Monthly Archives: July 2006

La Nina Santa – Lucretia Martel – Argentina 2004 – Mercedes Moran; Maria Alche; Carlos Belloso

Viewed – Tyneside Cinema 31 March 2005 – £5-95La Nina Santa – Lucretia Martel – Argentina 2004 – Mercedes Moran; Maria Alche; Carlos Belloso
Viewed – Tyneside Cinema 31 March 2005 – £5-95
 
 An Argentinean/Spanish chamber piece which avoids the cutesy archeness that cinema of this provenance often embraces as a solution to dramatic imbroglio’s.  Martel’s oblique framing and use of fragmented scenes allows the development of two parallel domains to flow out of three intersecting worlds which fold into one another like a complex origami construction.   La Nina Santa(LNS)  builds on intercourse between these worlds:  the fluxes of female adolescence, a rundown out of season hotel, a conference of doctors.
 
The three worlds are psychically and physically marked out by the hair of the principal players which has the power of an interlubricant.  Hair in LNS is not a control statement.   Hair in LNS is a manifest independent physical force of the actors that creates powerful fields of attraction and resistance independent of will.   In most Hollywood movies hair is something that is kept under the strictest control and carefully contoured as part of costume.  Hair is tamed and modeled to suit the needs of  the actors and the film script: it can be understood as a sort of production value: it operates as optical sign encoding moral character and mood.  As hair per se, as matter, it has no independent function or role(Garbo and Ingrid Bergmen exceptions here).   In the world of the girls, their hair is part of their sensualites and sensibilities;  the dry and frazzled hair of the hotel people and their shampoo(‘it dries out your hair’) personified by Mecedes Moran, is located at the centre of identity; the creeping baldness of the doctor(Carlos Belloso) is part of the aridity of  conference world.  Physical attributes such as hair can interweave and interflow through being in such a way that it becomes life.  Their are no haircuts so to speak in LNS; just hair as an attribute of being.
 
LNS is not just an interpenetrating of worlds.  Underlaying these worlds are domains: the domain of the visible and the domain of the invisible.   Lucretia Martel uses invisible musical instruments and the spraying invisible enemies as the outer markers of the things we can’t see.  Unseen domains are folded into the characters, carrying them and releasing in them the impulse to action.   The domains of past relationships, the domain of spirit, the domains of sexual yearnings and desires meld achieve transient intensities that instantly fragment and re-form. 
The opening shot of LNS sees the young girls at religious instruction listening to the song of the unseen forces of religion.  Looking at the group, it is a sea of trailing hair falling through faces punctuated by eyes.  The last shot we see  the two main young girls floating togather in the waters of the pool with their hair flowing about them as far away and above in another unseen world, we know that a tragi-comic script is being played out.
Adrin Neatrour 7 April 05
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

9 Songs – Michael Winterbottom – 2004 – UK – Keiran O’Brien – Margot Stilley

Tyneside Film Theatre 2 April 2005 – price £5-959 Songs – Michael Winterbottom – 2004 – UK – Keiran O’Brien – Margot Stilley
Tyneside Film Theatre 2 April 2005 – price £5-95
 
Performance as Dick-tat
 
During the opening sequence of 9 Songs a small plane flies over the icescape of  Antarctica – or what Keiran O’Brien in voice over claims is Antartica.  As the shadow of the plane travels across the ice Keiran O’Brien (KOB) says that: he will always remember her smell the texture the feel of her skin.  That’s what he says.   But a question raised by the film is who is KOB? Is he KOB himself or a character in a film?  Depending on the reply will he always remember the her smell and the feel of her skin; or will he actually remember the whir of the camera and Michael W and cameraman’s faces squeezed towards him as he fucks Margot Stilley(MS) or she fucks him.
 
9 Songs takes its form its from the intercutting of three sections:   9 Songs performed at the Brixton Academy(where KOB and MS meet each other): short sequences from ‘the Antarctic which permit KOB voiced geophilosophic musings on the nature world and of permanence of memory; and scenes from the relationship between MS and KOB.  The performances of bands such as Franz Ferdinand and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are not immediately problematic.  The depicted relationship of KOB and MS(which Winterbottom contrives as a chronological story voiced by the male, with a beginning a middle and an end) raises some issues.  This section is defined and expressed on film, mainly but not entirely, by scenes of supposedly unsimulated hard-on fucking and licking.  This is the heart of the film.  The performances of KOB and MS touch on issues central not just to the film but also to a critical socio-cultural movement away from the rigid lines that define the performed and actual – a line that Performance artists have always explored – but which the acting profession struggles to maintain. 
 
 Is there or is there not a line separating the frame of acting from the frame of the real? Have the times blown apart and away the distinctions between performance and actual so that the expressive plastic arts are celebrated on the plateau of the now.  For in these times there is only: now and then; in and out.  What will KOB and MS remember and take away from the experience – anything or nothing:  the memories of each others smells and intensities – apologies to each other – satisfaction at a job well done, the film in the can – resentments at Winterbottom?
 
The sex scenes were graphically and somatically real.  Perhaps prosthesis was used occasionally in the filming; but we are ‘told’ (and that’s important; though do film publicists never lie…?) the sex was for real and mostly it looked dripping and tumescent body parts –  sex organs which are connected to our strongest drives, emotions and increasingly self image. Or perhaps not?  Everyone’s different, actors and actresses no less anyone else.  Actors spend much time and expenditure of energy in faking emotionally charged drives and states: fear, remorse, sorrow, dispair, anger etc.   Actors train to develop an expressive range of  facial and bodily responses for displaying through simulation and mimicry these arousal’s.  Actors also develop skills for enacting (faking) physical acts – dying – being wounded – being tortured – panicking – and sex.  Psychic involvement with character allows the actor to explore the parameters and ranges of responses –  while always retaining expressive control needed for direction.  Actors sometimes seem to utilise a form of mild self hypnosis that allows complete identification with the part whilst in character, but enables this state to be shaken off quite quickly when role is dropped, set left and cues of everyday life re-introduced.  (most players move in and out of role with relative ease, but failure to master this knack can cause personal and career problems).  Why in this film did Winterbottom  demand that his actors perform actual sex, rather than ask them to fake simulate and act out the action?  This could have been done, but it would have been a different film with a different point. 
 
The point about ‘acting’ is(was?) not to engage in real physical acts because real acts may have real physical consequences.  The traditional trick is to make the emotional experience  real  because engagement with feelings is through psychological mechanisms and triggers( as well as the whole mis-en-scene) Actions involving potentially fateful engagement with others are traditionally all simulations: fights – injuries – murders – slaps – full kissing – sex.  You do have a physical theater of the body based on dance, gymnastics, acts and feats of strength stamina and endurance.  But in the case of physical theatre there is the absolute injunction to take care – of yourself and the other.  The ethos of acting has been to fake action using mime skilled simulation use of prostheses and careful rehersal etc.  It is based on a notion that if there was a real engagement of the body, if the slap to the face was real, if the cut and blood drawn were real, the line would be crossed and actors would no longer be having to deal with a fabricated scenario but an event with real consequences for them and acting relationships; the cost would also be unpredictable loss of expressive control which the contriving machine – the camera or theatre was attempting to impose. 
 
The trends in public entertainment have mostly been to move away from the traditional  boundary  lines of acting on stage or the film set.  The movement is towards creating new machines where manipulation and exploitation of the real, of the visceral can be presented as entertainment with actual consequences.   Reality TV as a sort of Roman circus where there is expectation that participants will experience ‘real stress’ ‘real pain’ not the acted out faked stuff in a bottle of theatrical make up.  The line mapping the border between the real and faked is blurred and crossed.  Participants are subjected to both psychological and physical stress in a manner in which the authenticity of  reaction is ensured.   
 
The blurring between doing and being has long been the working assumption of both the pornography industry and the sado masochistic industry.  Both these expressive industries(including snuff movies) have progressively edged into mainstream media in the form of girly mags like Cosmopolitan and the Male laddish press.   Sex in the porntrade is not performance art – the players in pornographic films simply put in their days at the office, projecting  themselves into doing sex. Most of these performers stake little claim to thespian status: their cocks tits and orifaces are the business and the stars of the system are supposed know how to look after themselves physically and psychologically. (Though exploitation is rife and the industry has serious casualties).  The sex performers whether on stage screen or behind the curtains of the brothel may use mechanisms of distance and deterritorialisation from their working bodies.  These are shizoid psychic shifts of conscousness(sometimes anaesthetizing) that in themselves do not involve acting skills .
 
In some respects the acting profession has also incorporated trends from these marginal zones.  This blurring – merging  – this lack of discontinuities – between being and doing.  Actors are increasingly pressured (by society? By producers and directors?) to become their roles.  It’s what we come to expect.  An actress works as a waitress to prepare herself for a role, which in itself is more important than scenario or text.  But it’s not just an issue acquiring a mind set or gestural vocabulary: there are also demands that the body must be prepared.  Christian Bale to become the Mechanic(“ Total Film”) undertakes a three month ordeal of starvation to reduce weight and find the character.   The body becomes the central spectacle for our gaze.  We are back to the circus where the spectacle is at the centre of the arena.  Discontinuities.  What special preparations,  exercises did KOB and MS undertake to ready themselves for 9 Songs?
 
 This is what 9 Songs points to.  The inexorable movement in entertainment towards the exploitation of the actual.  Perhaps its corollary is inexorable movement in the other direction in film, towards the exploitation of the virtual, in that digital technologies are taking over huge swathes of the action images to the extent that it may soon be possible for films to star digital actors and actresses.  How interesting to see digital beings fuck?   9 Songs asks an ethical question at the core of the of the socioentertainment culture about whether distinctions between the forms of the faked and the real have any meaning for us.  And in this 9 Songs is a moral statement.  We are moving into an ethos where the issue is that for many audiences  the real has an overwhelming authenticity of effect.  And the image industry exists to fulfill the expectations of its audiences.  All those engaging in it will have to adapt to this transformation, that we are moving into a culture of discontinuities in which acted sequences will be replaced by the real with real consequences for the performers. How long before an actor(agreeing freely in his contract) agrees to be shot and killed as part of a sequence in a movie.  It’ll be real though it  won’t look any different from the faked. But we will be told its real.   This is the song that 9 Songs sings.
 
The film also calls attention to another interesting aspect of sociocultural experience and that is the nature of performance itself.  In 9 Songs music is performed; sex is performed; (a Voice Over snow is performed but this is an acted faked sequence; or is it?).  The music gigs and the sex have the same attributes in that they are real and presented as such.  But what is the connection between real performance and feeling?   There is no necessary connection: on tour, bands perform their songs every night and from their performance ellicit strong emotional reactions from audience(just like Hitler).  But the bands don’t actually have to feel anything.  In performance they can connect with their gestures and actions, they can surf the power unleashed and the reaction to the power unleashed.  As they actually make the music they perform it out but they don’t have to feel anything – even though the audience does.  Similarly with sex as performance.  Sex may be performed with great prowess, drawing on a knowledge and confidence both in your own body and in other bodies, but as sex  becomes performance so link to feeling becomes another discontinuity.  Cultures based on actual performance tend to deterritorialise emotional feeling.  Did KOB and MS have feelings when they fucked, or like porntrade stars did they adopt strategies of self alienation or whatever?  Having no access to states of mind obviously these sort of questions cannot be answered.  But at the end of 9 Songs the feeling that came through for me was one of emotional deadness and flatness(matching the male voice over – and why did Micheal W chose the male party to tell the story?)  Emotional deadness is a possible price for the uncoupling of action and feeling a process that is also part of the machine of mainstream culture production.
 
Adrin Neatrour  5 April 2005
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Lost In Translation – USA 2003 Written and Directed Sofia CoppolaA little way into Lost in Translation (LIT) as Bill Murray was going through his paces, he reminded me of an old news item I’d seen in the early ‘90’s. An item actually so long ago I can no longer remember if it was real or if I dreamt it. Whatever – in this memory George Bush senior is visiting China and is shown round a high tech factory. In wide shot, we see a picture of him as he enters a room full of Chinese technicians. As his Chinese hosts gesture and explain what’s happening, Bush peers out anxiously at the scene. In the close-up that follows the master shot we see his face clearly and that it divides into two expressive halves. In the lower section his lips are bared back into a rictus, a forced smile which suggests an attempt at the sort of expressive control demanded by convention and protocol, to show that he is engaged and interested in what he is looking at. But in the upper section of his face his eyes have this look of a threatened incomprehension. He doesn’t get what’s happening, he doesn’t understand all these funny little fellahs agitating around his knees. Or, perhaps old George was thinking of the ordeal that lies ahead in the evening to come. The 39 course Chinese banquet where he will have to ingest matter that possesses few of the qualities that Americans normally associate with food. Food that can choke you.
As with George Bush so with Bill Murray, LIT is a litmus paper from Hollywood marking the psychic chemistry underlying the basis of US foreign policy. Aggressive incomprehension. OK some people need no introduction or reminder of this psychic reality but it is worth pausing to think about the nature of the writer director of LIT, Sofia(wisdom-sic)Coppola. As evidenced here her work is representative of the experience and ambitions of a totally assimilated ‘second generation’ American. Her father’s films drew on his innate cultural experience and still had a residual italianate character. Daddy’s films, Hollywood in form, were invested with and exploited Italian American cultural experience. By the time we get to Sofia, this world hjas slipped off the map. Even in its superficial trappings, it is abandoned territory. With Sofia the new sensibility is of the shopping mall and the hotel room. Her film, and as writer director of LIT it is her film, gazes upon a world which she can shoot, she can buy sell and possess momentarily but which otherwise interests her very little.
At heart LIT is a travelogue tricked out with a couple of running gags. Gags such as – hey! Japan is weird – and we keep having this bunch of stuff happen – like its really funny you know – the thing is the japs – how d’ya know what’s going on – in their heads – you know. The second gag revolves round the portals of communication from home: like – like Bill – keeps getting these calls and fax right up his ass – stuff from his wife – like he can’t relate to it – in this weird Tokyo shit just doesn’t make any sense.
Intentioned or not the film depicts the brutal banality underlying US relations with other cultures. Minds brainwashed by suburban monogamy and homogeneity the American psyche is unable to comprehend the other. Unless strangeness is artfully arranged( Like flowers -hey the Japs are into that stuff) to accommodate their gaze the American feels trapped in a menacing and threatening environment. The response of LIT to ‘this other’ is at two levels.
At the level at which the film itself was conceived, the script written and developed, shot and edited – the response of LIT in structure and form is to target the Japs and the Jap culture as the butt of the joke. Deterritorialised within the vehicular language of Hollywood film scripting, the Japanese and their culture are characatured and ridiculed as being rigid frantic and utterly bizarre like Monte Python TV. The internal response contained within the film is that the two characters Bill and Scarlet(I’m sticking with their real names) being sensitive souls, in the face of this otherness, retreat to the sanctity and sanity of the hotel/asylum. They hide in the ensuite bedrooms and the American bar where they find comfort amidst the familiar and reassuring trappings of American corporate culture – a cultural milieu in which I suspect Sofia also finds comfort in times of stress.
In this comfort zone you can watch goofy Jap TV to confirm how right you are to be where you are. In the hotel room, Scarlet and Bill find each other and in each others company address some of life’s problems. Strange to note that as we watched Bill (or was it Scarlet?) channel hop the TV a scene from La Dolce Vita appears on channel and we see Anita Eckberg and a cat on screen. So Sofia has been to the video store or maybe raided Dad’s video collection to check out Italian neo-realism. Is this some sort of acknowledgement of LIT’s pedigree, a nod to the masters – a statement of her ambition?
Then I wondered if she had also checked out French new wave. A disconcerting thought occurred to me as I pondered other potential intellectual markers. I wondered if somewhere in the conceptual bowels of Lost In Translation there lurked Sofia’s attempt at an homage to Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour? A frisson of anticipation took hold of me when Scarlet got on a train to leave Tokyo during a travelogue section of the film. I wondered where she was going. Is she going to Hiroshima? So she and Bill can talk about important things back in the hotel room? To my relief Sofia wisely avoided sending her protagonist to Hiroshima. Sofia settled for sending her to the safety of Kyoto where Scarlet indulges some harmless Temple watching and spies a coffee-table wedding of a beautiful Japanese couple.
Actually Scarlet’s character even in terms of the films limited ambition to aim no higher than Bill’s amusingly receding hairline, is mildly disappointing. As a recently graduated philosophy student she is not allowed mention of a philosopher and confines herself to bobo questions to Bill relating to the great unknown – the American suburban marriage and its progress through time to the arrival of kids.
In sum LIT is a terrible movie but a dark parable. I don’t think anything is lost in translation its all there if you need any more dark Hollywood parables.
Adrin Neatrour Jan 2004

Blissfully Yours – Apichatpong Weersethakul – Thailand 2002

Viewed ICA cinema 2; 20 – 03 – 05; ticket £6-50Blissfully Yours – Apichatpong Weersethakul – Thailand 2002
Viewed ICA cinema 2;    20 – 03 – 05; ticket £6-50
 
natural arousals
Apichatpong’s film  is an inflowing from another world.  A world where there exists a vision of an opening up of bodies to nature in a way that almost inexpressible in the West.  Perhaps because ‘nature’ ‘the natural world’ has become for Westerners, if not merely a cartoon backdrop to be exploited,  then a metaphore or allegory relating to our own condition rather than place in itself. 
 
In Western cinema/literature, nature is often caste in the role of an allegorical hand maiden, with appropriate signification as hand baggage.  Woods, forests, rivers sea shore often enjoy a cameo role – a moment of idyll in a film – a break out from the motivational lines of force driving the characters to the appointed and scripted ends.  Sometimes in films like Elvira Madagan nature is used to poignantly offset the machinations of the social machine, or in survivalist Hollywood scripts nature ends up caste in an adversorial role.
 
Blissfully Yours starts in the town.  A quest to solve the problems of the town, trying to sort out the papers of an illegal immigrant.  All the usual hassles you get in static unyielding environments governed by beaurocracy.  Then suddenly the film takes off.  Apichatpong takes to the wing with his camera and  flies away from the square static ungiving urban environment.  In a series of sensuous languorous tracking shots filmed  from the rear window of the car we watch  as if on the magic carpet of some magician.  the road behind us uncoil like a snake or a tongue or a stiffening penis.   In the view from the rear window we leave behind not just the concerns and fixations of the town but move into a new time dimension governed by a different set of beats rhythms and fluxes. 
 
The natural environment of Apichatpong is neither an idyllic nor allegorical place. It is a place where a different governmental order is at work, and in Blissfully Yours the woods and streams and vallies of Western Thailand are place where three characters Min, Rooug and Orn give themselves to this order.  They don’t cease to have problems or identities, the subjective world doesn’t change.  Simply these things now have different expressive context in which they have another dimension of  value.  Nor is the forest a place where story has any part to play – this is not a Western style film where the woods are a certain kind of narrative setting for ‘things to happen’.  Narrative doesn’t develop in this natural domain.  Experience does.    
 
The forest is a place of flow: flow of images and sounds – sometime working together sometimes independently.  Water wind the sounds of birds and other animals the flow of life – the ants.  In the presence of this fluidity –  raked with turbulance, for there is no flow without random occassional congestion and spasm – the three characters Min, Rooug and Orn (I think that two of them were played by non actors) adjust to the flows joining their own fluxes, tears body fluids semen skin urine thoughts so that the roar that is happening about them is happening in them.  Nothing essential changes – there are not any answers either to Rooug’s or Min’s problems(some answers to the slight narrative questions[with a political resonance] posed by the characters are given as text during the end titles which is a warm and humane  touch;  not essential in the context of what we have seen) – the scenario becomes one flow with  a multitude of tracks and notes. 
 
In the last sequence of the film Rooug lying at Min’s side by the forest stream her fingers drift to the fly of his shorts open the buttons to reveal his cock.  Her delicate lazy movement at last arouses him.  The lightness of her finger touch uncoils him as he slowly swells up, flows through multiple forms,  a snake transforming to a flower becoming an exotic snail a rich fruit and finally a cock.  In its own time another final flowing before we go and know that we can take nothing with us.  The forest is one of those machines – you leave everything behind.
adrin neatrour  25 03 05
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Ydessa, the Bears, and etc. Agnes Varda – Fr 2004

viewed: Film Forum, New York, 26 Feb 2005 – ticket price Ydessa, the Bears, and etc.     Agnes Varda – Fr 2004
viewed: Film Forum, New York, 26 Feb 2005 – ticket price
 
The avowed intent of Agnes Varda in her documentary films is to explore photography and its ability to preserve a moment for eternity while remaining open to an array of interpretations that themselves evolve over time.   In relation to Ydessa, the Bears, and etc. this statement of intent sounds to me both unimaginative and trite.  A tagline that might come from a Fuji film ad accompanied by a banal truism about the nature of perception and understanding.  However,  Ydessa, the bears, and etc delivers a spacio-temporal study that engages with both private and personal history in a disturbing and clever simply shot film with an extraordinary subject at the centre of its focusing. There is also the question of to what exactly, “….and etc.” that is part of the title, points.
 
Varda’s film treats of a personal story of an unusual subject.  Ydessa is a jewish woman born in 1948 in Germany to parents who were both survivors of Auschwitz.  We see a picture of Ydessa as a child  tucked up in bed with her teddy bear.  Her parents remained living in Germany until Ydessa was 5 at which time they emigrated to Toronto.  We are never told anything of the circumstances determining this emigration.  Perhaps that is part of the question raised by the ‘and etc.’   What we glean from the film is that its subject Ydessa is a very very rich woman who plays a significant role in the Toronto art and gallery scene.
 
The story jumps 55 years from the emigration to Canada back to Germany: to an exhibition at the Munich Kunsthaus of an exhibition designed presented and curated by Ydessa, of Ydessa’s collection of photographs of people with Teddy Bears taken in a vast array of situations and settings.   The Kunsthaus was built by Hitler as a gallery for pure correct Nazi art and artists.  In the main room of this Kunsthaus show, Ydessa’s photos are hung on the walls and exhibited closely together, and mounted from about 6 inches off the floor almost up to ceiling.  The impression is of an overwhelming density of photos crowded into too small a space.
 
 The film has its first meeting/interview with Ydessa at her gallery in Toronto.  Although we hear the questions Varda puts to Ydessa; it’s as if we see the replies.  We see the replies because this interview is shot in close-up and it’s as if Ydessa’s  replies to Varda are in fact inscribed into Ydessa’s extraordinary face.  It is the face that gives the answers.  It is a face that demands fascination.  On the close-up inspection given us by Varda’s shot, Ydessa’s face has a twisted contorted aspect – perhaps she has had a stroke or perhaps she has been under the knife of cosmetic surgery. Perhaps not. Pain, compressed pain is burnt into every pore of this face,  pain that has now frozen into a look of death. 
 
Subjective/objective?  My companion at the film simply couldn’t look at Ydessa.  Perhaps this reaction is extreme.  The response of one interviewee at Ydessa’s exhibition at the Kunsthaus to Varda’s question of how she found the Teddy Bear photo exhibition, was to say that: ‘… it was like ….death.’  Death haunts this film as a sort of aesthetic supplement to what we see on the screen.  We do hear Ydessa’s words as she connects the early photo of her with her Teddy to a later impulsion to collect photographs of the same sort.  It seems reasonable enough.  Later in the film we learn from her how rare and difficult to find such photos are; and that locating them becomes an obsession pursued relentlessly through contacts in the art world, auction houses and of course on the net – ebay.   An activity of a driven nature pursued by a wealthy woman with huge resources of time and money.  A driven woman.  Could childhood memory alone, a sentimental personal ikonography be sufficient to energise the drive?  Or is it valid to ask supplementary questions?
 
Her parents were inmates in a German concentration camp – Auschwitz.  Ydessa lives in Toronto.  She lives alone in a huge English style manor house with 18 bedrooms.  She lives in this space that is home to her Teddy Bear photographs and her collection of sizeally inverted sculptures that represent as small some things that should be big(like a bathroom suite) and as big, some things that should be small( a Zippo lighter) as if the world had been made subject to a corrective perspective on importance.  The thought occurs that perhaps being in a death camp also subjected the victims to inverted shifts in perspective.
 
Most of the Teddy Bear pictures in Ydessa’s collection predate the second world war and were taken in Germany and the USA.   The photographs show people in all sorts of situations:  children alone(in bed, in gardens, dressed up, on tricycle), family groups(at the seaside, or more formally at the photographic studio) and associational groups(sports clubs, drinking clubs, armed forces) .  And certainly Nazi party members are well represented.  But putting the latter consideration aside or in some form of bracketing, something in the nature of the situations and many of the backgrounds of these photographs representing hundreds of different families, set as they are on the plane of the ordinary and everyday, recalls to my mind only one other set of groupings: the photos of concentration camp victims taken before the catastrophe.  These groups often represented by prosperous Berlin Jews look out not just from another era, but from a collective state of mind in which they were unaware of their destiny as Jews in Germany.  The factor of randomness underlying the survival of these ordinary photographs taken to perpetuate or commemorate individuals and groups underlies their poignancy as does our knowledge that most of the people depicted will be murdered in the concentration and death camps. 
 
The Teddy Bear pictures too have survived through the forces of random selection.  And in Ydessa’s curatorship their destiny has been to be collected together individually and then exhibited as a concentration of images.   It is not the individual photos that stand out as memorable in this context: it is their concentration that is the salient feature of the show.  A concentration that overwhelms, not just the people attending the Kunsthaus who in interview with Varda attest to their confusion in being confronted with this dense presentation, but also the viewers of the film as they scan the walls of the space wallpapered with the imagery.  The fate of the Teddy Bear Photographs is also ultimately to be confined in a sort concentration camp, sanctioned by art.   There is another room in the exhibition.  You enter; the walls are painted white.  The room is an empty save for a life size figure kneeling on the floor as if in prayer:  it is a model of Adolf Hitler. And I wonder: is Ydessa a curator or a deterritorialised camp commandant?
 
As the film unwinds – and it is a supple engrossing unwinding – it is clear that Agnes Varda is treating her material with a light touch.(except perhaps the close ups of Ydessa.  They press on me, connecting to ideas that link physical outer form with inner states; asking questions of by what outer marks individuals may be linked to their collective histories. Unfashionable stuff.)  Ydessa, the bears, and etc. is certainly open to different readings of Ydessa and her world, as long as the historical material that is embedded in the film is regarded as incidental and not part of a structured layering.  If the material is suddenly seen as a historical layering, then Ydessa, both her identity and her physical features, her migration from Germany to Canada, her wealth(unexplained), her obsessive pictures of people with Teddy bears, all take place and can be understood in the historical context of the Jewish Hollocaust.  And the ‘…and etc.’ of the title points to a supplementary aesthetic of time moulding the structure(the film has the formality of a uundertakers) and figuration of the film as a death mask.
adrin neatrour       3 March 05
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Devil Doll – 1936 – Todd Browning Lionel Barrymore – Maureen O’Sullivan Script Eric von Stroheim, Garrett Fort, Guy Endore

Viewed Side Cinema – 30 01 05 Devil Doll – 1936 – Todd Browning   Lionel Barrymore – Maureen O’Sullivan  Script Eric von Stroheim, Garrett Fort, Guy Endore
Viewed Side Cinema – 30 01 05
 
Devil Doll is the almost last crack of the whip for Todd Browning his last show as the heretic Ring Master before being outed and dumped by the Hollywood Inquisition.  The last shot of Devil Doll sees the protagonist descending the heights of the Eiffel Tower from the domain of the Gods to the inconsequential level of the mortals. It is a long descent in the gloom and feels like a final  exit.    
 
Devil Doll is a film that flows across the screen like a dream that is comprised of a number discrete sections, all interrelated but characterised by breaks in continuity. The discontinuities resolve themselves as dream unfolding, a circus circus of dreams.  Devil Doll is Browning’s transposed circus of the freaks and the disinherited and it is structured as a series of circus acts.  Devil Doll is a film of the vengeance taken by the mutants on the straight world.  It is Browning’s coda, a final statement of his integrity.    
 
As in dreams or circuses, discontinuities don’t matter because the strength of the underlying logic drives the imagery and story we are watching, short circuits the need for narrative rationale.  We take each sequence, each act as it comes.  From Devil Doll’s opening shot of a searchlight beam  directed straight out from the screen into the eyes of the audience temporarily dazzling us before swinging round into the  forest where the hunt is on for two escaped prisoners, to the strange Parisian toyshop and the miniaturisation sequences, we are caste into the circus of revenge.   With sardonic charm Ring Master Browning introduces us to his collection of freaks cripples and clowns who will grapple and finally overcome the forces of the straight world of the smug the mean and the fat.
 
Barrymore, the clown in chief, plays to the house as a cross dressing old lady whose mission is the revenge killing of the greedy bankers who have robbed him and destroyed his life completely. The high points of the film are the miniaturisation sequences in which the live humans are reduced to the size of tiny dolls, in order to carry out the revenge as directed by Barrymore.  There is something in the technical affectation of these ‘freak’ sections which are effected  by mechanical and optical devices(traveling mattes and the building of large sets) that  makes them the more powerful than the seamless digital effects of today.  The point I think is that although the effects are technically superbly done in Devil Doll ( in particular the scene where the miniature woman doll extricates herself from under the crooked elbow of little girl sleeping in her cot) there is in them an aspect that is both slightly gauche and magical.  The sequences have the quality of Hans Christian Anderson’s stories like the Tin Soldier of the Little Flower Girl, where fragility is central to the creation of the character. The Tin Soldier and the Little Flower Girl are coruscating shimmering creations whose vulnerability permeates their stories.   Browning’s image creations with use of effectively simple mechanical technology has a similar quality: it is child-like and warm .  Today’s digital effects  have a colder feel to them.  The comparatively easy production of digitised effects makes anything possible and fragility of  image is often less in evidence than the confident excess of facile mastery.         
 
The subplot has two lovers(one of whom is Barrymore’s estranged daughter) whose preferred meeting place is at the top of the Eiffel tower.  Only when up in the Gods can they find meaning away from the humdrum  pull of life’s gravitational mass. There is something about this arrangement that belongs to dream logic. But it is also a part of the film’s circus assemblage, as you realise that these lovers are Browning’s trapeze artists, dazzling aerialists who only find happiness in the defiance of gravity.   
 
The end sequence takes place on Eiffel’s high platform and ends the film on the dark directorial note alluded to earlier,  with Barrymore’s descent of the tower in the lift. Down down down.  The shadows of the girders move across his face as he goes down.   From what he has said we know that having completed his revenge that he is going, in one form or another, to kill himself.  Given that Browning knew that this would be one of his last films, if not his last this is surely a personal statement.  Browning’s realisation of Freaks had disgusted Mayer at MGM and Browning knew he was working out his contract.  It was the end for him. He was an apostate filmmaker who had challenged the Hollywood ideology of ‘ideal type’ representation.  In the Hollywood catechism, it is not the place of the crippled or the mutants to lead the way.  These are outcast.  Only the whole and the unblemished may take the lead across the silver screen.  Browning broke this primal canon of the Hollywood coda.  He paid the price.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

2046 -Wong Kar Wai – Hong Kong – 2004, Tony Leung – Su Lizhen – Bai Ling – Faye Wong

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 11/ 2/ 05 Ticket – £5 – 95

When the bubble pops.2046 -Wong Kar Wai – Hong Kong – 2004, Tony Leung – Su Lizhen – Bai Ling – Faye Wong
Viewed: Tyneside Cinema Newcastle  11/ 2/ 05   Ticket – £5 – 95
 
When the bubble pops.
 
As soon as I saw the opening credits that announced where the money to make 2046 came from – ARTE France and ZDF- the film was announced as a hybrid product of  Euros and HK dollars.  So I wondered what sort of a movie I was going to see.  From experience the odds were it was going to be a variation on Pot Noodles.  A dish with Chinese ideograms wrapping a meal prepared for the European palate. 
 
2046 is a coffee table movie with a dynamic of intensification modeling its structure. The feel of the film is for a saturation along certain dimensions such as texture and colour  in particular green, Vermeer rather than jade; a visual saturation over laid with mannered movement in particular the mannered acting style extracted from all the lead players.  IN relation to its sound track ‘2046’is washed through with both music – some of it perhaps parody but most of it middle of the road Western classical sentimentality ; and rather twee dialogue exchanges.  ‘2046′ is trailed as having a sci-fi  framework, but in fact this section feels pure gloss(more metaphoric than actual – but I’ll come to this later)  and has little substance. The dip into the future becomes an excuse for Won Kar Wai to raid the stylistic larder of films past to brighten up ‘2046′ –  a little Blade Runner, Alphaville etc.  Stylistically even those sequences not set in futuristic zones (‘2046 where nothing changes everything is always stays the same’ this description of course describes Hong Kong), have a Hollywood production look to them.  Something of  Scorcese and Coppola on that  ground where the Italian American eye with its sensibility for the movement meets visceral action – intensity developing out of violence. In Kar Wai’s world there is little overt violence rather an intensity constructed around a void.  An empty middle.
 
There is no doubt that Wong Kar Wai knows how to frame his pictures:  his use of blocked off partial lines of sight and his tracking shots as either reveals or occludes are usually(but not always) effective.  And he fills his frame with some beautiful images: in particular the curvaceous forms of his women(with beautiful asses) who are erotically off set in the rich fabric of their costumes and high heels.  Wong Kar Wai’s (WKW) composition of tactilely rich settings – fabric wood flesh – sensually energises his film and carries the somewhat weak scenario. 
 
In relation to Scorcese and Coppola their films worked not only because they understood the business of Hollywood in creating films with certain type of style leading out of and made possible by the production values; but also because the style itself was grounded in the articulation of certain  aspirational projections of Italian American experience.  WKW seems to be directing in a sort of cultural vacuum.   Perhaps this what  HK is?  A culture of passive assimulation.  A sort of sponge soaking up indescriminately the cultural influences of East and West.  The embodiment of no-place and WKW  the conjurer and creator of notional intensities.
 
‘2046′ feels locked into an introspective vision.  A sort of international marketing Hong Kong style.  Notionally set in 1960’s the supposedly future year 2046 always feels close to the present.  The characters face inwards their faces turned away from the world, with little connection to actual space or time. They are part of the HK bubble world; perhaps making movies out of HK no- place leads politically and socially to a sort of never never land of regressed personal and social  relationships ‘…….nothing ever changes here’.  WKW doesn’t try to break out of the HK mould,  putting in play human relationships to examine HK.  His investigations only find that it is a series of closed circuits leading nowhere.
 
There is a significance to the year 2046.   2046 is the year that the 1997 agreement(one country two systems) concerning the governance of HK, made between the British and the Chinese People’s Republic, ends;   2046 is the last year in which the status of HK as an independent enclave, a separate little statelet, with its own  ‘way’ is guaranteed.  It is the year when something will change.   The year when this little plot of land where nothing changes, will have to change.  The year when (perhaps) HK’s internalised circuitry will short out. In the meantime HK is sentenced to this period of introspection – as are her lovers – being nowhere going nowhere. 
 
As the film progressed 2046 evoked memories(sometimes painful)of a certain strand of French romantic films from the 1960’s onwards typified by Lelouche’s un Homme et une Femme(1968) and repeated ad nauseam with their central ideas about the demons that love’s desire always releases to torment and in the end defeat us.  These films often had a theme music that would cue key points of the film and were interspersed with much cod philosophising about the nature of love and lovers.  The better examples of the genre avoided over use of ‘the music’ and had a certain gusto in the playing and energy in the mis en scene to get them through their paces.  All these films took place in a bourgeois  bubble world.  The personae lived in a stream of endless money cars and apartments -all relationships were bound into the world of the film in which the events of the world were bypassed.
 
 In this sense 2046 is unlike its European precursors in that the social relations are a real reflection of the political matrix form which they evolve.  In this case everyone waits for the bubble to burst.  But of course it never does.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Old Boy – Park Chan-Wook – Korea 2003

Tyneside Film Theatre 29 Oct 04 Ticket £5-95Old Boy – Park Chan-Wook – Korea  2003
Tyneside Film Theatre 29 Oct 04 Ticket £5-95
 
The final shot of Old Boy, over which the end titles roll, seemed to me to be an entity detached from the rest of the film.  The camera pans across a huge snow covered mountain ridge and stops at a gap through the mountains.  The shot, suggesting space or the possibility of space on the other side of the ridge, stands apart from the rest of film which is shot in urban confines, in ‘any space whatever’ where we rarely see the whole picture or any place that in itself is culturally coded(in the way New York Paris or Tokyo are iconically tagged).  Old Boy action takes place and moves through ‘cross sectional space’ – interior sets bounded by wallpaper(lots of fine wallpapered surfaces) plaster, glass,  mirrors and exterior locations set on streets with anonymous urban vistas. Sets that are defined by the coordinates of intimacy and detachment rather than geography or building plans. 
 
Old Boy shot by Park in ‘anywhere space’ ends up somewhere.  In the mountains with a shot that moves slowly across a complete ridge coming to rest at an opening through the rocks through which we can see into the distance perhaps into the future.  
 
At some point during this pan (during which most of the audience leave) I see a credit for the New Zealand crew.  New Zealand……I’m surprised.  Of course any space whatever can be shot wherever: these mountains were New Zealand.  I am thinking that they are probably located on the South Island – the setting for the Lord of the Rings movies.  There are all sorts of cinematic referencings burrowing through Old Boy – spot them for yourself –  but does this last and final referencing event by the camera point directly to a ironical metaphysical juxtapositioning of the two films?
 
Both Lord of the Rings and Old Boy have a metaphysical imperative as an engine that drives them as respective filmic assemblages.  The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy realised and heightened through digital technology.  Old Boy uses parody as a stylistic expressive medium but counterweights the distancing effects of parody by grounding the film in the physicality of its protagonist Oh Dai-Su, brilliantly played by Choi Min-Sik in a performance that calls out to de Nero’s in Taxi Driver.  LoR explores as a simplistic metaphysic, the battle between the forces of good and evil – forces that seem defined in terms of race and culture.  LoR in closing with the triumph of the forces of the Shires is moral tale attuned to the nutritional requirements by the nursery for simple easily digested food.
 
Old Boy operates on a metaphysical plane that is personal and built on a mythic foundation overlaid with a recasting of familiar Judaic-Christian psycho religious psychological states.  It’s formal parody but the visceral and immediate nature of its imagery at critical moments heighten understanding of the processes at work(Dai-su’s use of chop sticks to dig his way out of his prison cell).   In the course of the action which begins( in fact there is a strange double start) with the  proposition of a man locked up fifteren years in a prison for reasons that  are not explained to him, Park and  Choi  plot out the dynamic overlayering of Judaic/Christian psycho religious concepts – guilt and atonement –  onto an oriental psychic and mythic code.   It is an overlayering that energises the film with the paraschizo fuel that burns through all the world.  There is no space left – only time zones.  As Western culture disperses, it melds and merges with other forms to create new twisted hyrid social types.
 
 Incest is the key myth underlying Old Boy, the Oriental version of the taboo not the Western.  In the Hellenic story of Oedipus, mother /son liaison is the forbidden relationship.  The East,  such as the Japanese myth of Amaterasu and Susanoo, favours the story of the forbidden nature of the brother / sister  relationship.  It is the oriental dynamic of forbidden incestuous relationships between brother and sister and the consequent terrible sense of shame(attached to public revelation) that works through Old Boy.  Drawing on a mythic wellspring the protagonist of Old Boy,  Dai-su journeys across a metaphysical plane impelled by the need the understand his condition – why me.  The temporal imperatives of TV, mobile phones, constant incessant monitoring, glass and mirrors are devices that collapse the coordinates of space.  Ideas of far and near are delusions in a world where you are never nearer an event than when you believe yourself distant from it.  Answers to questions sought in the quest lie in crossing time not space.  Far and near, near and far are not oppositional ideas but collusive spatial contractions.
 
Time is now a personal journey rather than a collectively experienced history.  Dai-su has assimilated a Judaic-Christian ethos into the machinery for coping with the demands of individual time travel.  Dai-su  in his quest for the answer moves through the idea of revenge into the processes of forgetting and remembering that lead to awareness of his own personal guilt.  Perhaps his own personal guilt is a state he always knew but had to forget but whose recognition could only be followed by penance expiation and redemption.  Personal redemption  – the shot of the gap through the mountains of New Zealand.   
 
Park has a story to tell ( and  at the end of Old Boy Dai-su also has a story to tell but part of the story is that he is unable to tell the story)  of how East meets West – how cultures and societies fuse schizoid responses to this mergeance.  The story encapsulated in the strange form taken by the title in the title sequence where the titles appear first as a sort of computer encrypted script that resolves briefly into legible characters before morphing back into a cipher.  Drawing on visually skewed references to Bunuel Tarrentino Goddard Scorcese etc  Park tells how it is with a sure understanding of what this global contraction implies for all of us.  
Adrin Neatrour 6 11 04
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk