs, the textural quality of stained cement: some scripted, Karrer’s story of the bloody suicide of one of his previous girlfriends; quotes from the doom mongering old testament prophets;  bleak self referencing drawn out monologues referencing love decency madness and tunnels. 

The plot which centres about manipulation double crossing and betrayal always plays second string to film’s design, its high contrast look and its camera work, the slow lateral tracking shots composed as  ‘reveals’. The arch deliberation of the camera movement is its defining quality.  The tracking becomes something the viewer starts to anticipate….you know the camera is going to move; you know that it is going to reveal a different perspective; you know that the director is making a certain deliberation. 

Tarr’s movie transmutes existential anxiety into an aesthetic. ‘Damnation’ is a siren call of emptiness designed to pull unwary sailors into its clutches and turn them to stone.  But what if you don’t want to be turned to stone?  Then Tarr’s movie will be no more than a series of overburdened familiar clichés wrapped up in a dressing of hi-art European camera work and left to stew slowly as it moves like the coal buckets steadily and slowly from nowhere to nowhere.   Enjoy!

adrin neatrour 

 adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Toxic Avenger       Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman (USA; 1984)  Andree Maranda, Mitchell Cohen, Mark Torgi

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 18 Sept 2025; ticket: £7

toxic society

On the dark side of the internet there are channels devoted to monkey torture: graphic monkey torture. The victims are mainly Capuchin monkies highly intelligent small primates whose facial features bare a marked humanoid resemblance.  Immobile tied down arms and legs akimbo, the little creatures are subjected to unspeakable torture.  Their screams of pain provoke enjoyment and howls of laughter, shared by that online community.  It’s all good fun.

Viewing ‘The Toxic Avenger’ (TA) made me think of the little monkeys. 

Made 10 year after Hooper’s ‘Chainsaw Massacre’ TA lowers the bar of legitimation in relation to the graphic effects of the damage that can be inflicted on the body by force. ‘Chainsaw’ as a feature film, abandons plot. The form of the film comprises a series of episodic events depicting the ‘Bonemen’s’ perpetration of escalating acts horror upon the unwary intruders.  Savagely slaughtered the victims are reduced to the status of mere things for the entertainment of the audience.  We are invited to enjoy and openly revel in human torture and death.  At one level of course it’s all in good fun.  With a wink and nod Hooper might claim that his over the top representation of horror is simply intended to be seen as a sophisticated parody of the genre.  It’s all a bit of laugh along sing along movie.  But Chainsaw’s indulgence of sadism stopped short of overt graphication of what was done to the flesh.  When the first victim is lifted up like a piece of meat and impaled on a butcher’s ‘S’ hook, there is no close-up of the penetration of the steel into her body.

Herz and Kaufman’s ‘TA’ rectifies this.  As in ‘Chainsaw’ there is no real plot, again it is a series of episodes with a tagged on ending.  The script is basically one thing after another, a series of events invoking extreme violence as ‘The Monster’ takes on disparate hard core of evil men and women.  But ‘TA’ shows all.  When the road killers find a child victim and run him down, when they see he’s not dead, they reverse over his head.  Cut! The audience are then shown the boy’s crushed head.  We are fed image after image of the effects of the Monster’s exercise of extreme violence.   The Monster after all is a force for good, a cross between Frankenstein and Superman with the traditional mission ‘to clean up the City’.  So we see hands that have been deep fried, face with gouged out eyes etc. all apparently sanctified in the name of parody. 

Still thinking about those little Capuchin monkeys. 

When thinking about them thoughts move in many directions.  As with the videos  of the monkeys, the viewers will be very aware of the shadow caste by the ‘creators’ of these extreme images.  The film makers are not absent: they feel present, winking at us as they show their wares.  When viewing a film directors are not usually in the forefront of the audience’s mind.  But when graphic material is produced, the compact between maker and viewer changes.  The makers are in effect asking for collusion. They are asking the viewer to actively accept the legitimacy of what they are being shown. Perhaps similar to the initiation rituals into places like interrogation centres and concentration camps.  Newcomers are quickly exposed to the extremities of the violence, so that it is legitimised and they are immediately colluding with the system of applied pain and humiliation.   In watching TA to view is to collude, even though we know the imagery is faked.  In ‘TA’ we have a particular relationship with the film makers: we absorb their shadow.  

American culture has increasingly emphasised the cult of the individual.  It is the dreams of the individual that shape society, it is individuated desire that drives the circuitry of the economy. The rights and protections of community are hindrances to gung-ho liberal capitalism.  But the price of this particular bias is that deprived of membership of collectivities individuals drift into becoming ever more isolated.  And one of the effects of isolation is increasing feelings of powerlessness.   An impotence that may then express itself in developing fantasies of violent revenge upon those perceived as enemies.  Film producers and studios have of course picked up this gravitational psychic shift and catered for the need, vicariously, by an ever increasing number of revenge movies characterised by acts of extreme violence.  The message projected is simple: the world is divided into the forces of good and evil; the only way to deal with evil people is to kill them – preferably after inflicting pain and humiliation.

As mass killings and humiliation stream into our monitors it’s as if huge tracts of people have become not just desensitised to human suffering and humiliation but actually enjoy it.  They see these kinds of movies as being shown not only to amuse and distract but also for people to align with their fantasial projections of good versus evil mythologies. Obviously the systematic perpetration of violence can by definition only be meted out on the evil.  As the audience in the Cinema giggled and laughed it felt that we were on a long dark road to where sadism becomes an inherent part of the mix of our future entertainment. 

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

Rebel Without a Cause    Nicholas Ray (USA: 1955)  James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 4^th Spt 2025: ticket £7

Film without cause but with purpose

Nick Ray’s ‘Rebel without a Cause’ doesn’t stack up to the 70 year viewing test.  It feels ponderously paced, labouriously scripted with a scenario that lacks tension. It looks like a film whose purpose was to promote James Dean.  A film crafted around his persona and faciality, his alternating looks of confusion and defiance registered through the lens of a camera instructed to magnify him.   

‘Rebel’ was made to be Dean’s rocket to Stardom.

Ray’s movie makes considerable demands on its audience to suspend belief.  Of course this is ‘film’ and we go to see films on the understanding that we will often have to ‘go along’ with hiatuses jumps multiple implausabilities or impossibilities because theme mood and intention override litterality.  This said the actors representing High School students all look a lot older than 18 years old, the idea that they are all at school, looks a stretched notion.  The accelerated animosity between new boy ‘Jim Stark’ and his school contemporaries feels like a plot artefact, not helped by unconvincing dialogue AND Ray’s centre piece the ‘Chicken Run’ also leaves a question hanging as to: HOW when Jim jumps out of the speeding car which barrels on, why doesn’t it go hurtling over the cliff onto the rocks below?

None of the above would register if Ray had made a film with a coherent theme.  Dean’s character represents the generation of the ‘50s that was the first to enjoy the fruits of the huge wealth generated by the American capitalist industrial machine (gorged on war).  This wealth found its way not just into the pay checks of the middle classes but also to their children who were now recipients of many of the accoutrements of money, including use of automobiles exemplified by Jim as he drives about in a buggy with white wall tyres.  Of course he doesn’t rebel against any of this.  It simply further feeds into his evident family derived neurosis and insecurity which he shares with the other two adolescent leads Judy and Plato. Psycho-disturbance is the actual focus of ‘Rebel’.  I suppose a film title such as ‘Neurotic without a Cure’ wouldn’t have done box office.   

The pacing and developmental structure of Rebel always feels ponderous. There is something about a lot of 50’s Hollywood movies that viewed today come across as stilted in the playing out of their core expressive content. Certainly there are many exceptions in particular some films by Wilder, Hitchcock and Siegle but where the theme of a movie revolves about relations often the restraining hand of self censorship inhibits both actors and scripts.   Today’s audience are often left with the feeling of a crabbed scenario, as sexual relations and intense emotion are swerved or avoided.  Of course there is the obvious consideration that films as cultural products will reflect their society but the best of 50’s films were able to create expressive modes that went beyond these inhibitions. ‘Rebel’ is not one of them.

Ray’s laborious pacing of ‘Rebel’ is characterised by the opening sequence of the film after the credits.  During the opening credits we see Jim dead drunk pushing himself along the ground fondling a little mechanical toy he’s found.  Ray then cuts to the key establishing scene in the police station where we’re introduced to the lead characters, Jim Judy and Plato who’ve all for one reason or another been picked up by the cops.   At the station we get the background gem on the three ‘kids’.  The script of course centres on Jim and being interviewed, he reveals to a detective something about his home situation.  The tec dropping his police persona evinces a paternal concern for Jim.  Eventually he’s led away by his parents in a manner that suggests Jim is a prisoner of his own family. But the scene is slow characterised by archetypal dialogue and has a forced scripted feel. The same applies to other key scenes such as Jim’s clash with the high school gang leading to the knife fight and even celebrated the chicken run sequence.

The real core of ‘Rebel’  is a substrate of the scenario: the depicted isolation and warping of the nuclear family relations in the middle classes.  A class that had become highly mobile and moved out of the city into the isolation of the suburbs, moves made possible by the expansion of car ownership.  This is the actual theme of ‘Rebel’. As suggested when James is led way from the copshop by his family, the feeling is that he is being taken from a place where he is understood, back to being misunderstood.  In the long confrontation between Jim and his dad, dad wears a frilly apron.  The apron suggests a cross dressing proclivity that together with his fathers subservience to his wife and her insistence on continually moving, create in Jim neurotic anxiety and insecurity.  The scenes in Judy’s home reveal a heightened state of sexual tension between Judy and her father pointing up a terrified fear of incest, a fear of course intensified by the enclosed nature of suburban living.  And Plato abandoned by his mother is left only with the recourse to murderous violence, violence perpetrated on defenceless puppies, as helpless as himself, but a means to deflect his rage and anger away from either himself or its real cause, his parents.  This is a fucked up society creating emotional mutants.   And of course the evident love felt by Plato for Jim is far more convincing than the formulaic ‘falling in love’ relationship scripted between Jim and Judy that effuses the last scenes of the movie, culminating in their: ‘First Kiss’.

It’s understood that Ray’s movie is a product of its times.  It’s true that some of the graphic scenes in particular the switch blade fight, ‘cut’ into new ground of film depiction ( the knife scene caused ‘Rebel’ to be banned in several countries including the UK).  But as the graphic spectacle element in popular films has become ever more extreme, Ray’s knife fight now looks on the tame side.  Movies that endure tend so to do not because of particular scenes, but because at some level they express some kind of truth.  A truth that resonates with audiences across time. A truth that can be political perceptual situational social or psychological but is imbedded in the heart of the film.    

‘Rebel without a Cause’ has elements of ‘truth’ in its peripheral domestic scenes. Otherwise it’s a a formulaic period melodrama that panders to Hollywood values and is devoid of truth content. 

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

Trial on the Road      Aleksey German (USSR; 1971)  Rolan Bykov; Anatoly Solonitsyn, Vladimir Zamansky

viewed 1^st Aug 2025 – streamed from internet archive

The USSR during the 1970’s and 80’s must have been a sort schizo place to make a movie.  Hundreds of films will have been produced in this period yet for the most part the films and directors now best appreciated from this era – Kira Muratova  Sergei Parajanov Andrei Tarkovsky and Aleksey German  – all had much of their output denied distribution.  They were in effect banned for expressing anti-Soviet ideas or attitudes.  But at the time these films were made it must have been evident from their scripts that these directors were all singular voices critical of the core socio-philosophical tenets of communism.   The films were produced then denied distribution and locked away in dark warehouses. Many of these films were not low cost. Some must have had large budgets with epic scenes involving large scale use of extras and special effects.    There must have been high placed individuals in the various film companies, Moskfilm Lenfilm who passionately loved cinema, who recognised film making genius and were able to use their executive offices to honour and enable these particular directors to create their work.  These executives, now unheralded must have held a conviction that their decision to green light these films would be vindicated in the future by the reception and acclaim of these forbidden movies.

German’s ‘Trial on the Road’ (interestingly adapted from the novel written by his father) was banned for fifteen years, only released during the first period of ‘perestroika’.

Set in 1942 with Soviet partisans engaged in a war of harassment with the invading Nazi forces, the film melds into a single statement two situations: the psycho dynamics of paranoid Stalinism and the snow bleached terrain of the Russian Winter.  The two actualities intertwine interlock to produce a film that embraces the chilling realities of conflict.

The film revolves around the character of Lazarev, a Russian sergeant captured by the Nazis, who collaborated with them under pain of death.  In an early section we see him in German uniform as he gives himself up to the partisans after escaping.  Lazarev explains that he would rather be shot by Russians than Germans.  In the paranoia of Stalinism everyone was a potential traitor. Accordingly no one captured by the Nazis let alone a collaborator could be trusted. Anyone taken prisoner should be shot.  And Lazarev (presumably named for he whom Jesus brought back to life) awaits death, expects to be shot. But the commander of the partisans sees Lazarev’s  burning patriotism and a desire for redemption.  To the fury of the political commissar, the commander trusts Lazarev to prove himself in action.  The commissar’s determination that the traitor should die pervades the film’s discourse, even after Lazarev’s critical part in a successful ambush.  His perception is unwavering: in political terms Lazarev is and always will be a traitor, no matter what acts of heroism he performs or any avowals of patriotism.  For Lazarev there is and will be no second life.  He will remain among the dead.   

The setting of ‘Trial on the Road’ in the midst of the Russian Winter sets the emotional temperature of the film. The hard snow landscape creates a background mood of harsh unforgiving conditions which permeates the political atmosphere.

Lazarev of course dies.  He knows for him there will be no resurrection. He dies during a raid on a German supply depot taking on overwhelming odds to allow his comrades to escape.  The film ends sardonically with an encounter at the war’s end with the commander of the partisans, still in a lowly command position having a chance encounter with a soldier who has had rapid promotion.  The thought occurs as to how long it will be before the commander is either banished to Siberia or shot.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

   

Hot Milk     Rebecca Lenkiewicz  (UK; Gr; 2025)  Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps

viewed 8^th July 2025 Tyneside Cinema; ticket £13.25

low fat milk

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s ‘Hot Milk’ is a film of a novel of the same name by Deborah Levy which I haven’t read. So ‘Hot Milk’ (HM)?  As a child when ill with a sore throat or similar a cup of hot milk was sometimes prescibed by mother as a comforting restorative.   The  heating of the milk giving it a thickened sort of sweetness that caressed the gullet soothed the tonsils on its way down.  Checking out the phrase with the ‘know-all’ it has a couple of slang meanings: street wise it means  ‘come’ as in ejac; in jazz, hot milk refs a hot lick, and in Urdu apparently it means: being over emotional. That’s as far as I got without feeling I’d got anywhere.  There’s some hanky-panky in HM, the sound track is tasteful modernist and emotions are by and large kept in check by Lenkiewicz, but allowed the occasional release of steam.  So maybe I missed something but the reason for all the trouble about the title is that I struggled to relate to the film and kept coming back to the title as perhaps offering some pointer.

It didn’t.

‘Hot Milk’ has an eliptical structure intercutting different physicalities and contrasting states of mind. It interweaves states of dominance subjection loss dependance disablity sexuality frailty aency incest set against visuals that celebrate watery aqueous images of the body and the heat of the sun fanned desire that contrast with the contained atmosphere of the interior images and the constrained ‘carer’ relationship between daughter and mum who makes a claim on being disabled.

At the end of the movie Hot Milk felt similar to a meal comprising one of those taster menus you get at fancy expensively designed restaurants.  In the taster menue they’re   lots of natty little dishes that one after the other are served to the table.  Each dish looks wonderful but they tend to cancel each other out.  So you get black pudding with piquant gooseberry sauce, thinly drilled swede filled with an avocado mix etcetera so likemise with Hot Milk we are presented with a series of little scenes the roll on one after another: trysts with a lover, watery swimming images, scenes in the clinic etcetera.  Like the refined setting of the taster meal they are enveloped in a carapace of fine art cinematography and a sparse finely wrought sound track.   A lot of people like the expensively fashioned taster experience. Others prefer a straightforward plate of food.

After seeing HM like dining on the taster meal you still feel hungrey afterwards. Having spent an hour and half watching HM as a pleasantly contrived assemblage of images there is feeling of having an experience that is self consciously artsy, vacuous and insubstantial.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Seventh Seal   Ingmar Bergman (Swe; 1957)  Max von Sydow; Gunnar Bjornstand,  Nils Poppe, Bibi Anderson, Bengt Ekerot

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 6^th July 25;  ticket: £7

At the dawn of the new idols

Bergman set ‘The Seventh Seal’ in fourteenth century Europe against the background of the Black Death.  The depicted spectacles of flagellant processions and witch hunts contrast fear induced superstition with ‘The Knight’s’ demand  for a knowable ‘God’.   But although the Medieval scenes – including the painting and sculptures –  work as effective cinematic contrivances, Bergman’s film today points to the concerns of his own time, the 1950’s and the consequences of the living in a techno rational world.

To see Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ some 70 years after it was made is to reflect on how the psychic mood of Europe has changed.  At the time Bergman made his movie, Europe could still be seen as Christian continent.  True that for many ‘belief’ was somewhat mechanical but the idea of a big man ‘God’ was a dominating part of the ‘Western’ condition. ‘God’ was an idea that could shape life and give it an overarching meaning that we exist enveloped within a moral metaphysical context.

The events of the twentieth century caused many Europeans to hold the Christian God to account both in terms of the disasters that had been experienced in Europe and the growing fear of a portended world wide catastrophe.   During WWll under the Nazis, Germany (that most devout of European countries) had committed mass murder on an industrial scale in the attempted genocide of the Jewish people: so where was God?  And by 1957 the world’s two super powers had developed hydrogen bombs and effected means for their delivery. The human race had attained to a power that in the Book of Revelation (a quotation from which bookends the movie) was reserved to God alone: the capacity to destroy all life on the planet.  ‘Man’ had become ‘God’.

The collectivist ethos of the 19^th and first part of the twentieth century enabled religion in general and Christianity in particular to survive both the First World War and Darwin’s reframing of the origins of life.  But the 20^th century’s explosive dissemination of science based technologies created generations capable of  independent thought based on: knowledge.  Bergman’s ‘Knight’ asserts he wants ‘knowledge’; but there is no empirical knowledge of God: only  – faith. The attempt by the  Marxist-Leninist dialectic to ground meaning in a socio-historical paradigm, lost credibility as it reduced humankind to being pawns in the race to the end of time, a concept in itself that had no meaning.  To Bergman humankind was entering an existential void.

By 1957 both Europe and the USA were undergoing a complete revolution in the way people lived. This was brought about by the transmutation of the material and biological sciences into technologies which changed the everyday facts of life.  Automobiles, labour saving devices, communication, increased automation allied with anti-biotics and a range of medicines (contraceptive pills were introduced in 1957 but initially as medication to regularise ovulation) started to remove many of the chance factors previously endemic to being alive.  Alongside this disposable incomes increased leading to the burgeoning development of the leisure ethos for a large percentage of Western people.  Fashion, long holidays, the entertainment industry: it was as if paradise had developed and occupied its own earthly niches.  Heaven had come down to Earth; who had to wait for death to have the good life?

 

Max von Sydow as ‘the Knight’ is cast as a noble Medieval archetype; but of course he’s a stand-in for Bergman asking the questions that for Bergman had urgency in the 1950’s: “What will happen to those of us who want to believe but aren’t able to?”  The rip tide of history the tsunami of invention put Europe in a place where it was difficult to accept the idea of ‘God’.  ‘The Knight’ like others of Bergman’s generation demands to some sort of proof for the existence of God…

In the scripting of ‘The Seventh Seal’ Bergman captures that time in the 1950’s when accelerated changes in life conditions gave questions about the relationship of man to God, an immediacy.  As voiced by ‘The Knight’ there is urgency to his despair as he realises he lives in a ghost world – he wants to confess but his heart is empty.   Bergman has chronicled that point in time from which there is no turning back,  in which belief in God is now unsustainable and humankind living off the wealth of systematic exploitation of the world’s resources, is happy to believe only in itself, discarding its irrational protective and restrictive carapace of belief.   

Viewing the film today, it comes across as an historical document of a time from which Europe has moved on.  The demands of the Knight seem abstract in the sense that in the West  ‘personal identity’ has now overtaken collective belief, both religious and political, as the fulcrum about which life revolves. To a greater extent the assertion of ‘I’ as an imperative now dominates discourse.  Accelerated by the tide of the digital revolution and the concomitant societal throughwash of social media, society has atomised into individuated units that revolve about identity nuclei.   On viewing ‘The Seventh Seal’ the feeling that comes is that we enjoy the film enjoy being part of ‘The Knight’s’ chess playing journey; we understand his concerns about Man’s relation to God and are interested that there should be such concerns; but by and large we find them irrelevant to today.

The film works because it is carried by the statuesque performance of 

Max von Sydow, superbly established, along with Ekerot’s ‘Death’ by Bergman in the opening beach/chess scenes.  It is Sydow, in body and mien, who sustains the tensions endemic in the script, posing questions to which he knows there are no answers and increasingly at one with his own mortality.  He sits down with Mia and Joff to enjoy that greatest gift of being alive and open the to world, a plate of freshly gathered wild strawberries.  Meanwhile his the chess party with Death continues through to the end game.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

The End   Joshua Oppenheimer  (USA; 1924)  Tilda Swinton, Signe Byrge Sorensen.

Viewed at Losing the Plot 7 June 2025-06-09

ok by me in America

everything fine in America

Joshua Oppenheimer’s ‘The End’ falls into a group of films that one way or another   depict ‘typical American life’.  Two films that come readily to mind are: Sam Woods’ ‘Our Town (1940), Lars von Trier’s ‘Dogville’ (2004).

These two movies are located in small American towns and examine socio- moral underbelly of their respective communities.  ‘Our Town’ deploys the Thornton Wilder script to present a setting of wondrous harmony where the people dwell in neat tidy houses, on neat tidy streets, living in a manner in which they are good, kind and helpful towards each other.  When a bad and cruel thing does happen, it turns out to have been just a nightmare, from which the dreamer awakens, and is able to continue her life in the actual dream world of small town USA.  Von Trier’s movie, feels like retort to ‘Our Town’. Von Trier dispenses with sets representing neat frame houses in favour of chalked out areas marking out the streets places and homes of his small town.  The machinations of the script involve the female protagonist Grace fleeing to the town, claiming to be escaping a vengeful criminal gang that’s after her.  The citizens are initially helpful and agree to give Grace the refuge she seeks.  But as Grace’s vulnerability increases, the plot thickens, the mask slips the knives come out: the true nature of the townsfolk is revealed.   They are two faced, violent exploitative and amoral, out for themselves whatever the cost to others. Von Trier ends his movie with a violent spasm of revenge in which Grace settles her scores with the town, with everyone deservedly annihilated and only the dog spared.

Both ‘Our Town’ and ‘Dogville’ are productions in which the communities exist within hermetically sealed spaces.  The scripts are both about the moral dynamics of living within the American dream which is also the characteristic feature of Oppenheimer’s ‘The End’.

The action take place at some point in the future after an environmental catastrophe. The setting is the prepared bolt hole of the McKays, an upper middle class American family.  Bolt hole suggests a rough and ready survivalist structure. But the McKay’s residence looks like any expensively furnished well proportioned large upper West Side apartment, replete with art works, mainly paintings, and period furniture.  It is a comfortable  re-assuring statement of entitlement and wealth.

Shortly after opening shots of the master bedroom and the location of the apartment as existing inside some sort of salt mine, the movie reveals itself as a sort of musical or perhaps operetta.  Cutting to the main living area, son McKay is building a finely detailed model of a pre-catastrophe townscape.  Unexpectedly he breaks into song,  soon mother McKay joins in, making the number a duet.  The banality of lyrics and tune made me wonder if I could see out the film’s two hours plus advertised length.

Along with the family McKay, there are some other bodies: mum’s best friend and dad’s friend, a woman fugitive plus a butler and a doctor. The latter two’s presence is never explained; you have to presume that a wealthy upper middle class family such as the McKay’s don’t go anywhere without a butler and a personal physician.  As scene follows scene each with its own model of normality and musical number, each with its own costumes and haircuts: it’s clear that ‘The End’ is a parody.  Even after the climate catastrophe the American dream goes on.

There are up’s and down’s a death a birth but the McKays simply live in an endless Lerner and Low musical with a song to mark every moment of life’s rich tapestry  Post catastrophe everything’s fine.  Everything normal.  Life’s a beach. There’s water in the taps (enough for the swimming pool) no rationing – endless food for the table, clothing medicines tobacco, whatever one needs, it’s on stream.  The cup of plenty runneth over for these people.  Post catastrophe?  It’s just like our way of life today. We ride on the hog’s back, enjoying the unending wealth of the privileged Western World.  We have everything.   Like the McKay’s most of us don’t know where our food comes from – we eat; we don’t know where our water comes from – we wash and drink;  we don’t know where our power comes from – we run our computers and appliances.  We consume without understanding either where the stuff comes from or what it costs.   I sit here tapping the keyboard of my computer with no idea how it works how it’s made or the cost of the earth’s finite resources expressed in its manufacture.  The McKay’s are just like us – The McKay household in their putative post catastrophe scenario: we in our current planet-wide climate crisis situation. 

But there is something lacking in Oppenheimer’s two hour parody.   His characters are good representations of their upper middle class privileged types; mother neurotic and controlling, father calm directing, son insecure the black fugitive assimilated, they cruise through the songs and the drama, but are untouched.  Oppenheimer’s script doesn’t go anywhere, it stays within the comfort of the parody. It shies off any sort of moral reckoning. Oppenheimer seems to have reached a level of self satisfaction with his script.  There are two the final shots of ‘The End’.  First, mother McKay and new mother McKay, stare out of their apartment at the salt mine in which their retreat is lodged; second, we see an image of what looks like it might be bacteria (or something?) squiggling across the frame.  Representing ‘life’?  Then cut to credits.  ‘The End’s’ sign off feels incomplete amorphous and smug.

Oppenheimer lacks an ultimate cinematic vision for ‘The End’.  He’s content to rock along in the comfort zone, parodying the contemporary spectacle of ‘life that goes on as usual’ which is characteristic of the West’s current sleep walk into the fire and water trial of global warming.  Without a cinematic moral questioning from within the hermetically sealed unit, Oppenheimer’s film amounts to little more than a shaggy dog story for the initiated.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  

The Spy in Black     Michael Powell, script: Emeric Pressburger (UK; 1939)  Conrad Veidt, Valerie Hobson

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 1^st June 2025; ticket: £7

another good German

Powell’s ‘Spy in Black’ for most of its duration is an exercise in intensities: cinematic intensities and relational intensities.  At the core of the intensity is the transgressive nature of what we are viewing and in a sense its normalisation in the very act of film making.

In ‘The Spy in Black’ (Spy) there are significant echoes of Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’ which he made some 20 years later.  Both films are built around rogue anti-heroes, quasi sympathetic protagonists whose actions violate society’s moral code, but whose characters do not conform to the expected negative cinematic stereotypes. Both films have German lead actors.

In ‘Spy’ the unwritten code that Powell breaks is that of representing in a positive light the German Officer, Hardt, a secret agent trying to carry out a master plan to destroy the British fleet in Scarp Flow during the First World War. (Day of the Jackal another example of strong transgressive protagonist) Hardt is depicted as a career naval officer, committed to serving his country. The film opens with a sequence in Kiel where action against the British fleet is being planned.  In a restaurant used by German military personnel, the conversation and good natured bonhomie of the enemy officers is depicted no differently from that which might have been used to portray Royal Navel officers in a British pub.  The German officers are humorous sardonic and honourable men discussing the war in a professional way consistent with their duty to advance their nation’s cause.  Given the general demonisation of Germans both during and after WWl  (and in 1939 war with Germany was expected imminently) to be a German was equated with being ‘other’. The positive aspects of Hardt’s character as drawn by Powell represents an inspired piece of reverse protagonist creativity.  The disassociation between character attributes and character role builds into the script a dynamic of inner tension that is left for the audience to resolve. 

Similarly Mark as protagonist of ‘Peeping Tom’ is a creation comprising a similar dissociative relationship between character and actions.  With his accent Mark (played by Karl Boehm) establishes himself as a German. in other words he, like Hardy is ‘other’.  It must have been important to Powell for Mark to be identified, marked out as German. We have a biography for Mark because this is key part of the script.  As Mark was born and raised in England his German accent can only be an artifice that was necessarily decided upon by Powell.  Powell obviously wanted Mark to be taken by the audience as a German.  The question is why?  At one level perhaps he might have felt the audience would find the film more acceptable if the serial killer was equated with a demonised nation; or perhaps it was Powell’s way of codifying Mark’s otherness; or perhaps Powell projected onto German identity a quasi romantic twisted vision – a vision of ‘being pre-doomed’ with which in some part of his character Powell himself also identified.

From the first opening sequence of ‘Peeping Tom’, shot mostly from Mark’s point of view as he murders his first victim, a prostitute,  we understand we are in the presence of a cold killer.  But Mark,  as a killer, is belied by the character he presents in his daily life.  Mark’s a loner but he’s also kind considerate and can be seen as lacking self confidence.  The audience understand that he’s schizo, driven to kill by the arousal of an obsessive drive, scripted with some of the same dissociative characteristics as Hardt.  Mark’s representation gives ‘Peeping Tom’ a spring loaded tensility that drives the narrative for the audience.

Central to the scripts of both ‘Peeping Tom’ and ‘Spy’ are forbidden relationships, relationships between a German man and classic English rose type women.  Neither of the women, Helen in ‘Peeping Tom’ and Tiel in ‘Spy’ are victims, they are simply mesmerised by the dark attraction of the ‘other’.  Interestingly both women are in positions of superiority to the men: Helen’s the daughter of Mark’s landlady, Tiel is Hardt’s superior officer. In the plot twist Tiel’s revealed as a double agent.  She is working for the British not the Germans. But whatever hat she is wearing, her attributes always suggest a quintessential Britishness.

The red room and the black room. The heightened erotics of ‘Peeping Tom’ take place in Mark’s ‘ photography darkroom, a room saturated in red that invokes blood death and sex.  The erotics of Spy take place in the noir chiaroscuro interior of the ‘safe house’.  Being a 1930’s film explicit depiction is restrained but the kiss between Tiel and Hardt and the development of the scene leading up to it are marked by an intensity that presages “Peeping Tom’.  Rooms for torture, rooms for forbidden relationships.

Virginal sweet English rose women abound in British movies:  in effect they are angels. They evince certain types of attributes:  women whose role is act as counterweight to the male protagonist’s often destructive instincts (and actions) in their unabashed femininity they draw attention to the voice and presence of the vulnerable, acting as a consciousness representing the dispossessed, caring for the male and nursing them; all the archetypal stereotypical female roles.  And they appear   frequently in Powell and Pressburger’s films: I know where I’m Going, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, A Matter of Life and Death.   But buried in the scripts and acting out of both ‘Spy’ and ‘Peeping Tom’ is the idea of violation, an impulse to effect a desecration of a lynchpin of the British film industry.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk   

 

 

 

 Tokyo Story Jasujiro Ozu (Jp; 1953)  Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 18 May 25; ticket: £7

the unsaid

In Ozu’s ‘Tokyo Story’ one event underlies the shape and design of his script.  It’s never mentioned it is never summoned it never makes an appearance.   It is submerged beneath the surface of scenario’s domesticity: Japan’s Pacific war. The shadow of death that it castes appears in a couple of scenes but there is never any direct mention or even allusion to the war waged by Japan from 1931 to 1945 which ended in complete capitulation. 

Their defeat was a defining temporal event, scarring the Japanese psyche, a defining moment which marked out time as being divided between two epochs: pre and post defeat; pre and post the radical wash through of Western/ American socio cultural influences into traditional life styles.

 

And what do Ozu’s people see?

There are no point of view shots in Ozu’s ‘Tokyo Story’.  But in specific scenes his characters look out at the world.  As tourists his main characters, Ma and Pa visiting their children in Tokyo, gaze out at Japan’s capital city. This is a city that in 1945, some 8 years before their visit, had been razed to the ground by a huge fire storm following US incendiary bombing.   After the fire there was nothing left of Tokyo, a city in the main constructed from wood was burnt to a cinder. As Ma and Pa gaze out either from the tour bus or from some vantage point what do they see? 

There is one thing we know that they see: the ‘empty centre’ of Tokyo.  This is the imperial palace and its extensive gardens which are located at the centre of the city.  We get a brief glimpse from the tourist bus of this ‘empty centre’ which is remarked by the old couple. And of course what they see is that it is unchanged: the empty centre remains the empty centre.  Almost alone it survived the devastation.

Looking at the empty centre it’s as if nothing has happened. 

During their one trip out on foot to explore Tokyo, Ma and Pa look out on the city.  But this city even though reconstruction had taken place at break neck speed must have still evidenced something of the conflagration that destroyed it.  But Ma and Pa appear to see nothing disturbing or untoward in the presenting vista.  Their response to seeing the city is that nothing’s changed since they last visited Tokyo.   

As if time has stood still.

Why can’t they see what they’re looking at?

There’s a schizo perception at the core of Ozu’s movie: nothing looks like it has changed but everything has changed.

Shot from the angle of the fixed camera, each scene comprises more or less a single take.  Ozu’s scenario is constructed upon quasi traditional ‘Noh’ classical precepts.  The scenario is continuous taking place through a particular unified window of time, chronicling the visit and return of elderly parents to their children in Tokyo. The action is delivered as a series of continuous shots without reactive intercutting.  There are no cuts no close up’s each scene locked into Ozu’s unhurried temporal rhythm.   Without shot manipulation, time has an integrity in ‘Tokyo Story’ that embeds itself structurally into a scenario whose particular theme is the subjective perception of the signs of time and change.  Schizo time.

Those who have too much time and those who have too little ‘time’.

Ozu’s script comprises in the main the ordinary interactions that fill out day to day  life: comings and goings, domesticity and food, the routines of ritual interchanges.  Through the mediated experience of Ma and Pa we understand that it is not just Tokyo that has an empty centre: following the defeat, the core expressive gestures of Japanese culture have also become emptied.  The traditional tokens of respect for parents, the bowing the kneeling the bringing together of hands before one’s face, are now become form without meaning.  They are simply gestures that sign an outer  compliance to traditional values, gestures which in the new situation have ceased to make a claim upon the hierarchy of deference to parents.  The children

hurried and scurried by the new reality simply want divest themselves of care and responsibility for Ma and Pa. Their key response is to pack them off out of the way to a spa: it would have been better for them not have come.  Finally Ma and Pa understand this, get the message and leave.  The outer forms signifying respect and honour which is their due in the traditional value system, simply flatter to deceive.  The new reality is that the young have not got time to minister to the old.

‘Tokyo Story’ employing generational dimensions, comprises a narrative shaped around an event that never happened: a war.  The younger generation overtaken by the press of American cultural influence, clinging to traditional outward forms, are overtaken by an invasive work ethos unable to see what has happened or pay attention to what is happening, as if nothing had changed.  The older generation, unable to confront the actuality of the war, are trapped in the ethos of change in life that it has caused.  At the heart of this society Ozu perceives a schizo seed.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk