Adrin Neatrour

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Out of the Furnace – Scott Cooper
(2013 USA) Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson

Viewed: 4 Feb 2014 ; Empire Cinema
Newcastle upon Tyne; Ticket: £3.95

Disneyland invert

The opening sequence of Cooper’s Out of
the Furnace takes place in a drive in movie and introduces us to
Woody Harrelson’s character Harlan. Harlan gets annoyed at something
or other (much of the detail in the film is elusively blurred). In
response to his stirred up emotions, he rams a hot dog (“Goddam
food makes me sick!”) down the throat of his lady consort, before
beating to a pulp the gentleman who has protested too much. Woody’s
visceral reaction to whatever it was that upset his guts is so
extreme its statement of excess becomes funny. It announces that
‘Out of the Furnace’ is going to lead us deep into the Hillbilly
swamplands of parody; an opening preemptive clip that’s bourn out in
the movie’s development

Cooper’s film expresses America as a
kind of inverted Disneyland.

And in this inverted Disneyland Woody
Harrelson plays the part of a demonic Jiminy Cricket. The voice of
the anti-conscience. Perhaps it is the creation of this dark Gothic
archetype that explains the allure of the film to its audience.
Harlan as the internalised voice that psychically legitimises the
violence of the enraged Id. In infantalised cultures defined by an
imperative for immediate gratification (and celebrated in the adverts
that precede the movie) frustration is intolerable. The urgency of
desire legitimises violence towards anything or anyone who is
perceived as a barrier to desire. As Harlan says when he first
meets and gives Rodney the look: “I got a problem with everyone”.

Harrelson’s performance as an
internalised psychopath comprises the film’s core. Even when not up
on screen like a shadow he’s still present. Hard eyes (hardening of
the muscles around the eyes is a trick Harrelson does very well) with
lips and skin stretched face, he exudes an implacable necessary
desire for doing only what he wants to do. Harlan’s psychopathic
counter conscience is offset with Russell and Rodney, the ‘good’
brothers, in a scripting device that splits off multiple
personalities into discrete characters. The rustbelt Pennsylvanian
setting of the film, photographed as a beautifully contrived
dilapidation, is no more than a picaresque back drop against which to
set the play out of the internalised personality forces at play in
American culture: Destruction and Accommodations.

The limitation of Cooper’s Out of the
Furnace (Furnace – presumably a metaphor of America, or a play on
Griffith’s intertitle line in Intolerance: Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking?) is that from his narrative he is able to produce
no more than a parody of the American Gothic genre.

The dialogue lurches from cliché to
cliché comprising one liners we’ve heard before in some other movie.
The scripting elements: the damaged war vet, the bare knuckle
fighting, dying old father, all tread well worn narrative paths
without deviating from the familiar. The scripting device that
exploits the idea the Mountain Men reflects the ultimate parody of
distancing. It spatially removes the schizoid psychopathic cultural
forces, destruction and accommodation, from close-up (Zimmerman’s
slaying of Martin – Florida 2012: Dunn’s slaying of Davis – Florida
2913. Both these killings appear to have been triggered by the
infantile rage of the killer when their will was opposed by young
blacks. Both killers took legal refuge in Florida’s Stand Your
Ground Statute.) to faraway. The Mountain Men become distant
phantoms removed from day to day life. ( ‘Some of them never bin down
from those hills’). Out of the Furnaces’s Mountain Men are caste as
sort of Zombie creatures, removed from mainstream psychic conditions,
who prosper in their own middens. Of course this device of the
‘other’ (Hillbillies, Mountain Men, Swamp Men) has been prodigiously
over exploited by Hollywood from Boorman’s Deliverance and a host of
movies since. Cooper again brings nothing new to the idea, only
replication and repetition.

The final sequence of film abrogates
any moral claims Cooper might make for his movie. Folded into the
film is a subplot with a racial dimension. In one of the opening
scenes in the movie Russell has a black girl friend. During the
stretch he serves for drunken driving, she leaves him for the town’s
black police chief. Although apparently in love with Russell, she
choses black middle class respectability over white trash life style.
The sexual competition between the two men is suggested but muted in
the script. The image projected by Out of the Furnace is one of a
matured interrace relations in which racist white attitudes have been
completely eroded by liberal progressive states of mind. The problem
is that this liberal optimism is countervailed by the film’s core
proposition of the schizoid character of the white American. And in
the penultimate scene, where Russell is chasing and gunning down
Harlan, the black cop in pursuit orders Russell to put down his gun
and not shoot. Russell disobeys and kills Harlan. This resolution
is dishonest and points to the difficulties white film makers have
with race. The filmmakers lose their nerve and the plot. The only
moral outcome for the plot was for the black cop to have killed
Russell and Harlan to have escaped. The reality of the American
Psyche is suppressed rage, which in the film is represented by
Harrelson’s Harlan. This demented schizo force is the one that
eludes escapes and elides with the good, and the logic is that it
should escape. Every slock horror film script writer and director
knows this and intuitively understands the logic, even in parody,
that this is what has to be. Cooper for whatever reason doesn’t get
it.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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American Hustle David O
Russell (USA 2013) Christian Bale; Amy Adams; Bradley Cooper.

Viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne 28 Jan 2014
Ticket:£3.95

Hanging in/out

After two hours plus in the cinema I
found it difficult to understand what Russell’s American Hustle was
about except style and mood. It’s a relaxed laid back type movie
personified in Bale and Adams who comprise the performing axis, and
the excuse for the plot to crank through its laborious machinations.

Set in the 1970’s, it is based
loosely (very loosely I suspect) on a conman and con woman entrapped
by the FBI and whose skills are used to expose high level political
corruption in New Jersey and Washington. But all
the plot shenanigans are played out in an inconsequential manner that
became progressively perfunctory. The script initially lends the two
protagonists voice overs giving some insight into Irving and Sydney’s
states of mind. This device is soon abandoned leaving the audience
to gaze at the surface of the movie: the costumes and haircuts, the
music and the square dance of the personal relationships that pivot
around Irving’s wife and girlfriend.

American Hustle is little more than a
bland exercise in style. It is laboriously scripted with cliche’d
one liners borrowed from a previous jaunts into the Con-land genre
such as the Sting and the Grifters. The dialogue represents a
stereotyped cod American philosophy of survival captured all those
years ago by W C Fields: “ Never give a sucker an even break.”
How long can they go on recycling these gash lines?
American Hustle is almost completely
lacking in on screen tension unless you count the extreme décolletage
of the outfits worn by Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence. Bursting out
of the costumes, their tits threaten to pop out completely at any
time. But the scenarists decide not to do a take on this particular
gag line, and the tape or whatever, does its job. And, in the final
scenes in which the plot has bestowed upon all the players smiling
faces and happy MacDonald family hour, the ladies mamories are
appropriately and symbolically nicely tucked up inside their bras.
The tension is over and so is the film.
American Hustle: tit’s haircuts
costumes and 70’s music all the way down the line. Everything on
the surface. Judging by its face American Hustle is an exercise in
borrowed style from a bygone epoch, the usual Hollywood retro refuge
when the material has nothing much else going for it. A surface of
contrasting haircuts and coiffure, frocks and flairs and whenever the
script or haircuts or costumes start to flag, Russell fades up some
70’s grooves David Bowie, Donna Summer Elton John to keep the
audience interested. American Hustle a sales pitch for a 70’s
select CD.

In a filmic sense American Hustle is a
dead dog, a tired stylised exercise of genre Hollywood output. But
there is one particular thing of note in the scenario and that is the
psychic make up of the main characters. They replicate in their
identities an increasingly opperant feature of Western identity: the
schizo ID. Each of American Hustle’s main characters plays out a
schizo personality; no one is whom they seem to be. Irving is and
Sydney are professional cons whose presentation of self is at the
same time both a fabrication and a deeper assertion of their real
selves. And the FBI agent and Roslyn also move into variant schizo
identities of the people they start out as representing. American
Hustle’s main characters are all schizos and symbolise the forces
that are at work in a culture where leisure has replaced work and
status as the loci of identity.

Embedded in the core of the film’s
characters is the idea of duality of identity. As the characters
move between different strata and social networks they shift identity
to accord with their needs and purposes. ID is changed: just like
changing a frock. We live in the land of the quick change schizo
artist. But of course this ID schizo shift in the movie replicates
what’s become the default option in the West. Increasingly
individuals operate across a number of discrete domaines such as work
leisure and in particular on-line worlds. In step with this de facto
separation there’s a tendency to create and adopt variant ID’s to
interact with each network of people. This schizo tenancy in
fronting contemporary identities can be slight or radical, but
overwhelming forces are at work driving the process. Schizo
identity claims have become part of the deep game playing that is
used sometimes to effect successful manipulation, but that often ends
up as a sort of compulsion to control all the parameters relating to
the presentation of self. And American Hustle on its own somewhat
anodyne terms certainly uses this schizo feature of contemporary life
as a playing out factor of the film.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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12 Years a Slave Steve McQueen (2013
USA) Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt

Viewed: 14 Jan 2014, Empire Cinema
Newcastle; Ticket £3.95

As presented film, Steve McQueen’s 12
Years a Slave is little more than a soap opera tricked out with
predictable contemporary graphic violence. The big stars Brad and
Michael do their movie gestural facial acting without ever breaking
sweat. Ejiofor is a competent lead figurehead, but without a voice, who
takes us down the overlong narrative from its beginning until it gets
to its end. ‘!2 Years’ is a typical product of that Hollywood
production line that turns out noble but anodyne films.

But it is something more: it is also a
betrayal of its source material.

Camera replaces voice.

Steve McQueen’s movie ’12 years a
slave’ is based on the book of the same title written by free black
Northerner, Solomon Northup, about his experience as a slave. It is
remarkable work, both as literature and as document.

Published in 1854 and written in the
first person, it is a harrowing terrible account in which the author
explains how he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. An
ordeal of brutal beatings and humiliation, a vicious existence as a
non-being that lasted 12 years before somewhat fortuitously Salomon
contrived his own rescue.

This classic work of American
literature might have seemed a natural fit for black UK director
McQueen. An opportunity to make a filmic statement out of a strong
clear black voice harking from the shadows of the nineteenth century.

Significantly though McQueen chooses
not to use Northup’s voice as the dynamic form holding the story
together. McQueen’s camera replaces Northup’s voice. Image
replaces insight. The clarity and understanding of Northup is
replaced by a mish-mash of camera angles that represent only
McQueen’s technical decisions. The camera replaces voice promoting
uncertainty of origination; and McQueen’s semi flashback structure
which looks cobbled together in the edit, replaces Northup’s straight
time line.
McQueen renders the material from
Northup’s book in the same way cheap hamburger producers render meat.
His film ends up like a pattie of cliche’d images palatable to the
taste of the consumer. ’12 Years’ is not so much a film more a soap
opera or TV mini series, whose scenario was designed to manipulate
Northup’s observations to pander to the prejudices of contemporary
audiences and Oscar juries. For the director who made Hunger, ’12
years’ looks like a sell out to the usual suspects. ’12 Years’ is
refusal to take on the contextualised material on its own terms.

’12 Years’ is the voice of a man:
Solomon Northup. A man of his time with perspectives informed and
fashioned by his age. As a voice of a man, if you do not respect it
but instead manipulate it for your own ends, then you are little more
than a mountebank. A thief laying claim to a false legitimacy of
ownership. Instead of writing his own script and filling it out with
his own retrojected contemporary conceits McQueen goes through the
process of dishonestly representing Northup’s work as something that
it is not.
Opportunistic fabrication characterises
McQueen’s film.

This is the voice of man. Solomon
Northrup’s account of his experiences in ’12 years’ retains its power
and more because read today it surprises us at every level. The
first thing you hear in this voice is a sensitised intelligence
grounded in character and experience. Intelligence as a resource
that is refined throughout Northup’s suffering. The second thing
that strikes the reader is that Solomon’s ‘intelligence’ informs not
only his intellect but also his emotions. This sort of intelligence
is difficult to understand. The pain inflicted on him by the white
race produced in Northup neither anger nor hate but compassionate
insight in the hollowness of the white psyche; an understanding that
a corrupt social system produces corrupted vicious individuals to
represent it. Like both Primo Levy and Nelson Mandala he rises
above the cesspit system of racially structured degradation and
annihilation arriving at a state of mind in which he sees clearly the
nature of evil. Finally Solomon Northup[ is sustained during his
torture by his faith in the Lord. It is faith that carries him
through. His ability to call on an externalised power (whether
projected or real) endows him with the psychic stamina to sustain
hope and finally take his chance. His faith in the Lord and the New
Testament is strengthened even by the slave owners selective use of
readings form the New Testament to their slaves. Northup sees at
once that it is an abusive attempt to justify what is indefensible
in Christian terms. These readings, judged by Solomon Northup to be
a distorted self evident insult to intelligence, are by McQueen’s
script exploited as an opportunity for cheap theatrical parody.

And in choosing the option of
theatrical effect and the spectacle over voice, McQueen’s film is
not true to the spirit of the book. The lie replaces the true.
But the betrayal of Northup’s spirit
extends into fabrications of the actual text that McQueen finds it
necessary to introduce. When Solomon regaining his freedom, returns
home after his 12 years, the film represents that his wife Anne has
remarried and her new husband is with her when she greets Solomon.
This is not in the book. In the book Northup writes that when she
heard he had returned, his wife Anne ran home from work into his
arms.

There are many ways of honouring truth:
literalism is but one. It can be honoured in the word in the spirit
in the practice in the structure. McQueen chooses none of these. He
seems to have taken a road in the development of his scenario in
which piece by piece what is true in Northup’s book has been
gradually discarded. All that remains is pastiche soap opera. In
which case why lay claim to Northup’s work? Instead like Tarantino,
fashion your own Slave story script and do what you want with it !
Make it film that panders to whatever values of history, history of
film and entertainment and indulge whatever anachronisms you want:
have your escaped slave call home on a mobile.

In this scenario of ’12 Years’: the lie
replaces the truth.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Innocents
Jack Clayton (UK 1961) Deborah
Kerr; Michael Redgrave

writing credits: John Mortimer, William Archibold, Truman Capote

viewed Tyneside Cinema 5 Jan 2014; ticket: £6:95

There is a moment at the height of Miss Giddens’ epic contest with Miles where she is seen in full ‘battle regalia’ her luxuriant hair let down like a warrior. Until this point her hair, neatly pinned up has been a symbolic token of her reason and self control. As her rolling locks cascade over her shoulders we see for the first something of her primal energy. In the movies, hair cuts tell their own stories about the characters, suggesting in the lines and contours of the hair something about the landscape of personality underneath. In this letting go moment it felt like Miss Giddens had arrived at an epithany, a point where she recognised that to ‘win’ she would have to call up from within herself unfamiliar latent forces. A ‘hair-down’ shot in which Clayton would start to release something of his own invention into the scenario. A moment of truth which would transform the staid dull neuroticism of Deborah Kerr’s playing into something energised. The Innocents would be transformed into a film inspired by not inhibited by, Henry James’ magnificent short story: The Turn of the Screw.

But this moment remains simply that, a brief ‘hair encounter’. After which the movie returns to the mechanics of its laboured plodding Gothic plot. A telling of the plot that significantly diverges from the original telling of the story in as much as where James teases and finally opts for a phenomenological ambiguity, Clayton plays out a literalistic interpretation. Of course every film finds its own path through its material to its own form. Clayton in opting for development of specific plot mechanics over character development, leaves his film with an empty centre.

The Innocents pivots on the performance of the role of Governess Miss Giddens. She is the soul of the work and Henry James wrote his novella in the form of a letter written by her. This letter structures the work as a point of view: a seeing and recounting of the events. This is one of things James explored: how seeing informs understanding. However in the Innocents film version, we don’t see things from her point of view. Sometimes we do but mostly we get a camera taking up different narrative roles dominated by overdetermined affect images that Clayton asks Deboral Kerr as governess to give. The role of governess is defined by stereotypical faciality of the melodramatic horror genre characterised by the lowering of the jaw, the stretching of the skin over cheek bones, the widening of eyes. Locked into her rigid characterisation Kerr, directed by Clayton is unable to suggest the chaotic mental states that characterise perception and judgement in unstable psychic relationships. And so, like a fire, without sufficient psychic energy to consume, the film slowly dies down and goes out. There are a couple of moments with both Miles and Flora that kindle, but in the end instead of a focus of intent, there are just images edited and manipulated to impose the occasional shock on the audience.

The other weakness of the Innocents is the failure of Jack Clayton to create a world within which to locate his action. The action mostly takes place in a large country house called Bly. For the film to work the location should take on some numinous identity of its own. The setting should emanate a sense of presence and immanence in relation to the events that it secretes. But Clayton doesn’t develop the house as anything more than a backdrop to the action. Looking at the garden and the house, the props suggest a polymorphous raiding of the studio’s prop cupboard. None of the items, the statues the pictures the drapes have any resonance. The best shots are the over the shoulder tracking shots down the corridor (which might have influenced Kubrick’s Shining) and the use of the windows as mirror reflectors of faces. But neither of these more effective shots are intrinsic to the fabric of the setting, they could be part of any large house.

David Lean, in films such as Great Expectations and Brief Encounter, anchored his films within the numinous possibilities inherent in created and imagined worlds. His characters and plots were embedded in in the very fabric of his settings. In this film adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, Jack Clayton needed to better understand that the content and features of his setting were central to his artistic vision. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Double Indemnity Billy Wilder (USA
1944) Barabara Stanwyck, Fred McMurray, Edward G Robinson

Viewed DVD Boxing Day 2013

Mythic Surprise Party
One thing that struck me about Double
indemnity was that it was on the whole in terms of its images highly
abstract. Its actual concerns were located in the realm of ideas and
myth and the film was the more the powerful
for this bias.
Most commentators or at least the ones
I have read, pick out Wilder’s Double Indemnity as a prime exemplar
of the film noir genre. Reviewers agree that all the film’s
constituent elements were superbly crafted and delivered to produce a
very fine movie.

Let’s start with the structure of the
film. Double indemnity is structured as a back story told in the
course of Frank’s confession into Keyes’ dictaphone. This appliance
is a sort of confession machine; a mythical hole in the rock into
which you whisper your sins. It’s an automated depersonalised
confessional that intensifies and triggers the truth telling reflex
in an immoral irreligious age that responds to technology but not to
authority. In Wilder’s hands it’s a device which is never strained
or stretched and in the final scene the machine is cleverly but not
artificially, integrated into the film’s climax.

The script from a James Cain story has
a relentless narrative drive boned and honed by Raymond Chandler and
Wilder, spiced with sour dark dialogue for Phylis and Frank, and
variant wiseacring from Keyes.

The acting; high energy performances
from Stanwyck (the allure of the fake and brittle, in a wig) McMurray and
Robinson.

The cinematography: John Seitz’s
high key noir mood lighting rigs reflect the protagonists states of
mind. And the camera movement: Wilder’s direction makes use of
tracking shots to shift perspective and heighten psychological
affect. We see a scene that starts with a CLOSE SHOT of the
conspiring couple about to make love on the sofa in Frank’s
apartment. The camera suddenly tracks back pulling Phylis and Frank
into a WIDE PERSPECTIVE. The effect of the movement is to strip back
the naked raw desire driving their intention; but at the same time
also reveals them as vulnerable and alone together, pre-doomed by
the crime that lies before them.

But Double Indemnity is more than the
sum of all its qualities because it’s caste in a mythic form, which
gives the film a psychic authenticity that connects its action to a
grounded meaning. I don’t think that any one myth underlies Double
Indemnity, rather that the script suggests a number of mythic
sources, some Biblical and some Classical.

The core of the film’s mythic grounding
lies in the relationship between the two male protagonists. At the
end of the film Frank lies bleeding to death on the floor at the
door of the Company with Keyes beside him. He tells Keyes that Keyes
was too close to him to see what he was doing. Keyes replies: “Closer
than that…” Frank looks up at him and says: “Love you too.”
Extraordinary final dialogue! At once we understand that the theme
of the film is betrayal. This dialogue might construe a homoerotic
relationship between the men, the love that dare not speak its name.
More plausibly in relation to what we have seen, it might indicate
the love that develops in the relationship between master and
apprentice, master and disciple. A love characterised by an immense
fondness: The love of Moses for Aaron, of Jesus for Judas, the love
of Laius for Oedipus. The mythic theme underlying Double Indemnity
is the epic of betrayal, the leaving of the true and righteous path
of virtue for the gratification of desire. The forsaking of the love
of the master and his teachings for the blandishments of the flesh

The Pacific Insurance Company (shot as
a modern Temple of Commerce) is represented as a good and decent
place. It is the repository of a belief system that serves the
decency of the American way of life. Keyes is a high priest and
Frank his acolyte and successor. Both men symbolise in their roles
the forces of truth which have to stand firm against the
destabilising forces of putrescence and deception that seek to
undermine the Temple. Seduced by the flesh Frank betrays his love
for the Master, leaves the Temple and takes up residence in the
Brothel. In so doing, like Judas, he also determines the course of
his own destruction. Psychically castrated Frank cannot survive
without the sustaining love of his master.

Interestingly it is perhaps this very
love between the two men that overburdons Frank. As if Frank is
overwhelmed by the expectation of Keyes’ too great a love, and can
only respond to the inner tensions that it causes by betrayal, a
course of action that will destroy himself and perhaps Keyes. A true love story.
There is a wonderfully scripted
leitmotif that defines the relationship between the two male
protagonists: the Promethian spark. Throughout the movie Keyes asks
Frank for a light for his cigar. Frank always obliges. He takes a
match and flicking the nail of his thumb against its head, ignites
it. It’s a cheap trick, but as an image it effectively suggests the
idea of an energised cathartic relationship bonding the two men. The
spark that passes from the the younger man to the older: sexual
energy, the spark of knowledge, the fire of life. A metaphor for a
Promethean pact, a pact that is expertly reversed in the final scene
when Keyes demonstrates that he too is a consummate fire master and
lights Frank\s final cigarette with a match lit by a flick of his own
thumb.

The film works and retains its power
because working through a mythological casting of images, fire,
sacrifice, betrayal castration love it links the audience to a series
of primal archetypal elements that engage and link psychic states of
mind to action.

One final thought. Wilder when he made
Double Indemnity still seems to retain a belief in the moral solidity
of American capitalism. There is a certain collective commitment
that morally sustained the system. Wilder (and Chandler presumably)
saw that it was under threat from the new and increasingly
intensified forces of individuated desire. But in this movie, the
moral collective, the Temple holds its ground; it sees off the
brothel and the raging forces and the chaos of the id. Decency
represented by high priest Keyes wins, even if it is sorely wounded
as there are still enough good men left standing. By the time Wilder
makes Ace in the Hole in 1951, he has lost belief in the ability of
the American system to be decent. He sees the organisation of big
business irremediably corrupted by individual desire. The good no
longer can withstand the bad. On the outside the Temple might still
look like it is standing but inside it has turned into a brothel.
The era of an unashamed and unrestrained individualism is beginning.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Wages of Fear (le Salaire de la Peur) Henri-George Clouzot (Fr 1953) Yves Montard; Charles Vanel; Vera Clouzot Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 8 Dec 2013; ticket price: £5 Requiem for white trash….requiem for us all… Clouzot’s Wages of Fear is a filmic probe into the colonial and neo-colonial relations between the West and the developing world in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although film contains superbly crafted action sequences, its power derives from two defining elements. The scenario written as a series of beautiful and powerful metaphors: insects, the dusty town, the trucks the lake of oil the fire. And secondly its action is never detached from its driving theme: exploitation. The opening setting is in some Central American country, an arid clapboard sun bleached small town in the middle nowhere: but close to oil. The opening shot of the movie is a condensed visual symbol of the film’s theme, a movement image, a tracking shot that links the initial close up to the wide perspective. In close up a clutch of insects, scorpions perhaps, murderously crawl over each other in a hollow in the ground, scooped out of the dust. As the camera pulls back we see that each of these venomous creatures is attached by a piece of string to a small wooden frame held in the hand of a small boy. The child has these creatures, which could kill him, by the balls. Distracted by something happening in the street, he yanks up the stick frame, leaving the creatures spinning helplessly in mid air. A perfect expression of what is going on in this place. Clouzot’s camera, in this tracking shot as elsewhere in the film uses the shot to pull together disparate images into one idea. The function of the town is to supply the oil industry with cheap labour. Seen through the eyes of the white trash marooned in the town, the first part of Clouzot’s movie establishes the economic realities of a rentier economy. The oil company controls everything. They hold all the strings. They decide who works. The men in the town supply the non unionised cheap labor to the company: they either send remittances back or they come back as corpses. The white trash gaze on with indifference as a woman angered by the return of nine shrouds, pours out a political tirade of scorn and condemnation of the oil company. Her anger attracts and raises a crowd who temporarily overrun the company guards. But they are a demoralised people and lack the resources to sustain a prolonged struggle. If the town and its people are the fulcrum of exploitation, then the poor whites represent an expendable but useful alternative resource: a sort of social counter balance. The whites also have lives of little value, but their need to define themselves apart from and as essentially different from the natives, gives them a certain value to the company for certain types of dirty work. Today they are mercenaries hired by companies such as Blackwater. In Wages of Fear, they are the drivers of the death trucks. Wages of Fear divides into two parts. The first part, realist in representation, establishes the town as two groups of people with separate relations, states of mind and attitudes vis a vis the Oil Company. The second part, focusing on the whites, depicts their journey of terror as they ferry nitroglycerine to the blown out oil wells. Much of this second part is shot so that it has an abstract quality. Even the final ordeal of driving the truck through through the lake of black oil, has an abstracted metaphysical resonance. Like evil the black slime overwhelms Joe and Mario. In the image of the oil spill we see they ( and us) are drowning in forces of corporate capitalism, which penetrates into the totality of being. In this second half of the film, the focus is on the abstracted interior of the cab of the trucks. As the landscapes ghost by in the headlamps, it is in these compressed psychic spaces where the schizo states of mind of the men play out. Living with the possibility of death at every jolt and hole in the road, goaded by the promise of a huge cash payment, the scenes in the darkened cabs take place at the intersection of the men’s fear and desire; the forces that finally kill them. The forces exploited and controlled by oil. But although the forces set to work by Clouzot have an abstract quality, his actors, in particular Yves Montard as Mario, bring,with their bodies, a raw physicality to their roles. They are flesh and blood. In contrast to Anglo Saxon world, France in the pre 60’s period presented an open minded attitude towards homosexuality (at least in Parisian arts circles). Acceptance of homosexuality tended towards its quasi glamorous representation, emphasising the cerebral rather than the physical. Clouzot breaks out from these artsie boundaries. The mercenaries are rough trade. Their gender doesn’t define their sexuality. Ingenuous acceptance of homoerotic relations, is part of who the men are. Clouzot places this undifferentiated sexuality at the core of his characters. The physicality between men pressed together in the tiny cabs, is emphatically realised when Big Joe, the macho guy with the gun, adopts the passive role of the woman. Mario ends up treating Joe with the same callous indifference with which he treated Linda.. Vera Clouzot the director’s wife, plays the part of Linda. With her painfully thin waif like figure she represents a terrifying but almost comic book figure of frailty. In Wages of Fear the men have scorned women, and she is little more than an object of Mario’s abuse. But she is also the foil for her husband’s black Bunuelesque anti religious humour, that runs through the script. As Linda prays fervently, like Viridiana, in a scene of mawkish religious sentimentality, she looks up and sees the soles of the shoes of one of the white trash who has hung himself suspended from the beam above her. In the penultimate scene Clouzot presents his final visual metaphor. The shots of the fires at the well head. It is an apocalyptic vision of hell: raging fire, black smoke. A vision of the where the big oil companies and the world of oil, are taking us. As if to say the Gods whom we serve are implacable and will destroy us: if not today then tomorrow. Be warned. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Selfish Giant Clio Barnard (2013 Uk) Connor Chapman; Shaun Thomas Viewed Tyneside Cinema 22 Nov 2013 Ticket: £7.50 Film as an act of grace… Clio Barnard’s eponomous movie credits itself with being inspired by Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale. Judging from what has been written about the film, most reviewers have obviously not read the Selfish Giant and think that the film is based on the story. It’s certainly not. As the end credits state: it is inspired by the story. Wilde’s work (possibly co-authored with his wife) is a transparent allegory on the working of grace and embued with religious symbolism. A morally improving work such as Oscar possibly read to his children. So there is a question that can be asked: what inspirational element in the Selfish Giant does Clio Barnard’s film draw on? The Selfish Giant is set in the alienated lumpen welfare world of Bradford. A world abandoned to social agencies characterised by dependency and criminality. It was described by Andrea Dunbar’s 1980 play the Arbor which was also set in Bradford. So it is no surprise that Clio Barnard’s first film was a documentary about Dunbar and her play. So this is a territory and a social strata very familiar to Barnard who references. Dunbar’s work directly in the Selfish Giant by giving her lead boy protagonist the name, Arbor. Thereby laying claim to a direct line of provenance and descent. The Arbor, named after a road on a sink estate, opened up an abandoned world of intergenerational deprivation. Andrea Dunbar, herself a teenage single mother born on the Arbor, lived and described a culture often characterised by economic desperation and degraded relations between people. Women laid claim to life by serial procrearation; many men lived off the women in bonds defined by violence and/or made out through crime. Drugs and alcohol abuse were an endemic part of life on the Estate both as a palliative and a way of life. Dunbar in the very act of her writing shone light on and gave an actual recognition to the lives she described. Her observations including those of herself, staked out a claim for acknowledgement that her people were also a part of social matrix. The condition of their lives a price paid by them for the wealth of others. The Selfish Giant takes from where up the Arbor’s setting and situation leaves off. But as it develops, moves beyond it, extending out into a dimension that goes beyond Dunbar’s work reaching out into a sort of mythology. The opening shot is a wide night time shot of a field of horses. A shot chartacterised by both its urban setting and its stillness. There are a number of these sort of shots throughout the film: electricity substations, giant cooling towers, the moon. Shots that suggest in their manner and pacing, something of the film’s expressive code . Although contemporary in setting these shots have a quality that locates them in a zone outside of time, before before written history. They are derived from an originary world of primal forces, where the pacts of survival are between men and nature. not between men and social agencies. The actual world inhabited by Arbor and Swifty, documented in the first section of the film, is dominated by forces of control; as the scenario develops these forces fade and the shape of destiny is moulded by other possibilities. The story is set in the world of the scrappers. The scrap yard bears no resemblance to the Giant’s garden, except its wall which has two functions. But like the Giant’s garden, the scrap yard has allegorical meaning. It’s a place where people who have been scrapped live off society’s junk and trash. The scrap yard is a mythical zone, like Hades or the caves of the dwarves. Those who work there are outcastes, unclean and tainted beings. What happens in the yard is a source of mystery: Out of the chaos those who recognise the true value of scrap turn base metal into riches. It’s a form of alchemy. And , as the work of the scrapper is to return everything they touch to its originary form. Put to the fire stripped of all outer sheathing and markers the legimate and the illegimate become one, an indistinguishable molten mass. The scrap man has the laugh, everything is finally reduced to money, and his money in the melting pot of society built on respect for wealth, is as good as anyone else’s. It pays the bills. I Of course the scrapyard in Selfish Giant locates a story that directs the actions of the characters, But the impression is that Barnard is not so much interested in the mechanics of narrative, rather the location of the stream of events. Barnard does not accept that her characters are bound by the destiny of deprivation. Arbor, troubled as he is, and Swifty, lacjing confidence, are drawn to and seek out another reality for the entrapped doomed male. And they find it through the portal of the scrap yard. The yard releases them into primary contact with elemental forces: the animal totem, fire, precious metal copper, and the ferocity of nature. Through the scrap yard they are at least partially take on the mantel of Celtic Princes. Freed from the immediate scrutiny of agents they become aristocrats of their own making, and aas well as reeping the rewards have to pay the price for this. Freedom that is won always cmes at a cost. The Selfish Giant is not about horse race, criminality or social relations. All these have a place in the scenario. It is about spirit. A spirit that cathects, energises its protagonists in an elemental contract and in so doing ennobles them. The purpose of the film is relocation of its subjects. The selfish giant removes its protagonists from the realm of judgement into the realm of mythe. Barnard simply points to a possibility. She employs film as an art form and and uses film as a means to induce another way of seeing, another way of looking at the world presented. And that surely is one of the ways in which art works upon us: to help us to see. Inspired by the Selfish Giant. I think Clio Barnard’s film is an act of grace. As the Selfish Giant was transformed by his realisation, so the she transforms her characters from base into pure, from dead end sink estate kids into Celtic princes. But this case, the act of grace has to come from the audience. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Gravity Alfonso
Cuarón (USA 2013) Sandra Bullock. George Clooney

viewed 12 Nov 13 Empire Cinema newcastle ticket £5:95

Gravity is the story of Ryan, a woman with a man’s name. What was
this about I wondered?

The long opening shot of Gravity establishes something of the
qualitative nature of the space experience: its solitude. Out there
you are alone. This opening shot is of very long duration. It
carries us seamlessly from a long and distant vista of the space ship
to a fluid series of close ups of Matt and Ryan, the two astronauts
at work outside the ship. And beyond the two figures in space we see
the Planet Earth, a vast presence, the source of life.

However I felt that the opening shot’s length beyond a certain
point became counter productive. It ends up simply drawing attention
to itself as the director’s self referential act of filmic
narcissism. As it goes on and on and on, the shot delivers
diminishing returns adding nothing to the movie. Instead the shot
only draws attention to itself as an outer force unanchored in any
premise. It is neither, point of view nor state of mind nor
perception. It is a gaze; the gaze of a space tourist. The shot
taken by the unseen Steadicam operator like an iphone snap for the
Face Book page. It draws attention to the sender not the image.
Wish you were here!

Cuaron’s opening shot makes a statement about the film’s form:
rather than set up a situation. This is a Hollywood movie and we’re
here for the beer, to see what the camera’s got on offer.

Cuaron having overindulged with his first shot sets in play and
tests out relations, that like Ridley Scott’s go beyond cosmic
metaphysics. The scenario sets in play a series of propositions that
relate to the social matrix. These propositions, are not be found in
the million dollar surface of 3D digital FX that define the look of
Gravity. Cuaron is no Kubrick able in one stroke to make
cosmological connections through use of the pure image. Overall I
found Gravity visually less compelling an experience than Kubrick’s
2001. Even in 3D there is simply nothing in his film that remotely
matches Kubrick’s visionary realisations. Gravity to my eye lacked
cinematographic edge, with the exception of one particular shot
which connected directly to Gravity’s underlying story.

The two protagonists Matt and Ryan spend most of the film in their
spacesuits, which are quite different from swimsuits. Space suits are
a complete protective carapace, worlds in their own right, the
sequester the flesh. They are interfaces that remove the wearer from
all direct contact physical contact and interaction. The suits are
functional extensions of the body, designed for specific purposes. As
mediaeval knights in heavy armour were effectively extensions of one
function, combat; so Matt and Ryan in their astronaut suits are
simply extensions of functions for surviving and working in space.
In their spacesuits humans are machines, fit only for the functions
of space. The most powerful scene in the film, Cuaron’s coup de
cinema, is when Ryan divests herself of her space suit. She strips
it off like a burlesque performer, revealing her body and visually
laying claim to possession of flesh and blood as a psychic reality.
In shedding her carapace Ryan in fact affirms that she is a prisoner
of the forces that have projected her into space. The space suit
carries to the extreme the subjugation of being human to becoming
machine. In space as in the large corporations that dominate earth
machine precedes essence. As you look upon the worlds created by the
the great IT corporations: Facebook, Google, Apple, this is a future,
the large corporations envelope us as certainly as the space suit.
Escape is ecstatic and exhilerating, but illusionary.

Gravity’s narrative is simple: it’s the old story of boy meets
girl: Ryan meets Matt. A girl meets boy story which plays out in a
very particular manner. Strapped into their spacesuits and seen
through the camera lens, the girl and boy, are not so much characters
as specimens. They are Cuaron’s laboratory specimens. As if
Gravity’s plot line was a thought experiment, in which Cuaron
extrapolates what is visible in contemporary human relations into the
future. As experimenter Cuaron places the boy /girl diad in the bell
jar of outer space, cut off from any external contact or
communications. Like in a video game based on trail by ordeal, a set
of purely functional tasks have to be completed for survival. Having
locked in his specimens, Cuaron films and records the outcome.

In Gravity Cuaron has given his female specimen the male name of
Ryan, whilst his male has the generic everyman name of Matt: Matt
AnyMan of our times. Hi Matt.

We see that it is the nature of the space suit to be an
integument defined by pure function. What happens when function
precedes being. Much of the attention of Gravity’s camera is focused
on the consequences of the increasing masculinisation of the female.
Or to put it another way, the subsumation of the female into the
pure world of male function. Gravity, in the form of Ryan
extrapolates a certain type of future. With her male name, her
space suit that decouples sexuality and gender from identity,
untethered from her biological drives which are but a memory, and
required only to function or die, Ryan personifies the future of
social relations. The course piloted by the female is not just that
of non dependance on the male, but of the complete expendability of
the male. And the male realises this. Male specimen Matt decoupling
the lanyard clip that holds him to Ryan’s umbilical cord realises the
inevitability of the male destiny. It’s Goobye Matt. Extinction and
replacement by the masculinised female.

Working beyond this interesting but comic book experiment, there
was a deeper idea I felt implicit in Gravity: the idea of isolation.
The extent to which isolation both as a situation and a state of
mind is an increasingly characteristic of contemporary society.
Increasingly loneliness is becoming a default state and plotted onto
a map of the future looks only to increase. Clamped into devices,
wired into computers, strapped inside machines for living, we are
alone. Functional physical extensions displace other areas of
psychic space.

As a corollary we become happy to live by ourselves in a world
defined by technological relations not human relations. Ryan the
masculated woman exists outside human relations. She is without a
prayer, using the radio as she drives home from work to anaesthetise
herself and be ready for work next day. She has become a robot
defined by function: a worker bee the sterile servant of a vast
machine. Isolation is a characteristic feature suburban and
corporate America, as the carapace of work becomes the defining
feature of identity. And it is the extrapolation of the forces of
isolation that lie at the heart of Gravity. Gazing at the mother
planet, near but far off, spat out alone onto its surface Ryan is the
future woman degendered by the disappearance of the male, isolated in
her sex, occupying a virtual body within a machine.

When Ryan is catapulted back to mother earth she is alone: no one
comes to her.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Filth Jon S Baird (2013 Scot Ger Swe ) James McAvoy

Viewed Empire Cinema newcastle upon Tyne 17 Oct 13 ticket: £6.40
Now here’s a funny thing: when I left the cinema after seeing
Filth, protagonist Bruce Robertson’s catch phrase: Same rules apply
– kept on ringing about in my head. Whenever Robertson did the
dirty on some poor sap who crossed his path, he would quip: ‘Same
rules apply’ Although I didn’t quite get it at first, the phrase got
me thinking about Rules which I presume is what both Director Jon
Baird and writer Irvine Welsh, who wrote the novel, intended.

The opening sequences of Filth introduce two locations : the
bedroom and the police station, settings which provide much of the
film’s action. Bottoms up and bottoms down you might say; sex and
power lie at the heart of the film’s concern. In the opening
sequence of Filth we see a sexy woman provocatively dressing and
talking about power being the ultimate turn on and how she keeps hold
of her policeman husband by playing the tease. The scene providies a
significant cue that sex as a power tool would play hard ball in this
scenario.

The second sequence of shots introduces the protagonist Bruce
Robertson of the Edinburgh CID as, during a breifing for a murder
case, he leeringly appraises and evaluates his rivals for promotion.

In the screen tradition of Touch of Evil, LA Confidential and Joe
Orton’s Loot, I had thought that Filth would feature police
corruption in its narrative. But in the same way that at a given
level Welsh’s Trainspotting is not about drug dealing, so Filth is
not about police corruption. It’s not even about the police.
Although its key setting might be the Edinburgh CID, this is not
central to the situation that Baird set ups and develops. The plot
hinges on the manipulations and gambits made by Bruce Robertson in
his attempt to secure promotion to the rank of Detective Inspector.
As a promotion competition the plot could be set inside any corporate
body: Amazon, BA Systems, Ford or some large Council.

Filth is grounded not so much in particiulars as in universals.
Same rules apply. Filth is not concerned with the particular
relations and practices engendered by the police in their role as the
interface between Society and the Law. Filth’s focus of concern is
raw competition; the battle between men for scare resources: the
battle for Promotion. An indivisible prize only one man or woman can
win.
In Filth. Baird probes the state of our society in a manner that
might be philisophically grounded in the writings of Thomas Hobbes,
the 17th century political philosopher. Although Hobbes
was writing to justify the state, his ideas can be transposed to any
level of catastrophic social disintegration. In the 20th
and 21st centuries Welsh and Baird realise that it is the
break down at the micro level of social ordering which is leading to
chaotic social conditions. The disappearance of collective
institutions, with their values and structures, in the face of
attack by sociopathic individualism. A collapsed social situation
that is well summed up by Hobbes: “it is manifest
that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all
in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a
war as is of every man against every man.”
The moral consequences of this break down of social order provides
the framework for Filth. In vacuum caused by break down of the moral
order, the sociopath fills the gap. In persuit of promotion Bruce
Robertson is at war with everyone, and as war has become the default
state: same rules apply.
As is the case in the bedroom where sex is persued both as a war
strategy and as a basis of personal identity. With sex and power
linked, sexual relations also become located within the chaotic
conditions of the war of all against all and become the centre of a
dysfunctional self identity. Like drugs sex can be both adictive and
subject to what Bill Boroughs calls the bitch of tolerance: you
always need more of a substance to get the same effect.

As Filth develops Bruce needs more sex. Detached from feeling,
his power play sex becomes an increasingly isolated masturbatory
ritual . Sex drives Bruce into a kind of blindness, a black hole
through which light neither enters nor leaves.

As constructed by Baird and Welsh Filth is a dystopian fable
grounded in the breakdown of the micro order. interesting
that at the beginning of the film the audience were laughing at the
slightest sugestion of a smutty joke or risque reference; at the end
of the movie, there was not much laughter. Hobbes is worth
quoting again as he summerises human life in relation to the
conditions of the war of all against all: (quote) ‘ in this condition
the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short.’ Which is a accurate desciption how Baird and Welsh have
mapped the moral career of Bruce Robertson.

So: Same rules apply….what does it mean? It’s
telling you there are ‘no rules’. So watch out.
Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Blue Jasmine Woody Allen (USA 2013)
Cate Blanchette
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 2nd
Oct 2013 Ticket £8.20

Blue Jasmine got me thinking about
clowns.

In the Music Halls when disaster struck
the cry would go up: “Bring on the clowns!” The idea being that
clowns would divert the audience’s attention from whatever it was,
that had gone wrong. Treating the funny men and women as a
distraction does less than justice to their artistry and genius. In
particular those who have dominated cinema such as Chaplin and
Keaton, whose ranks also include Woody Allen.
But Cinema today has less space for the
wise fool. They are crowded out by films that exploit either
spectacle or emotions or desires.
Films of course are signs of the times.
They say something about the states of mind and psychic moods that
underlie the social matrix. The tsunami of apocalyptic films
flooding over our cinema screens attests to the insecurities and
fears that characterise our world.
And then there’s films like Woody
Allen’s latest movie Blue Jasmine. It doesn’t really seem to know
what it is. Perhaps appropriate in that it mirrors a society where
many people don’t know who they are. Also, like many of us, it is a
film that would like to be taken seriously. Indeed the final shot of
it’s A list star Cate Blachette sitting in a public place without her
make up and showing her age, stakes out Blue Jasmine’s claim to be a
drama, perhaps even a tragedy. But the problem is that the preceding
hour and a half of its footage have made any such claims ridiculous.
Comparisons have been made between the
plot line of Tennessee Williams’ Street Car named Desire and Blue
Jasmine. Comparisons have been made between butter and margarine.
Time usually sorts these things out; and as with butter and
margarine, any comparison between Blue Jasmine and Street Car is a
case of at best an errant judgement; at worst a cynical marketing
ploy.

Williams play, filmed in 1951, is a
testosterone soaked wake up call to America about the dangers of the
delusional states of sentimentality pedalled by Hollywood and Madison
Avenue. Tennessee Williams pitched Streetcar at post war audiences
who had not yet totally embraced the consumerist ethos. The
collective psyche was at a turning point and audiences were prepared
to hear out Williams play. But whatever understanding you had of
Streetcar, it was not an advert. Williams was not selling anything.
It was a moral statement.

In contrast Blue Jasmine looks and
feels like a life style advertisement; and it is assembled in a
similar way to those adverts for glossy consumer products that
preceded it on the screen. Like a advert or a cake for that matter
Blue Jasmine is an assemblage of a number of key ingredients. The
Hollywood recipe says: mix into the script one good looking lead
actress on whom to hang the story; add sexy locations – New York San
Francisco; fold in moody music in the form of a sultry jazz sound
track, and sprinkle with products flaunting a pantheon of desirable
consumer goodies: BMW Dior Versace etc. Blue Jasmine is a product
of a mass communication industry where material desire is now the
bed rock of an audience’s expectations.

Blue Jasmine is styled like a
commercial so how does it work dramatically? It’s flashback
structure, which seems de rigour for lazy film-makers at the moment,
is flabby and delivers little tension as it builds up to the big
revelation that Jasmine it was who shopped No pun intended) her
husband to the Feds. As a wannabe tragedy Blue Jasmine poses as a
morality fable based on the Bernie Madoff story, (Jasmine’s husband
Hal even has a passing resemblance to Bernie and I wonder if Woody
lost a bundle of money in Bernie’s Ponzi swindle). But the ethical
posturing of Blue Jasmine is not strong enough to overcome its
stylistic provenance. That last shot, onto which so much is staked,
the naked face of the A lister, is supposed to flag that Cate’s
character, Jasmine is paying the price for her collusive badness, as
she descends into alcohol fuelled madness. But her wretched
condition doesn’t seem to be the result of any personal moral crisis,
any moment of confronting the truth about herself. Her downfall is
not the consequence of her self condemnation. Her madness is the
result of her loss of her enviable life style and a failure of her
make-over as she tried to pass herself off as an innocent. The
lesson of Blue Jasmine is that if you collude in your husband’s
criminality, even if you find out he’s cheating on you, don’t shop
him to the cops,or you’ll lose everything.

Ok so Blue Jasmine is a drawn out life
style promo which is unconvincing as a drama. But none of this would
matter very much if it were funny. Blue Jasmine is not very funny.
The issue of its unfunniness goes right to the core of the assembly
of the film. Cait Blanchette has all the qualities needed to sell
the movie. But she is not a clown. And Woody Allen’s scripts
usually demand a clown, as the lead roles are alter egos of Woody
himself, and and without a clown they don’t work: it’s like Hamlet
without the Prince.

Woody Allen as a performer was a
natural clown, and the clown corresponds to a certain sort of
archetype. The clown courts disaster without meaning to and always
find themselves in the shit; clowns always falls flat on their face
because they think they can do something very very well, but can’t do
it at all; and clowns fail to understand the situation they are in.
The clown’s face mirrors their mental state: alert idiocy,
irrepressible optimism, and well meaning if occasional malicious
incompetence. Allen and Diane Keaton were funny because they were
clowns who knew how to work the clown material. Cate Blanchette
lacks this gift. In consequence her relations in the film with Ginger
and her boyfriends lack bathos; the running gags about her work and
relationships as a dental receptionist are clumsy and vacuous.
Without the clown persona Blue Jasmine
is reduced to being a plodding stylised comedy of manners, a genre
which it doesn’t fit. I say “Bring back the the clowns!”

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk