Adrin Neatrour

Solaris Andrei
Tarkovsky (USSR, 1972) Donatas Banionis,
Anatoley Solonitsyn, Natalya Bondarchuk,

Viewed: Star and
Shadow Cinema Newcastle; 16 Nov 2014; Ticket: £6.
2001 Stanley Kubrick (USA 1968) Keir Dulleaviewed Tyneside Cinema; 5 Dec 2014; ticket £6

A future haunted by metaphysics

It’s interesting to think about Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Kubrick’s 2001. Both use the medium of sci-fi to project their own present-day concepts onto future time. And although these films were produced some 40 years ago, the respective concerns that drove the two director/writers are still relevant .

Tarkovsky’s script presents as pure allegory as he ponders the enigma that the further we travel out of history, outside time, the more are we overwhelmed by the processes of time, mediated through: memory reliquaries museums. The journey the Space Station and Solaris the mysterious new planet, all elements projected outside human history unleash the hounds of time as living uncontrollable forces, hunting down the interiorities both of the cosmonauts and of ourselves.

This allegorical voyage represents Tarkovsky’s metaphysical understanding of the place of time in Soviet Russia. Since the November 1917 revolution, history as a living force, had been abolished by the USSR, replaced by the chrono-mechanics of the Communist Party. So Soviet Russia was unable to respond, except with regimented suppression, when the forces of history inexorably returned to haunt the land its leaders and its people. Solaris is a pure psycho-metaphysical contemplation of time/history that imprints itself on the film with increasing weight as the scenario unravels. What are understood at first as separate presences, phantoms that are different to and alien to us, finally reveal themselves as being our own mirror like reflections. The metaphysical insight of an eternal recurrence that we shall return to haunt ourselves.

Kubrick’s 2001 comes from an entirely different direction. The central pillar of Kubrick’s thinking in 2001 is the control of humanity by mysterious exteriorised entities. 2001 looks at this through both cosmic and social frames. It is the social frame, projected through advanced intelligence technology, that is the most successful. Although Kubrick always talked about making a movie about Artificial Intelligence, 2001 is his AI movie.(His failure to make another AI movie may simply reflect that in 2001 Kubrick had said all he had to say about this idea, remembering that power relations were a core concern of this director)

The most successful sections of 2001 posit a spaceship world controlled by AI. Actually this clean hi-tech world wonderfully anticipates the products and ethos of Apple Inc. Kubrick’s spaceship sequences with the wonderful clean lines of the sets complementing the soothing ingratiating voice of HAL, feels like it seduces as much as serves the crew (and the viewers) with its expression of a certain techie perfection. Kubrick’s Discovery 1 suggests, like Steve Jobs, (who would have been 13 at the time of the release of 2001) an encompassing corporate concept: products built with powerful operating systems, designed with intuitive controls and built with the consumer in mind. In fact when I think about it there was something of HAL in the way Steve presented himself. Products that seduce. But what seduces can also betray. So the saga of the betrayal by Hal of his human charges is the central drama that grips the movie. And this betrayal stands as Kubrick’s sharpest insight into the the core problems of technology and AI. The more we trust and the more we try to build into our systems safeguards against betrayal, the more are we vulnerable. No current film maker to my knowledge has penetrated this proposition in relation to our current technology. And where might we be lead? To the sacrificial stone of our own collectove hubris?

As for Kubrick’s cosmology? It is vacuous. Despite starting with huge promise with the type of image fusion that only film can make: between Dawn Men with their the discovery of weapons and projectiles leading to Techman and Space Flight. The connection is magnificent expressed through a majestic cut. An idea of human development is linked to the appearance of a Dolmen at the Dawn of Man sequence and mankind’s subsequent movement into out of planet earth into space. Kubrick implies a destiny for man shaped by another mysterious realm of intelligence. As long as this is left vague, it is Ok as a story driver.

As the theme is persued by Kubrick in the latter stages of the film, a terrible vacuity opens up as you realise Kubrick has nothing to say beyond the truism that life is an enigma. Kubrick tries to substitute his ‘nothing to say’ by overwhelming us with images that appear to have meaning but in fact have none. When Bowman leaves the spaceship he is first sucked into a psychedelic tunnel warp, designed to overwhelm our visual sense, which deposits him in a room where he experiences Shakespeare’s Ages of Man. The problem is that is doesn’t signify anything beyond a desperate attempt to end the movie on a significant image: the embryo floating through space. The problem is it has no significance, The embryo has no referents, no grounding in the earlier part of the film. It is just a floating empty image. A testimony to Kubrick and Clark’s failure to resolve their material. But then metaphysics never was either Kubrick or Clark’s strong point.

One thing for certain, Solaris Station could never be mistaken for a product conceived by Steve Jobs. It does not have that Apple look. It looks tired, as tired and used as the civilisation that built it. It bears the marks of its own history, scuffed dirty litter strewn, mired in time. Whereas Discovery one is a linear structure, an arrow pointing at a target, Solaris Station is circular, those who live there doomed to circulatory, of meeting themselves as they try to escape from themselves. Decked out with the arbitrary trinkets of history, Solaris Station is in itself a time trap, locked into geostationary orbit over a terrifying plastic lake that feeds back only memories.

And it is this plasticity of time that marks out the ultimate vision of Solaris. As the lake gurgitates into vision a replicant of the home farm where the film begins (shot with visually suggestive fluidity) the realisation is that the significance of Tarkovsky’s film is as an allegory. We are critically lost in time. If we are cut off from the mechanism clock and calendar, we have no temporal anchorage. The actual and the hallucination start to elide and merge. As the home farm emerges out from the waters, we understand that the imputed events of the film may be only a cycle of repetitions. What we thought was a beginning was only the illusion of a beginning. We have lost the means of penetrating our realities, and like the Soviet Union, we too perhaps, the European West, are about the learn the lesson of Solaris. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk New documentA future haunted by metaphysicsA future haunted by metaphysics

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M Fritz Lang (Ger
1931 script Thea von Harbou) Peter
Lorre; Otto Wernicke

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 25 Sept 2014; matinee screening
ticket: £5.50

Retrocrit: Sound of silence

Although M is described as a film about the serial killer of little girls, Lang’s movie comes across as something more than this. German playwrights Brecht and Wedekind had already established murder as a type of idea, murder as a relevant theme for probing the underbelly of society’s moral structure. The abandoned the mutant the criminals and the insane, collectively could be seen as a distorted mirror through which the distorted social and moral values of industrial capitalism could the better be discerned.

Outcastes were a parody of the institutions that feared and despised them, and from which they were banned. The slaughter of the innocent little girls is never represented as anything other than horrific but is never exploited for melodramic charge. Lang’s bold stripped filmic statements need no emotional intensifiers. Lang creates the images: the shadows and shadow play, the child’s balloon caught in telephone wires; Hans walking calmly by with his little victim Elsie. Shots that cut to the quick of murders that are never seen and which it is not necessary to see because Lang and von Harbou have woven the horror on the ordinary loom of life: the everyday.

M’s scenario is highly contextualised. Just as the English crime thriller often had a generic upper class setting, Lang’s movie is set within the world of the little people: working class. The long panning opening shot of the tenement courtyard with children playing a song game whose words call up the child murderer, introduces a place where children occupy a different world from adults, unchaperoned and vulnerable. It’s a culture of hard work where children are left to fend for themselves – a recognisable feature of all European countries at this time. The victims are working class, as is Hans who preys on them. Hans understands the weaknesses to which they are exposed and how easily they are lured, The formal juxtaposed linkages between the shots that express class experience and the actions of the murderer suggest a Brechtian ethos working and guiding M which shapes and carries it foreword to its next stage of development.

The usurpation of power by the underworld. The victory of the gangsters.

As the police investigation stalls and their activity interferes with criminal enterprise, the gangsters take on the task of tracking down M. When M was being made in 1930 Germany experienced the huge surge in Nazi popularity culminating in their triumph in the 1930 elections. The characteristic features of their irresistible rise were violence anti Semitism and pack organisation. They understood the fears of the little people. And as a parallel psychic track, M can be read as Lang and von Harbou’s scripted analogy of the rise of Hitler. The gangsters and crooks take over. Riding on the back of the innocence and fear of the working class, the little people, they organise and justify taking power and justice into their own hands.

The key moment in this analogous parallelism is the chalk branding of Hans with the M sign on the back of his coat, so that he will be recognised as the Murderer. The crude M eerily pre-empts the Star of David and Juden badge that a few years later the Nazi’s obliged all Jews to wear. So that they would bare witness on their bodies the sign of their stigma. This moment of the marking of M is a stunning coup de film that precisely points to the dialectic that works through the film. From this moment the film’s logic is turned upside down and it is this ant-thetical logic which drives the final sections of the scenario.

In the first section of the film, Hans is perpetrator and hunter. From the moment of his branding, everything changes, he becomes victim and hunted. It is a measure of Lang’s insight as a director that he understood so clearly how to use the resources of film to create a pivotal moment from which we start to see everything differently, to invoke a different order of understanding. Lang and von Harbou have already shown how society has begun break down paniced by the hunt for the child sex killer, who could be anybody. But it is in the mock court scene where Hans is tried by the gangsters that the reality of mob rule is played out.

Legal institutions have developed over centuries to protect everyone and to ensure that all are treated equally. The accused have to be tried by a process which evaluates their fitness to plead. The mob sweeps this all away. Whatever you are Jew or Child Killer you have only the right to be sentenced to death for what you are. There is a moment of pure Brechtian theatre as Lang’s camera pans from the serried rows of gangsters baying for Hans blood to Hans himself, alone cowered against a wooden partition. But who will speak for me, Hans asks? The camera pans upwards now and reveals behind him, on a raised level, one of the gangsters . He leans towards Hans and says: that’s my job. In this shot immediate physical threat is resolved with high farce, violence with absurdist philosophical detachment. Extraordinary! Pure Brecht.

The criminal attorney conducts himself with composure and makes an eloquent defence of Hans. He shows the mob that terrible though Hans may be, the man is simply not responsible for his actions. Hans cannot be guilty of murder. Of course this plea will not make the slightest difference to the rabble who want blood. The interaction, the intercutting between the calm figure for the defence and the ferocity of the mob, heightens the viewers understanding of the issues in play; we understand at last that Hans is not guilty. However much his acts have disturbed and horrified us, we cannot condemn him of murder. And surely the screams by mobs of Nazis and proto Nazis calling for the death of Jews a few years later will have stuck in the mind of some who saw M in 1931. And more than ever now we need to remember this scene from a 1931 movie as we witness anger overwhelming judgement.

In this Brechtian parable we see the dialectic forces at work shaping the film and informing our understanding of what is happening. We are lead first to be overwhelmed by antagonism and fear of Hans; but these feelings are overturned by the revealed perspective that Hans is himself a victim and needs protection from the judgement of the mob, the vectors of hate and revenge, who exploit him for their own purposes.

Lang also sets a filmic dialectic to work in M. The interplayed tension between image and sound is a characteristic of M as film experience, But for a number of sequences Lang uses no sound, or at least only the most sparing of sound effects. Most of the film is played out with sound where the fury of dialogue works to lead and define the images. But a number of sequences Lang plays MOS, mit aus sound: mute. It is the most astonishing feature of the movie.

When Lang like some nineteenth century magician removes the sound (like the rabbit disappeared from the hat you wonder where it has gone) it is as if a hole has opened up in reality. The viewer is caste down into this hole as if experiencing a dream. As if Lang is saying at one level, all this life is a dream….but dream as it may be, we can still make sense of it. Lang sets us adrift in an underworld where film and dream coalesce and into these silent images we pour ourselves. I am reminded of the mute newsreels we shall see of the second world war. So in silence we watch: the panic of the crowd, the anger of the gangsters, the animal fear of Hans, the police hunt, the silence as Elsie walks away with Hans. Silence frames these sequences. Silence frames us as we without voice cannot speak, silence frames life and our powerlessness to act to save what needs to be saved. Many things we watch in and with silence, especialy evil.

With his use of the silent moments Lang confirms his status not just as both a evoker of dreams but also as filmmaker who is a moralist. Adrin Nepatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Gone Girl David Fincher (USA 2014); screenplay by Gilllian Flynn from her own novel Rosamund Pike; Ben Affleck Viewed: Empire Cinema 14 Oct 2014; ticket £3.50

From princess to psychopath – a contemporary fable

These Hollywood ‘relationship’ flicks always try to promote themselves as offering a new lamps for old deal on the nature of relations. But the movie’s claim on our attention though strong on lofty purpose: “Gone girl unearths the secrets at the heart of a modern marriage” is, as is generally the case, no more than a modesty patch covering up the frenzied murderous Valkyrie-esque ride of the script, which celebrates modern psychopathic woman as: the winner. Welcome to the new domestic CEO.

As do all the American suburban dwellings in Hollywood movies, the Dunns’ abode looks like a Doll’s House. (it’s interesting that the script incorporates the characteristic feature of a stage set, its insubstantial wobbly quality, to ‘prove’ the nature of the supposed assault on Amy) The Dunn’s place doesn’t looked lived in which is of course how its meant to look, a sort of idealised setting for action. But the Doll’s House look reminded me of Ibsen’s play, A Dolls House which also explored marriage as a mutual fantasy of misunderstanding. So no change here: from 19th to 21st century marriage has always had the potential of being a Gorgon’s head of bad sex murderous intention and oppression. It’s just today the gender and role mix is stitched up differently.

Ibsen’s marital drama was naturalistic in form, Fincher/ Flynn’s movie ( I haven’t read the book) is of course fantastical. I wondered if it is actually about marriage? Perhaps it’s real focus is some place else but it uses the marriage mode of relationship as an expressive template that disguises another realm of concern. The Nick role, male protagonist is drawn out as regular. Not too smart, easily deluded and, unable to communicate with Amy, his sex life with her is on a par ‘with masturbation’. So he finds himself some new pussy.

Amy role is that of the wife. But she is imagined by the script as a magical realist invention. She’s a mythical sorceress, an over the top mad Hollywood blend of Circe Medusa Nemesis whose powers are unleashed against eternal perfidy of the male, in the form of her husband. But is Nick’s perfidy the actual force that drives Amy to unleash, in parodied form her revenge upon his unsuspecting person? (Like many Hollywood movies what makes the rather overlong film watchable is its referencing and parodying of movies of like genre)

Sketched lightly into the open sequences of the movie, which provide some back story, (possibly more detailed in Flynn’s novel) is the idea that Amy is a modern ‘princess’. That is to say she has had the fairy tale status of ‘princess’ bestowed upon her by her family. In Amy’s case her parents exploited their vision of her ‘specialness’ by writing a series of books idealising her childhood. ‘Amy-Princess’ growing up in a charmed aura turns into ‘Amy-Psychopath’. She becomes a jealous idol that demands, that the adulation of her perfected attributes that defined her as a little girl, be extended into her adulthood

Film and book are called: Gone Girl: not Gone Woman. And when Amy returns it is captioned as Back Girl not Back Woman. Amy as woman is girl not woman, a child tyrant who demands and does not ask.

Nick’s infidelity triggers Amy’s latent powers. Like a child she first seeks his obliteration and destruction. But when circumstances change her magical realist CEO powers of anticipation organisation and logistics are directed at what is becomes her preferred goal: the total domination of Nick. His use as a sperm provider and ancillary consort, a necessary but controllable element in the perfect picture of coupledom. Nick exists to be a prince (frog prince?) along side his princess. Gone Girl then works as parody, turning upside down the Ibsenesque and twentieth century proposition that marriage exists for the subjection of women by men. Gillian Flynn shows that in the twenty-first century roles are reversed: marriage exists for the subjugation of men.

In its choice of subject matter and best selling authors as oracles of the Zeitgeist, Hollywood often takes depth soundings of changes of the collective unconscious. Hence, the Zombie the Visions of Apocalypse testify to the dark subterranean angst that characterises Western society. It seems that Amy and Nick’s marriage can also be taken as a wider allegory for the balance of power between the genders. A balance of power that sees ever more women take the public space. But despite the assertions of some feminists that such a feminin take over will lead to the emergence of softer less authoritarian management, the collective psyche fears that those woman who make their way to the top, will often claw their way up. It will be women driven by demons who will succeed the men. They will be indistinguishable from the men in their cruelty and ruthlessness pursuit and grip on power. Men and women may be different in style and expression, but daddy’s princess will be as dangerous as mummy’s boy to anyone who gets in their way.

Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Dawn
of the Planet of the Apes Matt Reeves
(USA 2014) Gary Oldham. Keri Russell,
Andy Serkis

Viewed: 2D release at Empire Cinema Newcastle UK;
ticket £7.50

White man speak with forked tongue

Delightful it is to see our simian cousins swing through the trees from branch to branch and in distressed pseudo-Gothic buildings, from beam to beam. There are moments of visual allure in the film but they barely compensate for an overall feeling of staleness of its ideas and its filmic reliance on the vacuity of the affect images that are overused in an attempt to implicate/absorb the audience in the state of mind of Caesar the Heap Big Chief Ape.

Reeves’ Ape Dawn project actually seems to have stalled at the conceptualisation stage, a creative inability to establish the ‘Ape world’ beyond the stereotypes associated with the Noble Savage. Visually the Apes look move and rock and roll like monkeys, but conceptually they behave and respond as reborn Native Americans, Red Injuns in old money, caste out of old discredited Hollywood simplifications.

There is nothing deeply alien or other in these Ape creatures. When they break out of their own communication code/language and speak English, they do so in the gruff manneristic way of the Apache in Stagecoach. ‘Ape not kill Ape!’ The way in which the Apes live together as one tribe, is Indian not animal so that when we see the Ape’s camp with its many fires, it looks like the scene from the Comache camp in the Searchers. And the ‘Dawn’ Apes unlike actual animals have a socio-political organisation based about the one leader, the Big Chief, which may be true for some Native American tribes but is not true for simian organisation.

These creatures aren’t monkeys: Dawn is backdoor reinvention of the Western, a sort of redressed homage to the gold age of the genre.

Even visually the Apes resemble the Injuns of old: their rib sections picked out in white, like Sioux war breast plates. The way the Apes ride their horses without stirrups looks like the image on the front cover of my copy of Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee. In the emotional tone of their responses, the Apes are American Native replicants. There is nothing intrinsically amiss in all this except for its predictability and the loss of a response spectrum that is animal not Disney anthropomorphic.

To drive the narrative of ‘Dawn…’ the scripting department was unable to come up with anything more that a transposed Western Indian story which seemed so familiar I felt I’d seen it many times before. The story of the good leader, discredited in his relations with outsiders, overthrown and (nearly)slain by the upstart wannabe who then leads his people against the white man before being in turn defeated by the return of the true leader. It’s a variation on the Fort Apache script. The Apes even have a full frontal charge into the coral against the guns of the good town people.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes points to the creative hollow that underlies movies built on SFX. There is so much effort and cost expended in verisimilitude, in getting the wow factor going, that there is less investment in working out how to exploit the possibilities of this material in a scripting dynamic. Perhaps the huge expense involved (there were 1000’s of sfx workers credited) means the producers usually decide to play safe and opt for a straight concept backed by narrative characterised by simple devices and roles everyone can relate to. Fair enough, but it also seems something of a wasted opportunity to extend the extraordinary feat of the SFX into another conceptual dimension.

As the film progresses it seems to become increasingly important to Matt Reeves that we ‘get’ the chimps as ‘affect’ creatures. Consequently this means that the audience are subjected to long big close-ups of the Apes’ faces, close-ups characterised by immobility of the features. In fact these shots are mostly of Caesar as he is the central player. These long durational shots are supposed to make an affect image of his face so that the audience absorbed by Caesar’s immobility intraject their own states of mind onto his face so supplying an inducted internality to his character. Whilst this mode of shot can be highly affective, I don’t think it works very well in Dawn of the Apes. There is something in the Ape mask that resists human affective intrajection. But even if it might have worked once as a shot, the multiplication of the series of shots of Caesars face in Big Close Up exhausts the affect circuitry leaving only banality.

And banality is the mood music of Dawn, and of course the plot is nicely set up for a sequel of more of the same. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Two days one night (Deux jours un nuit) J-P & L Dardenne (Bel/Fr 2014) Marion Cotillard; Fabrizio Rongione Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle, 6th Sept 2014; Ticket £7.30

I came out of this film, looked in the mirror and saw myself: Adrin Neatrour. My situation as a worker,of the second class order, employed in a medium sized housing business. My life periodically lived on the the edge of humiliation and fear. ‘Cover your back!’ that’s what they say, ‘Don’t let the bastard managers get you.’

This is a film about the contemporary work situation. The Dardennes brothers probing the nature of work and work relations not only in the film script but also the structure style and manner in which their film is shot.

The Dardennes film is an exploration of the psychic conditions governing post industrial work conditions. An exploration that uses ‘Linda-machine’ as an individual subject in post industrial work-relations. In the post industrial landscape the workers are no longer slaves to machines, rather they are part of an extended apparatus comprising stream of just-in–time communications of which they are an integral part. The worker no longer tends the machine but in a sense they have to become machines/ or robots in themselves. There is no longer a collectivity of shared experience but a subjectivity of experience. In the face of the evolving micro management the possibility of shared dignity (in the face of oppression and class war) is replaced by individuated degradation.

Two days one night is a contemporary horror story. But unlike the quasi metaphoric forms that use the horror genre and exploit alien life forms, vampires, monsters, slashers and fuckers for affect, Two days one night is casually and prosaically actual everyday terror of work.

It examines how work has become a subjectivity of individuated entrapment. The nightmare is that workers find themselves living in a closed circuit of amplification wired up to the poles of desire and fear. A life defined by mortgages high end consumer products and debt generates desperation for work at whatever cost as the desire to pay off the mortgage intensifies the fear of losing one’s job. The consumer praxis: everyone must work, everyone must pay their dues to the ministry of fear.

Old school industrial relations were macro managed through politics and the laws governing collective rights. Biased against the worker as were these the institutions, class consciousness and opposition were significant positive psychic opperants in play under these conditions. Cut to today and the situation is quite different. The dominant pattern is the mitivesicro management of workers in comparatively small groups. Characterised by anxiety and dependence, the psychic opperants in play are compliance and isolation. Large numbers of managers monitor the states of mind ofcomparatively small numbers of workers assessing them not just for output but or attitude and psychological fitness for purpose.

I referred to the film as having an exploratory nature. By this I meant that the script probes in depth the relations and situation of Linda, the main character. Linda-machine has had a break down causing her to miss work for a time. When Linda-machine wants to start work again the company have discovered they don’t need her but that they do need to save money. The workers are given a choice: they can choose for Linda to return to work and lose their bonus, or keep the bonus money and choose that Linda loses her job.

The proposition put to the workers at the start of the film encapsulatess the worker’s dilemma. They are given choices, pre-selected choices which offer them illusion of control over their future but deprives them of the autonomy of decision making. The multiple choice management tactic not only is a divisive but it forces the workers into emotional subjectivity exposing them to denigratory self examination and confirming them in psychic isolation.

So Linda undertakes, at the urging of her husband and friend a quest to ask her co-workers to save her job, to forego their E1000 bonus. But before she begins her odyssey of ritual humiliation it becomes clear that Linda-machine is really a broken machine. But no one wants to see that she is broken. Everyone including Linda-machine herself is governed by fear. It is too frightening to think that the psychic reality of post industrial work may be more than Linda-machine can tolerate. As she desperately pops the pills to keep herself up and running, husband, Manu-machine and friends increasingly pressurise her to plead for her job. Life is a rollercoaster of desire and fear whatever the cost. But the cost to Linda-machine is to her own existence. to work under these conditions is perhaps something she cannot do. It is killing her. But the question cannot even be formulated. Like machines she and her husband are simply wage earning robots: eating junk food, and making money for the bank under the guise of home ownership. And Linda herself realises the solidarity between herself and her husband is based on their entrapment in the apparatus of work and debt, not love. No sex in the machines.

As Linda-machine visits her fellow workers to ask them to save her job, the filmic nature of her ordeal reveals the apparatus. Like a terrible chasm it opens up beneath her feet forcing her to see into its depth. And she grasps that this apparatus with its cogs wheels gears and chains comprises the subjectivity of very people she is petitioning. Everyone is trapped in desire fear circuit which extracts from them its tribute of self loathing and humiliation. And of course through these others, she sees herself. It is the this reflected image of her debased self that nearly kills her.

Two days one night is a moral film. Like Bresson, the Dardennes ask a question in film and answer the question on their own terms. The moral core of Dardennes film is honesty. A truthfulness to the forces it sets into play. And this truth is not only expressed in the integrity of the script but also in the shooting and settings. Two days one night is shot as a series of long takes. The purpose is not the current fashion for long takes for their own sakes, but to provide the space for the actors to play out their roles in situation. It is situation rather than character that moulds the performances. Had Two days been shot conventionally as shot reaction shot, the scripting would have lost its force, reducing the dyadic meetings to a series of reactive expressive face moments. Shot as a long takes the actors released into situation can respond to its demands with honest constancy and without faked emotions.

The settings used by the Dardennes also carefully calibrate the regime of the contemporary apparatus. Linda-machine’s house is a laboratory for living, but not the type envisaged by the Bauhaus. Her house is no longer a place of sanctuary, rather it is a nerve centre of a never ending inflow and outflow of communications. There is no peace only the agitation of demands and responses. The bedroom is not a place of sleep and love, but foetal pain; the bathroom a place of self medication; the kitchen a place to consume industrialised food. The house we see in Two nights and a day is a transformed space; no longer private but wired up to the apparatus of which it is a part.

The exterior Belgium settings do not comprise a world of: shops, malls, history. We see Belgium of the suburbs, of anyplacewhatsoever: standard red brick and concrete backgrounds. The ordinary, where the invisible processes of our society play out. Yet the Dardennes make extraordinary use of these modest vistas. As Linda makes the pitch for her job against the red and the grey, a transient beauty is glimpsed and sometimes it seems as if the brothers were exploiting a subtle code in background colour to express the quality of the negotiations.

As I said I came out of the movie looked in the mirror and saw myself. This is one of the Dardennes brothers very best films that quits on a note of optimism after unflinchingly revealing to ourselves what we have become. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

God’s Pocket John Slattery (USA 2014) Philip Seymour, Christina Jenkins, Richard Jenkins Viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle UK 12 AUG 2014; ticket: £3.50 How to lose your soul God’s Pocket reminded me of Carson McCullers’ work. Slattery’s film, based on Pete Dexter’s novel though set in the North rather than the South, has that same feeling of pervasive decay attaching to it; a decay of community registered in the sepia grain of its colour. God’s Pocket is set in the 1980’s, and basks in the eternal etiolated twilight of ‘50’s America. A place where filmmakers go when they want to find somewhere the human face and the human body not computers iPhones and tablets, are the interlocutors between people. A vanished world. A vanishing America. So this is a movie about place and the qualities that people bring to their neighbourhoods. As an ensemble piece centred on the eponymous small community of God’s Pocket it invites some comparison with the films Frank Capra made in the1940’s celebrating small town America: It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr Smith goes to Washington. Capra’s movies were optimistic affirmations of American values; decency individualism and democracy. Looked back on the films have an inherent charm, but the scripting’s were not representative in any meaningful way of blue collar working class or minority groups. They were an idealistic rendering of a homogenous America, a setting with apposite values later exploited by Spielberg’s suburban dream. Nevertheless as expressions of an idealised people Capra’s films were powerful sentimental models. Slattery’s film moulded around the face and body of Mickey (played by Seymour), comes across as a particular statement about the way things are today. Not of aspirational hope or optimism in the values of US society, but a study of decadence. A society that is dilapidated, coming apart in the constant flux of unravelling values. A society that partially lame hobbles on. It is not so much the people of God’s Pocket who are degraded rather the system, the social and economic matrix. The people respond as best they can to the pressures within which they have to survive. We’re looking at a broken machine held together by human resilience. Even for the ‘respectable’ inhabitants of the neighbourhood, those trying to work, the small business people, everyday life is circumscribed and penetrated by debt gangsters and crime. These people pay the ‘Goodfellahs’ whores. And they now have to ‘whore’ for themselves to exist. Initially the film’s structure is woven about a Voice Over, the words of Richard Shelburn, a journalist on the local newspaper whose poetic insight into the community again reminds me of McCullers prose ( She must have been an inspiration to many writers of Dexter’s generation). It’s not so much a Voice Over but almost a Greek Chorus a heightened poetical polemic whose muse is truth. What develops in God’s Pocket is that this chorus, Richard’s voice gradually leaves the wings and takes on a full frontal character in the script. Richard Shelburn moves from being a voice off to having an identity, a physical presence, an active role and to finally being centre stage. There is scope in terms of script and film structure for a Voice to become a flexible component in a film’s structure. Too many films are structured about Voice Over narration that is predictable and flabby, comprising a Ready-Brek solution to core scriptive and filmic problems. So the idea of a Voice that elides into a different type of dramatic presence has transformative possibilities. In God’s Pocket I think this movement of voice into presence doesn’t work. It feels like the intrusion of what is a subjectivity into collectivity. The elemental basis of God’s Pocket is its collective character which is reflected in its ensemble playing. The community is a decaying matrix of family ethnic and business ties corrupted by debt and gangsterism. Slattery brings this complex of relations into play through the device of a sudden death that agitates the community sending a series of adaptive and sometimes violent ripples across its surface. Interestingly the key filmic component of the collective playing is not the wide shot but the close up. The face reacts to relations, and by framing his camera on the face and body, Slattery negotiates the ebb of flow of emotions deals and conflict. One of the strenghts of God’s Pocket film is the use of the face to reveal the nature of these interconnecting reactions. But more than this the face suggests the strands of consciousness and cognizance that lie below its surface. In the strong scene in the bookies, with bets on, it feels possible to see beneath the surface of the expressions in the faces of the two gamblers and pick up the scent of drugs and protection rackets that undelay this culture. The intrusion of the journalist, Richard Shelburn, into the story is an individualist intrusion that undermines the core collective substance of the film without any compensating benefit. The final centre stage liaison between Richard and Jeannie (Mickey’s wife) feels like a mechanical device. It betrays the film in a number of ways. It undermines any moral dimension to Jeannie. OK, she is in a way peripheral (all the women in God’s Pocket are peripheral), but even in her peripherality she conveys a certain insistent strength of character. The idea that she fucks an old celebrity journalist because he spouts some tired old prose at her (the fucking in God’s Pocket is joyless pump house style). It’s a scripting decision that demeans her. A device to work Richard from the back stage to front of house. A device that only succeeds in debasing the movie. Changing it from gold to lead. Slattery may argue that the device eventually allow the repressed violence of God’s Pocket to be revealed. But we get this eliptically from the body of the movie without needing to see Richard kicked to death. God’s Pocket is a movie that doesn’t so much have a narrative but works by creating a world of collective interconnectivity that is undermined by a liaison that takes place outside its own parameters of significance, crudely interpolated and without compensating gain for the audience in either insight revelation or even tension.

So long as it remains true to its collective focus God’s Pocket unfolds as a series of expressive vignettes of blue collar community. However corruped God’s Pocket retains it sense of identity. When it loses this focus it loses it soul. The actual ending in the trailer park is interesting as it suggests a sort of idea: that the only movement possible is to find a ‘way out’. Perhaps somewhere like Florida where they have a benign proactive gun laws. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Boyhood
Richard Linklater (USA 2014)
Patricia Arquette, Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater Ethan Hawke

Plus ca change… Move on…

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood comes heavily trailed
for the durational character of its shoot.
It was made over an eleven year period from 2002 to 2013, over which time
the movie was shot periodically using the same actors. The USP was that this method of filming the
story would allow some natural traits to become visible: ageing most obviously,
and that the story would have a certain organicity, organic both in respect of
its internal and external relations of caste/characters.

The question is does its durational quality
amount to anything more than a gimmick? A sales Macguffin used to lure in the
audience exploiting their expectation of gazing on something actual: a real ageing process rather than the usual
faked ageing process. As if ‘the real’
was an added value currency, that the ‘real’
is something the viewer yearns for in the age of the unreal the veiled and the
fake. Next up we’ll have feature films construed on the premise of’ real’
births or ‘real’ deaths or ‘real’ fights ‘real’ fucks. Just so we know it’s ‘real’, not faked.

My feeling is that the distinction between
the real and fake has nothing to do with origination of material but rather
with intention of the project, the intention of the players and the form given
to the material. Linklater’s intention
was to make an American feature film;
his material is framed shot and edited to be a feature film. Without the manipulations of the Boyhood
publicity machine whose purpose was to modify and premould the anticipation of the
audience and the way in which they received the film, there was nothing in
Boyhood that couldn’t have been successfully faked. If the audience had not known they were
watching the same people, speak their same scripted lines over an 11 year
period, I doubt that many would have realised.

This is because the film script is nothing more than a standard Hollywood formula: a suburban saga of overcoming. Its durational theme makes it into a soap opera. Boyhood is built on a fragmentary structure, strips of action separated by a couple of years. But its basic template is the Soap Opera, as it follows the emotional familial intertwining’s of its four main characters. It is shot in the conventional shot reverse shot style, cutting away on the dialogue; it has nothing to offer in relation to the perception or the internality of its long distance actors except what they give us in the dialogue slots. (The material does no feel real in any sense that it actually touches them) In an actual documentary, the look on a face, a moment of spontaneity, body language or a tone of voice can open up vistas of the unsayable. But in Boyhood as in Soaps, it is only what’s scripted directed and edited that is seen. In Boyhood everything is on the table.

Even with its fragmented structure comprising strips of time, Boyhood stays true to its form, the Soap Opera. And this form, like a primal ‘Blob’ absorbs anything real, and processes it into a homogenised pulp. A stream of conventions. Again as with many so called independent films ‘product placement’ features as an evident concern catching the eye of the film maker. In this case it is ‘Apple’ and we sort of get a potted history of Apple products from the early classic iMac through to iPod and their recent stuff. Interestingly in films of this kind, unlike in actual life, the stuff always works: its reliable and never causes the user any frustration. In passing I must observe that the family would appear have been rather more likely to have had a pc than a Mac. Anyway it would have been refreshing to see a little human machine interaction: rage and frustration, but this as probably a step to real. And there again, Apple probably wouldn’t approve; which again raises the old question of the interrelation between sponsors and producers. Featuring as it did Apple appliances was there any deal between the company and the producers? And if so what effect did such a relationship have on the scenario? Of course any producer (and indeed overt or covert sponsor) will usually deny any direct influence of any company over creative decisions. More to the point is the subtler (well not so subtle) pressure of self censorship on creative talent when accepting favour from another party. I obviously don’t know the situation in relation to Linklater and Apple Inc., but where there is blatant product placement, then I believe a disclaimer should be considered. And this use of Brand endorsement in movies seems to be on the rise. Ok. So a lot of people are going to like Boyhood’s scenario and script. It’s contemporary in its focus: single mums, split families, spliced families, grafted families, social media, art, creativity, being yourself. Most of its strips have their narrative theme built around the relationships of Mum. But everything else is a vacuum, a strange pantomime that takes place in an ethereal suburbia, The film takes a couple of shots at relating to politics: there is a anti-Bush rant by Dad, and Dad supports Obama in ’08. But these events feel like add-ons; attempts to lay claim to a certain sort of credibility. Otherwise the tensions of both social and political relations are absent. Mostly we are in the vacuum of the family, a place where time for all its passing, actually seems to stand still. Like a good soap Boyhood ticks all the politically correct boxes but the characters seem unaffected by anything, which is perhaps what I meant in saying time seems to stand still in the movie. There is the old suburban advice given to people after difficulties: “Move on”. And that’s what the characters in Boyhood do. They move on. All the time. Divorce, failed relationships, abusive husbands and foster dads, lost friendships everyone just moves on as if nothing had really happened. The only exception is at the end of the final strip. Mason is leaving home for college, and Mum becomes sad and comments that with Mason and Samantha gone, that’s it for her. She has built her life around them and now there is nothing. What’s left for her? But by now, it is too late in Boyhood for ‘thoughts’. The film is over and the scene melodramatic, more a piece of theatre for Mason than a real internal shift in consciousness. Somehow we know Mum will: Move on: And so will we. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk