Daily Archives: Saturday, December 30, 2006

Slide to porn
The contemporary Western action thriller is on a dead end trip with nowhere to go other than towards the pornography of violence and sex. It’s a clapped out genre trapped in a logical cul de sac of is own making. The genre has nothing to say; it has nothing to show other than a series of gestural posturing; it has nothing to reveal. All that is left to the genre at this stunted stage of its expressive cycle is the slide down the incline of images of sex and violence(in the end the two become culturally interchangeable and indistinguishable). These images obey the laws of decreasing returns. Consequently directors of productions of this type (like those of hardcore pornography) are locked into a struggle against the constant devaluation of shock value, and scriptwriters must work hard to devise and invent ever new variations and graphic representations of sex and pain. They say it’s what we want. The Last King of Scotland – Kevin MacDonald – USA/UK 2006: Forest Whitaker, James McAvoy
Viewed: Tyneside Cinema at Gateshead Town Hall; free Bafta Preview screening

Slide to porn
The contemporary Western action thriller is on a dead end trip with nowhere to go other than towards the pornography of violence and sex.  It’s a clapped out genre trapped in a logical cul de sac of is own making.  The genre has nothing to say; it has nothing to show other than a series of  gestural posturing; it has nothing to reveal.  All that is left to the genre at this stunted stage of its expressive cycle is the slide down the incline of images of sex and violence(in the end the two become culturally interchangeable and indistinguishable).  These images obey the laws of decreasing returns. Consequently directors of productions of this type (like those of hardcore pornography) are locked into a struggle against the constant devaluation of shock value, and scriptwriters must work hard to devise and invent ever new variations and graphic representations of sex and pain.  They say it’s what we want.   

LKS is a case in point. You can film against exotic locations, such as Uganda; you can set the action background against a period of historical notoriety such as Amin’s dictatorship; but ultimately LKS is on a journey whose only purpose is to initiate a slide down to the inevitable images intended to gratify a retinal lust for blood.  LKS from its first frame seems intent on drawing me towards  two images:  Kay Amin dead and naked on a slab legs spread wide so I can see the butchered meat that once was her  sex.  Idi Amin says to Nick: “ We found her clitoris halfway down her throat – you don’t expect that…” a piece of dialogue introduced just in case I don’t get it.  Second image – Nick (protagonist) – gets the meat hook treatment. In Big Close Up,  hooks are inserted into his flesh under his nipples(A Man Called Horse) and attached to rope so that he can be hoisted up and hung from a beam like a carcass.  LKS is revealed as film that is simply an exercise in the delivery of these sexual mutilations/titillations.  These are the points of the delivery, as banal and meaningless as they are central to the impoverished ethos of the film. With these two images Kevin MacDonald underscores the fact that his film has been nowhere and has nowhere to go.    

At the heart of LKS is the role of the camera and the performance of James McAvoy as Nick.  Forest Whitaker plays Idi Amin but this is acting as impersonation.  It is Nick whom the film asks us to watch through the camera instructions of the director, and this is the core of the film’s weakness.   All we do is that we watch Nick.  The camera watches and Nick reacts or doesn’t, depending on the situation.   James McAvoy is  simply an object seen through a lens.  The camera has no other vocabulary other than object fixation and as the film develops this poverty of camera is evidenced in shot repetition and decline in filmic tension as there are not sufficient camera and shooting vocabulary to build the type of meanings that create oppositions.  The film develops into a repetitive flatness of sound and image with none of the psychic foldings that give tension to life.  A film that has as potential theme the idea of an individual trapped through his own conceit in an increasingly terrifying amoral spiral of descent cannot work unless we see what Nick sees; we have to be able to see some events from his point of view in order to weigh his understanding of each act of moral equivilence .  We have to see the change that he sees in each step of his relationship with Amin.    The shooting style that comprises a series of action cuts in the end just delivers a sort of puppet show.

In response to this situation James McAvoy’s performance is in one sense clown like. Nick as a sort of clown in Idi’s circus – except the range of McAvoy’s clown is strictly limited.  McAvoy’s act is a sort of invariant gestural and facial response to all situations presented by the script.   It seems like another instance of actors being turned into simplistic foils of the director or the script using talent to bounce the action through.  When the actor is used as a reflective agent the usual demand on the actors is that they have a sort of default facial set.  Repressed menace, inscrutability and wide eyed innocence are common facial sets employed as monodimensional devices in film.  In LKS McAvoy adopts set features suggesting a sort of jocular Scottish innocence.  Although the ingenuous faciality undergoes a change in function as it moves from being an initial reaction to novelty of place to a frozen response to the gaze of Amin.  a means of controlling expressive leakage.    The limited range of McAvoy’s performance, the stunted vocabulary of the camera work deliver a film in which interest in any ideas quickly atrophies, tensions dies because there are no oppositions either structural or formal.  The audience are left with a film that slides to porn in the mechanistic working out of plot.

LKS is set in Africa but there is no feeling for Africa in the film either as a subjectivity or an objectivity.  Africa is simply a background for a circus, a comic book place filled out with the usual stereotyped characters and images.  There is no sense of otherness, just the presentation of an African dystopia more or less decontextualised from its colonial heritage.   The problem when a location is used simply a backdrop is that contrived situations and contrived characters reinforce negative perceptions and prejudices.  LKS joins a list of films that exploit their locations as a cheap means of both claiming a kind of contrived authenticity(LKS has the almost obligatory period news reel montage near the front of the film as a means of laying claim to political/ humanist concerns) and giving a real feel to the contrived action. However I think that film makers from the Western colonial countries that first exploited Africa for its raw materials and then carved it out into politically and ethnically convenient but disastrous sections of the map, should feel shame at returning there to continue another chapter of exploitation.      
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A deadly interest in film making
There has been a recent interest by Western film makers in looking at Europe’s psychic inheritance in relation to our responsibility for both colonialism and the effects of our retreat from direct colonial rule. The question can be posed as to whether this interest is anything more than superficial, using history as a hook on which to hang the plots of action movies, exploiting exotic backgrounds or notorious events for their dramatic impact. Haneka’s Hidden both in style and narrative form examines the consequences of the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1959. Politics is at the heart of Hidden which is located in Paris as is Le Peron’s more recent Ben Barka movie.I saw Ben Barka get Killed  – Serge Le Peron    Fr /Morrocco/ Sp 2005 Charles Berling 
Tyneside Cinema 5 11 06 ticket £6-20

 A deadly interest in film making
There has been a recent interest by Western film makers in looking at Europe’s psychic inheritance in relation to our responsibility for both colonialism and the effects of our  retreat from direct colonial rule.  The question can be posed as to whether this interest is anything more than superficial, using history as a hook on which to hang the plots of action movies,  exploiting exotic backgrounds or notorious events for their dramatic  impact.  Haneka’s Hidden both in style and narrative form examines the consequences of the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1959.   Politics is at the heart of Hidden which is located in Paris as is Le Peron’s more recent Ben Barka movie.

The opening sequence of le Peron’s film leads to the discovery of the narrator’s corpse lieing on the floor of a house whilst the police conduct a disinterested scene of crime routine.  A full on ‘60’s style jazz score accompanies the next sequence which is a fast paced montage of 50’s archive film political in content which features images of Mao Castro Khruschev and scenes of political protest.  I saw Ben Barka get Killed seems to be setting out its stall with a claim for political relevance, but this grainy montage footage represents the high water mark  of the films commitment to either history or politics.  As the montage moves from one political event to another, from Mao to Africa there are no explanations, no contexts: just images.   For younger watchers the pictures may well mean very little.  But the scratchy archival quality of the film clips and the situations that they record signifies protestation in general against the interests of the West.  The archive montage works as a sort of posturing of the films political pretensions, a sequence in a film that never develops into anything more than a piece of stylised political posing.   Like a haircut.

Ben Barka,  about whom the movie’s assassination plot revolves, is not explained in any meaningful way.  What did Ben Barka stand for?  What interests ranged against him?  The film is never clear on these basic underlying details.  Instead Ben Barka is simply represented as a good man.   Those who opposed him were bad men,.  Ben Barka is a man unsullied by the corruption of the powerful forces which oppose him.    Without adequate context Ben Barka slips away as a real person and becomes a summation of idealistic yearnings.   But as Ben Barka slides into myth, it is clear that the film is not about politics it is about attitudes, a stylistic gloss on the early sixties that uses a political disappearance to justify a gangster movie.   I saw Ben Barka get Killed (ISBBGK) is a mannered stylistic exercise whose use of politics is to provide a superficial retro glam background to what is a classy looking thiller….a thriller that works on its own terms. But apparently has an allegorical subtext.

Whilst ISBBGK doesn’t work as a film with political pretensions it does encode a moral allegory about the nature of film making.  In the plot, narrated by the dead main protagonist , the film producer, both he and his subject – Ben Barka – end up dead, both murdered by a notional film that is never made.  The film’s plot relates how a small time crook – with artistic friends – is set up as a patsy film producer in order to lure Ben Barka to Paris so that he can be murdered by his enemies.  Interestingly the structure of the plot, and its use of the idea of film as a lure,  opens up the field of ethical dimensions that underlie much documentary film making.  Ethical and moral considerations that rarely see light.  Many documentary films are the result of a  collusive relationship between the makers and their subjects.  The film makers want to make their films.  That’s what they do; they have agendas and commit resources to their projects.  They also desire to make films that arouse interest that have strong characters and outstanding characteristics.  To achieve their production criteria they endeavour to take as much control as possible over the material they shoot; so that only they the film makers can decide its final form.  Often this process leads to the film makers practicing a series of deceptions on their subjects.  Deceptions can be more or less malign or benign but their point is to enhance the film by maximising the power of the producer.  Subjects too have their own agendas.  If they have the resources either in wit and intelligence or power and wealth, they can sometimes succeed in making their story into the film’s story.  To accomplish this they also have to engage in the practice of deception, deception of the film makers.  But whichever way the balance of power lies in the movie, many documentary films are the product of tacit understandings, of the desires in play, between the two parties involved during the making of the film.  And of course these tacit understandings can return to haunt both parties.  In the case of the Ben Barka movie the tacit understandings lead to the deaths of both the protagonists.

As a metatextual statement, ISBBGK works much better a moral comment on the nature of film making than it does as a political statement.  This however does seem to be an oblique reading of the movie.  Perhaps if Le Peron had brought this aspect a little further to the fore, he might have made a clearer political statement within the stylistic parameters that he wished to work.  Film can be a deadly enterprise for all parties.
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk