Adrin Neatrour

Skyfall Sam Mendes (2012 UK) Daniel Craig; Judy Dench Javier Bardem Viewed: Empire Cinema Newcastle Ticket £3.60

Post modernist conceit – in a good way

OK it is James Bond, but rather than Ian Fleming it is Orson Welles who lurks in the shadows of Skyfall (SF), a film that pays its dues to cinema rather than literature.

Welles’ filmic genius penetrates the movie at all levels including its actual title. The coy revelation of the source of the film’s title, the name Skyfall, carved onto the gatepost of James Bond’s ancestral Scots home in the last action sequence, is reminiscent of the Welle’s equally restrained disclosure of the source of ‘Rosebud’ in Kane. Operating at different levels both reveals serve as pointers to a mysterious past that is about to be consumed in flames and vanish forever. Names without a trace….

The Shanghai fight sequence in SF that is shot exploiting the refracted images created and multiplied by the glass surfaces within and without the structures of Shanghai’s light blazoned skyscrapers, instantly calls to mind the shoot out sequence in Welles’ Lady from Shanghai. In lady from Shanghai Welles and Rita Hayworth engage in a lethal gun fight in a Hall of Mirrors. Like the earlier Welles sequence, SF’s exploitation of a world generated by the interplay of replicated images creates a destabilisation of identity, a confusion of action and an intensifying of effect.

Lastly the sequences in the London Underground call up Welles’ most famous screen role as the Third Man, the master of Vienna’s underground sewer system. Javier Bardems intimacy with the subterranean and its many doors, recall Welles ample elfin movements in a similar environment.

As an action movie the scenario of SF has to facilitate the film’s movement from one set piece situation to another. In SF the 6 set pieces, as in almost any action film are realised very well. In many action movies the ideas driving the scenario are simplistically contrived oppositions childishly conceived and lacking developmental stamina, these action films simply run out of road. But holding SF together as it shifts through action are a number of loosely knit understated psychic strands that locate what we see and situate the script in a world characterised by some sort of meta meaning.

I am not referring to the incest motif linking M and Silva. In itself this dynamic works OK as a plot exciter, but it’s crude device and retreads familiar motivational passageways in many movies. The key feature of the script’s play on the incest idea, is that it does not work alone as an isolated gimmick; rather it is part of the film’s incalling of allegorical motifs that drive its narrative between the action scenes and sustain audiences’ engrossment in outcome.

A film franchise that counts 50 years of existence can only do so by constant reinvention of itself in terms of the signifiers it deploys and the significations to which it points.

James Bond started filmic life (Dr No) as a lifestyle agent whose persona was attached to a series of desirable consumer products. Aspirational signifiers were carefully inculcated into Bond’s Scots Britishness. SF has moved away completely from this. Unlike some contemporary US products of the action genre which seem little more than advertising billboards for the products of corporate USA, Bond and Skyfall avoid product placement. (symbolically perhaps we see the famous Aston Marin destroyed) The place that Bond is occupies now is very different world from the world of Fleming where he started,. The product consuming British agent has elided first into a superhero charged with saving the world, and now, in Skyfall has again moved on to something quite different. In Skyfall JB has morphed into a spirit entity, a phantom being from the Land of the Dead. We can see this most directly in Bond’s face: at this stage of his incarnation as JB, Daniel Craig has very very old looking eyes: there is no doubt that he is an old soul. As indeed is Judy Dench (Admittedly she is old, but…Central Casting could have fixed that had they wanted.)

Not in its scripted dialogue but in its filmic realisation, SF has something of the patina of a Gothic horror movie, perhaps an undead/zombie sort of horror movie (in a good way). The the locations and the settings all suggest that the action is taking place in a world that is not of the living. The first pre-title action sequence takes place in daylight mostly, except for the tunnels, but thereafter the film mostly moves into night or places abandoned by the living or subterranean locations, the haunts of the undead. A Gothic sensibility pervades the mis en scene. This is not only a fashionable make over, but gives the internal movement of the film coherence and an integrity of logic. The new displaced MI6 HQ, is an old vaulted castle with JB, like Dracula about to be sent forth into the world of daylight; the Shanghai sequence a phastasorama of ghostly apparitions; Silva’s city of the dead; the London underground with its denizens of commuter zombies and the final stand-off at the haunted mansion which ends in flames and destruction. (A nod to Mandalay in Hitchcock’s Rebecca) SF is caste in Gothic form, located in Gothic space with a hero from the shadows of an ancient vanished civilisation that exists only in myth and the old stories.

Britain and Bond have shifted and gone through a time warp in SF. The forces in play have changed. At the start of the 50 year journey (Dr No) JB and GB were both part of an actual world, engaging with specific forces that could be located in that world. In SF, neither are part of the actual world: they are both relegated to the lower nether regions and can only act as phantoms involved in the psychodrama of their own internecine struggles. But their confidence in themselves is retained. Their maintained self belief, although ridiculous, is unaffected by their change of status from living to dead.

In SF JB is transposed to Gothic underworld as an agent of the dead charged with being the elemental psychic link between the mother son’s incestual cathexis.

Whilst signifying content and signification may have changed, a key element of franchise has not altered: the style of the actors’ engagement with content. The persona James Bond has always been a detached entity denotating and affecting a wry amusement both at self and at the world: even a world that is falling to pieces. The Bond franchise has stayed true to its distancing of itself from itself.

This detachment, the ability of the Bond movies to keep values and outcomes in this perspective is one reason for its longevity. The Bond films never engage with fear as a state of mind. In this they contrast with US franchise vehicles such as Batman which with their committed stance in relation to specifically American values, build their films about arousing fear as a state of mind in relation to the threats perceived in the world of these values being ATTACKED. The value attached to these values is so great that any sacrifice, even the DESTRUCTION of the whole world is preferred to the loss of these values that they hold so dear. This inclination gives US superhero films a bias towards apocalyptic endings, as in the 2012 Batman vehicle where the whole of New York is destroyed but the value of freedom is upheld and maintained. The question arises as to whether the repetition of such committed apocalypse scenarios can maintain the Batman franchise as long as he detached Bond model. Or perhaps the outings of the Batman series will have to be constrictively rationed. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Seven Psychopaths Martin McDonagh ( 2012 UK) Colin Farell Woody Harrelson SamRockwell.

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 10 Dec 2012; ticket £7 Stoney heart….

On 11 June 1963 Thich Quang Duc a Vietnamese Bhuddist Monk immolated himself in Saigon at the crossroads in front of the Cambodian Embassy. The act of self immolation was Duc’s (supported by his fellow monks and nuns) ultimate protest against the discrimination practiced by the Diem regime against Bhuddists. Diem himself, a corrupt reliquary of French colonial rule, was a Catholic and the regime used the Catholic religion as the touchstone of political reliability; to advance under Diem’s administration you had to be Catholic, although the South Vietnamese population was 90% Bhuddist despite a decade of forced conversions. Diem was progressively curtailing Bhuddist rights and expressions of their faith, and Duc’s act of self immolation was a direct response to Diem’s ban on the flying of traditional Bhuddist flags on the birthday of the Bhudda. Interestingly Duc’s heart survived intact both his self immolation and his later cremation which was viewed as an attestation of his sainthood. On the evidence of Seven Psychopaths, Martin McDonagh’s heart, if he has one, will burn.

This historical digression is prompted by McDonagh’s movie Seven Psychopaths (SP) that has as one of its core interwoven stories, the tale of a ‘Bhuddist psychopath’. The monk story psychology is somewhat convoluted and unconvincing, but its raison d’etre is that a monk such as Duc, had he not immolated himself, might instead have sought out his revenge on the USA for their war in Vietnam. The story is admittedly almost deliberately confused. But it is clear that the Bhuddist protests of this era that included acts of self immolation, had nothing to do with protest against the USA; and that the Bhuddist ethos amongst the monks and nuns of South Vietnam at this time, had no place for violence against others. The moral bankruptcy of both the film script and the director/writer Martin McDonagh (MM) is evidenced in the manipulative distortion both of history and religion that MM has had to recourse to, in order to give his film even the semblance of an ending. A cheap trick that allows the film to go out with a ‘bang’ in one of its last sequences by exploiting the recreated image of a burning monk. As if this act and its corresponding image had any meaningful connection to the gash footage that had preceded it. A cheap trick.

The distorted history used as back story in SP is exploitative demeaning junk in the worst Hollywood tradition. What else remains? Certainly not the cinematography which is uninteresting and adds little to the film except to confirm its mediocracy.

The structure of the film is built on a sort of deconstructed model that is broken down into compartmentalised narratives that interlink with each other and with imaginary strands (most noticeably the Vietnam psychopath story) . The film’s structure is a knowing nod at post modernist and New Wave film sensibility. But the structure built on the intertweaved strands of dognappers, the travails of a script writer and a criminal gang, lacks a unifying dynamic. SP is not so much filled out with an idea but emptied out of ideas. Frantic chaotic desperate action replaces any semblance of a coherent film or dramatic theme. Lacking a material idea, the film is without energy; without energy there is no tension in the interplay and interrelationship between its strands; without tension there is no pace, only a confused melee of images. Without a structural dynamic, SP overdepends on dialogue such as the ‘pitching sessions’ between Marty and Tommy(?), Like the movie, the dialogue comprises a series of little ideas that amount to nothing much except the repeated arch suggestion of a story featuring the idea of a Bhuddist psychopath (sic).

The film relies on one running gag, the dognapping idea, which is the source of continuous referential humour; but the mawkish repetition of the device released by the idea of the heavy criminal having a big soft spot for his pooch soon ceases to be very funny. The film also relies on its humorous dialogue which takes its cue from the sort of interchanges that Tarantino perfected in his early films, interwoven with the sort of deadpan ‘silly’ writing Ricky Gervaise successfully built into ‘the Office’ series and a little Iain Banks thrown in for the lurid detail. The only trouble with MM’S writing is that it is laborious unfunny and patently derivative in the manner sometimes heard in pubs where one member of a ‘crowd’ is entertaining his mates.

The script development is so uneven that the characters can be seen only as mechanical ciphers, spurious affect machines for MM’s vacuous meanderings. The number of films that are patched up with music! People flood a film with music. They are preventing us from seeing that there is nothing in those images. (Robert Bresson – Notes on the Cinematographer) The soundtrack of SP is filled out with a selection of eclectic music. I sometimes wondered if MM’s choice of music was intended to take my mind away from rather than draw me into the film I was watching. After a quote from Book of Revelations, which opens the movie (again Tarantino type quote/homage referencing the hitman in Pulp Fiction – which is superbly structured) and a cute dialogue about Dillinger getting shot in the eye, the film breaks into PP Arnold’s The First Cut is the Deepest. Like the rest of the music in SP the song had no relation that I could fathom to anything that appeared on screen. I supposed the song, like the others, was in the movie because MM liked it and more importantly it operated as a powerful distraction from what was on the screen. ( and it probably cost a lot of money).

On the evidence of SP, MM is running out of road and has no where to go except Hollywood style distortion and manipulation of ideas. On the Sunday evening I saw this heavily promoted film the cinema was almost empty and what audience there was seemed unmoved by the spectacle before their eyes. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Amour (Love)
Michael Haneka (Fr Ger
2012) J P Trentignant; Emmanuelle
Rive

Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle, 16 Nov 2012; Ticket £7.00

Empty box blues.

Amour is a film narrative expressed in Michael Haneka’s (MH) own scenario and enfolded in his particular directorial style.. After viewing the film my reaction was that the script for Amour is not in accord with his language as a film maker. Consequently the film is like a Japanese gift: the beautifully wrapped box that contains the gift is more singular than the contents

Amour shot completely in colour by MH, is presented to the audience wrapped a sepia hued patina that is redolently suggestive of the richness of the earlier life of Anne and Georges. The shooting comprises two types of shots already familiar from Hanika’s previous films: the long steadicam shots that follow characters through the increasingly familiar layout of the living space; and the formal two shot, set up as still life portraits. In Amour these two types of shots are interspersed with close ups, that often cut to reverse shot, to carry dialogue. The dominant theme suggested by the camera is that it represents that unseen presence,, the viewer’s gaze. We gaze from th outside upon the performances of the actors. We watch two actors at work evoking in their performing the processes of acute and chronic illness, understood in the context of what is presented as their long contented relationship.

Doors open and close, and feature in Amour as they do in other MH films. For instance the film opens with the couple’s apartment door smashed open by firemen. In Amour the function of the door and its frame differs from his previous work. MH in his other movies uses the door motif to suggest something about what it is possible to see. Doors are shot half open, only partially disclosing the space people and events. This framing sets up the viewer to engage with what is only partially revealed, to confront the world as a place where the hidden and the seen are in constant interplay. In MH’s films the audience is always outside, and challenged by MH to understand what is hidden and why. In Amour, the apartment’s huge French panelled doors with their impressive architraves are certainly prominent, but they serve only to seal off the space. As the apartment becomes a world of the dead, the door transposes into a gate, that is either open or closed, Beyond this there is nothing in the portal itself to challenge comprehension of what is happening. A person is dying a world is slipping away the door is closing.

It seems to me in MH’s films there are no internalities. MH does not work with subjectivity in the grain of his films. We are presented with facts of the matter; the actors play out the scenario which probes about the presented situation.

In Amour neither the camera work, nor the structure of the shots (what the camera allows us to see) nor editing, work to effect the viewer’s passage into the states of mind of the protagonists. We see the situation. It is a film about a situation. We stay on the outside of the situation; this is a film of exteriorities. As such Amour is a vehicle completely reliant of the expressive affect of its two protagonists, Anne and George, which ultimately defines the movie as an art house soap opera, worthy in its intent, barren in its execution.

The audience are cast as the watchers of the mechanics of the script. The script itself resembles a medico-sociological paper on status change in acute and chronic illness. The script cranks through the post stroke situations that sufferers and carers face: we see loss of speech and diminution of mental faculties, loss of mobility, the need for help in using the toilet, loss of bowel and bladder control, the bad nurse experience, the need to be fed, the final stages of consciously and emotionally experienced incapacitation. Each stage a little episode on the downward inclining slipway that eventually leads to the logic of mutual death. All of this is no more than a log with parellel emotive commentary. This emotive commentary, provided almost exclusively in the affect images of the actor’s faces, leads to a limited palette of the same expressive gesturing: suffering, stoicism, understanding. The longer the film continues the more evident it becomes that we are watching two actors faking it. This feeling of faking is particularly strong in the scene where Anne is killed by Georges. The camera pans off the close shot of George and Anne (who’s asphyxiating under the pillow that he holds down over her face) to Anne’s body which we see, for some 30 seconds or more, struggle and twitch as she dies. But we know no one is dieing. At this point Amour and MH lose all credibility in the banality of the literalised faked film image. For MH to film the faked twitching of Emmanuelle Rive is counterproductive and pointless, an insult to the audience. Not disturbing or shocking only irrelevant bad film making.

As it progresses Amour becomes desperate in its expressive devices. Towards the end of the film there is a montage of the watercolour landscapes which han in the apartment. The apartment space is almost overflowing with matter artefacts memorabilia of the past. MH is careful, except for a sketch of a bird in the bookcase at the entrance of le salon, to exclude this material from the imagery of the film. We are aware of it without being able to specify it. We know there are paintings but they are lost in the background. Suddenly as Anne enters the portaql of her last act, there is a montage of at least 6 paintings, all wistful landscapes The effect of this montage is to understand it as a rather heavy handed metaphor. Also intercut into Amour are a dream sequence of Georges and a fantasy sequence where he sees Anne after he had killed her. Both seem to belong to another film that was not made.

The one sequence that points to a revealing of internality comprises the scene between George and the pigeon that intrudes for a second time into the apartment through the open window. The scene is allowed to end enigmatically, though it seems likely that George having caught the bird, kills it, as a sort of emotional dry run. The scene opens up possibilities that are enigmatic dark and perhaps contradictory and which are otherwise absent in Amour, and for this reason the scene also feels like it belongs only tangentally to Haneka’s scenario adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Robert Bresson Season fall 2012, at Star and Shadow – an overview

Film screened: Les Dames de Bois de Boulogne (1945) , Au Hazard Balthazar (1966), Mouchette (1967), L’Argent (1983)

In the hand of Bresson mediums are the message

Viewing retrospectively a series of films by Bresson (RB) in the conditions for which they were intended, in a cinema and on a large screen, is a privileged opportunity to overview and penetrate more deeply into the mainsprings of his filmic demiurge.

The films exhibited at the Star and Shadow included movies from the beginning and end of his directing career, and two from the mid period of his output.

The first film shown at the Star and Shadow was RB’s second film, Les Dames de Bois de Boulogne. I think it is a disaster, but seen in light of his subsequent output it was a disaster from which he learnt and which revealed for him the only path that he could take: To thy own self be true.

‘Dames…’ is a film that has nothing to do with RB’s primary desire as director. “Dames…’ looks like a hard learnt lesson as to what happens when an artist betrays himself for the sake of the usual mess of la-la potage: image – recognition – flattery = death of self. You get to work with cultural greats like Cocteau, beautiful actresses like Maria Casares you become one of us and presumably get paid but you pay a price: the destruction of spirit. For some that’s a reasonable compact: but not for RB.

RB determined to live and work FROM THIS POINT on his own terms. ‘Dames…’ is Cocteau’s script; it is Cocteau’s film. It is Cocteau’s transposed revisitation of an old mythic theme, the revenge of the Queen on the Night (death) on the Life impulse. Costumed with sets and acting tuned into high opera this is Cocteau’s world of phantasmic yearnings finding form in film. It bears no relation to the concerns of RB: the earth and its substrate, the human situation and the conditions of life, which RB grounds not in Cocteau’s parallel worlds, but in the everyday, in rural or urban settings, amongst those who struggle to survive and whose daily decisions always have to have an element of primal calculation.

It is the expressive style of his actors that governs the affects RB educes in his movies. I think that the performances RB elicits from his actors make them into mediums through which the audience are able to see the situations that the films present. BR’s actors are signs pointing the audience to social relations; BR’s actors are not signifiers for the viewers empathic relations. Of course this does not mean that a viewer cannot have an empathy with Mouchette or Balthazar; only that such empathy is not grounded in the image but in the viewer.

BR’s actors do not mimic or imitate or use gestures and other physical expressive responses that excite the emotions. RB asks his actors to acknowledge and give recognition to the situations in which the scenario locates them. The actors are mediums, channels for the conduction of the implications of situations and ensuing events; they are conductors through whom the audience experiences what is happening. RB believes that responses lie in the viewer’s domain of understanding. In RB’s films, the viewer is not given a ride to vicarious emotional involvement, a shortcut to affective indulgence.

The stoic and disciplined use of this acting technique, in which the actors do not put out, is characteristic feature of Balthazar Mouchette and L’Argent. In relation to the cognitive and emotional in the films there are only our meanings, the understanding we chose to read. This is exemplified of course in the character of Balthazar the donkey. In the film he is a link between the different orders of human experience, a sort of foil to Marie’s course through life in the same village. Balthazar as a link is a construct through whom we can understand: cruelty, betrayal, sadness, desperation, neglect. But BR also points to perhaps strangely, a certain lyricism in life and in death. In the final scene of Balthazar the donkey finds death in the mountains lieing down to meet die in what we can understand as a sort of bucolic peace. This scene works because by this time, as with Mouchette who also dies a choreographed lyrical death, we understand that both Balthazar and Mouchette are constructs with who in the course of the film we the viewers, have had to form our own particular relation.

Of course RB’s situational acting, perhaps hard to accept even at the time that the films were made, is even the more so now. Some of the audience coming out of the films immediately commented on the ‘bad acting.’ Which is of course not the point, but also there were viewers who had seen beyond the acting into the layers that RB lays down in his films for the viewer to penetrate through his mediums.

My feeling on viewing Balthasar Mouchette and L’Argent is that Bresson was not much interested in narratives, so much as with situations and conditions. The conditions he was concerned with were those of human commerce in its broadest sense. Our being in the world which forms our relations.

His settings revolve about the material interchange which charactises life: shops, bars, smugglers, small time dealers, tenants and landlords all are forced into intercourse with each other. Exchange intercession sex drink work tending buying selling robbing thieving smugglings illness are conditions within which situations arise. Within these situations, events occur which have their own ‘life’ a ‘life’ powerful enough to overtake the characters. And in this commerce between people it is the hand to which the attention of RB is drawn. The hand, that busy dealing appendage, that when ‘events’ take over, has a mind of its own.

In RB films it is his hand at work and it is always the hand we see. The hand that grasps grabs caresses soothes holds pushes beats laments. The hand takes on its own imperative. The connection made by hand action repeats as a key motif through RB’s work. The hands at the ATM, the teacher’s hands on the keys of the piano, the hands that set lures, the hands that whip. When the hand leads ‘life’ becomes strangely connected. Through the hand the situations engender events that defy the logic of normal relations. The logic is not narrative in a psychological sense, it is the connective movement of the hand which shapes destiny. The burglar who on entering a house sees an axe and decides on impulse to wait for the householders to return and kill them. Just a connection. That is the dynamic RB engages.

What stops RB’s films being without hope, and generally if you look qt the sequence of situations and events there is a feeling that the characters are sliding into helpless and hopelessness, is simply the acting style. Balthazar, Marie, Mouchette, Yvon are connective devices through whom the audience is linked to their being in the world. Without emotional expression (OK Mouchette does cry, but why does she cry?) it is we who are confronted with the condition of the world and the hope if we look for it is only to be found within us, the viewer as a seer. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Beyond the
Hills (Dupa
Dealuri) Christian Mungiu (Romania
2012) Valeriu Niculescu; Comina
Stratan; Christina Fluture

viewed: NYFF Ticket:

Not dug into the Hills…

Beyond the Hills (BH) looks like and is written and acted like a TV movie. I didn’t see Christian Mungiu’s (CM) feature Four months three weeks two days, but looking at BH he does not seem to me to count amongst the innovative distinctive group of filmmakers who have emerged out of Romamia in the past decade.

BH is set in a rural Orthodox community of nuns who are led by an priest. Its driving narrative mechanism invokes Alina’s search for reaching for an old friendship within the parallel world of a religious space. BH presents as a movie that is uncertain of itself, or its theme and this uncertainty is most of all communicated in the way in which it has been produced and shot.

BH is a laboriously played out drama that attempts to adopt some of the outer signing of filmic signification, but in this signing it simply lacks, significance. For example CM’s deployment of long hand held tracking shots and cinematic ploys such as focusing his camera’s attention onto the details of the set or the setting. As if such gestures could in themselves be enough to substantiate a claim that we are watching a film rather than a TV movie. BH flaunts some of the outer appurtenances of filmic technique, but lacks understanding of how they might actually work as part of the movie.

There is a problem with the long tracking shots, such as the one in the opening sequence in which the steadicam follows Alina as she walks beside the length of a train at the station, to find Vouhita. All that is indicated here in this long shot, is a laborious durational literalism. It does not invoke a transposable relational structural idea that might inherently link the shot to core theme of the script which which is a certain type of ‘seeking out’. Perhaps the shot would have worked better if Alina had been filmed walking into the steadycam. A recurrent weakness of BH is that a heavy handed sort of literalism characterises most of the long duration shots. A literalism that leads nowhere. The camera that can record everything but reveal nothing. The long shots, devoid of any filmic thesis or inherent tension only add duration to the material, ( the film is 2 ½ hours long) and contribute nothing in substance to the film’s core ideas: neither the quest for unequivocal friendship; nor contribute anything the audience’s understanding of the unfolding of events.

CM’s directorial handling if BH raises questions as to how the technical and cinematographic structuring elements of a movie relate to its filmic theme or subject.

For instance in a recent film, Once upon a time in Anatolia by Nuri Ceylan, the theme, and the narrative revolve round the idea of ‘uncovering’, an uncovering at different levels; both physically in the form of a body, and psychically in the musings and fears in the minds of the protagonists. In the long night of the first section of the film, the long takes have the effect drawing the audience into the nature of searching for things in the darkness; of a groping towards and of an uncertainty in the characters, the which mood lies at the heart of the film. The way the film is shot, including the long shot of the girl serving tea to the searchers by oil lamp, is grounded within the film’s core. The setting, the use of illumination as an the idea that little can actually be seen, and the shot duration, are intrinsic to the film’s unfolding, the nature of the manifestation of light let into obscurity..

Those film makers who are certain of what they are doing, contemporary film makers such as Ceylan, Porumboiu, von Trier, Haneka, the themes and structure of their films are grounded in the way in which they are designed shot and edited. So lighting and sound designs the nature of the originating medium, the way the film is shot are all intrinsic to the theme of their material.

What seems to happen is that more derivative film makers admire some of the affects arising out of grounded movies, perhaps mistaking them for stylistic gloss, and adapt ideas or borrow these production and filmic affects for their own purposes. In effect they graft onto their material technical and production solutions without understanding exactly how they actually work as grounded signifiers.

I believe that CM in BH has mistaken simple duration of shot as an affect that can transpose the idea of the search for meaning. In fact other shooting techniques in relation to intensity and quest, might have worked better. In this case the HD origination of the material was also counterproductive; visually also presenting a literalist image rather than the softer more inchoate yearnings for an uncompromised relations.

Even on its own terms as a plodding narrative I did not find BH convincing. My festival companion at the movie was Ana Marton, who had seen CM’s ‘Four months…’. She felt that the critical relation in BH the friendship or ex friendship Alina and Vouhita had been written and depicted by a writer who knew little about woman’s friendships. The friendship as depicted in BH seemed designed to express conformity with the demands of the script rather than authentic movement of two vulnerable women. The two actresses seemed to have been given personality instructions by CM and then had to keep to that character profile, to do as they were told. The result is two mono dimensional performances that hardly seem to register the one to the other, as if each actress were isolated from the other in a sort of character bubble. I do wonder how the ‘jury’ at Cannes arrived at the decision to give both actresses the Palme d’ Or’ for these perfomrances? I don’t get it. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Charlie is my Darling
Peter Whitehead (UK 1965) Doc – The Rolling Stones

or

The Rolling Stones Charlie is my Darling Peter Whitehead (UK
1965;) and Mick Gochanour (USA 2012)

Viewed: New York Film Festival 29 9 2012 Ticket Price:

Schizo movie

Complete with an on stage post – movie guest appearance by Andrew Loog Oldham (ALO), Charlie is my Darling (CMD), or as they like to call it, The Rolling Stones Charlie is my Darling, came across as a film with a split personality; a film that had been handed over to a foster carer, and didn’t know who its actual daddy and mummy were.

The explanations given by ALO after the film left me in no doubt that CMD is schizo film of the first order. It evidences all the symptoms of a subject experiencing the classic double bind situation: a film that simultaneously admits and denies two opposing types of propositions: that Peter Whitehead is the director and editor of the film, but at the same, he is not the editor and director of the film which blazons his name, like a symbolic shield at the head of the opening credits.

Schizo as it is, CMD is of course an eloquent statement of the convoluted tortured and contradictory claims that the corporate bodies ABKCO, have had resort to, in their anxiety to justify their manipulations and exploitations of the CMD material in question. In their practice of contradiction, they are like the Red Queen in Alice; and almost as funny.

Every medical condition has a case history and the history of CMD is the key to its schizo development. CMD was made in 1965 by Peter Whitehead (PW) and commissioned and produced by ALO. PW directed the film, shot the original footage on an Éclair, then edited it: his film. According to ALO speaking at the New York screening, he as producer never really meant the film to be seen. ALO suggested that at this time. the mid’60’s when other groups such as the Beetles were experimenting reaching out and extending their audience and income through movies, he ALO only wanted to see what the Stones would look like on film. ALO said he never wanted PW’s film to be released. It was made as a sort of group audition, for appraisal and their eyes only. ALO seemed to suggest that he never seriously considered releasing CMD.

I found this explanation, though it may be true, less than convincing. It occurred to me there might have been other reasons for shyness. Perhaps PW’s edit of the material had been problematic: in one way or the other.

In fact the original CMD had a screening at Berlin Film Festival, and caused a stir. It then seems to have had some limited form of exhibition. I say this because on-line there are people who say they have seen it, but this remains a little uncertain to me.

From his original footage, PW cut a film that I think was originally about an hour, a little less perhaps. This cut and all the outtakes were then withdrawn in an act resembling a sort of distributive coitus interruptus. Perhaps the film and all the rushes were sold on with constraining contractual clauses and eventually in the mid nineties, 30 years after the original shoot and edit, they re=appear in the ownership of Abkco, a large media conglomerate.

Contacted by Richard Pena in 1995 who wanted to screen CMD at that years NYFF, Abkco say they have acquired the film and the rights and are at work restoring the material.

Cut to 17 years later, 2012, a film called The Rolling Stones Charlie is my Darling turns up on the NY festival programme. A film by Peter Whitehead, directed shot and edited by Peter Whitehead; but also crediting a new role call of creative and technical personelle: director – Mick Gochanour; Editor – Nathan Punwar; Producor – Robert Klein! A schizo films with two sets of everything. A film that took 17 years to sort out before this potentially desirable and profitable piece of merchandise could be released.

After the screening I asked the director who was present but not on stage with ALO what percentage of PW’s original cut was now in the film we had just seen and which seemed to be titled: The Rolling Stones Charlie is my Darling. His reply was that it was about 60% recut. Which is fair enough. But is this any longer Peter Whitehead’s film? it is not his cut. And is the claim on the publicity postcard I have in front of me, that the film is directed photographed and edited by PW in any sense meaningful?

Abkco are desperate for some reason (one wonders what this reason might be – contracts?) for Peter Whitehead’s name to stand emblazoned over and across the film like an endorsement – not that there are many left today except a few old film buffs who even know his name let alone his fame as a film maker.

What I saw was a schizo film from one of the homes of schizo capitalism, the entertainment industry.

The film, the one with director Mick Gochanour bears the unmistakable intensity and presence of all the camera work by Peter Whitehead, and I was glad to have seen it for this reason. It lacks the originality and dynamic that PW brought to fashioning and editing his material . The edit on view is OK but is pretty standard treatment. So the original footage is extraordinary and apparently if you buy the whole dvd package the original cut is included in the deal, though at this point I don’t know if you would get all the original cut or whether some scenes or lines, might have got the snip. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Shadow Dancer
James Marsh (UK 2012)
Andrea Risborough; Clive Owen

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema: 29 Aug 2012
Ticket: £7.00

Famous red raincoat

James Marsh’s (JM) Shadow Dancer (SD) looks like a TV mini series condensed into a feature film. It brings nothing to cinema except TV values, both in its aesthetic and structure.

The main characters Max and Clair and Kevin are no more than cogs in SD’s mechanical espionage like plot Max an MI5 officer who turns the IRA operative Claire who is in her turn hunted out by her IRA minder Kevin. This being TV the character roles depend on haircuts and costumes rather than more internalised attributes. The protagonist, Claire as a women has to be drawn as a fully rounded character, a mother with a young child as well as a terrorist. But even this dual role doesn’t extend the range of responses in her as a character.

TV films like to make the claim that they are about ‘real people’ (perhaps this means they are like the average viewer) This controlling concept introduces into the core of SD a primary clash of interests in the life of Claire: her family which defines her and her tribal loyalty which prompts her action. Clair’s dilemma, set up in the second section of SD is that she has to decide for whom she is playing: herself or the IRA.

At the level of its narrative SD is a concatenation of unlikely initial propositions that proceed to become ever more far fetched. Although in desperation JM tries to graft on a covert passion for Claire by her handler Max, it simply reflects the film’s problems in maintaining its own internal credibility. JM as director is increasingly caught in a familiar pincer movement of his own devising. He wants his film to have a realist core: characters that appear to be located within the strong folds of the everyday; but JM also wants action. A certain internal structural narrative logic is erected: the struggle, the family the housing estate the political background. But this establishing narrative structure is increasingly discredited by the logic of the action which makes demands that are at odds with background. The background is in effect degraded left behind by the primacy of the action generated tensions: erotic violent emotional.

In SD, particularly in relation to Clair the two strands of the scripting become increasingly detached. In fact SD is difficult to swallow even in its initial proposition at the point when we realise the IRA have ordered Claire to bomb London. She will be vulnerable as an agent if caught (because of her family situation), but her IRA minders overlook her unaccounted time in London. If we go with the poetic license implicit in this opening proposition, we then have a narrative and action development which becomes increasingly absurd. Claire goes to meet her MI5 handler in a ‘remote’ location which she can only get to by walking or public transport because she does not have a car. She walks or perhaps buses (the film is silent on this point) to this rendez-vous dressed in a bright red fashionable macintosh. Looking like a sexy telephone box in case anyone should have failed to spot her. The action demands of film mean that Claire has to look attractive and alluring and vulnerable, so she has to be provided with some sort of outer garment sheath to signal these defining features.

What the film tries to do is to transpose the tensions of Le Carre spook culture onto a more natural Irish setting. The poster for SD contains the strap line: Mother daughter sister spy. Le Carre’s world, as depicted in novels and even in film, functions on its own terms in a world parallel to the everyday. The mechanisms at work in the espionage world work better as an abstracted tenplate on which the forces in play can be seen clearly. The tensions the contradictions the stratagems of the spooks gain greater force and piquancy. And the roles played by the characters gain clarity from the fact that they are not the rounded individuals beloved by the TV industry.

Caught in this classic pincer of opposing purposes, SD has nothing else to do but take itself seriously as its story becomes more and more of a joke. Though it is a telling point that this is a film totally devoid of intentional humour. Though there is in the cack handed set ups, such as the attempted assassination, a certain amount of unintentional humour.

Steve McQueen’s Hunger as a movie/installation added a layer of understanding to Bobby Sands: the desperation of his situation, the Maze prison, the state of mind that impelled him to direct confrontation with Margaret Thatcher. There is nothing like this kind of ambition set in play here. The acting is all contemporary monogestural unipart posturing, and the state of mind of the lead players ignored, they are no more than the sum of their actions.

Max and Clair sleep/walk their way through the film. She in her famous red raincoat he in his regulation fit spook English suit that says MI5. Their different conflicts are depicted as purely mechanical processes instigated by the wheels of the plot which in itself is no more than a sub standard le Carre fare. JM uninterested in anything other than his plot mechanics, is unable to engineer any insight into character. He simply opts for expressive safety and confines his players in a straightjacket of the one dead pan look

With so much Cinema sold out to the demands of the TV companies, it is no surprise that the mechanics of SD’s are complemented by the mechanics of the shooting script. JM’s film does nothing to alarm TV buyers. Its camera work concentrates on the routine collection of regulation shots/ reverse shot. After its routine editing, add some tinkly music and few old ‘70’s records, one red hot fetish raincoat for the poster and the channel trail, and you have a very saleable TV movie that is not cinema. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz) Patricio Guzman ( 2010 Chile) Viewed Tyneside Cinema 12 08 2012 Ticket: £7.00

After viewing the film, I still could not immediately understand the significance of the title. What does ‘Nostalgia’ in this title point to?

Perhaps I missed something that was said, or blinked. There was an acknowledgement in the end credits I think to the person who suggested this phrase, ‘Nostalgia for the light’ (NL) as I thought about the film I began to suspect that it was another instance of Patricio Guzman’s (PG) poetic affectation. Nostalgia implies an idea of a heartfelt sorrowful longing; a sentimentalisation of the past.

Despite some of its harrowing content, the NL is a sentimentalised vehicle of sorts. PG’s film reads like a carefully crafted documentary assemblage that has been designed to produce a film for international distribution. A typical teleological product. In itself that’s fair enough; but the problems arise when such assemblages are constructed out of parts that don’t work in the way they are meant to. The ingredients assembled to whet the appetite of the documentary commissioners, landscape, science, justice don’t work for each other, perhaps even work against each other and have to be forced into coexistence as a kind of filmic sausage. The cost to NL is to vacuously compromise in the conceit of its structure the main concern of its content: the continuing history of the ‘disappeared’ murdered by Pinochet. The stories of the women who search the dessert for bodies, of the architect who memorised the layout of his prisons to be able to reconstruct them when they had gone are core material whose meaning and impact is lessoned rather heightened by the associational structure of NL.

The opening twenty minutes of NL introduces the film’s main proposition. The claim that there is some sort of relationship, a conceptual parallelism between the star gazers located in the desert and the women scouring the dessert for remains of the disappeared. The fact that both these activities share the same location, the extraordinary environment of the Atacama dessert, is given weight and signification at a high metaphysical level. In the ponderous opening sequence, mainly characterised by an unremitting voice over of PG, and an interview with an astronomer, we hear the laborious exploration of the self evident where it is revealed that these astronomers, as they measure light and photons emitted by far away stars, are actually looking into the past! If we don’t get the meta lingo, there is even a comment by one of the star gazers that….”…the stars are looking at us” These people are presented as deep thinkers, involved in the deep paradox of time. This sort of mumbo jumbo is supposed the flatter the audience into believing that ‘deep truths’ they have not previously considered, are being revealed. Following this establishing proposition, the mumbo jumbo about ‘time’ is transposed as a metaphysical framework through which we can understand the way in which the past of Pinochet’s Chile, is seen today, by his victims.

My own feeling was that the audience were being fed a series a specious connections. Connections strong enough to pitch the film, but not strong enough to carry it.

The Atacama dessert is an extraordinary location, whose physical properties, its size and meterological conditions that favour slow decomposition, thereby give a defining quality to the outlook of the women of the lost generation who search there for bodies and body parts. Other than this, the Atacama dessert filmed by PG, has little connection with the core of these women’s concerns either metaphysical or actual. And the accident of the siting of the world’s most advanced telescopes in the desert is again an accident, a particular that no amount of musing about time can actually connect to the disaster of the General’s years. As contextualised in NL is has little relevance.

PG attempts to overcome the paucity of the intellectual/moral nexus of NL by overwhelming us with intercut images. Shot like an airbrushed National Geographic Magazine photo-shoot, PG resorts to the techniques of the advert or of propaganda. Hard cut two ideas from two different domains: you get strong association, connections and sales. We see it in adverts all the time, and we should be equally aware when documentary film makers use these techniques to bypass out critical faculties. The editing style used by PG has nothing to do with the intrinsic material arising out of content in the film. Neither the scientists nor the women reference each other in this cross associational way. It is the filmmaker’s pitch. The continual hard straight cuts from dessert to the intricate marvellous machinery of the telescopes; from the searching women to the analytical astronomers. Of course accompanied by synchronised music characterised by a ponderous series of sonorous chord changes.

I was left with the feeling that a writer like the late JG Ballard would make better and more insightful sense of this encompassing dessert and the worlds that it contains, in particular their essential remoteness from each other. ‘Time’ as a concept in this place has a disconcerting implacability, an indifference to the plight of the women and the camp survivors. The monitors of the scientists suggest that all memory will be filtered down to little blips of electrons on a screen gazed at by educated and cerebral scientists who chart calibrate and record. The scientists in their detachment and sequestered intellectual worlds are as far removed from the emotions of the women as the stars themselves, for they are part of the world that moves on continually endlessly almost at the speed of light.

If further confirmation were needed that PG’s film was primarily an exercise in the expression of an empty sentimentalised production, the final scene provided evidence for the same. In this scene the two main human strands of the film are brought together in one image. As if in this image, this conjoining of concepts, the film’s proposition can become a theorem. We see two of the women who scour the dessert for their disappeared, sitting on the old telescope, their faces smiling and radiant. They have come to look at the stars; this is the moment they yearned for; to gaze on pure time. (perhaps rather pretending to look at the stars from what I could judge)

It is like the pack shot in an advert, neatly even if implausibly, two phenomena from different worlds are married into one image. Truth is presented as self evident, the more so if it is not the truth. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Batman – The Dark Knight Rises Christopher Nolan (USA 2012) Christian Bale; Anne Hathaway; Tom Hardy Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 03 08 2012 Ticket: £7.00

James Holmes is kinda hot – chelseah’s twitter

Pun in the sub title of the movie: the Dark Night Rises. As knight closes in on the American Empire only a purging apocalyptic violence remains.

What does the audience see when they view the movie?

Better to begin with the film as affect rather than a stream of thoughts that link the movie to the world and the social relations out of which and from which it is projected – both in itself and in its associated epiphenomena of death, represented most immediately by the murders committed by James Holmes (JH).

The genesis of Christopher Nolan’s (CN) look and style in Batman are the DC comic books fused with the imagery of the computer game. The movie replicates the characteristics of the comic; nothing happens beneath the surfaces. Everything that happens takes place on the surface of the screen: its sets locations and computer generated graphics. We read the movie in images, pictograms to follow what is happening. Likewise nothing is left unsaid: what you get in the speech bubble is all that is said. Everything can be taken at face value. Batman then has a mythic quality in this respect in that the issue of meaning is not intrinsic but rather extrinsic and belongs in the realm of cultural responses.

Neither in structure nor camerawork nor CGI is there anything of filmic interest, CN defaults to Hollywood’s tried and tested methods culminating in a cross cut finale. Interest devolves onto the internalised specific details of production and what these signify.

The character of Batman himself is central to the film. It seemed to me that Batman is no longer an alter ego of Bruce Wayne. The Wayne/Batman two hander is not just a simple character switch using tights a mask and a cape. In the movies depiction of Batman, Bruce Wayne is a cripple. A figure rendered powerless and impotent by his evident handicap. Of course he is smart but this makes his crippled state the more frustrating as his body can no longer impose his will on situations.

The Batman costume has become more than a disguise. It is no longer a tight fitting suit made of a yielding material that follows the contour of body. It has evolved into an exoskeleton, a responsive total body prosthesis enabling Batman to justify himself. The Batman exoskeleton enables his body to impose his will on his enemies. To this extent it has the same quality as the gun, say the gun used by James Holmes, which in US society has become a prosthetic extension of the body. The prosthetic extension of choice for the child that needs to impose the dictates of his frustrated will upon an indifferent world.

Likewise the machines used by Batman and Catwoman are not actually machines. They too are prostheses. Fantasial creations stemming out of the fusion of comic and game. These devices are objects that are without traditional operational considerations capacities or limitations. They are devices that are responsive extensions of body and mind, seamlessly interfacing human desire and action through the medium of speed. In the age of the drone it is almost as if the power speed and intensity of these machines enables them to accelerate through reflective ethical considerations and to present the spectacle of the destruction they have caused as a logic in itself that is right . Right because it is too late to argue, and there never was time anyway. Military drones the Batmobile the Batbike exist as prostheses to create situations that are by the immediacy of their nature irreversible. The magical moment when the speed of the missile or the machine or the bullet changes everything. The gunman looks down at the dead bodies in the cinema knows that he has done this and things can never be as they were before. And this too is rightful.

A culture, not just American but world wide, in which there seem to be changes to the psychic processes structuring the way we think. Increasingly action is an ideal that bypasses thought. Action an outcome driven by and governed by internally projected images drawn from the collective resource bank of computer games and movies and given efficacy by speed. Acton precipitated by the rage of the child processed in an adult body unable to escape its deeply internalised infantile needs. Immediate gratification of desire; intolerance of frustration. A culture that encourages fosters and exploits these needs as part of our consumer culture. What we pursue is no longer the collective dream but our own personal nightmares.

Progress adjusted to the profit motif finally seemed to have come down to the irruption of a host of machine toys for adults who could with their aid, do what they had been forbidden to do as children. (Paul Virilio – Ground Zero)

As the child has overtaken the adult so the image has overtaken the process of thought. Cut off from any real collective life we revert to a stream of consciousness in which a fantasy life of images is superimposed on our own internalised states of mind. We transform ourselves into the superstar of our own action movie. And since the Hollywood action movie (imitated of course in cinema around the world) specialises in the cathartic playing out of individual redemption by violent murderous closure, then this too is the scenario of choice for numbers of battered bruised psyches, who experience impotence and powerless opposition to the perceived controlling forces that deny them.

James Holmes another way of being in the movie.

One feature of the Batman plot is that it is ultimately meaningless. Well almost. The group who take over NYC do so without any overt purpose. There is no purpose to these people only state. We are to understand that they are evil. It is difficult to understand what is happening as anything else other than meaningless destruction for the sake of it. Sense you cannot make of it; all you can accept is the outcome: the destruction of the city as providing its own justification. Right at the end of the film we are given an explanation by the ‘uncovered’ antagonist. All this destruction, and the final detonation of the atomic bomb in the middle of the city is revenge upon you and the way you treated me and continued to enjoy your rich consumer lives as I watched on in fury – but now my revenge is your destruction. This of course to some extent, in personalised parenthesis is a slight echo of a jihadist statement. But more to the point it is the revenge of the child. Mass destruction no longer a function of personal gain, ideology, religion, war, competition but of individual will. The spectacle of destruction is consequent to the rage of the child inside the body of an adult that finds its expression in the speed of imposed death.

CN’s Batman is characterised by the brutal periodic irruption of meaningless violence throughout his scenario. Meaningless in that the extreme violence is the mechanism for moving action along. But then into the cinema during the film steps James Holmes to perpetrate an action, to overlay the film with another act of violence; meaningful to him but meaningless to the audience who at first simply assumed he was part of the movie. And in a sense Holmes was part of the movie. He’s part of the movie released into the theatre by the same forces that create Batman as an archetypal cultural product. Enabled by gun weaponry prostheses to act out his own personal movie on the biggest screen in the world inside his own head; the child man bearing the fruit of his own frustrated desires. Be that the whole world is destroyed, I am vindicated.

In the penultimate scene of the movie the camera looks over the destroyed infrstructure of Manhatton. The bridges blown away, huge areas reduced to rubble. A message does ring out: this is what happens when America lowers her guard and puts down her guns…..but the message seems to have overlooked the fact that the terror is now within the grain of America itself and it has sown the individual seeds of its own destruction. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Hors de Loi ( Outside the Law) Rachid Boucharab (Fr 2010) Jamil Debbaya, Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouailla. Viewed National Film Theatre London: 10 07 2012, Ticket : £ 5.00

Everything comes out in the wash

Boucharab’s (RB) concern is to caste Hors de Loi (HL) as a validating vehicle for the Algerian revolution, lending filmic authority to fictive revolutionary archetypes and associative characters. As such it is an exercise that in itself dramatises the inevitable fate of revolutions as the moss of history clings to them, the movement from the polemic and political to the fake melodramatics of the soap opera. HL is more melodrama than political history.

However it is the principle setting of HL that is its most noteworthy characteristic.

Although the action moves back and forth between Algeria and Paris, it is Paris that presents as the real location of the film. Not as a background but as a setting of signification. It is this setting that gives RB’s film a contemporary resonance that stands on firmer ground than its claim to either emotion or historical authenticity. HL’s main action does not take place in remote Algiers but in ‘near’ Paris. Interpenetration of peoples is the underlying theme. In HL the war in Algeria is depicted as being played out in its own right, on its own terms, in the capital of France. Algerians were not some far away people. They and their struggle, their goals and aspirations, whether consciously articulated or not, were immediate and present even if hidden away in the bidonville of Nanterre, the late shifts of Renault car factories and shady bars. In Paris, as in the rest of Europe it is the unseen peoples of Africa and Eastern Europe who do the work. Often exploited in neo colonial relationships, if they cannot make themselves heard legitimately, they are close enough to make themselves felt. It is not possible to disconnect the conditions which these people have left, from the conditions in which they live amongst us.

Other then its close to home setting HL offers nothing in itself as film. It presents as medium through which to plough a chronology that takes its main characters from rural Algeria in 1925 to Paris in 1962. It is a sort of break neck charge through significant dates in Algeria’s anti colonial history. The speed and broken nature of the film’s time line betrays the complexity of events to a narrative device. The device stitching RB’S sprawling material together comprises of the ‘follow’ mechanism: follow the three brothers. Three Algerian brothers are the core of film’s scenario and they are tracked through their relationship both with the forces of the age and their relationship with each other.

The problem with this mechanism in film is that the end product is usually pure surface: all the energy of the film is expended on stapling together the complexities of the surface relations: history and personal relationships. In this HL calls to mind Lean’s Dr Zhivago a failure in everything other than its good looks and memorable theme tune: otherwise essentially empty. A vacuous statement that was unable to point the viewer further than Jarre’s ‘Lara’s Theme’ , used with indecent frequency to hold together the whole bag of collapsing affects and events.

We watch events unfold. In this type of structure where outcome is known, there is no tension working through the scenario, working through the deeper grain of the material. Conflict, tactical and strategic and ambiguities are at the core of every political endeavour, but the tensions which they create often only become visible when a different phase of operations commences. RB has tailored his script to avoid real tensions relating to ends and means, tensions involving Islam and the FLN. The script’s set up of the three brother mechanism is exploited to indicate tensions: the opposition of ends and means that arises between two of the brothers Abdulkadir and Messaoud. But the latter’s initial distaste and personal disinclination to use the garrotte as an extrajudicial means of capital punishment is resolved all too easily; as is Said’s (the third brother) resistance to the FLN interfering with his boxing promotion.

To generate tension, having decided to eschew interpersonal fraternal conflict, RB relies on the tried and tested set piece of action. This revolves about violence and fire fights: the killing of rivals of political factions, the assassination set piece and the attempted military style operation. These events are cathartic male film rituals familiar from war gangster and sci fi genres. The extended use by RB of action sequences particularly in the Paris setting reduces HL to an action genre rather than claiming HL as a significant political interpretent.

With other possibilities RB makes of his film a series of events, rather than a process, to the detriment of HL which had the potential ini ts setting and in the forces it depicts, to be a different kind of film. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk