Monthly Archives: July 2006

Dogville – Lars Von Trier – USA/Denmark 2004Dogville is film as machine, a well oiled machine designed to process Nicole Kidman. The machine is heavily larded with John Hurts voice over explaining in detail the sociopathic mechanisms inherent in the design and function of the mechanism( at times it seems he’ll never shut up) Each section of the machine is introduced by an often tongue in cheek title card. We watch the Dogville machine at work adopting its stray dog raw material, shaping it, masticating it and finally trying to destroy it before itself being destroyed by the consequences of its own actions: simultaneously we hear the voice of machine minder sardonically calling our attention to the ever mutating mechanisms of desire that are at work. As machine film Dogville is a parody of the Hollywood movie factory where dreams and delusions and fake states of mind roll off the production line. Dogville as a referential work takes up on one film which is an essential component of Hollywood’s gospel of idealised americana: Our Town. It’s a long time since I saw Our Town, but I instantly recognised its characteristic features: the stock american small town characters of a certain era(1930’s), the cadence of its spoken home-spun words, the set. Sam Wood’s film, shot in a studio built town is a machine(larded by the voice of Frank Craven[whom, unlike Hurt, we do see as a character] ) built on simple socially constructed mechanisms that function as a endorsement of the values and behaviour of real America. The fable that Our Town spins is that there is no real discrepant gap between values and action in this, the real America. Out of this referent with its carefully built and painted sets, camera set ups and artfully contrived lighting all seamlessly edited, comes Dogville like the anti-matter machine with its highly charged strangely named particles of energy – such as hand held digital camera and jump cut. All the action takes place in the crucible of the set which is simply made up of spaces marked out in white chalk which are sparsely littered with emblematic and economically employed theatrical props. Our Town was a big production set that mimicked reality. Its characteristic quality is opaqueness: it comprises of closed spaces characterised by walls doors and other obstacles to lines of vision. The set in Dogsville is open: the light(there is much commentary on light and its nature in the film) passes through and exposes all the set. The action is transparent. In Dogville the translucent set functions as a glass housing for the machine that unchains the dog of desire and examines its effect on smalltown. The overlaid pastiche of stock characters, stock situations and a carefully parodied script produce in the glass crucible of Dogville, a bestialisation of the town. Its nature and the nature of its desire, cock shit and meanness, is open to the light. There is no redemption for the characters who fail to see(or in the case of Tom who understands too late) that they are the components of a desire machine. In case it might seem there is a saving Grace in Dogville, in the form of a canonisation of Nicole Kidman as sainted product, Von Trier, after allowing Nicole and her dad a little philosophical babbling, closes the story grand guignole Hollywood style, with an apocalyptic Old Testament revenge ending. As if it were the destiny of all such machines to destroy themselves. Dogville is moral film literal in purpose and in detail. Each section of the machine has a function and that function can only be understood by seeing each process. Machine films that don’t skip processes can only work through time and generally(I’m sure there are exceptions put I can’t think of any) employ the classical unities and continuities to make them intelligible as machines. Dogville is a wonderful machine but with one irritation the over elaborated dog-matic Voice Over. Perhaps it is part of the dogma to rub the audience’s nose in the shit. – adrin neatrour – 7 March 2004

The Maybe Men by Tom Jennings

[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 7, April 2005]

The Yes Men, dirs. Dan Ollman, Sarah Price, Chris Smith (USA 2004)The Yes Men, dirs. Dan Ollman, Sarah Price, Chris Smith (USA 2004)
This latest liberal-left documentary on the big screen follows anti-globalisation performance-activists Mike Bonnano and Andy Bichlbaum spoofing neoliberalism on the internet, in the media and at international trade conferences. Faking World Trade Organisation and GATT websites, they parody corporate-speak so convincingly they’re invited to global industry junkets – pronouncing and powerpointing on squeezing niche profits from contemporary slavery and market-driven fascism. So, on the problems of keeping the peace on remote factory plantations, they zip open their business suits to reveal giant inflatable phallic panopticon surveillance gizmos; or resolve uneconomic patterns of agriculture along with world hunger by unveiling surreal Soylent Green junk food recipes for Third-World burgers made from First-World shit. And they’re taken seriously, applauded politely, and welcomed into the prestigious think-tank fold. It should all make energising material in the service of some larger anticapitalist tactic – and much fun is clearly had. Nevertheless, despite the creative intelligence at work, there’s a sense of naïve fluffy left-critique gone horribly wrong, sucked into the Quatermass of its antithesis.
Entertaining, insightful and potentially productive though this kind of ‘culture jamming’ may be, it doesn’t occur to the film makers to address viewers not converted to the cause – or to design the narrative so as to solicit active participation. We’re left in a curiously passive position, open-mouthed like the hapless corporate patsies at the cleverness of Bonnano and Bichlbaum’s interventions. This is a wasted opportunity if the film reaches multiplexes, which was crying out for a sharper promotional hook than merely  trumpeting student rag week japes. After it was made, another ‘triumph’ was achieved when a purported representative of Dow Chemicals admitted responsibility for the Union Carbide chemicals disaster in Bhopal, India. Considerable international news coverage elapsed before the Yes Men were rumbled; whether or not they accounted for the survivors’ falsely raised hopes and anguish is unclear …
Populist political comedians like Michael Moore or Mark Thomas would never make these mistakes, and their grandiose schemes always at least hint at smaller-scale efforts that us lesser mortals might consider. Genuine personal involvement helps – with those resisting domination, on a comically human level with adversaries, or direct bodily engagement with your ‘issue’. And if the film was intended for internal consumption by the anti-globalisation movement (not being expected to attract commercial interest), then finding a politically strategic focus for Situationist stunts should top the agenda. Simply cheerleading our heroes’ sneering at the cretinism of capitalism’s flunkies doesn’t cut it. We’re all stupid, after all.
Having said that, The Yes Men is well worth seeing and recommending – for a laugh; as food for thought and inspiration; to enrich our polemical vocabulary … and as encouragement to aim for more than protesting the moral evils of late capitalism.
[The Yes Men is on general release, and can also be seen on April 21st at the CCA, Glasgow, as part of the RISK: Creative Action In Political Culture programme.]
www.variant.org.uk
www.freedompress.org.uk
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

The Qeros, directed John Cohen Doc 50 minutes. 1977Shown at Side Cinema Sunday 6th November 2003.
A floating film about a floating world high up in the Peruvian Andies. A political film about gravity and what happens when you come down. Simply shot powerfully voiced record of a way of life that seems doomed to extinction as ruthless market forces gather in, like sheep, the last of the stray ecomonically free tribal groups.
The film is a journey that starts high in the mountains, miles up above man and ends down in the town with man. The opening shots look down on the clouds like the old gods and then reveal a stone landscape where the people and their animals float across the screen. Like the stone everything is hard, like the stone there is little artifice. Cohen does not make a faked sentimental picture of these people. They are as other people: some are arseholes, some fucked up. Death hunger and illness are tightly woven into life but the people endure though their culture which gives resiliance and resolve. The physical and the mental. Then gravity the elementary force exerts its pressure as the film moves forward and leaves the floating plain falling down the side of the mountain – first into the jungle.
The rain forest is vital to the indians as a source of seed for their maize crop. But they don’t like the rain forest because it stifles them entraps them chokes them pinions them, with its folliage liens and tubers. The film’s descent stops at the town of Cuzco. Cuzco is the fall. Outside the gates of Eden. The future. It is what lies in store for the Runi. In Cuzco we see the actualisation of the political and social process that reduces the Indian to the level of beasts of burdon, lumpen proletariat carrying huge loads for remote economic forces. Where once the Indian used the llama to as a pack animal, now they themselves take on this role. The loads are of extrardinary dimensions: huge unwieldy shapes strapped to their backs so that they look like exotic insects, beetles with huge carapaces. And these loads, pinion them and press them down.
The indians of Cuzco are not of the air. They do not float; they stagger through the streets heads bent and bodies doubled over. The Runi of Qeros walk lightly, heads upright parading wonderful colourful hats . In Qeros the Indians carry their own loads. They do not carry other peoples cargo. Their llamas carry the loads of corn up the mountains, but not more than 50 pounds. Neatly stashed and trim, the llamas carry easy; it looks a reasonable load, more reasonable than the the burdons that the Indians have to carry in Cuzco. The film floats because the Runi Indians are at the moment free of burdons; they do not have to lump cargo that belong to other people’s econonmic interests. They survive where they are and on what they have, with tradition and ingenuity and their piercing flutes. Flutes that play notes that are light and etherial and which bear no relation to the heavy melodic despotism of the commercialised Spanish music. This is music as energy and being. The sounds owe nothing to world of products or any rules governing artistic form or content. The sounds the Runi make are of the air and travel though the thin atmosphere going where they please.
Despite the hardship of life the Runi have a freedom which also lets their spirit soar and a freedom to move without burdons. And this lightness is something you carry away when the film is over: perhaps you are glad that you don’t have carry the huge loads of the enslaved Indians; and you yearn to experience life above the clouds. I can still here the flutes, breathy atonal piping.
Adrin Neantrour 2003
more about John Cohen can be found at www.johncohenworks.com

Kuhle Wampe – 1932 Germany directed Slaten Dudow script by B. Brecht.

Score Hanns Eisler

Hertha Thiele as Anni

Side Cinema – 1 2 04 Kuhle Wampe – 1932 Germany directed Slaten Dudow script by B. Brecht.
Score Hanns Eisler
Hertha Thiele as Anni
Side Cinema – 1 2 04
The last shot of the film remained with me long after the lights came up. And I mean the end of the film, not of the polemic drama. Because Kuhle Wampe was a film with two creative impulses pushing through it. Although Brecht and Dudow achieve congress as collaborators, you can see which of them is in the driving seat at any point of the film, in which dialogue and image work in counterpoint.
So to return to the ending ……..there is long and played out but amusing piece of theatre that takes place on the U-train in which the riders react to a news item read out by one of the passengers about the thousands of tons of coffee that has been destroyed in Brazil. On the train common man and woman react with the intellectual tools at their disposal – common sense, bigotry, bewilderment and the arithmetic of poverty. Also on the train, the young communists, returning from their week-end jamboree, are savvy to the algebraic formulae of world commodity markets. They understand and can explain that scarcity is a product of the market.
This cleverly penned scene with small groups of passengers talking arguing swopping insights about coffee is fundamentally theatrical in composition and orchestration. Conceptually its built up like a piece of music, a cannon or a fugue: no one individual dominates and the different sub groups build on and repeat with variations their points of view and ideas. There is some emotional input from the bigot, but emotion does not disrupt the balance of the section which works filmically because of its formal musical construction. We experience repeat sequence of characters to whom we return with variation. It is a successful piece of filmed theatre: the innate humour and intelligence of the writing shine out(as it does in the rest of the film) but the scene would sit equally well performed on stage.
The culmination of the sequence arrives when the question is asked: how things are ever going to change? (the question is no different today). The sequence cuts to a high key shot of Annie – the female protagonist(with a haircut that is pure Bauhaus) – who answers direct to camera with the polemic line: It will change because we will not accept it the way it is. The line immediately feels like the end of the drama – the dynamic switch to a full face close up, the line enunciating a concluding idea.
It is the end of Brechts drama. But it is not the end of the film. Slaten Dudow has the final sequence, the last image. From the close up of Anni, the film cuts to a subterranean tunnel, part of the U-Bahn. A long wide mouthed structure funnelling through shadows into darkness. From the camera side crowds file past into the tunnel: perhaps people who have just got off the train – old young well dressed poorly dressed, everyman all life, all Germany filing into the darkness.
All though the film, being on the hind side of history where all has been told, I am acutely conscious of the date and time, 1932, and the implications this has for how I see this film. Kuhle Wampe, a camp for the unemployed and dispossessed a benign proleptic image of the Nazi concentration camp. Such imagery of dispossession was perhaps familiar and vaguely comforting to Germans. But no where in the film is there any reference to the political situation in Germany. No reference that on the streets of Berlin extraordinary events are taking place. The Nazis, the Stromtroopers don’t exist. Perhaps it raised issues that were uncomfortable. Both Nazis and Communists made similar use of propaganda, youth organisations and rhetoric of the oppression and certainly the long sequences in the movie portraying the Communist Youth Organisation, the club, the sports rally and jamborie, had a frozen mechanical quality, which if different in detail from the organised Nazi youth activities, seem parallel in spirit. Neither the Hitler Jugend, the Hitler Band, nor Hitler and the Nazis appear or are or alluded to. Except in the last and final shot which silently wordlessly directs us towards this future which is endlessly streaming out of this present as the people get off the train.
The shot depicts people, perhaps the people who have just got off the U-bahn coming into shot from behind camera and moving past it to go down into a large wide dark tunnel. The shot is held for some considerable period. It is a shot in itself. It is not part of a sequence. A shot in and for itself that in concluding the film references it without specific sign. The people advance endlessly press forwards into the shadow (of the future). In ending his film in this way Dudow uses image to suggest fears emotions feelings for which Brecht lacked words. Perhaps Dudow, an outsider, a Bulgarian recently come Germany after studying in the USSR, knew that his film had to end not with the challenge of socialist polemic but on the vista of the uncertain. I don’t know how contemporary audiences understood this ending, but many in Germany were wired into the foreboding zeitgeist. The end of the film both presages the descent into darkness and death that came with the Third Reich. But also, in another key, this shot anticipates the development of post holocaust cinema with its abstracted locations its dislocation of time and its awareness of perception.

I Vitelloni (1953) / Amacord (1973) – Fellini double bill

Viewed Curzon Mayfair 17 07 05 Ticket price -£5- 00
I Vitelloni (1953) / Amacord (1973) – Fellini double bill
Viewed Curzon Mayfair  17 07 05  Ticket price -£5- 00
 
There is an tendency to see films through the telescopic concept of the auteur principle understanding film through the singularity of the director’s voice.  Certainly it is valid to look at a director’s output and try to discern their underlying film attributes and themes as they develop over the course of a career:  style – formal concerns – structure – subject and content.    Viewing two examples of Fellini’s output, one relatively early and the other relatively late was for me also a strong reminder that filmic output is often collaborative  work and that for some directors there are essential collaborations in their careers that determine the force of their attraction.  Collaborative partnerships can be with producers, writers, cameramen, editors and actors.  From a viewing Fellini’s films recently I think that Fellini’s owes his reputation as a director to Guilietta Masina the actress whom he married and who was the clown star of most of the work central to his reputation.
 
With I Vitelloni Fellini shows that he is a director endowed with a fluid musicality in his composition, in his use of his tracks and pans and his ability to orchestrate space and spectacle. But these achievements in their visual aesthetic qualities, divert attention away from the fact that I Vitelloni feels like a film, visuals excepted, without a strong core either in focal concern or subject matter.  Autobiographical in inspiration, I Vitelloni sentimentalises provincial Italy of the early’50s.   The 5 young men, whom the film follows in their contextual world of the out of season sea side town, all feel too old too formed.  This is not an absolute age connected observation.  The characters feel like they are already formed beings so the film can never deliver a sense of the process of forming or of change.  The rebellion of the characters, such as it is,  is circumscribed by the preformed boundaries of the originary world of the film – physical metaphysical and social.  The revolt by the characters is a sham.  A sham which is beautifully captured as spectacle by Fellini.  But is a sham with which he seems happy to conspire, a pretend reaction to what is a phantom world with which he is ultimately content.  Interesting to compare I Vitelloni with Antonioni’s Il Grido.  Shot in a provincial canal side setting, it is a film set in the fog of post war Italian society where all certainties are now blurred and society and social relations are torn apart with no obvious ways in which to repair the rents. A strong forceful work showing the forces of disintegration at work in post war Italy.
 
In its focal concerns, its originery world and main subjects (but not in visual style) Fellini’s I Vitelloni resembles something of the output of Ealing Studios in the 1940’s and ‘50’s.  In particular those which were based on the concept of a world:  Whiskey Galore, the Titfield Thunderbolt, Passport to Pimlico.  All products of an unashamed sentimental vein of filmmaking, all constrained in their capacity to make social connections by the hermetically sealed nature of their context.  Films locked into sealed worlds with scripts tricked out with fake social and character tensions – enjoyable as sacred social relics(charm)and for the strong social character acting but weak in ideas and filmic impact.
 
 Fellini’s I Vitelloni has visual style and charm but nothing to say.  But this at least in relation to Amacord makes it watchable movie.  Amacord is unwatchable in the sense that by this stage in his career Fellini is only interested in indulging his craving for creating and filming spectacle; as if spectacle alone were the necessary and sufficient effect to justify a film.  Like fireworks they are spectacular to view two or three times a year; to view them every night – unless you are the pyrotechnican – is tedious.  Amacord delivers a firework display every 15 minutes.  In fact the opening 20 minutes presents as full of promise: this opening suggests the idea of  a visual examination of fascism through use of spectacle.  An idea which held me in thrall until the repetitive motif’s of the made up faces, the red dresses, the uniforms, the fires and the fireworks revealed that to realise such an idea was beyond Fellini’s powers.  Without a collaborator such a Giulietta Masina to work with, Fellini becomes increasingly trapped in his own self referential world, entrapped in a barren circularity.  Doomed to recreate vacuous fluid works in the opera bouffe manner.
 
When I Vitelloni and Amacord are compared to films that he made with Guilietta Masina the critical difference seems to be the ability of  these works to connect the formal visual style and the subjects of the films to the wider referential world of contemporary Italy.  Something happens to Fellini’s films when Guilietta is involved.  The films are linked into a wider field of concern and they possess vitality, allowing Guilietta clown to escape out of the confines of the originary context and connect with social processes.  Il Bidoni, La Strada, La Notti de Cabera all have a clown entity in the form of Masina but as such an entity she transposes her clown nature, without sentimentality, onto a wider social canvass.  From La Strada -1953 – to Juliet of the Spirits -1965 – this seems to be the period when Masina was in most of Fellini’s films.  As collaborator and Fellini’s wife it is her spirit as the ultimate clown that fills out these films not with mindless indulgence but with a sure understanding of how the character and dilemma of the clown could be tuned to focal connections with society.  The clown cannot exist in vacuo.  The clown – she who is always in the shit – has to exist in a world of wider references or she quickly uses up all her material a series of gestures that yield increasingly diminishing returns.  
 
That film is often a collaborative undertaking is seldom recognised.  Both Lean and Eisenstein have acknowledged the role played by Young and Tisse as their respective cinematographers.  Sydow  Bjornstrand and Anderson seem to be involved in Bergman’s films far beyond their calling as actors.  As wife and partner to Fellini, Guilietta Masina’s influence on the films in which she was involved during this period have the effect of raising Fellini’s work out of the mediocrity of his self indulgence to a level of significant filmic achievement where ideas, visual concerns and style, attention and subject matter combine in complex interplay.
 
I don’t know if Masina’s influence on Fellini,  her consummate acting abilities and strength of personality worked to inspire him to move beyond the boundaries of his natural egotistical concerns, or whether there was collaboration between them at the level of ideas and/or in the composition of the scenario.  I do think that the Masina effect is an effect that can be seen in the films in which she and Fellini worked togather, and the consequences of her lack of presence are evident in the ordinary output of his early period and the dire product of his later films.
adrin neatrour     
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
 8 September 05

Down by Law – Jim Jarmusch – USA 1986 – John Lurie, Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni

Viewed: Side Cinema, 19 June 2005 – ticket price £3-00Down by Law – Jim Jarmusch – USA 1986 – John Lurie, Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni
Viewed: Side Cinema, 19 June 2005 – ticket price £3-00
 
Retrocrit
 
Haircuts at dawn
Down by Law opens with a series of floating tracking shots of a series of facades shot upwards from a acute low angle.  Filmed as if from a Venetian gondola the buildings glide through the lens the camera as a particularly flat perception of the world.  Slum tenements, industrial units, middle class lawn-girt spruce white detached houses, roccocco mid town 19th century blocks with ornate caste iron balconies, no man’s land all slip by and out of sight as we listen to a latino Creole fusion of complex cross rhythms laid over the picture.
 
 In this opening Jarmusch assembles the American South as a world of facades.  Like an opera set on a proscenium stage it is a land populated by two dimensional stick figures, a world defined only by its surface.  In Down by Law surface is all there is in the world and the narrative is but a  device a for movement across this surface.  In this it shares some characteristic features with opera where plot is also a simple device, a narrative welded together out of non sequiturs and improbable coincidence that serves to cue a series of emotional states driven by the music.   Whereas Opera uses music as an intensifier of the emotional affects and responses, in Down by Law, Jarmusch uses film as a deintensifier of emotive and affective states.  A world in which in a similar manner to opera the narrative line is essentially overblown and  episodically implausible; different to opera in that there is no associational emotive linkage.  Down by Law works through an integral disassociation of emotion from image   What matters here is what you see and hear in the now. In Down by Law there is no back story, there is no front story, there is no story: there is only what you see at and on the surface.  This is a world of flowing disassocation.
 
Moving into the first act of his opera bouffe, Jarmusch utilises a high key American gothic style of lighting.  The point here is not to use this lighting rig as an intensifier of whatever – character, emotion, plot line.  The lighting serves to amplify dissonance between the lighting frame and what we actually fills frame – in particular the characters.  As the sequence of scenes setting up Jack and Zak unfold,  it is evident that Jarmusch is not interested in any sort of Hollywood acting style – method, deep characterisation or anything like this.  The acting style is a put on.  In a film comprising layers rather than the illusion of filmic unity, the acting is another detached layer in the film, a spoofed  playing that goes through the motions of action and reaction only in so far as they are surface bound.  Its an act – not acting. 
 
As with the Marx Brothers or Jean Harlow hair style undercuts and underlies the affect of the performance.  The performance is always now. In Down by Law it is the haircuts that are the central gestural pivot of the act.  Not faciality; not body language.  The hair in the film is all thick black greased up stuff devoid of certain line or form, that falls about the head and moves according to its own rights.  It is the New York punk style de rigeur of the early ‘80’s.  Its deterritorialised shift to New Orleans not only heightens the alien quality of the 3 stooges but it is the edge to their occupation of space and their dialogues(brilliant written) which layer into the space impermanence vulnerability  dissonance and anarchy.  It all happens beneath the hair line.  Wherever that is.
 
The delimiting surfaces are intrinsic to the look and style of Down by Law.  The wall, whether of gaol home or fantasy accentuates the idea of containment within a two dimensional world.  The idea that what we living here is a two dimensional culture that has the illusion of depth that is created by an accumulation of layerings.  The walls are covered with graffitti – cumulations of words images calculations which build up deeply patterned milieus.  There is one moment of formation of the set surround that points to core of the film and its relationship to the spirit of America.  Roberto in the prison cell, picks up a pencil which Zac has been using to mark off the days spent in custody.  He goes to a wall of the cell draws the outline of a window frame complete with cross pieces.  It is a blank window endowed with the complete quality of intense opacity.  Looking at nothing.  It is an idea.  Its complete functional uselessness suggests the joke of there being nothing to see except what is on the surface. Later in the narrative after the 3 stooges escape and find the fairy tale cottage, they are eating a meal in the house.  Behind them as they eat is the same window: blank empty smiling looking out to nothing.  From gaol to home from containment to freedom, its all the same view.  There’s nowhere to go.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Palindromes – Todd Solondz – USA – 2004

Viewed 3rd June 2004 – Tyneside Cinema Ticket price £6-00

No message from dead woman walkingPalindromes – Todd Solondz – USA – 2004
Viewed 3rd June 2004 – Tyneside Cinema Ticket price £6-00
 
No message from dead woman walking
 
Palindromes like Todd Solondz’ earlier Happiness, has the feel of a cartoon: a Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs goes through one of those sequences in which he adopts multiple forms of identity in order to escape the hunter or …..whatever.  It’s not only that the Palindrome characters transpose their identities into different bodies into different forms in the same roles.   Palindrome also shares some stylistic traits with Toon town in that as a visual experience its characterising feature is density.  Where it differs from the Toon town key note is that its emotional and psychic tone is deadness.  It is a message from the dead zone opening with death and closing with death with a bias towards the female.
 
It’s a film that has almost no luminous quality.  Except for tracking shots from vehicles most of film is the framed in cordoned off spaces such as bedrooms, motels and wooded locations.   There are few window shots and no spaces where light streams, of light sparkling, of light illuminating or light movement.  As in cartoons light in Palindrones has the quality of being something immobile, a function of colour and pattern contrasting the hyper-realness of the sets.  In the space created in Palindrone – with one exception –  there is no issuance of luminance as an intensity. 
 
The exception is one short sequence where the light suggests another world rather than a strip of framed space.  Henrietta(Aviva) is taken to Ma Sunshine’s where she is greeted by the Blind Girl in the White dress who is hanging washing on the line.  Solondz shoots the sequence against the light and the film shimmers – an affective illusion he is quick to dampen.  Henrietta has not chanced into an enchanted world, rather another controlled  zone.   Palindromes is about spaces not worlds: and as film it is locked into corners and holes.  And as if to balance this density of compositional structure Todd Solondz mixes to white as a device for sectioning and marking off discrete sequences of the film, at which point the screen reflects an image of pure light back to the audience, a motif giving temporary relief from the absorbion of light that characterises the dramatic strips of the action.
 
Solondz understands that for the West World 21st century there are no stories left to tell.  We do not have cultural resources that include ‘stories’ on the inventory list of expressive modes.  What we have instead are strips of action that show the movement of individuals through frames.  Stories are based on structural tensions: strips of action are grounded in character and situational tensions – the personal.  Palindromes is a series of strips modeled on familiar thematic material – Dorothy – Red Riding Hood – Snow White – but transformed through the distorting mirror of American society.  In a manner that is characteristic of strip style fomulations Palindromes is moved along by utterances:  statements of personal perspective and value, rather than questions.  The scripted utterances in Palindromes drawn from a collusion of therapy speak and Walt Disney,  are the critical components defining what is going on here.  So what’s happening?  
 
 Central to structural matrix of Palindromes is the inverse relationship of adult and child and the idea of female troubles. Firstly as adult American society is progressively infantalised,  children, as a kind of autonomic compensation, become distorted adults trapped by the stimuli and expectations of the adult world – deterritorialised children. There is one area of prevarication: the reproductive reality of the body.   This area of evasion creates a situation where deterritorialised children may seek to reclaim their world, even though it no longer exists.   Although there is a sub-plot that is built around the botched murder of the doctor who performed the botched abortion on Aviva, the plot status in the film is fantastical rather than real.
 
 At the core of the film is the idea that US (Western) society exposes everyone, and specifically children, to an intense sexual grooming( the anticipation of sexuality). This grooming denies reproduction as a real biological consequence, setting up primary tensions between body and life style that threaten immanent fracture of both psyches and social releationships.  Palindromes measures this idea in a female psyche with a subsumed multiple personality called Aviva, as she checks out various responses: from somatic capitulation and suicide, to murder of the abortionist.  The growth of the fundamentalist Christianity to America now, is depicted as a consequence of infantile yearnings driven by the insecurities of living in a cultural disaster zone.
 
Palindrones starts with a prayer for the dead and ends with the dead.  From dead to dead.  The problem with the film, for all its intelligence and virtues is that it is soul- less.  Without soul or a humour(there’s some internally referenced black humour) that cuts through the crap it remains a stolid and rather heavy experience that is unable to rise above the obvious parameters which are set by American culture which actually imprisons the film.  Palindrome a film that is a prisoner of itself.  Like the idea itself: pointing at self referencing rather than meaning.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Edukators (Die Fetten Jahre Sing Vorbei) – Hans Weingarten – Germany 2004

Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre 7 5 05 Ticket price £5-95The Edukators (Die Fetten Jahre Sing Vorbei) – Hans Weingarten – Germany 2004
Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre 7 5 05 Ticket price £5-95
 
No message from the dead
 
Its interesting to note that the English title of this movie owes nothing to the original German which I think points directly to the past as a source of ideas. The English distributors have gone for a sort of neo punk handle contrived as hip gesture of semi-illiteracy in the hope of suggesting a film that has at least something vital in its craw.   But there is nothing here – it is an empty vacant movie with round smiling faces.
  
I think that as film The Educakors is not even a film: its a TV sit com, a sort of German version of Friends without the Manhattan haircuts but with similar if less well contrived  plot devices.  Looking at The Edukators it appeared to me so visually impoverished that it probably would have worked better as a radio play.  There are certainly no film ideas in evidence. The camera work comprises little more than the technical feat of pointing the thing in the right direction and remembering to turn it over;  the editing is characterised by cute little jump cuts in the action and little else and the acting is stolidly mediocre.  For which mediocrity, the actors are possibly blameless in as much as the script requires them to go through vacuous gestures in response to ideas that have been decanted of all meaning.  The political/social ideas that lurk as the historical background to the Edukators are not introduced in order to be probed examined put to the test suffered or destroyed.  Their existence in the film is marked only to the extent that they are milked for their entertainment value, for their value in manipulating ironic contretemps and as wallpaper for the light comedic situations.    This use of ideas let alone politics in movies  fully accords with the thinking of most Hollywood studios and looking at this work I wondered if Hans Weingarten might be marking his menu card for a possible piece of american  pie.    
 
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Downfall (Der Untergang) – Oliver Hirshbeigel- Germany 2004 – Bruno Ganz

Viewed at Tyneside Cinema Newcastle – 19 May 2005 – £6-00Downfall (Der Untergang) – Oliver Hirshbeigel- Germany 2004 –  Bruno Ganz
Viewed at Tyneside Cinema Newcastle – 19 May 2005  – £6-00
 
Out of a cradle endlessly rocking…..
 
From the opening shot of Traudl Junge descending into the Wolf’s Lair bunker on the eastern front, to the final shot of Traudl cycling away from Berlin to freedom Downfall reveals itself as a film concerned with the manufacture of innocence. As such Hirshbiegel and his producers are making a statement of intent in relation to German cinema.  Downfall is the admittance that it is Hollywood and American cinema that are to be the salvation of the Germans.  It is WG Griffith and Steven Spielberg, not Murnau, Pabst, Lang and Herzog, who will exorcise the demons of Germany and point the way to happiness and forgetfulness.   Downfall’s mission is the Americanisation of the German nightmare.  Wake up Germany and have a latte.
 
Downfall is predicated as a project on the faking of realism to recreate the final days of Hitler(the bunker set looks and feels like the real thing) In recreating the Fuhrer Bunker and filling it with actors and actresses dressed up in Third Reich period costumes, Hirshbiegel and his collaborators are setting their sights on the obdurate problem of the Third Reich as history: no one was innocent.   This state of affairs is simply not acceptable either to the cannons of Hollywood or to Hirshbiegel: there has to be a solution.  Hirshbiegel’s solution is simply  to run the Bunker part of the movie again and see if anything can be done.  The first time in the Bunker wasn’t quite right: Hitler got married and died in setting of Wagnerian proportions which was OK; but there were no obvious good guys, no positive messages coming out.  If the Bunker could be run again(a la Bunuel with everyone going back to the positions from which they started) things could be improved; a flame of innocence might be kindled in the story.
 
So was the Downfall Bunker Project set in motion. The big idea was to film the story with scrupulous attention to detail in order that the structured realism of the set would validate the authenticity of this re-running of history.   Within this setting, introducing a language of gesture (mostly from the actors) would give an expiatory framing to this final act of the history of the Third Reich, overwhelming and winning audiences through the suggested pathos.  Using filmic devices of montage and shot construction to shape and mold understanding of  the  critical areas of the action, Hirschbiegel effects a significant modification of the Bunker story: the insinuation of innocence.  Audiences may no longer look behind the screen to see where the train has gone, but they have advanced so much that they can forget to look behind the screen at all. 
 
In the manner in which the film has been conceived,  shot and edited  Downfall’s object is to establish ‘innocence’ as sufficient moral authorisation to distance the self from responsibility.  Typically we often suffer children a degree of this authorisation.   The Downfall project at inception had to locate child-innocence in its characterisation of at least one of the main historical players and then work the authenticity of this characterisation into the grain of the film – into its style and look.  Obviously Traudl Jung Hitler’s personal secretary, was seen right from the beginning of the project as the character with this potential. Such potential in fact that the film pivots on her story to suggest something primally innocent about her and her point of view as a character.
 
The selection of the actress(Alexandra Maria) to play Traudl was a key decision but not a particularly difficult one.  For the part of Traudl as required by Downfall, the facial look of the actress had to suggest a deep  set childish innocence – a Lillian Gish sort of look(as in Intolerance) – soft features with nicely set eyes and wavy undulating brown or champagne blond hair framing the face  – no angular features(this is Bambi territory).
 
The film divides up(opposes)between shots and sequences in the calmness of the bunker that are paralleled to events outside the bunker in the hell of a burnt and burning Berlin as it falls to the Russians. The Bunker is an evenly lit space, a bit like an American hotel. Although there is lots of bustle and tracking movements through the narrow corridors providing a sense of compressed enclosure, Traudl is rarely part of this.  She floats in a child space gazing at every horror she sees with the same look of surprised sadness and wide eyed innocence.   Her face, with its emotional vocabulary has a specific role in the script and in the intentions of the director:  it is as a sort of mirror of innocence.  Whenever Traudl hears and sees something of the real Third Reich, it’s as if she has learnt it for the first time. Hitler raging as summary executions are ordered, Hitler’s vindication of the Final Solution for the Jews, his callous fury the failure of  the German people, the detached preparation for the suicides.  At these revelatory moments there are reaction cuts to Traudl’s face.  We see: the small movements of her eyes; the merest widening of her eyes or eyebrows; the slight stretching of the skin over her cheek bones and the tremble of her lips.  She registers child like reaction of innocence to the horror of knowing.  Her facial vocabulary cues the audience to understand that these are terrible things that have been revealed to her and that she had never never heard these things before.  Downfall rewrites history as gesture.
 
In the locked-in world of the Fuhrer bunker, where the truth of the actual situation, the truth of the Third Reich is plain to see and known to everyone present, Traudl with her soft wistful features, is always filmed, captured in sequences and shots, standing a little aside from all this:  as if she is outside history.  That’s why the film allows her to escape on the bike( assimilating a boy-child for added-value innocence) and, like ET she can go Home on the bicycle as if none of this had happened.  By extension the audience are invited by means of the power of filmic suggestive logic, as co-innocents, to join Traudl the child on her bike. The downfall project is delivered.
 
The new German Hollywood cinema creates for its audiences, as does Speilberg, the face as an ideological comfort zone.  It commands from its key actors in any setting, carefully calibrated responses  to the exigencies of history that exonerate individual responsibility in the name of innocence to deliver a message that all is basically well and we can continue to eat ice creams and cookies.   The film message of Fritz Lang, on the complexities of personal responsibility and institutional contamination; Werner Herzog’s ideas about the infectious nature of madness are now discarded for simpler more reassuring explanations.   In Hirshbiegels film world, everything can be sorted out by a cut or a pan that takes us to a close-up of an actress whose eyes open wide in horror as she hears terrible things.  Innocence – there’s nothing else to understand.  Though of course every facial tick and nuance produced to cue by Traudl is a fraudulent trick – a lie –  designed into the Downfall project to subvert history for ideologically motivated ends.
 
Of course no one knows how much Traudl had come to realise after two years at the centre of the Nazi web.  Nobody knows how she thought or felt or responded to events as they unfolded in the Fuhrer Bunker.   But a series of responses from her can be falsified and staged that suit the Downfall project. The clip of an interview with the actual Traudl spliced onto the end of the film did not convey to me the image of an innocent woman, more like the idea of a woman trying to evade uncomfortable truths about herself.  
 
If Alexandra Marie as Traudl represents a faked intuitive naif female innocence, then Christian Berkel and Andre Herricke as General Mohnke and Dr Schenck play out the lesser but equally faked roles of male heroic(if muted) resistance, giving the Downfall project a trinity of fake exemplary characters on which to close down the Bunker and by extension the history of the Third Reich.
 
A final note on the Hollywood method.  The overall emphasis of most mainstream Hollywood projects is to create in the film a feeling of ‘realness’.  The aim is the suspension of audience belief through this style of filmic representation.   The settings, the stagings,  the acting has to feel ‘real’.  Current Hollywood actors are very proud of the detail to which they research and prepare for roles.  Obviously in Downfall Bruno Ganz playing the Hitler role went togreat lengths to establish his authenticity.  The objective intention of this emphasis  on ‘real’ seems to have an quasi ideological basis, in that it facilitates only a small number of readings of any film, preferably only one.  At most points in a Hollywood project the audience will know exactly what the characters are thinking(this of course leaves the film directors free to engage in easy manipulation of character expectations and situations by misdirection of the audience)  But by the end of a  film the preponderance of definitions available in the film will lead to only one interpretation, the desired one.  
 
As German film embraces Griffiths and Spielberg, it should remember  that one legacy of Hollywood to America is an arrogant inability to distinguish between the real from the fake. It was precisely this type of error that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler.  Hitler as many before him, but few with such devastation, exploited the relationship between real and imagined grievances.  In Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler found a film maker who could also exploit and manipulate faked images of reality.   German cinema should be aware of the consequences of taking any road that falsifies history: there are unfortunate precedents.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

O Lucky Man Lindsay Anderson; UK 1973; Malcolm McDowell; from an idea by Malcolm McDowell

Side Cinema Newcastle 23 April 2005 Price £3-50O Lucky Man     Lindsay Anderson;  UK 1973;  Malcolm McDowell; from an idea by Malcolm McDowell
Side Cinema Newcastle 23 April 2005      Price £3-50
 
Retrocrit
A Shaggy Dog Story
 
I think that Lucky Man points directly to Anderson’s limitations as a director/auteur.  Giving himself three hours to develop his theme – the something rotten in the state of England – he creates a film that comprises of an episodically structured closed system, a looped circuit that ends up by resorting to and feeding off cumbersome plotting rather than ideas as a source of image and film movement. 
 
What happens in Lucky Man is that the film closes down on and around itself unable to move beyond the core reactive idea of:  ‘the young man on the make’ who is repeatedly thrown back by the forces of social corruption.  For about an hour before the film ‘closes down’ around plot, the film works stylistically to probe and play with its central theme, but as it progresses Lucky Man does no more than excavate the same idea in a number of closed settings.  There is no feeling that the film progresses and as it degenerates into increasingly theatrical mode, it feels like Anderson has a tick box list of big targets for his critique: the police, local politics, the military/industrial complex, religion, alternative life styles, the medical business, business, the penal system and charity. O Lucky Man becomes a vehicle for Anderson systematically to get through this list in a series of discrete episodic cameos.  
 
The intellectual political insights cohering the film are not matched by any actual film vision, and Anderson is exposed as a director who does not use film.  He takes stylistic flourishes from obvious sources such as Bunuel and Goddard, but they feel no more than borrowings that he fails to make him own.  The devices Anderson uses: the fade to black, the structured intercutting of the Alan Price music, initially promise that a filmic sensibility and a film, rather than a theatrical experience, are in store.  In fact these two devices are simply relegated to the status of periodic film markers used lamely to partition sequences.  By the end of the film these two devices seem as if from another movie; as do the use of the inserted graphics and text that are never assimilated or made the movie’s own.     
 
Unable to articulate the richness of film possibilities to develop political social ideas Anderson is forced to use theatrical conventions and to play out a plot rather than play with ideas.  The problem seems to be that locked into repetitious utterance of one idea( an episodic script idea always has the problem of either exploiting the obvious course of its logic or twisting the logic or otherwise being stuck with the nature of the logic)  Stuck with the nature of  the logic Anderson is forced increasingly into melodramatic acting out of sequences to maintain interest and dynamic in the images.  The movement to melodrama( as in This Sporting Life) is disastrous for the film as it shifts mode from parody to burlesque  caricature, from discipline to camp overdrive, from heightened insight to indifference.
 
One question seems to be what happened to O Lucky Man ?  Possibly Anderson’s ambition overreached his resources as a film director  The opening hour has qualities that mark it out as film of potential.  The caliber of Malcolm McDowell’s winsome shaggy innocence mark him as a natural for the Candide type role of Travis.  The young men on the make all are coded by the shaggy haircuts of the era which oppose the smooth gents barber look of the establishment.  The hairy men and the smooth men.   The film opens with a spoof Ministry of Information/ Colonial Office propaganda film about coffee.  Instead of the soothing and reassuring tones of the narrator informing us of the benefits that British rule and commerce bring, we see the reality of the system of oppression based on a crude administration of a vicious penal code with disproportionate sanctions.  The coffee bean thief (Malcolm Macdowell), has his hands cut off.  However even in this wonderful opening there lurks the seed of the film’s lurch into an undisciplined theatricality.  By ending the sequence on a full close up facial shot of Malcolm Macdowell’s ‘scream’ as his hands are amputated by the sadistic military policeman,  Anderson intimates and signs an early preference for theatric solutions rather than film movement.  Spoof preferred to the discipline of parody.   Moving out of this sequence to a opening set by Alan Price playing the title theme the scenario goes straight to the interior of the coffee factory in West London where Travis’ career with Imperial Coffee(we know where that comes from) takes off as a salesman.  The episodes on the road accompanied by the sound world of the little transistor radio, the theme of the women left behind and encounters with police local politics and the military industrial all have pace  certainty of touch and movement. But as it progresses the film loses its coherence.  O Lucky Man stops letting the audience put the pieces together and starts to underline and explain.  It becomes patronising.  It loses its thread of intelligence and starts to preach.  It becomes more overtly theatric (starts looking like a Carry On movie) and crude wanting to do the thinking for its audience.    
 
Perhaps the failure of O Lucky Man represents the failure of a certain type of left wing political thinking which is founded ultimately on a distrust of audiences abilities to think things through for themselves.  The consequence of this is an indulgence in gross simplifications of situations and a willingness to distort any message to cohere and fit the line of left wing political argument.
 
Adrin Neatrour
 
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk