Adrin Neatrour

The Great Gatsby Baz Luhrmann (USA
2013) Leonado Di Caprio; Carry Mulligan; Tobey Maguire

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 20 May 13;
ticket price £10.25 (£1:75 3D supplement)
Drowning in the shallows

Before going to see Baz Luhrman’s
current Hollywood offering, The Great Gatsby, I did something a
little naughty, I reread the book. I wanted check it out again,
this after all, is one of the great American novels.

Of course few films actually deliver
the impact of their literary credentials (excepted in my view are the
David Lean adaptations of Dickens); most book / film transpositions
end up either as insubstantial homage or mis-shapen unhappy
compromises characterised by inept direction .
The Great Gatsby is a wonderfully
observed novel written, from the first person perspective by the
persona of Nick Carraway (a literary stand-in for Fitzgerald
himself). It is a tragedy that tells of the fall of House of Gatsby.
Essentially it’s a chamber piece for four players: Gatsby, Nick
himself and Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Its setting against the broad
canvas of the Jazz Age, gives relevance and poignancy to the human
relations. It has an almost Chekhovian level of intensity, as the
narrator strives to understand the forces of desire that are
channeled in and lived out through his characters,

So how would the Great Gatsby as film
stack up? Baz Luhrmann as director / script writer of Gatsby was
not a good omen. From the little I had seen of his work, Moulin
Rouge, he looked like a man best at home at the circus, filming the
wonders of the carnival: scantily dressed girls, trapeze artists and
clowns. And to boot, Gatsby was shot for 3D and I was going to see
the 3D version.

The answer is that in the best
American/Hollywood tradition, technology replaces ideas. Luhrmann’s
Gatsby a tech fix. He opts to film a roaring 20’s mega party, goes
for the wow factor; never mind human relations- sex up the image –
it’s a 3D fest.

This is a Gatsby defined by and
dedicated to spectacle and delivered in 3D if you want to wear the
glasses. It’s difficult to see how to justify delivering a chamber
piece like Gatsby in 3D unless you want it to look like an endless
parade of competing images. The problem is that Gatsby is so wrapped
up in the spectacle of itself that it struggles to unwrap its own
story. Instead of depth of character, personal motivation and the
vigour of relations, this Gatsby is filmed using shots that comprise
multi plane depth of field. My feelings were that 3D gives a
spurious depth to the Great Gatsby that not only fails to engage with
the theme but actually works against Fitzgerald’s ideas.
In the traditional method of filming
interaction between two characters, directors take the shot using a
shallow depth of field, so that backgrounds are blurred and offer
nothing to distract the eye’s attention from the characters. In 3D
the shots comprise a number of discrete visual planes, all in focus,
each of which makes a demand for our attention. Our eyes are
enchanted by multiple distractions, and the intensity of our
involvement with dialogue and interaction is thereby diluted and
diminished. And Gatsby suffers consequently in this respect from a
lack of engagement and involvement with its characters.
In the large set piece party sequences,
which dominate the first half of the film, Gatsby’s displays of
ostentation and conspicuous consumption exist simply for their own
sake. Seen in 3 D this emphasis on spectacle undermines and works
against the narrative, because the main characters are not part of
the spectacle. Gatsby is written in the first person; from the
point of view of Nick, the outsider. The point is that he observes.
He isn’t a full participant, he witnesses. But the way Gatsby’s
week-end parties are shot is intended to provide an immersive
experience for the audience, undercutting Nick’s point of view rather
than supporting it, alienating the audience from the tidal ebb of
his narrative. It looks sexy; its a riotous pop promo; but it
doesn’t work.

Even Baz Luhrman’s film structure is
tired: he uses the old hackneyed formulaic stand by of the
psychiatric interview to frame Nick’s telling of the story. And the
manner in which he introduces the flashbacks to Gatsby’s youth are
clumsy and crudely worked into the flow of the movie, with the effect
that they slow the film down making it feel overlong and tedious.
The actors, doomed to compete with technology, struggle to maintain
the tensions implicit in the plots psychic and social interweaving.
In the end poor souls, their fate is to become coat hangers; walking
talking wire frames draped with a pleasing succession of period
costumes.

The one element in this Gatsby that had
value was Luhrman’s development of Fitzgerald’s idea

that Gatsby was not just a victim of a
failed obsessional illusion but that he was running out of road. The
pursuit of Gatsby by the forces that are the source of his wealth is
suggested by Fitzgerald. There is deep inner corruption of Gatsby.
And this feeling of the encroachment of evil into the core of the
plot’s relations is something film can accomplish economically and
powerfully; but whilst Baz Luhrman develops this theme a little, he
left me with the feeling that more was possible, but mostly left
undone.

I left the cinema wondering why
Hollywood makes films like this. What did Baz Luhrman imagine he was
doing? Are such films a symptom of a film culture where there is
nothing really left to say, where the only goal is to attract a new
generation of audiences into the cinema with 3D and keep the industry
and its workers ticking over on borrowed time? Was it Godard who
said “Cinema has nothing left to do other than to reproduce
itself…”?
Anyway I was glad to have had a reason
to re-read the book.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Iron Man 3 Shane Black (USA 2013) Robert Downey Gwynith Paltrow Viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne Ticket: £3.75 Spontanious Human Bullshit All I can remember about Iron Man One was that it was full of commercial product placements and as I didn’t use these sort of products, I didn’t go to see Iron Man 2, but I thought I’d check into Iron Man 3. As 3 D makes me feel sick this review is from 2 D land, so I didn’t get the full on CGI show; but I can report that in Iron Man 3, there wasn’t a pack shot in sight. The camera turns its lens away from commercial products like a vestal virgin averting her eyes from the naked statue of Heracles at Helicarnassus. So what did I see in Iron Man 3. The writers of Iron Man 3, Drew Pierce and Shane Black, seem to have been sensitised, perhaps at an early and impressionable stage in their writing careers to the creative possibilities of Spontaneous Human Combustion. Spontaneous Human Combustion (or SHC) is the idea that human beings without warning, can spontaniously burst into flames, catch fire inside themselves and burn themselves out from within like a candle ,before being reduced to small sad pile of ashes. The heat produced in cases of SHC is intense enough to consume all flesh and bone of the unfortunate deceased. Dickens used SHC in Bleak House to dispose of one of his characters, interstingly an alcoholic. The writers of Iron man of course take the idea put a few nobs on it and give it the mad scientist treatment in the character of Aldrich. An experiment by Aldrich – the ‘Bad Guy’ – to induce extreme internal heat to cure drug addicts and alcoholics (?) goes badly wrong. The unfortunate subjects of the experiment burn out and blow everyone up. However in this disaster Aldrich sees – opportunity – as he says: Failure is the fog through which success is glimpsed. So he develops his heat treatment, not to give people a nice tanned look, but to turn people into his personal army of red hot soldiers – litterally. To the casual gaze these hot rods look just like you and me, but at the command of Aldrich they use their internal heat to unleash fire brimstone and death upon his enemies. It’s an idea that didn’t occur to the more prosaic Dickens, but this take on SHC by the scriptwriters provides the movie with an army of formidable enemies for Iron Man to biff and Iron Man likes nothing better than biffing a few bad guys. And they are well met: Iron Man spends a lot of time bolted into his metal exoskeleton, and Aldrich’s hot rod soldiers do their best to make things hot for him inside the suit. The plot if you can call it that, its not so much a plot, more a couple of sets of book ends that serve to keep the unruly meandering set pieces in some sort of time line. After an opening cod philosophical quote of the kind that Terrence Malik has a lot to answer for (the film opens with the portentous voice of Iron Man intoning for our instruction and edification, the sentence: ‘We create our own demons.’) Indeed we do. Anyway after this first Terrence Malik moment, we are whisked off to a scientific convention: Berne 1999 It’s an opening sequence in which Iron Man gives Aldrich – the bad guy – the cold shoulder. He stands him up, forgetting to meet him on the roof on the convention hotel. You see Iron man has the hots for a fruity lady scientist and more interesting things to do than keep an assignation with a geeky young inventor. Now some people might think forgetting an appointment was just one of those things that happen. Shit happens. But not your man Aldrich. No! This event dominates his life and he takes out a vow of revenge on the whole world, the whole cosmos for Iron Man’s unforgivable slight. In the nineteenth century Aldrich would have sent his seconds round to ask Iron Man for satisfaction. In the twenty first century that’s not enough: he has to destroy the world and every one in it to get his own back. That’s it really ! In a way the movie is a computer game scenario based on the ‘Quest’ idea. Stark aka as Iron Man has to find and nullify Aldrich before he ends the world as we know it and the American way of life become history. The script exploits a number of well know game characters: the wise child, the warrior woman, the buddie, the fool, the bad guy, to cue a series of CGI set pieces of graphic intensity. You know the kind of thing: an army of CGI technicians, thousands of them, lackies chained to computers, produce a series of extrordianry images and effects even seen in 2D: explosions on land sea and air, everything you see blows up, there’s fire, the earth quakes people dieing horribly by the bucket load. And another CGI effect also impresses: whenever he needs to fight the good fight, Stark simply whistles up his exoskeleton and piece by piece, it hurtles through space and time and bolts itself onto him, transforming him into a Medieval looking warrior A knight in armour going forth to save damsels and do good. Stark is also fashionably scripted with anxiety attacks and doubt, but protected, in the script, not by the word of God, but by Terrence Malick type gnomic utterances. The other plot device of note is supplied by Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin. The scenario initially creates the impression that the mayhem and destruction abroad in the world is being orchestrated by a comic book Bin Laden look alike, called the Mandarin. The film in exploiting the physical similarities of the Mandarin and Bin Laden walks a tricky line from the point of view of setting up Jihad as plot driver. Undiscriminating audiences may take the suggestion implicit in the image of the Mandarin and connect it with Jihad. And they may not be sophisticated enough to uncouple Jihadists and mainstream Islam. For the film to connect Islam and the annihilation of the USA is to move into criminally culpable zone of incitement. But Iron Man 3 resolves the device of the Mandarin half way through the movie. It is revealed that the Mandarin is a spoof. He is in fact only an actor called Trevor. The Mandarin, the Bin Laden look alike is simply a hapless frontman for the real evil presence, the dread Aldrich, the clean white boy who was slighted all those years ago by Iron Man and is now exacting his terrible revenge. The problem with revelation that the Mandarin is in fact only a stooge is that this leaves an implausible gap in the film’s motivational mechanism. Is revenge for being stood up by Iron Man a sufficiently strong reason to explain why the world has tobe destroyed? Is there perhaps some homerotic undertone at work? Is all this terrible destruction a simple psychic statement, Aldrich’s way of telling Iron Man that he really loves him? This is possible. But might there be some other purpose lurking within the film’s concoction? Why have all these CGI compositors and artists been put to work to make this film? Was it only to indulge the audience’s need to gaze on the detailed mechanics of the annihilation of the world? Or is there something else at work in the script? I thought about this and it occurred to me that perhaps the whole film was an allegory? I wondered if it was an allegory connected to scientology? I mean Hollywood is full of scientologists these days….. OK I agree the world can do without another conspiracy theory… …but the more I think about it….Iron Man somehow epitomises the idea of the superior being evolving out of the limitations of the human species. This proximates to the Scientology myth that homo sapiens is not the fully evolved article; he needs to be further developed by technology. With his exoskeleton Iron Man is the fusion of technology and flesh that is the promise of Scientology which belives we were once superior life forms called Thetans who have since degenerated. So The Scientology proposition is that we have to evolve and reclaim out Thetan identity; or we, as a race, will perish because of our evil our pusillanimity and weakness. Iron Man is a prototype operating Thetan, an advanced technological type who like Ron Hobbard opens the doors to others who are ready: the child the woman the man, enabling them to realise their true techie identity. In so doing Iron Man defeats evil and helps those who can to develop their Thetan identities. Far fetched perhaps. If you looking for high tech effects that roll down over you off the screen and flatten you, then go see Iron Man 3. If you crave meaning from Iron Man then it’ll have to be a do-it-yourself job. Thetans or bust. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A Taste of Cherry Abbas Kiarostami (Iran 1997) Homayoun
Ershadi

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle
4 April 2013 Ticket: £5

retrocrit: all is revealed (perhaps)

In his direction of A Taste of Cherry,
Abbas Kiarostami (AK) is like one of those magicians who put on a
great show of revealing to an audience the method by which they
accomplish their tricks, and then undermine the explanation by
pulling off the trick in contradiction to principles of the
explanation. A switch in framing that deepens the appreciation of
the audience.

In AK’s Taste of Cherry there are also
two frames at work. They mark out the two different perspectives that
AK has incorporated into the movie. In a Taste of Cherry the subject
matter, suicide, is presented within two contrasting frames of
reference which point to the different formal issues brought into
play. There is the conventional film frame which in itself sustains
the narrative with its convention of the privileged camera; and there
is the meta framing device that shows the camera and the crew,
revealing the film as a certain kind of product. The one frame
develops the fiction of the narrative whilst the ensuing frame strips
away this artifice and focuses attention on the construct.

The frame of filmmaking is revealed in
the final sequence of the film when we are shown the film crew at
work collecting the last pieces of material needed to finish TC.
This final framing points to the fact that TC was not intended to be
taken for anything ‘real’ in itself; it was never conceived as a pure
replication. The issues embedded in the story are real issues, the
way in which they are presented is real, but the narrational
presentation of them was always intended to be understood as a
construct. Perhaps in much the same way that a Platonic dialogue is
a construct; a transparently artificial device intended as a vehicle
for ideas, acted out by a set of characters, who follow a preordained
script.

As Plato set up his dramatis personae
in such a way that we understand that what is happening is a benign
fabrication for our entertainment and instruction, so AK exploits the
potential of film to first mask the perspective of the camera, in
order in the end, to dramatically reveal its meta presence. So that
we understand that what we have have been viewing and absorbing, as
‘real’, or rather a product designed to replicate the expressive
indicators of ‘real’, is in fact a simple mechanical product of
intentionality. Virtual not real. Most narrative film is of course
simply an expressive function of intentionality: a means of giving
form to mental representations. It takes an AK or a Godard to
exploit the possibilities of this truism, and reveal it in an
entertaining enlightening manner whilst remaining true to film as a
state of mind rather than as a didactic lesson.

In TC, the final shots comprise a
philosophical coup de film, a moment of pure re-evaluation. The
exposure of the film crew at work compels the viewer to drop from
their eyes the scales of any emotional purchase on the story, to drop
any illusion that there can be a real outcome or playing out of the
vectors of the narrative, and to understand the material and the
issues therein, as pure proposition. Like the magicians final act,
it is a joke, but a good one, that jolts us into consciousness.

The issues which provoked AK’s script
revolve about the idea of suicide and the sorts of claims this manner
of death makes upon intimacy. The idea of intimacy, fear of
intimacy, lies at the heart of the film. In the opening sequence we
see Mr Badii, (B) drive around looking for a man to help him . B
drives the car as if he were some predatory beast. B looks for his
man with the kind of intense desperation that characterises a man
looking for sex. B has that mixture of concealed desire and anxiety
that perhaps AK has observed in homosexual men cruising for sex, a
dangerous undertaking in a country where some 4000 homosexuals have
been executed since the revolution. B, furtive and anxious is not
looking for sex. He is looking for a man to partner him in a more
intimate entanglement: to help B to die.

Reflection: AK will certainly know the
phrase, le petit mort, often used to describe post coital sadness.
It is possible that consideration of the analogous intimacy of sex to
death, underlies TC. Overall I think that it would be doing scant
justice to AK as a thinker and filmmaker to reduce TC to such narrow
band of meaning. The filmic use of the car, B’s proposition of
suicide and the responses of the others engaged in the discourses
all point to a imperative in the film to use its devices to say
something about the human condition. The fact that suicide
illustrates both loneliness and need for intimacy.

And at the crux of the human condition
lies death through suicide. Perhaps in the human domaine it is the
last repository of meaningful dialogue. Sex, education, work have
all become subjects of mechanical discourses, often determined by the
shibboleths of social political or ideological beliefs. Suicide,
eludes the semantic clutches of the times and the easy passage of
formulaic responses. It remains a proposition for humans about which
there is a moral dilemma. At the heart of the proposition of
suicide lies the question as to why we should continue to live when
we feel overwhelmed; when life has become intolerable. What is
life? AK in his poetic realism sets the mulberry tree against the
cherry tree. The sweet opposes the bitter.

In its narrative opposition AK employs
the voice of one who has overcome the impulse to kill himself against
the voice of one on the cusp of fateful decision. The taxidermist
has come through a self destructive state of mind consequent to
personal disaster, and survived with a deeper insight not only into
life as a decision, but into death as a decision. This individual
although in his being opposing the stated intention of B to kill
himself in the hole by the cherry tree, understands his need for some
one with whom to share an intimacy and accepts B’s invitation to play
a part in his death. The dialogue between the two men itself wavers
between life and death, the spirit and body. Poised on the delicate
balance of frail human judgement the outcome is perhaps
philosophically irresolvable and so resolved in the structure of the
film itself. But it is the intimacy of the dialogue that compels,
revealing an essential loneliness in human experience. It was this
equation of suicide and intimacy that frightened and warned off the
other men whom B approached in the first sequences of TC. In our
modernity the pretext of self destruction can open us up. Like B we
spend all our time going through the motions of being alive, the big
car the expensive tastes and clothes, only for all this to be a
pretext for our decision to die.

The way in which C is shot from first
to last is to use the actual filming as a layer of meaning built into
the film. AK transposes in the filming of TC his concerns and their
conceptualisation into the style and form of the shooting script.

AK loves cars. There can be no doubt.
And part of his love of cars expresses itself in the way for which
they have come to represent us and to define our way of life.
Incessant movement and agitation. The transversing of space the
contraction of time: and suicide is the ultimate contraction of time.
And nearly all the film is shot on the move. The opening shots of TC
are all tracking shots from the car. The haunted peering of B out of
the window; always moving on; and despite his searching, barely able
to stop, because stopping is not in the nature of the car. As if
when you stop you are dead; when you stop moving you cease to exist.
When B stops there is only the grave under the cherry tree.
Filmmaking crafted out of the enduring and powerful states of mind
associated with car culture. In TC, AK builds this car culture of
infinite unlimited movement into the idea of the search for the
assured stillness that is death.

Movement and stillness. as if death
were the only way out for us. The long shots of B driving his car
down the myriad meandering roads that lead about the countryside and
hills outside the city provoke thoughts of the nature of life itself
as a twisting road. And again the only manner in which the car is
stopped is the lure of intimacy or the lure of death, which in TC
have been subsumed within each other: a transcendence finally
revealed by the film crew which marks the end of the film.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }TD P { margin-bottom: 0cm; }

At five in the afternoon Samira
Makmalbaf (2003 Iran.Fr) Agheleh Rezaie; Abdolgani Yousefrazi

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 4 April
2013 Ticket price: £5

shoes seen in a mirror

The phrase,
At five in the afternoon (5AN), the recitation of which, spoken over
a desolate and empty landscape, opens the film, is taken from the
Lorca poem with the same title. The Lorca poem is a lament for the
goring to death in 1934 in the bull ring, of his friend, the matador
Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. Samira Makmalbaf’s (SM)
film is also a lament for the loss of something vital in the world,
the independent spirit of the female. Perhaps 5AM also has a
metaphorical
resonance, in that the harsh exposed public elements of Afghan
society have characteristics that make it similar to the bull ring.
Afghanistan as a place where those who expose themselves to the five
o’clock light of the public arena and its judgement, are gored to
death.

Enfolded into the 5AN is the
journey towards the lament. A lament for life suffocated and for the
type of death that awaits independent spirit, in particular but not
exclusively the female, in a society that has been twisted by brutal
external forces, and taken blind refuge in tradition. But although
5AN, has a pessimistic ending with the death of Laylomah’s child and
the deeper exile of Nograh into the Taliban heartlands, the film is
remarkable and sustained by its affirmation of spirit. I think SM
avoids the simplistic crass iteration of despair;
SM has produced a true lament that whilst marking the point of
death, affirms the forces that are life bestowing. The flesh may die;
spirit is a flame that can always be rekindled. The lament it seems
to me is always about humans as worlds, humans as a totality in
themselves of a world, that always has the possibility of reaching
out and interpenetrating and affecting contiguous beings. Body and
soul.

And this is the strength of
SM’s film. Though life may now, in 2013, for Afghan women and men be
lived out in the enveloping shadow of reactive fundamentalism, the
shibboleths of Mullahs: – God knows all
we do – women refrain from dancing. These dour
incantations cannot extinguish the actuality that the
expression of joy and the gift of personal voice are in themselves
the flame of life.

5AN establishes that it is,
the within, that nurtures spirit. Oppressors whether religious or
political have always attempted to suppress ‘within space’. In 5AM
the girls/ young women, sit with their veils off in the courtyard of
the girls school. Without veil they are alive and vital as they
discuss the Taliban and its repression of women, and then discuss the
idea of the possibility of a woman becoming the president of
Afghanistan. The vitality of this debate is electrifying and
captivating.

These young women, in a film
made in 2002 ( released 2003), the first year of the American (UN/
IFOR) invasion after 14 years of Taliban rule, have come to life like
seeds in the desert after rain. There is evidenced a collective
female courage that simply has lain low until conditions changed.
The debate is innocent and naive but passionate. It affirms
something precious in life that always endures. Even the later death
of one of the most outspoken young women in a suicide bombing, and
the foreseen deterioration of security, cannot lessen the intensity
of feeling expressed and the certainty that these feelings and
insights can never be totally crushed.

Today we see the
courage of Malala Yousafzai from
the tribal lands in Pakistan and we recognise in her the young women
in this film

In 5AN, SM finds a visual
complement to her script in way she uses images of women in
Afghanistan. These images of women in burqas destroy the cliches
that we normally accept as signifying women in Afghan culture. The
shots of the young women moving en masse in their blue burqas take on
a different meaning because we have seen this visual collective of
burqas represent themselves effectively as individuals: we have heard
their voices. We now know they have voice. The usual shots in both
photographs and in film of women in full burqa huddled in groups,
normally signify to the Western gaze a passivity of being, a lacking
of individual will. SM confronts and demolishes the cliche by giving
the viewer access to the simple fact that behind the image of a group
of women traditionally attired, there are as many individual voices.
Voices denied but nevertheless actual. This outer aspect of
uniformity is only an appearance behind which lies that which is to
be revealed.

The protagonist, Nograh gives
the film its psychic movement. It again seems that SM has not wanted
to produce a sort of Afghan Mouchette or Rosetta. In some senses
both these films close down their female protagonists and allow them
little inner or outer space to do other than to slide down into
death. Nograh has multiple dimensions
through which her being is defined. Nograh locked into an actual
world. creates worlds, other spaces for her existence outside of the
fundamentalist cage that her father has put her in. Nograh
externally complies with the strictures of her father; and in SM’s
scenario there is no implied criticism of the father. He is severe;
perhaps his freedom and groundedness consist in his strict
observance. He has no ability to see any other choice for his
daughter other than to impose on her his own beliefs. Outwardly
Nograh obeys, each act of obeisance closing down
her outer world. But within there is another story. The debate in
the school captures her imagination and transforms her internal
world. The idea of a woman becoming president of Afghanistan, like
Bhutto in Pakistan, infiltrates her consciousness feeding her
imagination. Her excitement communicates itself to the young poet
who is enchanted by her vision and encourages the expression of the
fantasy. The idea becomes part of her meaningful world of
possibilities.

The leitmotif running
through the film is the pair of white heeled shoes secreted by Nograh
(N). This is the second time in a couple of weeks where I have seen
women’s shoes have featured as a significant force in a movie.
Park’s Stoker uses the cathectic charge of heeled shoes as part of
his movie’s signage, as a symbol. In the case of Stoker the high heel
shoes act as a fetish for an erotically charged rite de passage from
adolescence to womanhood. In Stoker. The high heeled shoes are used
as a laboriously fostered symbolic cliche for sexual potency and
freedom, a movement from infantalised incest to sexual independence.
In 5AN I think it is otherwise. SM uses the modest pair of white
heeled shoes that Nograh has somehow acquired not as a symbol but
rather as a practical tool; a means by which N may pass from one
world through into another. The shoes have a fairy tale quality. The
shoes are secret shoes, secreted shoes, power shoes. Slipped onto her
feet they are in themselves the entry into another world.

N’s shoes, above all for
her are a form of practical magic. They transform reality. They are
not a statement. They are not a symbol. They enable her to move.

5Am was cogently and
powerfully shot amidst the ruins of Afghanistan. SM films a country
that has been smashed up and is overwhelmed by internal migration of
refugees. It is collapsing into chaos; perhaps the only order is
religion. But 5AM seeks out in its scenario the visual
possibilities of the ruins. N’s father fleeing from what he sees as
profane chaos, finds shelter in the ruins of a old colonnaded palace,
with huge high ceilinged rooms. A vastness and emptiness define this
structure in opposition to the density and fullness of the cities.
And, there is one shot of N, in her white heeled shoes as she walks
on the flagstones between the monumental colonnade, taking possession
of the space in her billowing blue burqa. It is a moment of magic.
As N walks she becomes a queen or the president of Afghanistan, alone
in this palace. The walk is an unforgettable act of personal power.
Her power; a woman’s power.

Although cruelly and
honestly pessimistic in its tone and in the final destination of N,
stranded in desolation and emptiness and death, with her father, 5AM
does not leave a psychic legacy of hopelessness. The characters are
not, as in so many movies, mere mechanical puppets attached to the
working out of script. 5AN is set and shot in a real world in the
rawness of Afghan society. A society molded by the terrible forces
released by invasion and war. But the characters have dignity of
their own worlds, both father and daughter and it is this inner
dignity that carries them and carries us through the movie without
despair.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } The Paperboy Lee Daniels (UK 2013) Matthew McConaughey; Nicole Kidman; John Cusack; Zak Efron Viewed Tyneside Cinema 25 March 2013; ticket price £8.00 Ending up in the swamp The writers who have chronicled the dirty corrupt core of schizo USA, Robert Thompson, James Cain, Raymond Chandler, James Elroy have all usually written from the first person perspective. What they knew was that this perspective enabled them to express the state of mind of their protagonists. And the key to their writing is how events unfold within this state of mind. Writing from the first person allows expressive penetration in understanding the situations and events that comprise a story. The committed narrator gives the story a psychic framework through which actions and purposes can be grounded in a social and cultural but individuated matrix. When the first person device works, the reader/viewer is drawn into a particular subjective world governed by particular psychological rules. Lee Daniel’s (LD) The Paperboy (PB) which he co-wrote with the author (Peter Dexter) of the novel, does not use a first person narrative. The device used to set up and tell PB’s story, is a retrospective interview, the recalled memory of the black housemaid to the family at the time of the events. Aside from fitting up the film; which is set in the 60’s, with its retro political correctness, the device is purely mechanical. It’s a non-perspective in the critical sense of mediating understanding. The maid’s telling works as an aide-narrative to trigger and prompt the situations that engage the doings of the main characters: Charlotte Jack, Ward and Hilary. This interview device fails to deepen engagement with the material; it does not open the movie out into the possibility of entering into an immanent world. The only world engendered is a world of backgrounds, a world as a series of possible suggestions against which the action is construed. And yet PB like the works of the American noir writers is set in an unbounded world. PB is set in a particular place, Florida, at a particular time, the 1960’s, and proposes a particular set of situations: an investigation of the possible wrongful incarceration of a man for murder and the effect on this situation of his would be gaol-bird bride. These situations are mediated through human agencies (newspapers, law enforcement agencies,social agencies) which link the characters fatefully to the wider world. Unlike for instance the works of Tennessee Williams which are tightly bound into the psychic realities of the settings and the characters, and in which all development takes place within these boundaries. American noir style works to construct an individual take on the complex of relations with social agencies, so that they are absorbed by the reader/viewer as a subjectivity. Without a first person to suggest a world and to open up the story and to place it in a particular psychic state, LD is left with manipulations of other variables in attempting to establish the authenticity of his material. Failure to establish some claim on authenticity in PB’s story, condemns its actors, whatever qualities they bring to the scenario, to the role of puppets, cardboard cut out figures of the type that regale us in the adverts before the movie. All show no depth. On viewing PB it seems as if LD has targeted the settings the locations and the sound track as affective attributes to gain some traction on the attention of the viewers; attributes that are fashioned to lay some claim to signifying a reality, an authenticity against which the actors can strut their stuff. But the backgrounds in PB have been fabricated for their authenticity as period settings in themselves; not for their effect in suggesting or creating a world. In PB, LD’s settings do not comprise psychic containers for his material. The locations or situations all look right, but they are no more than wallpaper, they bring nothing of substance to the film; they lack qualities in themselves that might bring a sense of foreboding or prescience to the film and envelope its narrative. The film ends in the swamps (perhaps figuritively in the swamp of filmmaking), but there is nothing in the film that leads us to this world of the swamp. It seems more like a tourist destination where we can go to experience an otherness of environment and weird people. The swamp is swamped out by the desultory narrative that leads us there for want of anywhere else to go, not through some psychic imperative of drowning or sinking or being sucked in. The purpose of the swamp in PB is shown in the final shot of the film. The swamp is not a state of mind that pulls you down drowns you in its fetid reptilian waters, it is just a place from which to escape. This last shot sees Jack leave the swamp on the boat carrying out the murdered bodies of Charlotte and Ward. The camera pans from the narrow channel of the swamp water to the blueness of the ocean and its vast and boundless possibilities. And the voice over, which by this time has lost any credibility, informs us that, just like in the old fairy tales, it all works out ok for Jack: he ends up becoming a famous writer. Another lay of old Hollywood. It’s the familiar formula: trick out the film in a period (50’s 60’s 70’s – take your pick!) pay great attention to getting the ‘look’ right and then allow the script to play on the anachronistic gap between the period setting ( in this case ’60’s Florida) and today’s sensibilities. Finally fill out the sound track with lesser known unfamiliar but groovy records from the period. The purpose of the music is to fill out the psychological dimension absent from the scenario; and it is often more interesting than the image. (It used to require a certain specialist knowledge to track down these records but the use of the internet now makes it very easy: hence a number of films exploit this method of ‘filling out’ their material – Seven Psychopaths { another woeful Brit movie} also used this ploy) But the music in itself, in PB. is not employed with sufficient nous to add anything authentic to the film. It’s just a juke box in the pub stacked up with some old records. LD’s use of his tracks in PB, except for the bar scene, feels as if the music has been dumped on the soundtrack at opportunist moments with the aim of jigging up the audience’s attention a little. It is not planned or scored into PB’s sound track as part of the film ( or if it was in the scenario this might show how little the scenarist knows about film). Tarentino, Weir among others have understood how to use prerecorded records to affect. Otherwise it’s just background music. No affect. Just a trick. Lacking entry into a world mediated by a state of mind, the actors are forced to jump through LD’s ridiculous hoops to try and convince the audience of the credibility of their actions. The worse afflicted is Nicole Kidman (NK). A particular instance is the first visit to the prison by the ‘group’ in order to see Hilary. As the Charlotte character is no more than a series of gestural demands from both script and director, the visit is reduced to extracting just another gestural action from her; in this case the crude and unconvincing acting out of masturbation gesture at the demand of Hilary. Because there is no access to psychic reality both Cussack and NK are forced into a caricature of forbidden discomforting (perhaps) sexual desire. (This type of physical gesturing of fucking is repeated to equally uninteresting effect when we do see them at work later, when Hilary is released, engaging in penetrative sex). For all her gesturing, eyeballing and accent KB is little more than a coat hanger onto which to drape a number of costume changes and listen to a number of old records. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Stoker Chan-wook Park (USA 2013) Mia Wasikowska; Nicole Kidman; Matthew Goode Viewed Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle UK 1st March 2013; Ticket: £8 a kiss is just a kiss This piece of Gothic Amerikana is in one sense another revisiting of Park’s (P) favourite theme, incest. The incest theme was the mainspring of Old Boy and it is the psychic mainspring behind Stoker but for this film the incest idea has been transposed to the ut – (dys)- topia of suburban upper middle class USA. The film takes its psychic mainspring from the eponymous word in its title ‘Stoker’ Some one or something that builds up a fire, feeds the flames. So either India’s hormonally charged sexual development that stokes the fire, or perhaps the obsessive nature of hypocritical family secrecy, the keeping of skeletons locked in cupboards, feeds the flames that burn through the scenario. Interestingly, the Stoker (der Heizer)is also the title of the first short story by Kafka and became the first chapter of his uncompleted novel ‘America’. At the core of the story is a grudge and the turning point of the story is a revealed quasi incestuous relationship between nephew and forgotten Uncle. Although Kafka’s short story is an imaginative journey, Kafka expresses an intimate understanding of his characters; whereas Park as director communicates detachment from his material. As if his main point of contact with this cultural strand of American life has been watching the movies of Terrence Malick. Like Hollywood in general and Malick in particular a careful avoidance of context (social occupational historical) is critical to the way that Stoker’s coding deciphers the human relations in the scenarios. There are no dates, no real occupations (there are offices locations of employment but these too are dislocated decontextualised. [nb the deceased Mr Stoker is supposed to have been an architect but the house does not look like an architects home]), no media. Only hermetically sealed worlds in which the angels and demons of a shared post Spielberg moral consensus can be set in play. We are looking at a deterritorialised characters. They exist as oppositions in relation to each other: husband /wife, brother/sister, mother/son, but not as possibilities in relation to the world. And it is in this world voided of the actual, that Park has chosen to direct Stoker. The world as a bell jar. P’s style of filming is very like the cinematography of Malick’s movies. The tracks have a similar slow floating enunciate style which functions as a cue, that something of significance is in train, whether or not this is the case. The look of the S has that same hyper real HD luminance that is intended in Malicks’s cinematography to imbue the shot with a symbolic shimmering resonance; the more banal the shot the more both Malick and Park work to give the images a liminal meaning to add lustre and link to narrative structures shaped more by cod psychology than real forces. Hence perhaps, this piece of American gothic, like other films such as Ramsey’s ‘We need to talk about Kevin’, is filled out with Americana weird. Little shots, bolted onto the shooting script to show us that the film has moved into ‘weird’ territory, so that we can expect weird ‘stuff’ to happen. Stoker has it’s insects (Bunuel inspired perhaps), the fetish object it makes of India’s shoes, eggs, the metronome etc all which are supposed to imbue the scenario with psychic significance, psychological depth. In effect this style of film,to avoid taking risks, abuses symbolism as an cheap and easy means to express inner movement. The reason I use the word abuse is that the symbolism used by Park here and Ramsey is plucked from a compendium of Freudian dreams, an c arbitrary or opportunistic plucking from the dictionary. The symbols and the symbolic images they generate are not won from context, grounded in the material and then understood as possessing a wider signification. Like the shoes in S they are represented from the start of the film as being very significant. They then become a little puzzle built into the film; why are these symbols significant? Like Malicks’s script, P puffs out S with inscrutable philosophical phrases, lines spoken by the lead characters. These have a fake Zen quality, perhaps because faux Zen is perfect grist to the Hollywood script mill. Whereas insights that are hard won in the Zen tradition, in the Hollywood tradition they can be cheaply traduced as realisations, exploited by Hollywood scenarists who need a fix of philosophy to bulk out their characters. Malick tends to bulk out his characters’ emptiness with little quips about the realisation of ‘love’, by way of bestowing meaning on the proceedings. P and his script writer Miller, use the same ploy to insert proto Nietschian sentiments into the mouths of the characters from time to time. So we have India telling that she is as she is because…..’ a flower doesn’t chose its colour.’ Debatable what this means, but it is the basis for presenting the triumph of nature over nurture. A kiss is just a kiss….? Like many film of this type it is ultimately rendered uninteresting by its intrinsic mechanicality. A slasher vampire or zombie movie is enjoyable in its mechanistic working through of permutations of death. But these movies generally avoid inventing formed characters to whom the viewer can assign markers of an assigned individuality. Evelyn Stoker is such a character in Stoker, supposedly the widow of Richard (there is a case that Charlie and Richard are split personalities of the same man) and mother of India. P lavishes his movie with an opening relationship between Evelyn and Charlie, but then the script reveals this relationship is really a cover for the hard on that Charlie in fact has for India. We gaze upon this reciprocated revealed incestuous relationship, as does Evelyn who witnesses a deep French kiss between the niece and uncle (father?). When Charlie realises he has been seen with his tongue down India’s throat, he tries to divert Evelyn into dropping her guard, by making an immediate play for her (before admittedly strangling her with his strap). Now this play for Evelyn is led with his tongue, which he extrudes and is eagerly gobbled down by Evelyn, who sinks to the ground under the passion of Charlie’s hot kiss. At this point we enter pantomime land, the never never land of the mechanicality of the film maker. Charlie can drop Evelyn’s knickers, pant on her, but he cannot kiss her on the mouth with his mouth still dripping with India’s saliva. The film dies back at this point. Park seems well out of his cultural depth with Stoker. It is made with a eye to stringing together a series of arresting arbitrary images to make a piece of gothic americana that he does not really understand. He did this sort of thing better in Korea where he understood better the transgressions and cultural parameters needed pull of this kind of movie. In the USA he only succeeds in making another weird deterritorialised movie. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Daughters of Darkness (Les Levres Rouges) Harry Kumel (Fr 1971) Delphine Seyrig Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne, 3 March 2013; Ticket: £5 retrocrit: Reading the runes in the dunes or Marienbad transposed… The seaside hotel by the sea on the sands at Ostend, that is the location of Daughters of Darkness, is an architectural statement that resonates along a parallel frequency to that of the chateau at Marienbad. Harry Kumel (HK) in visualising Daughters of Darkness (DD) must have had the notion that in having successfully contracted Delphine Seyrig as his lead actress, DD could take on in some of its formal aspects, the form of a subtle parody of Last Year in Marienbad (LYM) Geometry The interiors of both LYM and DD both allude to the taste spectrum and formal aspirations of particular social castes. The Ostend hotel built for a burgeoning bourgeois market seems to consciously replicate the pretensions of an earlier aristocracy. The resort hotel at Ostend is laid out as a palace, and its opulent geometrical reception and public spaces will have been planned as a sop to the aspirations of the European bourgeoisie and lesser aristocracy that in a more public sphere they could by imitation equal the taste of a foreclosed aristocratic age that defined itself by private opulence and conspicuous consumption. Whereas Marienbad was situate in grounds where nature was made subservient to an ornamental geometry imposed by the hand of man; the Hotel in Ostend is positioned by the sea. Its geometric lines with regular columns and serried windows seems built to oppose the force of the sea, but is doomed to fail, to be rendered insignificant by the elements of darkening nature. Within their settings, their variegated encompassings both LYM and DD share a metaphysical core, which revolves about ideas of time. LYM with its infinite tracking across surfaces and through mirror worlds, creates a metaphysic of time that is presided over by the unnamed woman (Delphine Seyrig). Time becomes a function of space, a function of a Nietzschian eternal recurrence. More crudely perhaps DD, with its vampire and human blood theme also has an underlying temporal motif, the notion of eternal life, life eternally relived and renewed through the medium of human blood. It may be thought that LYM is much subtler in its insinuation of the time motif, but there is attaching to Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s mis-en-scene, something of the form of a religious sacrificial ceremony. Appropriate then that Delphine Seyrig (DS) should play a key role in both movies. But whilst her role in LYM is pivotal, in DD is central. With her performance as the Comptess de Bathony in DD, her persona dominates the film from the moment she enters frame poised like a spider at the centre of her web waiting to enmesh and devour her victims. In her poise, DS effortlessly assumes the high status of her queen spider/ high priestess and whilst on screen she spins our in her delivery of her dialogue, a spell of enchantment, effortlessly without over determination or crass exaggeration. The delivery of her lines, pulled from the silky depths of her throat, is perfectly synchronised with her breath and the vowels shaped delectably by the reddest of red lips. The voice engages at once both with a knowing entrapment, but also with an ironic distancing that allows us to see she is having fun with her arachnoid role in a vampire movie. She knows how to wear the frocks with an architectonic nuance as she has been here before in another incarnation albeit with a different haircut. In LYM the dresses were breathtaking, all white and feathery, DS a priestess cold with erotic indifferent to imprecation. In DD, HK encases DS’s body in a series of unceasingly stunning power frocks, blacks and golds enabling DS to move through the scenario beguilingly and effortlessly with increasing power as the personification of the hunger for death. In both DD and LYM, DS embodies the dark side of the anima, the feminine bringer of death; both movies are built upon her abilities to bring onto the screen this idea of a lethal anima. In filming DD HK was assured and confident in the understanding of how to use signs. Signs are of course what make horror movie genre work. Contradictory signs relating to roles, and the directional signs that point without ambiguity to the path the script will follow in pursuance of its narrative. The signs that point are critical of course for arousing anticipation, and anticipation either of pain or fear is what powers states of arousal. Many contemporary horror films, such as the Cabin in the Woods often archly overplay signs, making them very blatant; intended it would seem, not to arouse but rather set up the viewer for an ensuing voyeuristic gore/ slash fest; satiation of violence, rather than fear, being the purpose. So some ‘horror’ movies made today almost do away with the use of psychological signs preferring to cut straight to the chase, the final blood sequence, either played for laughs or whatever. Movies of this era, such as DD, rely on signs to prime the audience ( which is not to say that many of the films are not tongue in cheek and capable of ironic self comment – DD often is.) But the viewer is given work to do in interpretation of signs and allowed to build their own anticipation of outcome. Movies shot using such formal scripted methods enlist more viewer involvement and the occasional moments of dread. There is no voyeurism rather it is anticipation of outcome that holds us, the sign pointing the way. The play on our minds. Haircuts play a important part in the filming of DD as of course they do in many movies – in particular film noir. But in DD, and horror genre they have a particular use as signs. The hair of the those representing the forces of darkness, in this case Comptess Bathony, is usually rigidly styled, like a wig (baldness can have a similar effect), DS’s hair permed in frozen locks that frame her face like a judge’s periwig and suggest the idea of judgement, judicial authority. DS under her periwig becomes she who must be obeyed. It also functions as a counter sign to her voice which teases and bewitches, paralysing her victims in the interplay of contradictory signage. Victims hair for a woman is usually long, often blond and hanging long. In DD, Valerie’s hair covers her face like a death shroud, wrapping about her face, exaggerating and heightening the expressive affects of her eyes and mouth and throat. Like a lamb for the slaughter, the sign points as soon as she appears. DD is a woman’s movie in the sense that the only players are the women. It is woman’s business that comprises its subject matter; it is about the dark force of the female anima, In movies of this kind the men really have no role and therefore usually have nondescript haircuts. In DD Mark’s longish neatly cut hair marks him our from the beginning as a non player. Although he has a role, he is a pawn, not central to the forces at work and expendable. As a horror movie DD is old school, It does exactly what it sets out to do. It sets up what is going to happen allows the audience to anticipate it (understand the inevitable) and for the signed events to come to pass, and then it tells you they have happened. Managed through superb acting and excellent pacing, the tension and humour are balanced, and deliver to the audience a film that works as planned. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Possession Andrzej Zulawski (Fr
1981) Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill
Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema; 28 Feb
13; Ticket £5

retrocrit: Shot to death

Set in Berlin in about 1980, Zulawski’s
(AZ) Possession (P) was presumably intended to echo back, in its
psycho-sexual schizoid script, as an allegorical comment on divided
condition of Germany exemplified by Berlin split in two by its
East-West Wall and the rise of European revolutionary terrorist
groups. Art house intellectual horror was perhaps his intention.

The opening shots track down a length
of the Wall from the West looking over to the East, an enclosed vista
of boarded up delapidation and dereliction. Z then cuts to another
kind of architectural statement, a marble clad corporate headquarters
with serried columns, inside of which festers some kind of state
twilight agency. This agency employs Mark, in a non specific
capacity, and seems to have a sinister perhaps menacing security
remit.

And as a set up that’s it. There is
not much else that is cogently fed into the script to enable the
viewer to read signs in the film as to what it is about: it might be
an quasi- allegorical political piece, or something else even less
specific than the agency. Perhaps that is the point. However the
film was made at the height of the activity of left wing
revolutionary cells in Europe in Italy the Red Brigade and in Western
Germany the Red Army Faction, Bader-Meinhof activists. Both these
groups and the various spin off revolutionary cells, entered into a
train of murderous killings and assassinations justified both by
revolutionary liberation rhetoric borrowed from South America and
traditional European Anarchism and Maoist-Marxism; driven by a naif
belief in the USSR and China, and mistrust of the neo-fascism they
perceived at the root of the Italian and German democracies in
particular and Western democracies in general.

Public shock in Europe in the 70’s and
80’s, at the appearance of revolutionary groups in their midst was
further increased by the realisation that the members of the groups
hailed form the prosperous educated middle classes and that women
were at the core of these revolutionary groups. Given that women had
always played a prominent role in revolution (Rosa Luxembourg; the
nihilist groups of Russia in the 1870’s) this was hardly a surprise.
What was different was that this era was the time of the paparazzi.
Sex sold magazines and newspapers, and revolutionary women were ‘hot
dangerous dolls’! Dolls being the operative word as women were
scorned as independent agents so it was the convenient working
assumption that they were literally screwed into belief, by the
ultimate succubus, the revolutionary monster. So although it is in
fact poorly sketched out, and ultimately AZ seems to have lost
interest in the political allegorical model whilst making his film,
this is still the path that seems to be suggested allegorially at
least, that is taken by Anna in P.

Anna, despite being a mother, abandons
her husband (who is away a lot doing whatever) first, for a new age
lover who having practiced all the correct Tantric exercises knows
how to fuck her good. She still continues to try and pass as if
she’s leading a ‘normal’ life but, sexual degradation at some
undefined point in the movie, starts to invest her being and she ends
up in East Berlin the sex slave of a sort slimy betenticled squid
like monster, who fucks the brains out of her. It all ends badly of
course (as it did with the Red army Faction and like) in stake outs,
shoot outs and a final Armageddon. Oddly enough as part of the
narrative development AZ introduces during the second stage of Anna’s
corruption (when she abandons her child) a sort of doppelganger for
Anna in the form of Helen (also played by Adjani) as a good Anna, the
Anna that Anna was supposed to be, but had split from, introducing
another schizo level in the film, which again fails to add up to or
mean anything, just hangs limply like another dead branch on AZ’s
tree.

In fact the remains of the allegorical
structure are so slight that I felt as if I was pulling it together
from an intense reading of its residual signs. It’s possible this
reading might be purely fanciful. But in itself this attempt at
reading indicates the movies core weakness: it doesn’t have a core.
Z has shot a film empty of any force moving through either its
structure or content that makes for a coherent set of responses to
the material. As such P lacks tension. Even the shot, presumably
supposed to be the “WoW’ moment in the movie, when we see the
creature fucking Anna, panders to voyeurism rather than to horror,
affect rather than effect; in revealing this in all its full on
imagery, the monster becomes a joke rather than a force. Although
the shot is rated by the supporters of the movie, this is as voyeurs
( nothing wrong with this in itself); but direct gazing upon this
scene adds nothing to the movie as a whole.

Polanski’s REPULSION, on which some
elements of the film certainly the Anna roll has been modelled, has
the defining characteristic of being a forceful expression of a dark
carnal degeneration. Repulsion knows what it is about where it is
going, and takes the viewer on the appropriate cinematic ride. AZ’s
P, its sketchy (perhaps inexistent) allegorical structure, is fuzzy
and unspecific. It takes the viewer nowhere; rather offers them
‘moments’: pink socks, the beast, nasty slayings of people as if they
were sacrificial victims (RAF) some fun cod philosophical dialogue,
and architecture. But everything slithers into inconsequentiality.

One key element of the film holds it
together that makes it watchable.

Bruno Nuytten’s camera work is
extraordinary, embedded not just into the structure but in the
possible reading of P. The camera constantly suggests the
possibility of effect. The camera, tracks, floats reveals and
penetrates. The movement of the camera through architecture of the
60’s apartment with its corridors, right angles and blocked fields of
vision, captures the menace that suddenly appears in the core of the
relationships of the family. The camera understands this space. The
tracks that float out from close-up scrutiny of a scene to wide shot,
powerfully suggest the opening out of awareness to a new dimension.
The reveals such as across Mark and Anna as they lie in their bed,
the penetration of the camera into the darkness, all prime the viewer
to expectation. However the expectation is all there is, as after
these camera movements, the viewer is usually dropped back into
incoherent void that comprises P. But in itself the camera movement
is so assured and composed that it holds the incoherence together.
The final shot, around the spiral staircase, although empty in
content is so full of architectural form, as to almost be complete in
itself.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Django Unchained Quentin Tarantino (USA 2012) Jamie Foxx; Leonardo DiCapprio; Christopher Waltz Viewed: Empire Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne Ticket £3.60 Digestive problems Viewed on the budget ticket night (Tuesdays) the cinema was full of people eating buckets of popcorn and trays of Nachos. Set in 1858 in Texas and the Southern States of the USA, the only surprise in Tarantino’s (QT) latest confection of stylised violence, Django Unchained (DU) is that no one uses a mobile phone. They would certainly come in handy from time to time in the old West and raise a laugh that would cut above the corn. These days it’s almost cruel to deny the cowboy a touch screen, when every other anachronism is OK. DU is a movie that exemplifies the notion that film has little left to express beyond revisiting its own past and history and engaging in replication and recreation of itself out of its previous forms. Otherwise there is not much to say about DU or QT. Excepting that its bloated length and etiolated stretched out structure is not sufficiently justified by QT’s ambition of revisiting almost every style of Western from John Ford and Hoppalong Cassady through to Lars Von Trier, Arthur Penn and John Sturges. It’s a belly full o beans as Mel Brooks might have put it, who is paid extensive tribute in the faux KKK scene which is another anachronistic farrago (laboriously and mechanically executed). DU’s narrative is simply a device to enable QT to work through a sizeable number of action and sound images that reference the Western genre in all its poly-variant glory, whilst simultaneously exposing them to the distancing mechanism of dialogue and attitudinal gloss embedded in contemporary discourse. In relation to the referencing two areas of the film stood out: the film score in itself, and the landscapes and backgrounds. DU’s score is a key to the way in which the film psychically unfolds and affects. The score quotes and reprises every type of Western theme music of which I aware, from the 50’s to date. This music, much of it familiar even if not actually recognised, lends a disjunctive deconstructive element to the film, working to detach and disassociate the viewer from the relentlessly aggressive modernist stream of the acting and dialogue. The score, in itself, creates a meta track outside of the spacial contemporaneity of DU, a space that comprises the dimension of history. The score brings history and the traditions of the Western genre into the audience’s consciousness. The music allows DU to flow out from its performance bound present back into a referenced past The score adds the dimension of time to the experience. Time is located on one of the film’s tracks as a counterweight to the images and dialogue in DU that are uncompromisingly dedicated as a celebration of the present. The music in the score, at given points in the development of the narrative, swells and announces its momentary sovereignty in affective mood establishment. We hear in the music, the knightly decoriously attired apple pie cowboys of 50’s TV series, Cisco Kid Roy Rogers the Lone Ranger. These card board characters with their noble steeds such as Silver, and their side kicks such as Tonto, are briefly suggested, resurrected and brought back to momentary life as phantom presences. In the music, the epic Westerns of Ford and Wayne swell up in our minds. Films such as: the Searchers Red River True Grit, with their strange lone cowboy ballads, enter envelope and then quit remembrance, shadows flickering on the cave wall of the mind. As DU ploughs through later Rock n Roll thematic cowboy anthems suggested by the movies of Sturges, Peckinpah and even Von Trier (I count Mandalay as a Western) so too moments from these films are reinvested in the score. Softening the edges of an uncompromising contemporary bad ass script, the score, in mediating other filmic eras of fantasy and style, folds into the action, the dimension of an immersed recollection in other images, that makes it possible to watch the film through. Many of the action images in DU of course pay homage to and quote all these types of films (some of the images of horses were pure revisiting of the horses in the 50’s US cowboy series) But it is the music in the score that carries the history and which connects us to a cultural collective memory. In a similar vein the backdrops and landscapes against which QT shot DU, serve a similar function to the film’s score. Their purpose again seems to be to act as an historical reprise, to trigger nostalgia for earlier simpler forms of the genre. QT moves DU through the whole lexicon of Western locations. The obviously fake studio recreations of ‘rock outcrops’ and ‘camp sites’ through to the delirious encompassing landscapes of Ford and other outdoor directors: the grand magnificent vistas that promise to open up the whole world for us. The movement between these exterior locations and the ‘back lot’ studio look of the small Western towns in DU, gives the film a dynamic range of image quotes from a wide range of earlier Westerns, which in themselves, as the film develops into an obvious pastiche, lends DU a sort of mantel of cod authenticity. Although the narrative revolves round the raw issue of slavery and its horror, the acting out of the sequences, the mannered detached stylisation of the actors ( who perform in the manner of actors in adverts), never permits QT to develop the film as anything more than a stylised exercise in violent sequences. Any more than James Bond could make any informed statement about the politics of democracy, no more can DU be considered an angry diatribe against the evils of slavery. These films are about style and detachment from the real and the actual. As such, DU is a film that speaks to an audience that consumes violence in the same way that they consume pop corn and nachos: mechanically with little discrimination and in huge amounts. There there is a whole dimension of street violence that is concerned with how it looks, personal style rather than what it means. DU as stated earlier may be a bloated overlong production, but as a movie, pregnant with its own past, it is QT’s best filmic statement for some time. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Foxfire Laurent Cantet (2012 USA) Raven Adamson, Tamara Hope Viewed: Cinema at Villette Paris Ticket: Euro10.50 On the right to choose. This is the second time Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Foxfire (FF) has been filmed, first time was in 1999. I haven’t seen the first film adaptation or read the novel which is set during the ‘50’s in small town upstate New York, the sort of community familiar to Joyce Oates from her own upbringing. It is a location that will not be familiar to Laurent Cantet (LC) from his upbringing, but to a limited extent, the setting and situations dealt with are perhaps familiar territory from his previous movie Entre deux Murs, which also adapted a biographical novel and dealt with the experience of a teacher in a tough deprived Parisian suburb. But Foxfire for me charts LCs own personal filmic journey, in which this film maker previously concerned with narratives connected to realist situations starts to relocate his subjects in the world of fantasy. In the case of FF the world of the child is remoulded outside of the classroom of Entre deux Murs and projected onto the wish fulfilment structure of the peer group: the girl gang. It is my impression that in traditional story telling, from fairy tale through 19th to mid twentieth century narratives, the child is portrayed predominantly as victim. Both in fairy and in Victorian story, the child was a pawn of the moral. The child suffered within the strictures of its structured relations; but the good child eventually with help from magical creatures or the working of destiny, was restored back to the world in its rightful place. Children were in the worlds of Dickens or of the Fairy Tale the object of moral and social forces that were beyond their control; of relations with power that were not of their choosing. Even Richmal Compton’s creation ‘William’ for all his proactive exertions, always in the end had to bow to the authority of the adult world. In literature and above all in film form for some time now the child has been recast as the active protagonist. The child is no longer victim but a player. Like the action hero the child is author of its own fate. In a sense the child is accorded full rights to a fantasy existence which is in accord with the consumer ideological ideal of always being able to choose. It is an ideological imperative of this right that the dream of the child should conform to the adult world view: the contemporary Weltanschauung. The mapped out possibility of the child being enabled to exert influence over the world as a fantastic realm, is an extension of Hollywood’s extension of the American Dream, which signifies in its story lines the right of individuals to self determination. Contemporary films for children (which are also made with adults as a target audience) constitute a logical extension of this right to self determination into the domaine of the child. The child being traditionally an agent unable to shape its own destiny, more a pawn than a castle, becomes a mover and a shaker, a fully fledged consumer able to live the dream able to buy and buy into the dream. As children are only active in limited spheres of activity, mostly home and school, the film industry has had to recast these locations as fantastic worlds in order to be able to play out narratives of determination populated by children. Adult scenarios in films may be of course fantasial narratives but realistic settings provide a structural framework holding the self evidential nature of the fantasy in check. Films featuring child protagonists and set in the world of the child, are located either in straightforward magical parellel worlds as seen in the Harry Potter series; or as in the case of FF, the setting and story are retrojected back in to hazy past, such as the ’50’s that is familiar but different. This setting with its locations props and costumes are authentic up to a point but can exploit the potential of anachronistic attitudes in the children. This allows contemporary attitudes to sport themselves, particularly in dialogue, giving cheap and easy exchange victories to the child protagonists. Interestingly Harry Potter and FF share some things in common in this process of empowerment of the child. Both are set in a sort of cosy past of certitude and both employ the idea of groups of children held together by secret oaths and the bonds of ritual. In FF, justified by the anachronistic power of retrospective morality, it is the gang of girls led by ‘Legs’ who occupy the moral high ground and whose actions are both successful and righteous. They live the dream of a fantasial empowerment, and assimilating the consumer diktat: desire. Whilst having a place in the developing current ideological discourses around child empowerment, FF offers nothing to film. The camera work is superficial and adds nothing to the film except the need to get from shot reaction shot. From one thing to another. The film image is flat and layered looking as it is in many HD productions. The acting performances from the adults is two dimensional cardboard. The script ponderous, concerned with conveying attitude rather than state of mind, and the performances of the girls whilst occasionally arresting, are mostly mechanical as they plough their course through the film from event to event. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk