Daily Archives: Monday, November 27, 2006

  • Branded to Kill – Seijun Suzuki – Japan 1966;

    How to cook the rice
    What to make of this film: it is the product of a totally schizoid society, a society ripped open by a cultural hurricane called the USA. Suzuki’s episodic story line links a series of increasingly violent confrontations all played out to a very cool jazz score by Naozumi Yamamoto. Branded to Kill reflects Japan as a broken society seen through the multiplexed reflections of smashed shards of a zen mirror. The here and now as a nightmare. A document produced by a defeated society, but made with the extraordinary lucidity of the state of affairs: a twisted deterritorialised Samurai gangster culture shaped by an ethos of sadism played out in depersonalised spaces with guns and American cars..

    Branded to Kill – Seijun Suzuki – Japan
    1966; Nanbura Koji, Jo Shishido

    ICA 2, 1st July 2006 Ticket
    price £6-50

    How to cook the rice

    What to make of this film: it is the
    product of a totally schizoid society, a society ripped open by a
    cultural hurricane called the USA. Suzuki’s episodic story line
    links a series of increasingly violent confrontations all played out
    to a very cool jazz score by Naozumi Yamamoto. Branded to Kill
    reflects Japan as a broken society seen through the multiplexed
    reflections of smashed shards of a zen mirror. The here and now as a
    nightmare. A document produced by a defeated society, but made with
    the extraordinary lucidity of the state of affairs: a twisted
    deterritorialised Samurai gangster culture shaped by an ethos of
    sadism played out in depersonalised spaces with guns and American
    cars..

    However at the centre of the film is
    the image of the pot of rice. The enduring symbol of Shintoism rice.
    This image of a pot full of cooked rice is returned to regularly. The
    pot belonging to the protagonist and as in fairytale, it’s a pot
    that for him is always a full and which nourishes him physically
    and psychically. Rice is his favorite food, the food he craves. Yet
    the pot is not a traditional pot: it is an electric rice cooker.
    The white rice fluffs up perfectly cooked in this gadget. A
    automatic device that is a double sign: a sign of the quintessential
    world of the American – slick electric efficient non traditional and
    – also the food that is the core of Japanese culture, symbolising
    genesis and purity. The rice pot, at the centre of the Branded to
    Kill is a cursive elegant statement about Japan in the 1960’s: a
    traditional culture cooked up in the encompassing embrace of a alien
    society.

    For the most part, Seijun Suzuki uses
    the film as a full blown suicidal assault on traditional Japanese
    values and sensibilities. Violence and sex intertwine and twist as a
    pastiche of American iconic imagery: the moll, the gun, the gangster
    are taken to extremes in sequences that are exercises in a parody of
    controlled ironic Japanese detachment. In Branded to Kill the
    various sequences comprising: chase fight torture or sex are defined
    by stylistic detachment and frequently use the sound track as a
    deintensifier of the extreme action. For example when the sexy
    gangster’s moll is being tortured to death with a blow torch her
    face retains an amused insouciant playful demeanor and hums to
    herself: this attitude of amused exteriority audio and visual
    effectively deintensifies the horror of the blow torch sequence
    transforming it into something like an amusing game, a childish
    conceit.

    Most of the film there is a rendering
    of the acting and the fractured plot that make Branded to Kill an
    assemblage of the world of the child. Perhaps this is endemic in the
    gangster movie genre: because certainly both Edward G Robinson and
    James Cagney both had baby faces and there is in the violence of the
    gangster the fury of the wronged and angered child. The idea of
    gangster unleashes and frees these destructive forces. I think that
    Suzuki is saying something parallel but different within Branded to
    Kill that relates the Japanese experience of military defeat and
    cultural invasion had caused Japanese society to revert to a
    collective infantilism where its core institutions and values had
    undergone a sort of inversion of the playground.

    Adrin Neatrour 11 Aug 2006

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • The Son (Le Fils)- Jean-Pierre/Luc Dardenne France 2002 – Olivier Gourmet

    There is the possibility…of grace

    The setting is a youth training centre in Belgium where young men without skills are sent to learn practical trades. The opening shot is of a functional overhead light fitting that castes its harsh glare down onto the floor and walls of an adapted featureless partitioned industrial unit…..

    The Son (Le Fils)- Jean-Pierre/Luc
    Dardenne France 2002 – Olivier Gourmet

    Viewed Riverside Studio – 6 Aug 06 –
    Double Bill with L’Enfant. Ticket price £6-00

    There is the possibility…of grace

    The setting is a youth training centre
    in Belgium where young men without skills are sent to learn practical
    trades. The opening shot is of a functional overhead light fitting
    that castes its harsh glare down onto the floor and walls of an
    adapted featureless partitioned industrial unit.

    The unit is revealed in several long
    shots as the camera tracks down from the light and follows the flow
    of the action as it passes through a world of plasterboard, metal
    personal lockers, concrete floors, unit shelving and teaching areas.
    It is an impoverished visual world with its low level fluorescent
    lighting creating the illusion of a monochrome grey environment in
    which little colour is able to bleed through. It is a soulless world
    populated by monosyllabic young men. An institutional place which
    however well intentioned has a tangible deadness at its core.

    The camera is mainly positioned behind
    Olivier the main character who is the carpentry trainer at the
    centre. With the camera filming over the shoulder of Olivier we
    become conscious of the space in which Olivier moves and how he
    relates to and operates in his space. As the viewer follows him in
    the long camera takes through the corridors of training centre, up
    and down the stairs, into the office, the car park, town and home we
    latch onto his interest in a young trainee whom he has accepted on
    his course after initially rejecting him. Always outside Olivier the
    camera never makes any claim to be acting as a proxy for Olivier’s
    consciousness.

    There is something in the way we
    experience Olivier’s actions particularly as a trainer that is very
    humbling, even contradictory. We see Olivier teach his charges the
    simple rudimentary woodworking skills: how to carry lengths of timber
    safely, how to use the set square, how to measure correctly. But he
    brings to this practice an intrinsic message about the dignity of
    labour and a belief that the simple habit of attention to detail is
    basic to seeing the world in the way proper to the trade and dignity
    of the carpenter. Olivier imparts his knowledge without affect and
    with few words; there is an innate conviction at the core of his
    sparse teaching style. A sparsity that is carried over into what the
    Dardennes show of his personal world. Olivier – divorced – lives
    alone in a small apartment where he carries out the rituals of his
    existence – doing remedial exercises for his injured back( he wears a
    large leather brace) and mechanically going through the routine of
    preparing and eating bachelor food. It seems a world without hope;
    a world of day to day existence and world whose greyness and monotony
    has perhaps been triggered by the death of his only son. But we
    don’t know. Understanding of Olivier’s world is always a
    question weighing up the possibilities inherent in different readings
    of the signs emitted by him in the film. We are allowed no access to
    Olivier’s internal state of mind. (Indeed we have no access to
    internal states of mind other than our own) Perhaps Olivier was like
    this before the death of his son. Dardennes give us no access to
    Olivier’s consciouness, either through sentimentality of his
    actions or his words. We can only arrive at tentative understandings
    of his inner world through reading the potentialities in the signs he
    gives out in his praxis.

    There is something in the Dardennes’
    films that I have found one dimensional, monochromatic. They seem
    over determined with both characters and action severely constrained
    by situation and environment. The story line is filtered along one
    dimension with all tracks closed off except the intended outcome.
    They are behaviourist soap operas, worthy in approach but ultimately
    uninteresting as there is little development from the original
    thesis. However Le Fils is different: the controlled discipline over
    affective response(in Olivier) in the scenario, the intelligence of
    the camera, the integrity of the acting open up an avenue of light
    into the film so that the provoked dramatic situation, the
    confrontation of the father of the murdered child with his killer
    excites the latent potential of the material to effect multiple
    possible lines of development.

    The extreme situation of the encounter
    provokes neither melodrama nor affected expression of sentiment.
    Rather it engenders questions about Olivier’s consciousness, his
    state of mind. Because the viewer is presented with a situation
    which puts into play strong emotions but has little affective
    information about how these emotions are effecting Olivier, the
    viewer has to posit, to interpose from the action what is happening
    to the states of mind of Olivier. In Le Fils the one and only
    central issue is the state of mind of Olivier and what changes are
    taking place in his engagement with the world consequent to changes
    in his consciouness. From what we are shown there is the
    possibility at the end of the film that Olivier has been touched by
    grace. Perhaps Olivier at some moment (whether for a second or for
    eternity) has accepted the gift of grace, an overwhelming ability to
    live and to be without desire, to live without ego to move in the
    world with love. For the viewer it is an overwhelming thought that
    such a thing should even be possible in this world. Of course other
    possibilities, more mundane, also present themselves as other
    possible explanations for understanding Olivier. Explanations that
    are more mechanistic: perhaps his behavioural responses to the young
    boy are driven by a substitution / replacement impulse, or by the
    desire on his part to taste the thrill of forbidden fruit, and so on
    the list is of course long because we don’t have access to
    Olivcier’s state of mind, it is only something we can infer.

    But it is the idea of grace that
    somehow insists as the most potent suffusing channel for coming to an
    understanding of Olivier’s actions and movement during the final
    frames of the film. In making a film about the possibility of grace
    as a state of consciousness, the Dardennes are working outside the
    limited confines of most cinematic drama, where the usual states of
    mind portrayed amount to no more than the obvious easily read
    emotions – anger, sadness, happiness, unhappiness etc. and the
    actions that stem therefrom. A state of grace can perhaps only ever
    be a fleeting possibility. It is not a state that can ever be laid
    claim to but only inferred from outer signs. For the Dardennes to
    evoke such a possibility for the viewer is a testament to the
    discipline they possess as film makers who understand the use of
    signage.

    However such discipline is hard won and
    easily lost. Accompanying Le Fils on the same bill was L’Enfant
    that lacks the disciplined and sure understanding of signs that made
    Le Fils an assemblage of the potential and possible. In L’Enfant
    the story is probably overdominated by the physical presence of a
    young child, a symbol rather than a sign. In L’Enfant, the
    Dardennes instead of directing signs that allow the viewer to see and
    evaluate what’s happening allow the film to dissipate into mawkish
    sentimentality and one dimensional story telling. To see both films
    on the same bill (both good prints) was to see the difference between
    the success and failure of the Dardennes and to understand that their
    strengths lie in the registration of signs and ideas related to the
    internal states of mind of their protagonists.

    Adrin Neatrour 14 Aug 06

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Manderlay – Lars von Trier – Denmark 2005 Bryce Howard

    Wobbly camera

    The opening sequence comprised of digitally mastered shots plots the course of a small convoy of cars as it crosses a schematic political map of the USA, out of Texas and into the South. This convoy comes to a halt in the blackness of von Trier’s theatrically contrived studio space which contains the iconically and ironically named cotton plantation of Manderlay. As in the house of the same name in Hitchcock’s Rebecca, it is the past that permeates and controls the present of this eponymous foundation.

    Manderlay – Lars von Trier – Denmark
    2005 Bryce Howard

    Viewed: 6 03 06 Cine Centre
    Shaftsbury Avenue London: afternoon screening, ticket price £6-50

    Wobbly camera

    The opening sequence comprised of
    digitally mastered shots plots the course of a small convoy of cars
    as it crosses a schematic political map of the USA, out of Texas and
    into the South. This convoy comes to a halt in the blackness of von
    Trier’s theatrically contrived studio space which contains the
    iconically and ironically named cotton plantation of Manderlay. As
    in the house of the same name in Hitchcock’s Rebecca, it is the
    past that permeates and controls the present of this eponymous
    foundation.

    Lars von Trier(LvT) picks up Manderlay
    where Dogville left off. It’s still the Depression. It’s still
    the same characters in the limousines. But it is not Nicole Kidman
    who steps out at Manderlay but rather Bryce Dallas Howard. BDH now
    plays the role of Grace, naïve torch carrier for the white
    liberal conscience and the core values of rationality. Grace
    arrested by the spectacle of the public flogging of a black slave,
    decides to stay to impose on these people a new order for living.

    For all its theatric devices, Dogville
    worked as film. The inherent tendency of melodrama to break up and
    degenerate into a soap opera parody of a self referential world was
    checked by LvT’s bold invention and the caliber of the players.
    The decision to use a bare stage with minimalist sets stripped of any
    props that did not have a function, intensified the affect of the
    actors. Seen against and pressed out of the encompassing and
    encircling off stage darkness their presence was magnified; whilst at
    the same time the ideas that they represented were proportional to
    the mechanics of setting: Grace wants shelter; Grace wants work;
    Grace wants to escape; Grace wants vengeance. These core
    propositions in the script were realisable within the embrace of the
    sparse sets. The tension between individual desire and the
    circuitry of the collective machine was tested amplified and resolved
    as drama. The relevance of individual desire and collective
    responsibility to wider philosophical ideas was implicit rather than
    explicit. The wider political and social implications of Dogville
    were subtext not text. The dynamics of the scripting, the
    intelligence of both Kidman’s playing of her lead role and the
    supportive ensemble playing, were elements drawn together by long
    hand held camera takes, producing a film that delivered a strong
    dramatic statement to serve a moral vision.

    Manderlay in contrast fails to convince
    me that it is any thing more than a series of contrivances. The
    initial situation is a contrivance: Manderlay is presented as a
    plantation that some 70 years after abolition is still practicing
    outright slavery. The role of Grace as the kick-ass feminist reformer
    and the roles of the blacks as reluctant followers of the democratic
    path all follow from a script that seems to have been contrived as a
    heavy handed allegory on the dangers of enforcing compliance with a
    one dimensional definition of freedom. An allegory that fits the
    contemporary events in Iraq better than the situation of blacks in
    the US today. Grace wants the practice of democracy; Grace wants the
    practice of equal opportunities; Grace was social discrimination
    banned. Grace gets her way because she can enforce it by using her
    with superior force.

    Like those seventeenth and eighteenth
    century dramas which had persona named for their character traits
    such a Coward, Rascal, Cheat, Hope etc, Manderlay’s characters are
    intentionally overdetermined by their inventor and not permitted
    behavioral deviations. LvT creates a mythic universe constrained in
    time and space by his sets but the filmic language he uses doesn’t
    serve to develop his mythic allegoric form, it works against it. His
    camera, set to an agitated drifting autofocus, constantly moving
    ducking diving bobbing weaving, deconstructs the mythic form. And in
    losing its mythic form the construct loses its tension; the film
    becomes a set of demands on the actors that they perform for the
    camera, that they go through the motions of playing their parts. The
    script instead of being a living thing dies in the camera and the
    film becomes an apparatus for transporting the actors from the
    beginning to the end of the script. A mechanical device.

    This mechanicality is highlighted by
    the ritualised humiliating fuck that BDH has to bend into with the
    Cunning Black. As part of his antiromantic Hollywood crusade
    LvTs lead actresses usually have to get a bad fuck. In
    Dogville the tensions surrounding and permeating the space occupied
    by Kidman through the camera, make the bad fuck work. It feels part
    of the escalation of events in Dogville. In Manderley the bad
    fuck is a deadly scripted device and mediated by what looks
    increasingly like clumsy and cack handed camera work on the part of
    LvT. The agitated restless hand held camera work makes Manderlay
    feel more like soap opera than melodrama. And whereas myth can be
    played melodramatically it doesn’t sit easily with soap form. And
    the drift towards soap is compounded by the performance of BDH who
    pouts beautifully in many and different ways and occasionally smiles
    but has little by way of nuance to offer. This may have been LvT’s
    reason for casting her(she has the haircut) as the architypic modern
    organised female lead, but as played and shot she becomes
    increasingly detached from the process of the film.

    One questionable aspect of Dogville was
    the use of the Voice Over as a character/narrator. This Voice,
    played by John Hurt was written by LvT as a privileged text, privy to
    the inner states of mind of some of the players and able to see
    clearly what was happening and make succinct comments on the current
    situation in the film. This Voice, rounded to inform us of its
    intelligence and carefully modulated to insinuate itself into our
    good graces, was the device that set up the action. At times it
    threatened to subsume the action but in Dogville LvT avoided the
    danger of the Voice becoming overbearing. If Hurt’s Voice was
    occasionally overused in Dogville, in Manderlay the device becomes
    increasingly irksome and finally plasters over all the cracks in the
    film with a unitary layer of explanation. Where in Dogville the
    voice fills in, in Manderlay it fills out explains, rounds and signs
    off. Its not a layer, its a complete surface that exerts over the
    material an expressive supremacy.

    Manderlay is a film that spins out of
    control. The constituent parts fail to interrelate or
    interpenetrate. Camera work acting scripting and mise en scene each
    pursue their own logic. But behind the facade of the film their
    lies the intensity of Lars von Trier. Manderlay for all its
    imperfections is intent that filmic expression should have a moral
    intent. And Manderlay is always a film made with intelligence and
    for this alone it is all the more worth seeing than most of the stuff
    on the screen at the moment.

    adrin neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Volver – Pedro Almodovar – Spain 2006 Penelope Cruz

    Witchy business

    The opening shot of Volver (v. to return) tracks through the graveyard of the village where the women are washing and cleaning the graves of their loved ones: women’s work with a menacing undertone carrying the tacit idea of woman’s implication in the process of death – especially the demise of the male. Like a lot of Almodovar’s filmic images it promises to open up for us a cinematic world. As in most of his films, the occasional visual flair displayed by Almodovar in Volver leads only to hopes dashed, an experience that by the end of the film, amounts to no more than substandard TV visual fare fleshed out with female leads posing as iconic feminists.

    Volver – Pedro Almodovar – Spain 2006
    Penelope Cruz

    Viewed Tyneside Cinema – 17 09 06
    Ticket price £6-20

    Witchy business

    The opening shot of Volver (v. to
    return) tracks through the graveyard of the village where the women
    are washing and cleaning the graves of their loved ones: women’s
    work with a menacing undertone carrying the tacit idea of woman’s
    implication in the process of death – especially the demise of the
    male. Like a lot of Almodovar’s filmic images it promises to open
    up for us a cinematic world. As in most of his films, the occasional
    visual flair displayed by Almodovar in Volver leads only to hopes
    dashed, an experience that by the end of the film, amounts to no
    more than substandard TV visual fare fleshed out with female leads
    posing as iconic feminists. Volver is a witchy film whose scenario,
    laboriously constructed out of tired old plot ideas, finally
    predicates the witchy world as the consequence of an originary primal
    act: incest. Incest of father on the daughter. The which(sic), in
    terms of the nuclear family, is a double betrayal of the model
    female: the wife’s love and trust and daughter’s innocence. The
    disturbance of ‘nature’ by the male’s unnatural acts, leads not
    as in the Arthurian legend to myth but to soap opera.

    In Volver the cemetery scene is
    simply a device – it has no other function than to introduce a
    situation rather than an idea. It is a scripted a plaster and wood
    contrivance that exists to introduce us to Raimunda (Penelope Cruz)
    and to the world of suburban witchery that she personifies. In
    Almodovar’s kitsch suburban world the women outlive the men and the
    men are either mad bad or false. But this world with its sisterly
    collusion, its knowing looks, its explosive kissing (the soundtrack’s
    tricksy amplification highlights the suck-smack sound of the lips as
    the women kiss each other) its situational humour, is a Disneyesque
    creation. Volver is a flat two dimensional cartoon, where the
    characters emit the fake intensity of Donald Duck as they go through
    the motions of their witchy affective parody.

    At the centre of Volver’s action is
    Raimunda(Penelope Cruz). Raimunda is voluptuous acarnal witch.
    With her permanently glowing eyes framed with black liner she looks
    like an escapee from the Adamms family house. The plot, such as it
    is, follows Raimunda as she, with the help of her coven, takes on and
    surmounts the challenges of murder, men, low income and family
    problems. The script with its interweaving dramatic lines is
    structured like a soap opera. All the tired plotting devices of this
    format are brought into play: we have a murder, we have disclosure of
    a false father, death, the return of a character thought to be
    dead(at the core of the film is the return of Raimunda’s mother –
    not dead but hiding). The situations the secret return of
    themother, a new business enterprise, the disposal of the body – all
    these are given the comedic treatment by virtue of their dissonance
    with domestic routine. The script with its intertwined strips of
    action, gives license to the actresses, Penelope Cruz in particular,
    to emote pose and witch in different situations as doors open and
    close with mechanical regularity to divide and partition the scenes.

    The mechanality of the plot line is
    matched by the camera work which in slavish response to the banality
    of the action laboriously tracks and pans in order to find any excuse
    for movement. Keep it moving said the director. The laborious
    camera movement underscores the predictibility of the script. When
    Raimunda returns to her apartment, the camera tracks then pans with
    her car, as she slows down and pulls into in a parking space. We see
    the parking space, we see the moving vehicle we see her park in the
    space: so we know, with know with banal certitude that this space and
    no other is where this movie has destined her to park her car.
    Almodovar seems to believe that in shooting a film he owes it to the
    audience to make everything that is to happen in the film
    predictable, including his shot sequences. For example: on the way
    to the village there is a large wind farm, a huge agglomeration of
    turbines. This cues a meaningful close up of one of the turbines the
    rotation of its sails…symbolic perhaps…. of the circular nature
    of life and death or whatever.

    No less predictible is the script. In
    the sequence leading up to the murder of the false father by his
    daughter: first we see him drunk; then we see (point of view of the
    ‘father’ a pan down)his look at his daughter’s crotch as she
    sits open legged in front of him in pink tights; then we see him
    sneaking past her room looking at her titties whilst she is
    undressing; finally, in one take, we see him refused sex by Raimunda
    and then hear his grunts and cock pumping as he masturbates.
    Almadovar doesn’t engage in anticipatory hints he telegraphs his
    intentions. The consequence of the dead and heavy uninspired camera
    work and the lumbering clumsy script is that Volver has no tension.
    It feels like a dead film: in composition, scenario and in
    characters.

    Volver as movie without tension offers
    little more that an occasion to create an excuse for a contemporary
    Spanish witchy world. Like musicals that exist only as an excuse
    for the star to go through a series of numbers, its OK if you like
    the star and the music. Usually these vehicles have few cinematic
    qualities. As a film maker Almodovar has made films which are by and
    large stylistic vehicles for conveying a certain brand of post
    feminist chuzpah. Their filmic quality depends on the engaging
    qualities of his female leads and their encapsulation of the outer
    form of feminist attitudes without the substance.

    adrin neatrour 18 Sept 06

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Effie Briest – Rainer Fassbender – 1974 – Hanna Schygula

    To thine own self be true

    The titles that open the film are burnt in black letters on a white background, a shimmering field that sets the tone for a film that is an optical rendering to spirit what is spirit’s, to all that which is not of the flesh. And the eponymous subject of Effie Briest is not of the flesh.

    Effie Briest – Rainer Fassbender – 1974
    – Hanna Schygula

    Viewed ICA London 6 May06 Ticket
    price – £6-50

    Retrocrit

    To thine own self be true

    The titles that open the film are burnt
    in black letters on a white background, a shimmering field that sets
    the tone for a film that is an optical rendering to spirit what is
    spirit’s, to all that which is not of the flesh. And the
    eponymous subject of Effie Briest is not of the flesh. She is a
    being totally vulnerable to the machinations of the world. The film
    is structured as a series of shots that fade to white, a slow pulsing
    surrendering of form to the intensity of pure light. There are fades
    to black and there are straight cuts, but the dominant visual
    experience of the film consists of long takes with Effie B as central
    subject, that terminate with a slow burning of the image to white.

    These rhythmic burnt in transitions
    call in a realm governed by an idea about the non-corporeality of
    life. Life without body. Life that is a becoming spirit. All
    about Effie the social machines with whom she is trapped in space
    engage in the machinations that will lead to her death. She alone is
    unaware of the plot, alive in the clutches of convention she is
    consumed. Effie has neither defenses nor understanding to withstand
    the forces that destroy her. She can only be true to her nature.
    And it is this only being true to her nature that is the essence of
    the film, a burning into celluloid that makes of Effie B an imprint
    of purity a spirit that is never broken. In that Effie is only true
    to herself she is not a victim any more than Jeanne d’Arc. Both
    are unbroken heroines. However mistreated however punished for being
    what she is, Effie remains true to her nature.

    Through each transition each event that
    she transcends, she becomes more spirit so that in the end only death
    can claim her. This is not a victim film. Had Effie changed to
    protect herself or to turn to attack those who would harm her then
    essentially she would have become victim – a woman forced to change
    her nature, to be untrue to herself, in order to survive in the world
    of social machines. In short she would be reacting to convention, but
    in reacting would inevitably in herself set in train correspondent
    conventions.

    From the opening shot of the house
    exterior which contains the world of Effie’s childhood, to her
    death, Fassbender creates an optical world which is a literal mirror
    for the constancy and intensity of light. Mirrors dominate the mis
    en scene and shot set ups to the extent that we become lost in the
    competing domains of light and uncertain as to which world has been
    exposed to our gaze, the real or the virtual. The mirroring opens
    up different modes of understanding. For instance, the idea of not
    looking directly at Effie, as if the camera were a very well brought
    up entity that knows that it is rude to stare directly at people but
    that it is permissible to look at them obliquely by means of
    reflection. Fascination with Effie is indulged through direct
    indirectness of the mirror. The mirror also works by presenting a
    parallel universe: the real world and the virtual world where things
    are other. Effie’s world not directly accessible but enterable as
    another dimension, a dimension where time moves differently. The
    social machines march and clank through secular clock time getting
    from one place to another, engaging in one machination or another;
    Effie moves through another type of space/time continuum that is of
    her own creation.

    It seems as if at some point in the
    post production that Fassbender may have lost his nerve. Having
    rendered Effie as a vision of constancy of nature, he suddenly,
    perhaps at the last moment, had doubts about the way in which the
    film might be seen. Did he become concerned that Effie B might be
    misunderstood as a chronicle of female victim passivity. Perhaps the
    nascent but ideologically ferocious women’s movement caused him to
    question his motives or even lose his confidence. Consequently he
    became concerned that Effie Briest might be attacked as another
    example of a passive female victim unable to respond to male cultural
    repression. So at the last moment he inserted into his opening
    credits the following long didactic subtitle :

    Effie Briest or many people are aware
    of their own capabilities and needs, yet acquiesce to the prevailing
    system in their thoughts and deeds thereby confirming and reinforcing
    the system.

    In terms of the film that he has
    produced this long subtitle makes no sense. It might conceivably
    refer to a film he originally intended to make out of Theodore
    Fontain’s novel. But it’s nothing to do with film he made.
    Somewhere in the dynamic of: vision, writing, and production, his pen
    his imagination the camera and Hanna Schygula created a film that
    comprises a world of sensibilities beyond action /reaction or the
    logic of dialetics. A film that sets out a space beyond the
    constraining logic of his long sub-title.

    Watching Effie Briest it occurred to me
    that Lars von Trier must have viewed Effie B and and taken some
    notes. In Effie B, Fassbender uses voice over in a consciously
    literary manner(acknowledging the provenance of the material) but
    constructing the dynamic of the voice over so that it becomes as a
    separate track in the film – having a life and logic of its own. The
    nature of the Voice, which is probably Fontain’s writing, is
    Dickensian and judicious in manner but not modulation. Through
    different filmic modes, action shots with and without dialogue, it
    interpelates, calling attention to some of the different planes that
    are in play in the film: Effie’s state of mind and varying
    perspectives, it fills out lacuna in time and space. Although
    literary in origin the voice is filmic in form as it is structured
    into Effie B as a separate entity that has a life in the film
    distinct from the visual and affective components of the film. In
    this the Voice resembles those in Dogville and Mandalay, though
    unlike these two films the Voice in Effie B is never overused or
    overdetermining of the action.

    Adrin Neatrour

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Hiroshima Mon Amour

    Alain Resnais 1959 Fr: script Margaruite Duras: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada

    Viewed 7 May 06 at Curzon Mayfair;
    double Resnais bill; ticket price – £6-50

    One of Resnais’ protagonists is
    French from Nevers, staying at the New Hiroshima Hotel in Hiroshima
    whilst working as an actress making a movie about peace; the other is
    an architect from Hiroshima having an affair with her whilst his wife
    is away. There is no story as such – only a strip of action. Two
    people come together in this town 13 years after it was blasted by
    the atomic bomb.

    The concern of Resnais (R ) is to probe
    into the mechanisms of deterritorialised memory. The first section
    of the film probes how memory when detached from its locus in the
    personal becomes the basis of new kinds of activities or even
    industries. The Auschwitz industry, the Hiroshima industry,
    industries based on the endless mechanical replay of atrocity
    footage, industries based on a certain assumptions about the nature
    of memory.

    The opening sequence of HMA intercuts
    images of post bomb survivors with images of the couple entwined in
    bed: the interweaving of their arms and legs the sensuous patina of
    their skins providing ironic counterpoint to the burnt blistered
    twisted torsos of the victims. Resnais assembled this opening
    montage to shock. But not to shock with the intention of creating in
    the viewer pornographic retinal excitement. To shock in order to
    provoke us to think. To think about the nature of the victim
    imagery and how it is actually internalised by the watcher. The
    voices of the lovers intoning Duras’ singular script are laid over
    the visuals: she says, today I went to the museum, he replies, there
    is no museum; she says, I’ve seen everything, he replies you’ve
    seen nothing. Image generated consciousness cannot replace memory.
    In actual memory there is some essence that is generically somatic.

    The opening sequence with visuals
    accompanied by a sound world of voices invokes the idea that mostly
    we do not have memory of terrible events; we only have received
    images derived from terrible events. We can respond by saying that
    from those images this was a terrible event. But how we incorporate
    these pictures into our beings or into our psyches is neither
    straight forward rational nor predictable. In the current state of
    an informational world overloaded with images competing to be part of
    our memories, R’s film uses images to question the validity of
    image as a source of derived memory of events. R has grasped the type
    of distortion that takes place when actual images of atrocity are
    exploited for their inherent potential to create a bank of memories
    representative of events for those who did not experience them. The
    intention and rationale of such a bank may be that these image
    derived experiences will act in the future as an atrocity
    prophylactic. In fact the detachment of the images from their
    anchoring in consciousness simply opens the door to manifold
    manipulations and banality. It is a short step to the ‘See it all
    Hiroshima Bus Tour’, and the souvenir shop. Detached from the
    individual minds and psyches of those who suffered such experiences,
    events as museum experiences, offer to the visitor’s gaze a series
    of emotional charges empty of primary signification and open to
    exploitation and manipulation. There is no evidence that individuals
    experiencing emotional arousal in the face of such stimuli connect
    with such stimuli in the prophylactic manner intended. There is no
    evidence that these institutions actually work to prevent further
    outrage.

    By 1959 R has become aware that human
    memory has become subject to new and changed forms of appropriation.
    In a society characterised by control, memory is now something that
    is manufactured by the powerful forces of vested interest and large
    corporations. History becomes a theme park, part of the heritage
    industry. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are tourist destinations which
    people visit. When they visit they are presented with a certain
    account of the past. It is not that these accounts are certain types
    of constructs that is of concern. Everything said is probably true.
    Rather it’s that museum presentations, as public relations
    exercises will be mounted in such a way that certain types of
    questions cannot be asked of the event and that certain kinds of
    contradictions inherent in the events will be excised. The
    attraction will concentrate on exhibits arranged in a simple and
    emotionally charged form. They claim to promote understanding, but
    will guilefully suggest a single reading of the past and present of
    which the atrocity is the link. A visit to a tourist atrocity
    attraction will usually provide only an emotional account of an
    event; it will not address simple and real questions of why. Why
    questions don’t have easy answers, require context and lines of
    enquiry. Tourists demand an experience and in response to this
    demand they are given images that overwhelm and flatten leaving them
    emotionally drained and either oversensitised or insensate. Images
    manipulate us, use us and refer only to themselves. Suffering can
    only be suffering; death can only be death. Why? is too
    uncomfortable as a question and draws us into examination of
    ourselves.

    In the age of mass communication memory
    is now a battleground. What dictates what we remember how we
    remember and why we remember? Resnais in Hiroshima Mon Amour is
    asking the questions and responding by pointing to the difference
    between human personal memory and the manufactured.

    The second strand in the film develops
    the obverse story of the woman, opening out into the her remembered
    experience in Nevers as an ajudged wartime collaborator who is
    ritually humiliated and punished for loving a German soldier. Again
    we have to refer to memory and its linkage to the archive footage.
    We have all seen the footage of the Liberation of France in’44. If
    we haven’t it’s of HMA. At the core of this footage, after the
    tiumphant parade of the GI’s through the cheering crowds, comes the
    next bit of action: the moment of calling the guilty to account. And
    at this point in the archive memory movie we always see the fury of
    the woman as takes they take their revenge on sex. It’s like a
    ritualised response which has its roots in very early primitive
    European culture, the cult of the sacrifice of the young virgins –
    Iphigenia. The French vented their fury on the young girls who
    fucked the Bosch instead of fighting them. They are caste down by
    the female avenging furies, they are beaten, have their heads shaved
    and their brats taken from them. In the movies the presentation of
    righteous indignation complete with gloating male commentary tells
    the story and underlines its moral. There is no place for personal
    memory. And those who might have personal memory – of a young German
    boy – have no right to such memories. They only have a right to see
    themselves in the image of their shame. As sinners punished they see
    their role played out over and over again in the newsreel. The
    actress with her Japanese lover, the other enemy, calls up for him
    her personal memories in defiance of the images that control her
    past. This strand of the film with her personal memory actualised in
    flashbacks that are melodramatically realised, is less taut than the
    Hiroshima thread but critical to completing the thesis of R’s film.

    From his experience in making
    documentary films, R realised that we were entering a completely new
    era in the relationship between individuals and the projected images
    amongst which they lived and believed. Images purporting to be
    actual were both defining of events and defining of the people caught
    up in those events.

    The young woman has a collective
    memory of an event of which she as a young woman played a part. Her
    situation is that although she has images that are personal they do
    not reconcile with what happened to her. Memory cannot connect with
    event. She herself is deterritorialised from Nevers, alienated from
    herself as a child. This strand of HMA feels less at ease with
    itself than the Hiroshima strand because R the melodramatic nature of
    the images of the forbidden lovers sits less happily with the formal
    concerns of the film, and it is during these sequences that the film
    seems to waver in intensity. But for the film to be complete the two
    sides of the coin of memory need to be addressed. As the
    generalised somatic memory is distorted by its own images so personal
    memory with its own images can be distorted and twisted by the
    general.

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

  • Nashville Robert Altman 1975 USA

    I had forgotten what a terrific assemblage Nashville comprises. A series of interfolded action strips and situations, and vignettes all encapsulated within the idea of documenting American society in the throws of undergoing the transformations that were visible in the 1970’s but are now in the 21st century, virtually complete. So we see in Nashville a society which is being taken over by disembodied entities. A society being colonised by political parties and large corporations and the social interests that they front. A society in which personal values are dying and replaced by amoral greed and materialism disguised as fake sentimentality. . A society in which people no longer represented by themselves but images of themselves. A society in which the people no longer exist.

    Nashville Robert Altman 1975 USA :
    script: Jane Tewkesbury: cast: Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Shelly
    Duvalle , Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin,

    Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre 26 7 06
    ticket price £6-00

    Voices of the Disembodied…

    I had forgotten what a terrific
    assemblage Nashville comprises. A series of interfolded action
    strips and situations, and vignettes all encapsulated within the idea
    of documenting American society in the throws of undergoing the
    transformations that were visible in the 1970’s but are now in the
    21st century, virtually complete. So we see in Nashville
    a society which is being taken over by disembodied entities. A
    society being colonised by political parties and large corporations
    and the social interests that they front. A society in which
    personal values are dying and replaced by amoral greed and
    materialism disguised as fake sentimentality. . A society in which
    people no longer represented by themselves but images of themselves.
    A society in which the people no longer exist.

    Giles Deleuze notes, “ ….that if
    there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis…the
    people are missing.”* Epic American cinema in the tradition of
    Ford Capra or Vidor testifies to the existence of a people, in
    hardships as well as in ways of recovering and rediscovering
    themselves. In Nashville, the home of the C and W music a form which
    had its roots in the folk traditions of the Appalachian country
    regions, whose initial articulation and expression stemmed from these
    roots, the people as a dynamic are constrained and marginalised into
    a passive fulfillment of desire by the mechanisms of power. Deleuze
    continues, “…if the people are missing, there is no longer
    consciousness evolution or revolution, it is the scheme of reversal
    which in itself becomes impossible.” Nashville is an epic film
    exposing the social mechanisms that have lead to the disappearance of
    the people and the appearance of the consumer. . A society in which
    people no longer represent themselves but are represented by images
    of themselves.

    At the heart of the film, from the
    beginning of the first sequence proper at the airport, (There is an
    opening title sequence during which the BBC reporter in Nashville
    visits the recording studio where Karen Black and Ned Beatty are both
    cutting records) we hear the voice of a disembodied political message
    from the truck mounted loud speaker calling on the people to vote for
    the Replacement Party. The truck mounted loudspeaker with its
    political message is a constant presence folded into each segment of
    the film as a subliminal message, bland yet insistent calling on the
    people who are always absent in this voided city, to vote for change
    by going back to a past, a mythic past that is the invention of the
    advertising industry and public relations industry. Although of
    course the Replacement Party message, subliminally inserted into the
    body of the film eventually leads us to Altman’s kitsch denoument
    of assassination, its real function seems to be to say that
    underlying all aspects of life in the USA today is a disembodied
    mechanical political imperative: the reality of who owns America and
    the interests of greed and accumulation that they represent. With
    this disembodied and remote reiterated political message continually
    issuing from the sound system, it is difficult to hear and understand
    what is being said. There seems to be a meta message that is
    actually in play that says simply that things are and will be OK.
    The political voices, the corporate voices use words in a particular
    way. They are common words yet like ivy they twist themselves round
    commonplace ideas and notions and strangle the life out of them
    through a process of steady banal misrepresentation of meaning. The
    political voice pervades Nashville but no one heeds it. Increasingly
    no one is there.

    In Nashville, Altman documents his cast
    as they parade through various locations: airport, car crash,
    hospital, diners, clubs, home, church, hotels, bed, performance,
    political rally. Often these situations comprise sequences that are
    captured in one long choreographed shot. As Altman moves the players
    through these situations it is clear that some people belong to the
    past and that some belong or are conditioned for the future. The
    casualties the old man whose wife is dying, Sue Ellen the Madonna
    like Country star have decency and a direct truthfulness of being
    that condemns them to be victims of the processes of the times. For
    the rest some survive with the necessary accommodations but it is the
    representatives of the disembodied who materially thrive, those whose
    future it is to be ciphers of the image, whether their own or of a
    large corporate body.

    The final act of Nashville is pure
    comedy. As Sue Ellen is led away bleeding to death, the massed black
    choirs assembled for the rally sing the final song of the film.

    “You tell me I ain’t free: I
    don’t care, I don’t care…”

    This refrain is sung over and over
    again until the words becoem totally meaningless in their repetition.
    This is the final political message delivered by Altman, the blacks
    fronted by a trashy white wananbee sing out the message the real
    message of the black revolution, that they are disappearing – along
    with everyone else in the USA, and that they don’t care.

    Adrin Neatrour 11 Au8 06

    * Giles Deleauze – Cinema 2 pp216
    University of Minnesota Press

    adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk