Adrin Neatrour

Reflections
on the Bergman Season at the Star and Shadow: 1st Sept 2014 to 21st Sept 2014

The
retrospective season at the Star and Shadow of four of Ingmar
Bergman’s films, the Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Through a glass
darkly and Persona was a chance to view and to appraise a director
who is regarded as one of the foremost film makers of the twentieth
century; an opportunity to understand what he offers today’s
audience in the age of the iphone.

Bergman’s
reputation is huge. But he has also been mercilessly parodied as a
gloomy scandinavian whose films for the most part trail dark despair
about the human condition.

Bergman’s
views of human nature and the incapacity of humans to communicate have
been criticised for their emotional and spiritual bleakness.

After
seeing the films my feeling is that these negative reactions to
Bergman are understandable. However they are unbalanced and less
than fair to Bergman as an artist film maker and thinker. Of course
much his work will not be what some cinema goers are looking for.
Bergman’s films are not about entertainment value although they can
certainly be entertaining. The films are personal. They represent
Bergman’s own understanding of world.

And
one key quality stands out in relation to Bergman’s work. He is not
selling anything: a belief system or a justification. Although
Bergman made films before 1951, in 1951 his financial situation
forced him to work for a year making cinema advertisements. And this
year seems to have been critical in developing his film making
technique and also in shaping a personal resolve that his films would
not sell anything. Like the man in the Leonard Cohen song, he would
not be a dealer in solutions, and this had a defining effect on both
the form and content of his films, and the way Bergman shot and
composed his scenarios, in particular his use of the Close Up of
which more later.

Refusing
to be a wheeler dealer in cinematic snake oil remedies was a
fundamental moral imperative for Bergman. He could only work from
the position in which he was truthful to himself. To thine own self
be true. Bergman’s being truthful is an overwhelming and
fundamental impression gained from viewing his work. They come
across like a casting of the shadows of his own inner dialogues, onto
the complex exterior form of his films.

In
these dialogues questions arise that are part of the weave of daily
life; the nature of our relations with and communication with others,
the reality of our aloneness, issues of our identity and place in the
fold of life. These questions emerge in the films through the
interplay of script character and image. Bergman not only refuses to
answer the questions, he states unequivocally, that for us, there are
no answers: Karin in Through A Glass Darkly says she has seen God and
that he was a large hairy spider; when the Knight in the Seventh Seal
asks about the existence of God, the after life and all that, Death
replies that he has no secrets to reveal. Something the knight
already knows.

Now
you might say this is bleak stuff. But my impression from the
audiences is that they were
overwhelmingly appreciative of Bergman’s moral stance. The AP people
understood that Bergman was an artist prepared to say that: life,
communication is hard – that we have to understand that there are
often no answers – that in some respects life comprises problems
not challenges. These may be unfashionable notions but some audiences
find a moment of black and white honesty, more positive than the rose
tinted philosophical twaddle, wrapped in High Definition cosmic
reassurance, peddled by directors such as Terrence Mallick.

If
there is honesty about our condition, at least we’ve got our feet on
the ground. The elements: the sea the sky the earth, are always
present in Bergman’s cinematography almost as reminders. The knight
as he progresses across the plague ridden Medieval Sweden, is framed
by earth sea and sky. For Bergman these elements surround us
externally, as do our memories and dreams internally. They are not
answers but resources for individuals to understand.

As
in a Trial at Law when an attorney finally asks a key question and the
witness responds with an actual answer, there is a palpable shock in
the Court room; so likewise there is shock in the cinema seat as
Bergman without flinching asks questions; and his films, as crucibles
sweat out the responses.

Returning
to the earlier point I want to look at the particular use that
Bergman makes of the close up. In film, it is the face, above all
that characterises the close up. As social beings we are face
readers, we read faces not just of others, but we see faces in
flaking paint, clouds and patterns in the sand. The face is a sign
that we interpret. A face always suggests a possibility. Bergman’s
facial close ups define the experience of viewing his films and are a
key element in the relationship between the films and the audience.

The
characterising feature of Bergman’s close ups is that they are
uncompromising: they are shots of long duration, they are mute and
within them there is little or no movement. They present as a pure
quality, an unindividuated affect, a passivity. Bergman’s close
up’s: Death’s face, the Wallpaper in Glass Darkly, Liv Ullman in
Wild Strawberries and Persona all have an impersonal quality, as if
they do not belong to the actors but could be masks taken on by
anyone. The way they are shot and edited into his films gives them a
quality that can absorb the viewer. In their immobility their
muteness and duration the close ups draw the audience into the shot
giving the audience the space to contribute something of themselves
into the fabric of the film, a sort cinematic short circuit of the
near and far. Absorbed by the close up, which is pure possibility,
the audience become the interpretants of the film, actively engaged
in its unravelliing.

As
the technical means of communication proliferate and multiply in our
society, perhaps there is also an increasing awareness of how
difficult it is to communicate. The thin wavering dieing signals
that we get from our friends, the notices of unavailability and the
ansaphone messages never returned, are like the signs from God at the
waning of the Middle Ages. A warning that we need to start and think
differently. Perhaps that’s a message Bergman still gives out to the
iphone generation of movie goers.

Adrin
Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Elysium Neill Blomkamp (USA 2013)
Matt Damon; Jodie Foster; Wagner Moura

Viewed Empire Cinema 3 Sept 13
Ticket: £3.75
The more remarkable Sci Fi films that I
have seen have been memorable, because in some way they left me with
a thought; which is a nice present to get from a movie. Ridley
Scott’s allegorical Blade Runner posed a question about the nature of
what it means to be human; Kubrick’s parable, 2001 contrasted the
unknowable vastness of space/time in the face of man’s ineffable
smallness; Don Siegal’s filmic metaphor, Invasion of the Body
Snatchers – probed the manifestation of political paranoia.
Whilst stylistically Blomkamp’s movie Elysium owes big time to these
precursors, the impression left by Elysium was one of confusion and
incoherence. It is a mish mash of forms, as if Blomkamp couldn’t
decide if Elysium was one thing or another, parable or blockbuster.
But in the end the motif of personal quest wins out. Elysium’s
commitment to the mega production values crushes all the light out of
the social forces that are initially set into play.
I can’t say if Elysium is a good or bad
movie; that depends as to whether you like your sci-fi bean feasts
served up as a spectacle of special effects and combat; or if you
prefer to leave muscular machinations to the men from Marvel and look
to the Sci fi genre for some cogent expression of ideas.

Anyway Elysium prompted within me the
following observations.
The film’s initial set up divides
planet earth into two contrasting worlds: Elysium and old Planet
Earth. Elysium is where the rulers and controllers of Planet Earth
live. Elysium is a vast tubular ring set in geo-stationary orbit,
modelled as an idealisation of American suburbia: with meadows,
colonial houses, lawns and 2.4 kids. The inhabitants want for
nothing ( materially at any rate) and every home has a very handy
healing machine that cures all ills. Aside from these images we are
given almost no hard data about Elysium. Are they practicing
Mormons? Scientologists? We are not told. Though some might think
on viewing Jodie Foster’s performance as Madame Delacourt, the evil
thin controller, less is more.
Opposing Elysium is dirty old planet
Earth, a slave colony of Elysium. Its population live in vast shanty
towns, oppressed and terrorised by Elysium controlled robots. The
earthlings do not have handy healing machines at home; if sick they
have take their chances in the familiar surroundings of chaotic
overloaded general hospitals.
Wardrope has kitted out Elysium people
with designer suits, very good teeth and expensive haircuts: Perhaps
the clever machines do grooming as well. Earthlings wear stuff from
Primark or patched up rags, with bad teeth and worse haircuts, with
the notable exception of Frey protagionist Max’s sweetheart. You
see immediately that these are two different peoples.
Now this setting of opposing worlds is
a situation that South African Blomkamp will be familiar with from
the continuation of Apartheid era racial and social divisions of his
native country. It is a familiar also in the geophysical division
between Israel and the Palestinians. So, the opening of Elysium
suggests a story that will have a political premise and hence a
certain underlying social weight pushing the narrative forward.
This is a bit of a shock! Elysium is a
Hollywood movie. Will Hollywood caste aside 40 years of resolve not
to make political films and allow Blomkamp to produce a transparently
political allegory. Bless its cotton socks! Of course not. For 40
years Tinsel Town has made films about personal acts of overcoming,
movies with individual self determination at their core of their
scripts. This is not going to change in 2013. Next year – maybe.
Although Blomkamp’s script has an
opposition organisation on Earth, it’s never clear what this
opposition actually wants and as the film progresses any latent
treacherous political tendencies are subverted and transposed to the
acquisition of desire: a desire for something everyone wants: a cure
for cancer.
Of course the provision of Health Care
has a symbolic significance in Apartheid situations such as Gaza,
where Palestinians can only access advanced health care in Israel.
But it is symbolic. Health provision is seen only as part of the
wider issue of repression. In Elysium it becomes the whole issue.
With a trick of the script, the political is flipped over and becomes
Max’s quest for health. Tragically over exposed to radiation in the
course of his assembly line work, Max has to get cured or die. And
the only cure in town is on Elysium with one of those nifty machines.
The plot driver becomes personal not political, and the story
regresses to a simplistic series of CGI battles as he takes on those
who would deny him the right to live.
Max’s quest is given legitimacy in the
scripting by the fact that Frey’s little girl, Matilda, has leukaemia
and so needs one of those Elysium machines. Noting President Obama’s
recent claim that: “it would be immoral not to go to war when small
children have been gassed…”, we can see that children’s stock has
high currency value these days. Children in Hollywood have long
played the role of moral validators. As American Political Life
increasingly imitates Hollywood, so Hollywood repays this tribute in
trumps as violence and war are ultimately justified by the child.
Final thoughts: firstly the idea of
exo-skelitans as in Iron Man, is gaining increased leverage on the
popular imagination. Elysium’s script again services the idea of
mankind overcoming personal body limitations by the fusion of the
mechanical and the biological. Secondly: Blomkamp again exploits the
computer age and its love of the technical fix. Solutions must be
instantanious. A computer is plugged into the master server and at
once a wholescale social about turn is effected: the inhabitants of
Elysium and Earth become one inclusive society. And of course those
handy omnicure machines: lie down count to ten and you’re healed,
except interestingly the machines cures the body but not the mind,
I said that Elysium did not leave me
with a thought. Well not immediately. But whilst writing this piece,
a thought happened. Perhaps the ELYSIUM as a manifestation of
Hollywoods belief system is correct in anticipating the demise of
politics in the face of individual desire. Perhaps the National
Health Service was the precursor to ushering in the post political
era. Now there’s a thought. Not perhaps one intended by Neill
Blomkamp.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Elysium coda:

A brief addition to my comments about
Elysium. It occurred to me when watching Elysium that Hollywood
suffers from a kind of belief system envy syndrome in relation to
Jihadists and their jihad. However misguided and misled the West
believes them to be, there is no doubt that the religious motivations
and intentions of the Jihadists are pure. Their objectives are not
contaminated by personal goals and gains; they fight for Allah.
Jihadists believe in the religious legitimacy of their struggle. To
fight for Allah lends the warriors the lustre of martyrdom and
justifies the atrocities and destruction of war, exonerating such
extreme practice as decapitation. To have such a clear super
personal goal to fight for, places Hollywood in an asymmetrical
ideological position vis a vis Jihad.

Hollywood scriptwriters have to justify
the actions of their protagonists in the name of something as
nebulous and imperfect as American democracy or the freedom to chose
between MacDonald and Burger King. This simply does not have the same
resonance as fighting for a religious ideal. Hence the strange
ideological void at the centre of action movies such as Elysium;
there is simply nothing there only personal desire.

And in Elysium it was interesting to
see that decapitation of one’s enemies, a primal primitive impulse
perhaps but religiously legitimate in the eyes of Jihardis, is on the
cusp of a certain level of acceptance by Hollywood. The baddie,
Spider attempts but fails to decapitate one of Max allies. But Max
himself does triumphantly decapitate an android robot. Thus taking a
couple of timid Hollywood steps towards legitimising imitation of the
Jihadist practice of humiliation of the foe. The problem being such
an extreme practice needs a clear ideological or religious stamp of
approval.

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Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Tony Richardson(UK 1962) Tom Courtenay

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Karel Reisz (UK 1960) Albert Finney; Shirley Anne
Field; Rachel Roberts

Viewed: 11 July 2013 and 14 July 2013
Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle; ticket £5

Retrocrit: pride and prejudice

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner were both novels written by
Alan Silitoe. Silitoe was one of that generation of post war British
writers who chronicled the lives working class people in the 1950’s
when they were being told that they had never had it so good.
Silitoe’s novels were keenly picked up by the new wave of British
film makers epitomised by directors such as Tony Richardson ( Who
directed Loneliness)and Carol Reisz ( director of Saturday Night and
Sunday morning) These film makers, like Silitoe, were driven by
ideological opposition to the traditional British class system; they
were committed to listen to rather than to gaze patronisingly at
Britain and the voices of her workers.

A contemporary film critic wrote of
these directors:

….when they came together, we
felt they had an attitude in common. Implicit in this attitude is a
belief in freedom, in the importance of people and in the
significance of the everyday.

Both Loneliness and Saturday night
which were also scripted as films by Alan Sillitoe, share one
critical attribute: attitude. They were iconoclastic products and
were perceived as such at the time. The intention of Alan Silitoe’s
writing was to give the lie to the contemporary smug propaganda messages that Britain was somehow a fair and pleasant land. As far as
Sillitoe was concerned Britain wasn’t even one land, he saw two
lands, governed by two codes. It was a feudal society of controllers
and the serfs, serfs chained not to the land but to factories shifts
and poor housing. Reisz and Richardson’s films stay true both to
this iconoclasm and to the moral vigour of Sillitoe’s writing. It is
not betrayed.

These films shocked the usual suspects
at the time were made. Ealing Comedies they were not. And when we see
these films today, they’re not only a voyage into another country,
they also resonate as a cry of pain for something that is about to
be lost ; even if what was lost was hardly noticed as everyone was
too busy watching the telly. These films are no cosy up Hovis style
nostalgia fests of terraced housing, enamel signs and chimney stacks.
The films capture and express working class life in the early
sixties. It’s a culture of full employment and extensive family ties
but it is also a culture of resistance and resilience. What Sillitoe
foresaw and foretold and is captured in both films, was the loss of
working class Pride. And that is the source of the pain. Because it
was a pride that was on the point of being undermined and destroyed
by the fostered desires of consumerism and the dependancy culture of
the Welfare State.

Noises off: Trainspotting and the skag
boys wait in the wings.

The protagonists, Colin in Loneliness
and Arthur in Saturday Night, are complex characters; spontaneous and
generous, twisted and two faced, but they have an intrinsic pride,
born of their class, that cannot be bought. Colin burns a one pound
note in one scene. However destructive their pride, it defines them,
and this pride, for all its fault lines and even bad faith, lies at
the core of their being. As Arthur says: You don’t let the bastards
grind you down.

So the two films probe not physical
landscapes but psychic landscapes. Attitudes shaped by social
conditions class work and graft. In their focus on these relations
Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson are closer to films made today in
developing countries that are still characterised by social and
cultural matrices of the kind we no longer have. The contemporary
Western movie industry has desire at the root of its narratives,
rather than struggle of one form or another.

Of the two films Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner is the more politically radical. In fact it’s not a
very well made film. It has a clumsy structure based on flashback,
which fails to deliver tension, and it is over reliant on the use of
the hymn Jerusalem in the soundtrack. But Richardson’s casting of Tom
Courtenay is inspired and is enough in itself to carry the film.
Courtenay’s skewered meat body look, hungry mien, misshapen head and loose
mouth, in themselves define the film’s theme of defiance and
resistance. As an actor of working class origins, Tom Courtenay has the authenticity necessary for the film to deliver Colin
Smith’s punch into the solar plexus of middle England: the refusal of
the petty thief, Borstal Boy, to play the establishment game.

Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning is also superbly acted. Albert Finney, as Arthur and Rachel
Roberts as Brenda, came from hard backgrounds that made them able to
work in the grain of their characters. And it shows in their
performances. Unlike Loneliness, Saturday Night is an exceptional
film not just because of the acting but because it is suburbly
crafted. The editing energises the action and always adds a
dimension to the narrative. With confidence and verve Reisz and his
editor, Seth Holt manipulate Freddie Francis’ superb cinematography
to shift the film through its gears, energising the tension between
images as the film cuts from the close and the intimate to the wide
and impersonal. The point here is that the dynamics of the editing
serve to heighten awareness in the viewer to shifts in perspectives:
from the bed to the factory, the pub to the kitchen. The way the
film is spliced sensitizes us to the different codes that operate in
these contexts, deepening and sharpening our understanding of
relations within the film. The main story is the moral rendering of
an extramarital affair. But this explicit narrative thread is never
allowed to dominate the scenario. It has to take its place within
the context of the images and cameos of working class in Nottingham
that Sillitoe Richardson and Reisz have woven together to produce the
film.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning both retain the raw
power of film to shock and make visible things that otherwise we
would not see.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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The Bling Ring Sofia Coppola (USA
2013) Katie Chang; Israel Broussard; Emma Watson,

Viewed Tyneside Cinema: 9 July 2013
Ticket: £8

The prefatory announcement at the start
of a film that it is “based on a true story” or “inspired by
actual events” engenders within me a certain sense of foreboding.
It’s true there have been some wonderful films so based, such as
William Wyler’s ‘ Ace in the Hole.’ But often film makers, when
trying to exploit a true story, are overburdened by too many facts,
overwhelmed by a need for authenticity, and are often unable to take
full possession of the narrative develop it as their own story.

So I wondered what Sofia Coppola would
make of the 2009 LA celebrity burglaries, planned and carried out by
teenage girls? What might she offer up to the Gods of film by way of
a spin on what it means to be young female and American?

In ‘Spring Breaks’ Harmony Korine
offered up a voluptuous transgressive take on the American female
psyche, and with all guns blazing the girls came out on top. In
Bling Ring likewise, it’s girls on top; but whereas Korine
understands the significance of his protagonists, Sofia Coppola’s
plot gets lost in translation, and is unable to come to terms with
the forces at work in the situation.

As I watched Bling Ring I found myself
starting to have ‘Wizard of Oz’ moments. Rebecca, the main
character, started to insinuate herself as a sort of re-incarnate
Dorothy. She is swept away not by a Kansas twister, but by the LA
whirlwind of celebrity worship. Perhaps celebrity fetishism is more
accurate descriptive label of her condition. All those teenage
hormones, Rebeca’s sexuality is displaced away from the insecurity of
the adolescent body and transferred onto comparative safety of
celebrity designer wear. Rebecca meets up with Marc, a sort of
composite Tin Man/ Lion/Scarecrow but in fact an honorary girl, and
she leads him and the other protagonists, the Munchkins, as they
follow a make over Yellow Brick Road to the Wizard’s castle, in this
case the Los Angeles A list celebrity homes and a series of fetish
driven burglaries.

The form of Bling Ring resembles a
fairy tale. But not the darker sort of tale as told by the Brothers
Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson, but rather a redacted Disney Story.
A sort amalgam of Oz and Ali Baba that takes place in LA,
re-imagined as a Never Never land of palaces and princesses. The
treasure troves that are buried deep in the heart of the fairy
mountain are replicated in Bling Ring, as being buried within the
inner crypts of the female celebrities. The houses of these female
celebrities resemble biomorphic stand-ins for their own bodies,
replicating in visual detail both the externalities of face and skin,
and the carnality of the secret vaginal passages that lead to the
womb. Within the inner womb sanctum’s of the female celebrities the
girls get the pay off – the stuff. Amidst rows of shoes dresses
perfume jewellery bags the girls achieve a proxy orgasm, sexual
energisation cathected onto the designed clothes and possessions of
the objects of desire. The actual taking and possessing of the stuff
is of secondary order to the primal connection with the Fetish in the
form of the possessions of the celebrity goddesses.

If you visit the British Museum will
find something similar but more dignified in the cargo cult fetishes
of the tribes of New Guinea.

The problem with Bling Ring is that
although all these powerful forces are set at work, Coppola seems
barely able to cope with them. The fairy tale, the fetishism the
biomorphic resonance of the architecture are all present, but under
her direction remain possibilities rather than realisations. In
relation to Bling Ring being a dystopian fairy tale, Coppola sketches
the outlines, but then abandons the idea, retreating to the safety of
a mechanical playing out of the facts.

The music in Bling Ring is interesting
and even suggestive. It is mostly rap and hip hop in style but
without angst or anger. When you castrate this sort of music, it
starts to sound like nursery rhythms which is what I heard. This
made me feel that the Bling Ring would probably have worked better
imitating the form of the Wizard of Oz and been devised as a musical.
A dysfunctional musical driven by rap bursary rhythms might have
provided Bling Ring with a rich suggestive architecture of illicit
desire intention and motive.

The structure of the film further
weakens the impact of its symbolic cues. Coppola’s scenario employs
the tired old formula of the flashback. It presents the various
scenes as perspectives from police and psychiatric interviews with
the protagonists after they have been caught. This device slows the
film, destroys what little tension there is in Copolla’s script and
breaks up the psychic integrity of the action.

Sofia Coppola’s film comes across more
as more an endorsement of celebrity life style than any sort of
attempt to probe the strangeness of its distorted realities. She
prefers to gloss over the soft wiring of her material, treating it as
a narrative rather than an opportunity to unwind the psychic
disturbances at the core of the displaced energy of mainstream
America.

Sofia Coppola had a strong subject
with great potential but overloaded by a need to be authentic she
falls victim to the curse of basing her movie on ‘true events’.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Like someone in love Abbas
Kiarostami (Fr Japan 2012) Tadashi
Okuno, Rin
Takanashi, Ryo
Kase

Viewed: BFI London Ticket price £7.50
(c)
Adrin Neatrour writes: Like having an
idea such as smashing the glass
Like someone in love is the third film
that Abbas Kairostami has made outside Iran as a self exiled film
maker. Kairostami decided to make his films outside Iran because the
political religious regime had made it almost impossible for him to
work inside the country. Kairostami’s films have always attracted
the hostility and censorship of the Iranian authorities who even
destroyed the master 35mm negative of his 1978 marital drama, the
Report. Had he persisted in film making there he would certainly
have found himself under house arrest or even imprisoned, a fate that
has befallen other Iranian film makers.

But what’s an exiled film maker gonna
to make films about? Kairostami has always made his films in Iran
and his subject matter has always been set in an Iranian context. Can
you take the fish out of water and expect it to breath and to make
films?

His films may have been set in Iran but
at the heart of his films lies Kairostami’s intelligence. His films
are not mechanical products; each is the outcome of a process of
thinking – thinking about images.

One of the concepts at the root of his
thinking is the idea of oppositions, oppositions that you can see in
people. Oppositions such as in – relationships – man and woman;
age – old people young people; life and death, knowledge and
ignorance, individual and family. And of course the context of
Iranian society with politico religious forces shaping the social
matrix, provided Kairostami’s films with a wide range of fault lines
to examine and probe.

So what’s he doing in Japan? Like
someone in love…what a strange title for his film. It’s the name of
a song, an old jazz standard. What does it mean, what does it point
to?

I think that in this film Kairostami
has created a new take on the old Japanese idea of the Floating
World. Famously represented in series of nineteenth wood cuts, the
Floating World was the name given to the transient world of pleasure
created by geishas prositutes and clients in nineteenth Tokyo. A
world of impermanence. In Like someone in love, Kairostami
revisualises the floating world as a series of multiple planes of
light that drift across the screen, the reflections and refractions
of modern Tokyo that float over the images of his characters,
obscuring them but at the same time placing them in context of night
and pleasure.

Tokyo is realised by Kairostami as a
series of surfaces. The bars the streets and clubs present a dazzling
beguiling field of vision for the eye. Japan’s culture is overlaid
with Western technological forms that it has made its own. It looks
like the West but it isn’t; and Akiko, Kairostami’s girl protagonist,
always looks like someone who she isn’t.

Kairostami sees that a whole range of
social relations have been absorbed into a new floating world of
impermanence; he also sees that he is an outsider peering into this
culture, through a glass darkly, trying to distinguish image from
reflection and reflection from image. And once the reality of the
glass is admitted then it too becomes part of picture, and also
there will come moments swhen the glass itself will crack

This is a mirror crystal world, and
within it Kairostami projects a love story – of sorts of the sort
that might reveal some of the critical stresses at work in this
society.

Kairostami loves cars as settings in
his films. Many of his films use scenes inside automobiles. He
revels in the contradiction that amidst the frenzy of life, it is
often inside a car, the symbol of movement, that his characters find
the stillness and space.

In Like someone in love, there is a
typical Kurostami moment of interaction in which like a brain surgeon
he penetrates through the hard surface presented the skull into the
deeper soft tissues of the brain. During the taxi ride taken by Akiko
to her new client, Kairostami inserts a scene which is brilliantly
conceived as a series of verbal phone messages picked up by Akiko
from her grandmother. The grandmother’s unsentimental prosaic words
project in full relief not only the growing void separating young and
old but the characteristic emptiness of mobile communications which
increasingly serve the dysfunction of not communicating.

It is the economy that Kairostami
brings to his understanding of Japan that lights up the movie. Using
only simple settings the interior of a car, the interior of an
apartment, the interior of a club he coaxes the surfaces of this
floating world to separate a little and to see the forces at work
that maintain the tension in the glass images: relations between men
and women, old and young, the new and the old, between the imported
culture and the older traditions.

It might sound complex but it is all
done very simply almost without us realising it, until we start to
pay attention. As in the scene where Akiko lies asleep in bed and
her very elderly client, selects a record from his album collection,
plays Ella Fitzgerald singing Like someone in love. The camera pans
off him to the dining table, set for dinner for two, plates knives
and forks and two long stemmed empty wine glasses, and Ella sings:

Everytime I look at you I’m as limp as
a glove, feeling like someone in love…”

For Kairostami, it’s time to break the
glass.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Man of Steel Zak Snyder (USA 2013)
Henry Cavill; Amy Adams;

Viewed 16 June 2013; Empire Cinema
Newcastle; Ticket £7.75
With underpants outside trousers I
remember as young kid playing Superman with my best friend Sid Green.
There were bouncy twin beds in the room he shared with his brother,
and placing these beds a strategic distance apart, we could leap
from one to the other, simulating the amazing feeling of flying
through the air. Obviously this apprenticeship qualifies me to speak
with some authority about Superman.
Needless to say Superman in the Man of
Steel has moved on from the naff device of wearing his knickers
outside his tights; he now wears a nifty set of combinations and is
part of the huge armada of franchised superheroes who kitted out with
full Visual FX move across planet earth scooping up buckets of money
for the studios.
I’ve seen a few superhero movies this
year. Each of scenarios has given to their protagonist a USP (Mad
talk for Unique Selling Proposition). A USP which defines in a fuzzy
way, something of the nature of the character. Batman, plagued by
self doubt, was about self redemption; Iron Man 3 was a Scientology
techie parable; And Man of Steel? Superman embraces the Messiah
myth. It’s not so much Jesus saves. It’s Superman saves.
The writers of Man of Steel have
appropriated the Jesus story. Like the ice cream pedalled in the
multiplex foyer, it’s a little soft; but both in script and in
iconic imagery this re-incarnation of Superman represents him as
Jesus, beard and all who waits for his thirty third birthday before
coming out and revealing his true identity. Like Jesus,
Superman/Clark Kent has a dual nature, half human and half Krypton,
and listen to this, Clark Kent says: “ “I know what I came for,
my father sent me.”
But why has the father sent his son?
Because Superman has something to say to us Earthlings. He is come
to guide us. Take a breath dudes!
Underpinning Man of Steel’s script
there is some heavy duty philosophy: the idea of free will. Free
will is the very basis of Christian theology; no free will no Christ,
because without choice, personal salvation makes no sense. And this
is why Superman is sent to us: to affirm our belief in free will.
Krypton was destroyed as the Kryptonites turned themselves into
programmed biomorphic machines. Only Clark Kent born outside the
Kryptonite approved birthing programme has free will, and he is sent
to help us choose good not evil. Awesome! One hopes he has a
better crack at it than Google.
Jesus as an idea is not only cued in
the Man of Steel script, he is also represented potently in the
movie’s imagery.
As the Man of Steel goes about duffing
up evil, his form he is captured in the glory of all those iconic
classic poses associated with Christ and beloved of Classical
painters. We see Superman in the Crucifixion pose,
Transfiguration, Descent into Hell and the Ascension, to name but a
few. The gorgeous hunk is not Superman but Saviour, and that letter
on his cozzie that looks like an S, is in fact an ancient Kryptonite
symbol meaning Hope.
Somewhere in the idea of Superman our
Redeemer, there is the germ of an interesting idea. I wonder if a
early draft of the script might have featured an imitatio Christi,
but instead of Jesus throwing the money lenders out of the Temple,
we would see Clark Kent join the occupy Wall Street movement, and and
take on the evils of Gonzo drug fed Capitalism and Globalisation.
No surprise the final draft of the Man of Steel script takes a more
conservative approach, Jesus’ philosophy honoured more in breech
than practice, and the shooting scenario more a device for
maximising the flash bang wallop of visual FX combat battle and
destruction.

It is the Visual FX that draw the
punters. I saw them in 2D and I am sure seen in 3D they are
wondrously realised. But I have to say that I found the Man of
Steel FX relentlessly overlong and repetitive. If I see another
petrol tanker picked up and thrown again with malice aforethought
I’ll go mad. It happens again and again. And when two combatants
equally matched with special powers fight each each other, the scenes
stretch out into endless tedium. The only winner is boredom and the
losers are the creative failure of the VFX people to find fresh
creative inspiration, beyond that of repeating the same moves against
different backgrounds.
I sometimes think that these big budget
movies with their end of the world scenarios are witness simply to a
general philosophy of fear that governs our collective psyche. A
philosophy initiated by the Nuclear bomb which revealed the extrinsic
power of science to destroy us all. A fear since fed by climate
chaos, pandemics, economic crashes, food scares terrorism etc. At
this point fear is a respectable and justifiable state of mind; as
if we need to live in a constant state of fear in order to survive.

Conversely Man of Steel also reminded
me of those psychological programmes which are used to help people
overcome phobias, such as aversion to spiders. They are gradually
desensitised so that in the end they are comfortable when placed in a
room full of arachnoids. As I sat in the full cinema, gazing at the
now familiar site of a razed Manhattan I felt I was in such a
desensitisation chamber. Man of Steel felt as if it were part of a
desensitisation programme designed to inure me with a complete
indifference to violence death and destruction. Was this a CIA
programme? As I biked home I wondered how Man of Steel would play in
down town Damascus.
As we played at Superman, Sid and I at
first had no thought for philosophy or fear. But one day a double
landing on a bed caused the frame to snap, and we received a short
sharp lesson in proto Nietschian aversion therapy from Mrs Sidney’s
accurate right hand. I understood at once the link between
philosophy and Superman.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Behind the Chandelabra Steven
Soderbergh (USA 2013) Matt Damon; Michael Douglas

Viewed: 11 June 13 Gate Cinema
Newcastle upon Tyne: ticket £3.75

I looked behind the candelabra and
there was nothing there.

Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Pierrot le Fou J-L Godard ( Fr 1965) Anna Karina, Jean Paul Belmondo Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 6 June 13; ticket £5 Pierrot le Fou (PF) in which Godard potently reconstituting himself as Pierrot le Fou, takes the road movie into the new era. Setting out the stall In an early sequence in the movie, at a typical high tone bourgeios party, Pierrot (aka Ferdinand – Belmondo) meets Sam Fuller the American film director. Pierrot asks him what movies are. Fuller replies that movies are like war, battles, money, people. Fuller ends by concluding that: in short films are emotions. Godard in PF lays out his cinema stall in a manner that is both in accord with and in contradistinction to Mr Fuller. For Godard (G) cinema is PASSION; passion in the making of films. That’s where the emotion is: not so much in sentiments expressed on screen, but rather emotion as registered in the intensity with which the ideas and multivariant signage are folded into the material. Godard’s films are wars, but fought with ideas, ideas expressed as only cinema expresses them: in a riot of image text sound and graphics. Godard’s films are passionate about thinking; what it is possible to think; and how film, with its collision of inputs, makes possible different types of thinking. G’s protagonist Pierrot is a fusion of clown and gangster. Pierrot as a type, the disillusioned romantic, points to the idea of clown. But Pierrot le Fou was also the soubriquet of a ruthless French gangster of the 1940’s, a true mean bastard. It seems to me that of the two fused personas, the clown is the basis of the character; it is the gangster who points to the way out, on the run, to the road. My feeling is that it is G himself who is this fused hoodlum–clown. The role is played wondrously by Belmondo, but the creation is the projection of Godard’s schizo nature; part gangster a restless transgressive figure who hates the Bourgoisie, and is alienated and distanced from their world.: and clown. As Pierrot his search for escape is doomed by his hopeless romantic love for Columbine ( Karina), whom he can never win and who will always drop him in the shit. The poetic fate of both clown and gangster is death. Godard’s genius was to create this cultural avatar of hoodlum clown and depict him in film as a satirical response to the conditions characteristic of life in the AMERICAN century. Road movies existed before PF, but I think it is G who gave this the genre its definitive post modernist form. In PF G replaces the mechanics of plot with process. It is a working out. The road is a pure process, and PF, a psychofilm. The series of cameos on the run provoke dialogues between the characters and the world, using the multivariant nature of the possibities of encounters on the road to elicit social and political observations and statements. After the brilliantly inventive opening titles, which announce the movie as a magical circus, PF plunges into the bath with Belmondo, who is looking at a book about Valasquez. The book depicts Valasquez as the Court painter, but an outsider, who in old age saw through the empty shallowness of power, and perceived in the peripheral figures of the Court, the dwarves and clowns, a twisted manifestation of the emptiness of regal life. And so Pierrot is set up. Like Velasquez he is an outsider looking into the vacuity of a class of people, in this case the bourgeiosie, and the parody of Americanised cullture and society they have adopted. Further the montage of the paintings that accompanies the discussion of Valasquez, also serves to alert the viewer that PF will comprise a structure that engages states of mind rather than the mechanicality of narative linearity. The film’s structure with interpolated paintings and graphics images breaks up conditoned responses, challenges the primacy of reason and asks the viewer how they understand what they see. The Vietnam war runs as a leitmotif thorugh PF. G inserts into PF newspaper headlines magazines photos newsreel and most stunning of all a clown show, in which Madeleine (Karina) transforms herself into a Vietnamese Columbine as a piece of mime in which she is playfully and casually shot, at point blank range, by Pierrot. The power of the Vietnam material lies in its random eruption into the film. Without a logic other than that of necessity, Vietnam is spliced into the action. The rudely extruded imagery of course points up the contradiction of normalisation. The televising of the Vietnam war has led to it becoming just another passing image, that might attract our attention momentarily but then just go away. Godard understood that the effect of 24 hour war coverage was to desensitize us and to normalize killing, but also in a more complex way it allowed us in the West to feel that we knew about it, without knowing anything at all about it. It’s a long way from but also close to home. PF is a rolling parody of affects and sentiments, one highlight being the sequence on the dock where the man tries to sing his song to Pierrot. One constant satiric theme throughout the scenario is the manner in which G depicts a society that is colonised by the outlook manner and attitudes of desire and consumption. The advertising industry. The actual effect of advertising is not to persuade us to buy this or that product. Rather advertising changes the whole gamut of social relations that operate between people and between institutions. These relations become based on consumption: on a psychic atmosphere of desire. The cumulative power of advertising, in our culture extends beyond its evident material presence in magazines on billboards in cinema and tv, to become an internalised social reality. Advertising is the way we are. Advertising is the power of propaganda which immobilises and neutralises alternative thinking. The clown and the gangster point to the way out. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Akiro Kurosawa Samurai
Season at the Star and Shadow

The Seven Samurai, Hidden Fortress,
Yojimbo, Sanjuro shown between 5 May13 and 26 May 13

Ticket price for each screening: £5

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Mostly we see films piecemeal, drip fed
to us by the cinema release system. Of course that’s the way the
industry works, everyone wants to see the latest movie. But some
directors make us catch our breath: we may have clocked Darren
Aronofski, Sofia Coppola, George Romero, Alfred Hitchcock and
realised that these guys make films we like to see.
And seeing a number of films close
togather by the same director can take appreciation to another level.
Buying the box set and spinning the discs is sometimes the only
way. But the small screen can fail to do justice to some films, so
the best way to see retrospectives is at the cinema.
Today this is a rare treat. In
Newcastle, however, we are lucky enough to have cinemas that do
programme retrospectives.

With director retros, the pleasure lies
not just in viewing some good films but also having the chance to
understand the concerns, obsessions and beliefs that drive particular
directors to make the films they do. What method might lie in the
madness of movie making?
For Instance! I am intrigued by the
way Hitchcock’s films constitute a discrete mapping of his psycho
sexual disturbamce. His beautifully sublimated scenarios probe his
own repressed feelings: his need to rage against his mummy, to
control and mentally torture woman, his castration and his
inferiority complex.

Akiro Kurosawa, the Japanese director recently had a retrospective
season of his Samurai films at the Star and Shadow Cinema, curated by
Chritian Barron.

I went to see: the Seven Samurai,
Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and Sanjuro and I wondered if the claim for
Kurosawa being a great director might extend beyond histechnical
prowess. Was some ulterior deeper vision in his output?

I was not disappointed.

As I watched his movies I became aware of an underlying concern
worked into the grain of these films. These Samurai movies are epic
in scale and handsomely photographed, the scene on the prison camp
steps in Hidden Fortress is jaw dropping. But what struck me most was
the intrinsicly Japanese quality of Kurosawa’s material. These films
in their imagery represent the quintessential the spirit of Japan.
This is Japan!

First and foremost Kurosawa’s sets. The dwellings with their screens,
shutters, lattice work, eaves, and opened rooms, these constitute a
full depiction of the traditional spaces that lie at the very heart
of Japanese life and identity. Yojimbo is outstanding in this
respect, and these sets also provide Kurosawa’s camera with stunning
opportunities both to frame and to light his shots.

The costumes also have a symbolicly essential Japanese quality all
made using traditional Japanese designs. These patterns on the
shirts and shifts worn both by peasant and the samurai most notably
in Sanjuro, refer back to and affirm ancient Japanese ornamental
traditions. And the erotic style in which the men’s garments are
worn, tucked up to reveal the flesh, signifies a culture that is not
ashamed of the body. By the way first in the roll of honour here is
Toshima Mifune whose bared bottochs and thighs, particularly in
Hidden Fortress, provide a feast for the eyes.

Factor in the role played by rice, by rain of tropical intensity, by
fire and finally by the people. The people Kurosawa depicts are men
of short stature. At times the screen is filled almost to bursting
with small bald headed little men. But they run – at full speed! It’s
as if Kurosawa is saying: “Yes! We are: little people, but we have
the energy!”

These expressive visuals extrude in imagary the essential symbols of
Japan: its soil, its culture its people, a representation of
traditional Japan that Kurosawa then proceeds to subvert.

Kurosawa was the son of a samurai, but knew the traditional order of
Japan had to change. In the mid twentieth century, Japan an
industrialised nation was still ruled by a Mediaeval militarised
power structure. This lag in social change led to the disaster of
Hiroshima, American occupation and the forced adaptation of an alien
culture and democratic political system.

Kurosawa determined to use his position
and ability as a film maker to support these democratic political
changes, which he saw as being necessary.

I imagine Kurosawa having an Eurika moment as he watched John Ford
movies and realised that Samurai could be transformed into a kind of
cowboy! Korosawa’s genius was to recreate the Samurai as a cowboy,
appropriating the form of the Hollywood Western, as a means of
recasting Japan’s past as mythe.
Over his symbolic elequent images of
old Japan, Kurosawa castes the shadow of the Samurai. The Samurai
represents the new man, epitomising the new values needed to remake
Japan: individualism, lack of repect for authority, the refusal to
accept fate, and In short Kurosawa’s Samurai got attitude big time,
and Toshiro Mifune was to Kurosawa what John Wayne was, to John
Ford, without of course the exposed thighs and bottocks, to John
Ford.

And the music! Kurosawa uses
traditional Japanese music to good effect, but at the most dynamic
moments, particularly in the Seven Samurai he cuts to jazz, an
uncompromisingly modern sound created by black of slaves and released
into the world as everyone’s music. It’s the sound that liberates
the action from the past.

So that’s it. I think the four Samurai films were intended as a
project conceived to resolve the innate Japanese tensions between her
traditions and her need to develop democratic social relations. As
if Kurosawa was saying that Japan should always be grounded in her
traditions, but never in such a way that she be hostage to this past.

I think Kurosawa’s claim to be a great
film maker rests on one key insight: cinema creates mythes and in
making his Samurai movies he stays constant to this realisation.

Of course the ultimate fate of these films was to be reimported back
into the tradition of making Westerns, this time to Italy and Sergio
Leone and the man who has no name. But there again we never catch
sight of Clint Eastwoods naked buttocks or thighs.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk