Monthly Archives: May 2021

Nomadland                  Chloe Zhao (2020; USA) Frances McDermand, David Strathairn, Linda May

Viewed: Everyman Cinema Newcastle 21 May 2021; ticket: £13:50 (with booking fee)

Woodstock generation finale

Nomadland feels as if it would have better realised as a documentary. Apparently many of the parts were played by people living mobile life styles, and Frances McDermand, as Fern, plays a role that is often close to being a stand in reporter / interviewer. But this hybrid form doesn’t cut into this subject area in the same way as a piece of actual reportage. Without the dramatic bookending of the film around Fern there would be more space for seeing and hearing the lost and hidden voices of the American dream.

Lee Issac Chung’s recently released Disneyesque celebration of the America, Minari, tells what happens when you go embrace the Dream full on: you overcome all obstacles. Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland tells what it’s like when you wake up from ‘the dream’: when the factory goes bust, when they repossess the farm or debts take your house. Then you are alone. The stark picture in Nomadland is America as a society of isolated individuation. In this situation many choose to climb into their cars or vans or mobile homes and roam the country, finding work and solace, disappearing in the vastness of the continent. Chloe Zhao shows the various communal initiatives, the attempts at forming collectivities out of this diverse crew, but more compelling are the images and stories that emphasise people’s aloneness. No surprise: this is a culture that has created the economic and social conditions where communities – economic – social – local – can no longer survive the onslaught of monetising capitalism. Only money has value, this is the logic of the global economy as it folds over the lives of working people.

Chloe Zhao’s scenario works best as it documents the casual work cycle of road existence and probes the psychic base upon which people weave their present reality. Nomadland opens with the closure of the Gyproc plant that pushes Fern out of the village of Empire onto the conveyor belt world of temp jobs: Amazon, theme parks, fast food outlets, where the rule is: use your body and leave your mind behind. ‘Papa Bob’ a kind of spokesman for the Nomads, talks in an early section of the film about the freedom endemic in being a American nomad. But Fern and those like her although not anchored in the financial system’s mortgage racket, they are still totally dependent on the macjob economy to pay fuel repair bills and parking/overstay fees.   They may not be anchored but as the script shows, they are tethered to the system: Fern needs money: gas, repair work, food and overnights.

The film starts in a strong suit: the reality of surviving on the margins of a fractured and broken state. But Chloe Zhao’s scenario at a point about half way through the film slips into image fascination. ‘Nomadland’ starts to look like another Disney Production, the screen filling out with chocolate box pictures of National Geographic America. We are shown tourist board images of rock mountain river gorge and desert. Compounding this imagery we have Frances McDermand plonked in the middle of a couple of these images, dancing and bathing, as if selling soap or freedom bras. Image dissonance: a message that somehow in adopting these advertising tropes and stereotypical poses, Fern is liberated.

As the film winds to conclusion it descends into sentimentality and the dishonesty that is surely part of the price it Chloe Zhao pays for choosing the dramatic rather than the documentary form. Drama, in particular Hollywood’s version, seems to demand (not all directors yield to this demand) some sort of emotional closure. The route taken by Chloe Zhao accedes to this demand, which is encapsulated by ‘Papa Bob’s’ encomium as he talks to Fern, denying the finality of endings: “We don’t die, we don’t say goodbye, we just say: “See you down the road!”.

James Baldwin makes a telling observation in relation to the Sherriff’s last words to Mr Tibbs in ‘The Heat of the Night’. The Southern white Sherriff who has at one point come close to lynching Mr Tibbs, the black detective, finally says goodby to him on the station platform with the words: “You take good care of yourself, you hear?” Hollywood loves to end a movie with a metaphorical ‘kiss’ meaning a faked reconciliatory gesture that makes everything all right. “ See you down the road!”

As the film descends into its Disneyesque ending, it becomes dull, devoid of the life and reality that sustains the opening sections. I also became more aware of the incongruity of the drone footage that Chloe Zhao mandates in her shooting script. Drone footage can be problematic. The ‘role of the camera’ in a film shoot can take on many guises, from ‘Point of View’, ‘privileged observer’, ‘analogous protagonist’ often cutting between these ‘persona’ as well as incorporating many other types of shot. There’s no rules. But drone shots usually have a suprahuman quality that can make them problematic as to what they represent and how they are incorporated into the structure of the story. Used as high shots, looking down on a situation or scene, they have an omniscient, God like quality that can take them outside the scenario. Used at ground level drone shots often have a detached quality that can take them outside the subject’s domain: they have an non-human quality. Used creatively drone shots reveal something to the audience that could not be seen by other means. They are a resource for filmic communication. Used as shots to fill a hole in the scenario, or as a piece of visual novelty instead of a tracking shot, used repetitively without a creative understanding of what they are contributing, drone shots are a device that can figuratively reveal the lack of any ethos guiding a film.

‘Nomadland’ is built upon the performance of Frances McDermand as a representative of a ‘type’, a woman dumped by society. ‘Nomadland’ is grounded in people and their experience of life. To resort, with increasing frequency to drone shots as a tracking device, detaches the image from its grounding within the human domain. The camera instead of being an observer or a companion to Fern’s life, becomes an ethereal detached stalker. But who’s the stalker? I don’t think Chloe Zhao knows but her drone camera work contains within itself a contradictory element: it’s smooth alien like motion, it’s stealth in following behind Fern is analogous to the very forces that are destroying her: the indifferent relentless smooth anonymous powers of banks and government that track and prey on the powerless. The camera as a drone becomes de facto an emanation of deterritorialised powers that are stalking America.

In one cameo we see Fern having a shit in her van. The imperative to both to shoot and include this shot in the film, would seem to derive from a commitment to a pedantic literalist realism. Of course the actual problem is not shitting in cramped confines. The problem is how/where to get rid of your shit once it’s in the bucket. Somehow the failure to grasp this basic issue sums up Chloe Zhao’s movie. For all its intentions Nomadland doesn’t get that it’s not about the shit, it’s the question behind the question, how you get rid of the shit.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beware a Holy Whore (Warnung vor einer heilige Nutte) R W Fassbinder (1971; FDR) Lou Castel, Hanna Schygulla, Eddie Constantine, R W Fassbinder.

viewed: BFI streaming 16 May 2021

An echo of Auschwitz

Fassbinder’s movie, ‘Beware a Holy Whore (BHW)’ was made in a year of frenzied film making. In 1971 five movies are credited to Fassbinder as writer/director, plus he had acting roles in four of them. And 1970 and 1972 were as busy as 1971. This is a director with something to say, but as in other films I’ve seen of his, his way of speaking is usually indirect. Contemporary film making is dominated by messaging movies, identity affirmation movies. They’re films targeted at audiences primed to hear particular messages or films designed to manipulate emotions in particular directions. Fassbinder doesn’t engage with this type of affirmationist intention.

Fassbinder’s films are grounded in that which is raw in human nature. Underneath the surface, whosoever you may be, whoever you are, whatever your sexuality, whatever your political/social beliefs, underneath are the raw drives of human nature. Bourgeois society, in particular German post war society, with its imperative need to cover up the monstrosities of the Fascist years, was a carefully manicured façade. An amnesiac society on autodrive contrived and designed if possible, to forget or at least cover up truth and replace it with a anodyne fantasial lie.  

Situation: Fassbinder often takes situations as the starting point for his scripts. Situations have a theatrical pedigree as places of beginnings where the writer can nurse the developmental vectors of ideas, giving the audience a route to follow into the scenario enabling the audience to start to think about things. In this Fassbinder carries within his scripts the dialectics of theatre of this time: Pinter, Durrenmatt, Sartre, Jellico . Create situations and let the psycho-social dynamic of the age play out. Allow the audience to assimilate the engine of the design and put their own readings on the material.

Fassbinder’s situation in ‘BHW’ is a film production, centred around the relations between the people involved in making a film on location in Spain. It is mostly set in the hotel where the caste and crew are holed up for the duration of the shoot. In many of Fassbinder’s films the presence of a Phantom Fuhrer seems integral to the manner in which he develops his scenarios. The old Diktator blew his brains out in the bunker of the Reich’s Chancellery. But for Fassbinder his spirit lives on in Germany, absorbing and permeating the social matrix. ‘BHW’ is divided in two parts: like the history of Germany from 1919 to 1945.   In the first section the film crew indulge in all manner of sybaritic indulgences, sensual, sexual, interpersonal, alcoholic. The film opens with a title card that reads: Pride comes before a Fall.   The motley crew are seen hanging around waiting for the director to turn up. They are aimless pursuing their own personal desire and need. The producer, Sasha (played by R W F) his ear screwed onto his phone tries to raise money for the enterprise. He keeps some sort of discipline but is mostly ineffectual. We are watching in analogy, a play out of the Weimar years, 1919 -1933.

But then the big Director Arrives.  Suddenly it’s 30^th January 1933: Hitler becomes Reich’s Chancellor. The time of dissolution and sybaritic play is gone. Everything changes, the phantom Fuhrer is come and filming must commence. And at once his acts of violence, his vicious assaults on his wife to be rid of her, and his hysterical energy become the focus of the scenario.   His will is centre stage. The Pride of the Crew is ‘fallen’; they are beholden to the one man. Even if he is a maniac, bent on the destruction of the world. The crew and caste adapt to the ways of the director, becoming by the the way casually racist, regarding the Spanish as non German speaking Untermensch. And the strange morbid drive of the director unravels as he reveals conceptual outlines of his film: Murder – you have to understand what a murder really means as a physical act – it is a film against the brutality of the state, what else would you make films about? – the title of the film is ‘Patria and Death.’

At last we move into: ‘Real Film Making’.

Fassbinder ends ‘BHW’ with a referential quote from Thomas Mann: “I am weary to death of depicting human nature without partaking of human nature.”   In ‘BHW’ Fassbinder delivers human nature on picture and on sound. Mordantly underplaying the film are the Songs of Leonard Cohen. Mostly drawn from the eponymous 1968 album and seemingly edited randomly onto the sound track (if there was a sequential logic I didn’t get it), Cohen classics such as: Sisters of Mercy, So Long Marian, Suzanne, Master Song. It was probably important to Fassbinder that Cohen was a Jewish singer/songwriter. It’s an essential part of Fassbinder’s filmic counterpoising to use the Cohen tracks, with their intense lyrical humanism, to sardonically, ironically, offset the brutality of the represented Germanic Hitler culture. The tender side of human nature smashed up by brutality.  The German and Jew playing out an old story. Although the Cohen tracks are diegetic, often selected by the caste and crew from the hotel lounge juke box, no one ever looks like they are listening to the music. Perhaps that is also something of Fassbinder’s insight: in Germany and by extension fascist capitalism: they play the music but they don’t listen to it.

The effect of Fassbinder’s opposition of image and sound, German and Jew, in ‘BHW’ is disturbing even painful. I found it difficult to hold the two together. In the face of the action I wanted to disattend the powerful songs of Cohen with their assertion of the primacy of the human spirit. In confronting this strange combination (perhaps it is the key element of the ‘BHW’) I recalled the Sunday afternoon concerts of classical music given by the inmates of Birkenau death camp for the pleasure and delight of the SS Commandant and his wife.

The film works as an affect through the medium of the acting. Fassbinder could call on an ensemble of actors with whom he had both developed and worked over a period of years. ‘BHW’ is an ensemble piece where all the players understand their roles and are disciplined in a quasi Brechtian mode of representation. The part is always understood as subservient to the whole. The acting does not involve internalising emotions and relations, rather externalising them and representing them.  The object is not manipulation of audience rather to enable the audience to see relations.

And Beware a Holy Whore, as a title is I think Fassbinder’s admonition to the audience to look in askance at all that attracts by promising to satiate desire – including movies – a holy whore.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi) Akira Kurosawa (1948; Japan) Takashi Shimura; Toshiro Mifune; Michiyo Koguro

viewed: BFI streaming; 3^rd May 2021

Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi) Akira Kurosawa (1948; Japan) Takashi Shimura; Toshiro Mifune; Michiyo Koguro

viewed: BFI streaming; 3^rd May 2021

Call for the Doctor

In deciding to view this early film of Kurosawa’s I was interested to see how and in what ways ‘Drunken Angel’ might represent Japan’s situation in 1948. A country that had experienced total war and total defeat; that had been ruled and led to war by a hereditary military caste but was now occupied by the Americans who were intent on imposing upon this particular society some of the norms that characterised their democracy and culture. How would these reflect on the surface of the film, how would the script register the overwhelming contradictions of post conflict Japanese society?

‘Drunken Angel’ is sometimes described as a ‘Noir’ movie. It’s not. It looks nothing like a ‘Noir’ product, nor does it evidence a ‘Noir’ sensibility.   Kurasawa’s cinematic design makes little use of shadow or chiascuro interplay, rather it is transparent, giving us things we can see, augmented by a panning shots that direct us to the relevant image. Likewise his Yakuza protagonist, has few elements that make up a ‘Noir’ character:he is simply doomed from the start. ‘Drunken Angel’ falls into a genre type not entirely absent from Hollywood out put, but an unusual one; it is forensic. Given the main character is a doctor ‘Drunken Angel’ is in its own fashion a diagnostic movie, using the crime and criminal activity as an allegorical artifice for considering Japan’s situation and predicament. The allegorical features of Kurosawa’s script are not over larded, rather they underlie the situations realised in the scenario.

From the start Kurosawa depicts the reality of things as they are in 1948: a Tokyo that has been firebombed razed and puddled by the US Air force. In his opening shot we see a huge fetid squalid pool of water, mosquito infected stagnant, but with people still drinking from it. This is the great city of Tokyo. And the stagnet pool is the recurring image in the film, returned to time and again. Hybrid Japanese-American music overlays the opening puddle shot: Japanese scales meshed with jazz rhythm, music indicating Japan’s new schizo cultural accommodation. This is perhaps the situation as Kurosawa sees it; a smashed people living in a schizo culture.   In ‘Drunken Angel’ his solution is: call for the doctor. We need to understand what’s going on.

The play out of the script revolves round Sanada’s (the Doctor) relationship with Matsunaga the gangster, which relationship hinges on Sanada’s diagnosis of Matsunaga’s TB. TB is the hidden disease.   From the outside there is nothing to see, everything looks OK.   But within the cavity of the body, the lungs waste away.   Sanada makes his diagnosis from a physical examination, which then needs to be confirmed by an Xray, the photographic eye that can penetrate the flesh.  The problem is not so much that Matsunaga doesn’t recognise that he has the disease but that he needs to deny it. He denies it because it is an insult to his self image as a Yakuza; to even suggest that he may have a weakness is a threat to which he responds by attacking the messenger, Sanada. When the Xray confirms his condition, when he is spitting coughing up blood and can no longer deny having TB, he adopts the belief that he can somehow overcome the disease by carrying on his life as usual, by aggressively and assertively ignoring the Doctor’s advice. When finally almost completely incapacitated he ceases to claim he can defy TB with his own will, rather he boasts to the Sanada that the Yakuza brotherhood will take care of him: it is Yakuza honour and their loyalty to each other that will save him. His last self deception, delusion.

Sanada observes Matsunaga’s inevitable decline as each stage of the illness takes its course.   Sanada stance towards his patient is of a quasi-Bhuddist compassion: he is detached, he has no emotional involvement. But Sanada’s compassion, his desire to minister to his truculent patient, accepts no bounds. Matsunaga assaults him, rejects him, abuses him, ignores him, but Sanada remains his doctor and will do all that can be done for him, even though Matsunaga knows ultimately only one law: the law of self destruction.

As an allegorical rendering of Japan’s condition, this is bleak. But Kurosawa’s humanistic design directs the film in a positive direction. The script’s central character is the doctor.  Sanada is the pivot of the movie: the one who sees. Kurosawa’s ‘seer’ is quite different from the ‘priest’ type in Hollywood gangster movies. In these the gangster is always at the centre of the script. In movies such as ‘Public Enemy’, ‘the priest’ acts as an externalised (societal or religious) voice of individual conscience, and as such often determines the outcome of plot. As ‘seer’ Sanada is unable to influence Matsunaga’s behaviour. But the point is his seeing: the seeing that there is a problem, that the people (ie Japanese society/culture) once they understand there is a problem can harness their own resources to come to terms with their past and take responsibility and control of their future. The essence of Sanada’s course of treatment for TB is discipline through time: understand the nature of the disease and the effect it has on the body; instigate life style changes to maximise the chances of the medication working; and understand that the healing process takes time, nothing will happen quickly. If all this is well understood, the cure will be slow but sure. And the film ends with one of his patients, who has followed Sanada’s recovery regime, presenting him with her X-rays that show she is clear of TB: a perfect set of lungs with which to live and breath. Hope.

Kurosawa’s movie is centred in the compassion of Sanada, but as a figure this doctor is no insufferable perfect being, a guy on a pedestal. No! Sanada is deeply flawed, an alcoholic bum, prisoner to his own resentments and insecurities which only the bottle can deaden. Mired in his own course of self destructive behaviour, his compassion is of a particularly human order. It flows into the world out of the realisation of his own problems. We are not listening to or trying to understand a saint, but an imperfect human being.

The feeling from Drunken Angel is not that it is anti-American. The gangster world has adopted Americanisation of life with its jazz, clothes and stylistic statements. But Kurasawa depicts these for what they are: diversions that people take up because they are enjoyable. But the Americanisation of life is a distraction, not even a quick fix. The rebuilding of Japan as a psychic entity will need a deeper more substantive shift, perhaps through a generation. But first the problems of Japan need to be seen and understood. And ‘Drunken Angel’ is Kurasawa’s means of stepping forward into the ruins and thinking about how new foundations might be built. Later his Sumurai movies would affirm again his belief that Japan contains within her own culture, the resources to develop its own form of modernism that had moved beyond its past.

adrin neatrour   adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Call for the Doctor

In deciding to view this early film of Kurosawa’s I was interested to see how and in what ways ‘Drunken Angel’ might represent Japan’s situation in 1948. A country that had experienced total war and total defeat; that had been ruled and led to war by a hereditary military caste but was now occupied by the Americans who were intent on imposing upon this particular society some of the norms that characterised their democracy and culture. How would these reflect on the surface of the film, how would the script register the overwhelming contradictions of post conflict Japanese society?

‘Drunken Angel’ is sometimes described as a ‘Noir’ movie. It’s not. It looks nothing like a ‘Noir’ product, nor does it evidence a ‘Noir’ sensibility.   Kurasawa’s cinematic design makes little use of shadow or chiascuro interplay, rather it is transparent, giving us things we can see, augmented by a panning shots that direct us to the relevant image. Likewise his Yakuza protagonist, has few elements that make up a ‘Noir’ character:he is simply doomed from the start. ‘Drunken Angel’ falls into a genre type not entirely absent from Hollywood out put, but an unusual one; it is forensic. Given the main character is a doctor ‘Drunken Angel’ is in its own fashion a diagnostic movie, using the crime and criminal activity as an allegorical artifice for considering Japan’s situation and predicament. The allegorical features of Kurosawa’s script are not over larded, rather they underlie the situations realised in the scenario.

From the start Kurosawa depicts the reality of things as they are in 1948: a Tokyo that has been firebombed razed and puddled by the US Air force. In his opening shot we see a huge fetid squalid pool of water, mosquito infected stagnant, but with people still drinking from it. This is the great city of Tokyo. Hybrid Japanese-American music overlays the puddle shot: Japanese scales meshed with jazz rhythm, music indicating Japan’s new schizo cultural accommodation. This is perhaps the situation as Kurosawa sees it; a smashed people living in a schizo culture.   In ‘Drunken Angel’ his solution is: call for the doctor. We need to understand what’s going on.

The play out of the script revolves round Sanada’s (the Doctor) relationship with Matsunaga the gangster, which relationship hinges on Sanada’s diagnosis of Matsunaga’s TB. TB is the hidden disease.   From the outside there is nothing to see, everything looks OK.   But within the cavity of the body, the lungs waste away.   Sanada makes his diagnosis from a physical examination, which then needs to be confirmed by an Xray, the photographic eye that can penetrate the flesh.  The problem is not so much that Matsunaga doesn’t recognise that he has the disease but that he needs to deny it. He denies it because it is an insult to his self image as a Yakuza; to even suggest that he may have a weakness is a threat to which he responds by attacking the messenger, Sanada. When the Xray confirms his condition, when he is spitting coughing up blood and can no longer deny having TB, he adopts the belief that he can somehow overcome the disease by carrying on his life as usual, by aggressively and assertively ignoring the Doctor’s advice. When finally almost completely incapacitated he ceases to claim he can defy TB with his own will, rather he boasts to the Sanada that the Yakuza brotherhood will take care of him: it is Yakuza honour and their loyalty to each other that will save him. His last self deception, delusion.

Sanada observes Matsunaga’s inevitable decline as each stage of the illness takes its course.   Sanada stance towards his patient is of a quasi-Bhuddist compassion: he is detached, he has no emotional involvement. But Sanada’s compassion, his desire to minister to his truculent patient, accepts no bounds. Matsunaga assaults him, rejects him, abuses him, ignores him, but Sanada remains his doctor and will do all that can be done for him, even though Matsunaga knows ultimately only one law: the law of self destruction.

As an allegorical rendering of Japan’s condition, this is bleak. But Kurosawa’s humanistic design directs the film in a positive direction. The script’s central character is the doctor.  Sanada is the pivot of the movie: the one who sees. Kurosawa’s ‘seer’ is quite different from the ‘priest’ type in Hollywood gangster movies. In these the gangster is always at the centre of the script. In movies such as ‘Public Enemy’, ‘the priest’ acts as an externalised (societal or religious) voice of individual conscience, and as such often determines the outcome of plot. As ‘seer’ Sanada is unable to influence Matsunaga’s behaviour. But the point is his seeing: the seeing that there is a problem, that the people (ie Japanese society/culture) once they understand there is a problem can harness their own resources to come to terms with their past and take responsibility and control of their future. The essence of Sanada’s course of treatment for TB is discipline through time: understand the nature of the disease and the effect it has on the body; instigate life style changes to maximise the chances of the medication working; and understand that the healing process takes time, nothing will happen quickly. If all this is well understood, the cure will be slow but sure. And the film ends with one of his patients, who has followed Sanada’s recovery regime, presenting him with her X-rays that show she is clear of TB: a perfect set of lungs with which to live and breath. Hope.

Kurosawa’s movie is centred in the compassion of Sanada, but as a figure this doctor is no insufferable perfect being, a guy on a pedestal. No! Sanada is deeply flawed, an alcoholic bum, prisoner to his own resentments and insecurities which only the bottle can deaden. Mired in his own course of self destructive behaviour, his compassion is of a particularly human order. It flows into the world out of the realisation of his own problems. We are not listening to or trying to understand a saint, but an imperfect human being.

The feeling from Drunken Angel is not that it is anti-American. The gangster world has adopted Americanisation of life with its jazz, clothes and stylistic statements. But Kurasawa depicts these for what they are: diversions that people take up because they are enjoyable. But the Americanisation of life is a distraction, not even a quick fix. The rebuilding of Japan as a psychic entity will need a deeper more substantive shift, perhaps through a generation. But first the problems of Japan need to be seen and understood. And ‘Drunken Angel’ is Kurasawa’s means of stepping forward into the ruins and thinking about how new foundations might be built. Later his Sumurai movies would affirm again his belief that Japan contains within her own culture, the resources to develop its own form of modernism that had moved beyond its past.

adrin neatrour   adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk