Adrin Neatrour

Killer Joe William Friedkin (2011 USA) Matthew McConaughey, Juno
Temple, Emile Hirsh

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 3 July 2012 Ticket: £6.95

The flat and hollow ring of a Zippo lighter…

Viewing some of William Friedkins’s (WF) output, French Connection, the Exorcist and now Killer Joe, the tangible connection of ‘possession’ runs right through them, in different guises: heroin; the devil; the need for money.

The French Connection and the Exorcist were both expressive visceral instruments of desire. Given form by a one dimensional take on actuality both movies had filmic and structural unity that took their respective tones from the narrow focus of their source material. In both cases these were books: one factual, the other a novel. Killer Joe’s (KJ) origin is as a theatre piece. What we see is WF’s tryst at transposing the form structure and language of a play into a film.

It doesn’t work.

Theatre even as narrative can be a supple layered and coded vehicle for the integration of action and ideas. Theatre works through the medium of the live actor working in the set which seeks to represent reality rather than replicate it. Actors can be both witness and witnessed, open to interaction with the audience or blind to them; actors can, at directorial will, change relationship to their role, playing a part methodically and fully entering character, or employing various distancing techniques and devices to comment on a role rather than playing it. The actor can move easily from self parody to communicated self consciousness for political social or emotional purposes. The switches in an actors key, tone, and relation to role can be sudden like a switchback or ambiguous, finely nuanced. What opens up for the audience in live performance is the possibility of different levels of reading the manipulations with which they are presented.

The decision by WF to structure KJ as a more or less straight narrative with bolted on theatricals makes this transposed adaptation reliant less on the muscular potential of the writing rather almost totally reliant on image exploitation of the usual gratuitous kind: graphic sex and violence, unnuanced by some of the factors that would have characterised the stage version. Stripped of ambiguous nuanced playing and role distancing, all that is left is the banality of literal image.

The movie KJ clearly shows its stage provenance. The play written by Tracy Letts was an off Broadway success in the ‘90’s. From the movie it looks like a typical piece of writing of its era. A sort of sub species of work in the style and form of Sam Shepherd. The typical settings are located in the white trash homelands, often cabins or trailer parks. The plots exude violent menace, black comedy and the absurd in varying quantity and degree, taking their cue from the sort of material to be found in the National Enquirer. Lobsters and psychopaths loom large and the affect of the situations is mediated by a theatrically knowing style of acting out, which has the effect of affectively distancing the player from the role and the action. Action which although realised in intent, is carried through on sets that are representations. In this sense the virtual and the intentional are the dominant features in this theatrical form.

None the less effective in engaging both emotional and intellectual responses.

WF has adapted KJ as a comic book so that the look and feel of the movie conform to this formula. Lurid inked in colours of the settings provide the background against which one dimensional characters play out the mechanics of the scenario. As suggested it is not one dimensionality per se that constrains the affect of the movie; rather it is the actors’ immobility of affect as WF locks them into a stylistic strait jacket as they act out what is a black comedy scenario, without the flexibility of role and gestural responses.

Only extraordinary directors such as Godard have being able to bring to screen this flexibility of thespian role play. And in so doing, plot becomes a relatively minor consideration; movement in itself becomes the driving force.

Without the theatric devices of varying role and stylistic commitment, KJ is exposed as a vacuous narrative shell. Lacking unitary cohesion, it is uncertain of what it is. Characteristic of the mis en scene is the filmicly weak and empty gimmick that eponymous Joe uses to announce his presence: a metallic ring caused by flicking a Zippo lighter cover. It doesn’t work because on film it seems an overdeliberated rhetorical gesture that the actor can do nothing to salvage from pretension.

The narrative is emptied out into a sort of no man’s land of signification: not a black comedy nor a study in contemporary manners, neither a piece of social crit nor a comment on the lunatic boundaries of American belief systems. What’s left is a heavy handed piece of film making, over wrought with theatrical contrivances. The weather the storms and lashing rain; the pole club and the ravenous dog add up to no more theatre effects that work as a sort of proscenium arch to the content.

These difficulties coalesce, coagulate during the chicken leg fallatio scene between Joe and Sharla, late in the film On stage however viciously Joe’s lines might be delivered, the audience would always be conscious of and in control of the fact that Sharla was sucking on a chicken leg: the ambiguities of intention, the absurdity of the situation would have to be factored into perception. With WF, calling the shots and controlling perception images of the action, the scene is just a conventional series of shots filmed to provoke disgust with the chicken leg sometimes even looking like a penis with Joe’s reactions simulating ejaculatory anticipation. The scene coming after the actual realistic beating Joe gives Sharla, construes as just a monotonous continuation of the violence. In fact I thought Joe was going to kill Sharma by ramming fried chicken leg down her throat, because that seemed the direction of his actions. The scene is locked into contradictions in form: It can’t push over into the domain of black comedy where it needs to go, because it trapped in a depictation and replication. At this point KJ and WF come to a dead end.

As a play KJ may have worked (I didn’t see it) because it had actors playing out virtual and intentional desires in a representational encompasser of the theatre set. WF’s KJ fails because it has actors trapped in actual playing of characters folling intentional lines of desire in realist settings. Nothing fits, only confusion and cross purpose are expressed. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Ran Akira Kurosawa (Japan 1985) Tatsuya Nakadal; Mieko Harada Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 17 June 2012; Ticket £5.00

Ran meaning: riot – uprising – disorder; disturbed – confused

Ran is a masterful exercise by AK in synthesising culturally opposing expressive forces in the exposition of his theme. Ran is riotous filmic feast in which traditional Japanese plastic arts are promiscuously are entangled with Hollywood’s; in larger writ plastic values of US and Japanese society and culture are seamlessly interwoven.

Ran’s confusion of stylistic and expressive affects structures the core underlying motif: a statement by AK about the disintegrative effects caused by the penetration of American values and practice into Japanese culture. A culture no longer protected by self policed isolation; a society and culture in turmoil but inventive and creative enough, to absorb and replicate on its own terms, to reinvent itself as a hybrid.

Ran (R) is a conscious play on form, a confusion of genre and expression. It is a triumphant mangling of Hollywood and Japan a sort of filmically structured paean to post war cultural buggery. Ran is witness to AK’s self evident delight in shuffling together: samurai and cowboy; ‘NOH’ acting tradition and US daytime soap convention; classical Shakespeare and Hollywood; the mobile and the immobile, the vertical and the horizontal.

The large set piece battles are majestically staged but the form of the battles strongly suggests John Ford. As the army of the King’s son charges on horse and foot across the field it is ambushed by devastating volleys of raking firearm fire decimating the attackers. The opposition of sword spear and bow and arrow against the gun, suddenly re-casts the battle as the traditional Hollywood spectacle pitching primitively armed Native Americans (Red Indians) against the superior arms of the US cavalry with their Colts and Springfields. The clash of the Samurai warriors instead of being represented as a traditional sword/spear based ritual, is filmed as a Hollywood slaughter vehicle, a massacre ensuant on the mismatch of unequal forces. The battles in Ran don’t pander to traditional notions of the Japanese Samurai Code. Death strikes anonymously without honour from a distance. When the cowboy shoots the lesser armed Sioux or Cheyanne, the gun acts as more than a tool. It is also a valedator. Its technological supremacy legitimises the victory of the White Man’s culture. In the same way, atomic weapon technology justified American cultural supremacy.

In Ran AK also exploits the dynamic and expressive possibilities of intermixing two styles of acting tradition which draw on very different formal expressive ideas and tradition. Noh tradition: the use of the mask, little or no facial expression; this is not a theatre of expressive faciality, rather of codified gesture where hand and body combine to create a system of signed meanings. The American soap style in contrast emphasises the face as the expressive medium, with full use of eyes mouth lips and teeth used to convey the required emotion. The signage in soap is mostly primary animalistic response, like a dog bearing its fangs you don’t need to be conversant with a code of cultural signs to get the meaning. Likewise the delivery of lines is emotively charged to convey unambiguous intent, even if the words are not explicitly understood. In the playing of characters such as Lord Hidetora and Lady Kaede, AK synthetically fuses these two opposing acting styles. The affect is an intensification of tension between the mobile and the immobile. The audience is caught suspended in anticipation of the character’s response: whether it be control or loss of control. Lady Kaede initially is all mask, a complex of archaic gestural signage, every movement initiated out of the depths of theatric stillness. In one sinewy terrifying moment like a snake pouncing she is at the throat of her brother in law and suddenly all Noh convention is completely abandoned and like a suburban housewife contorting her face she screams at her brother in law to marry her and bring her the head of his wife. Lady Kaede then with equal suddenness switches back to the still Noh mode of expressive presentation.

Ran is sometimes described as a Japanese version of King Lear. Ran is not pure as a narrative form. AK as part of a culture that traditionally has purity of form at its core, abandons this idea in Ran, and has recourse to the Hollywood idea of adaptation of the material: stripping the scenario down to a simple base line. Ran’s story is a conflation of Macbeth (with which K was very familiar) and a Lear type story, with sons substituted for daughters. Two ideas welded together: the conceit of power that is unable to see behind the formulaic countenance of love, behind which lurk simmering contempt and desire to usurp; and the mythic disaster caused by a weak usurper unable to resist the destructive forces of the feminine.

Fire seems to me to be the defining filmic element of Ran. Visually it periodically intrudes and finally dominates the visual field. In the first sections of Ran AK’s fills frame with horizontal movement. Bautifully staged pans, the flow of horses and people through and across frame. This is movement that in all its magnificence suggests continuities, as if it were the template of a timeline. In the final sequences but also intermittently through the final sections, ‘fire’ fills frame vertically. Cutting in disrupting on the vertical axis the easy harmony of flow. AK has structured into the visual syntax of Ran the core notion of disruption; time itself is subject to being broken, its flow smashed up, disrupted. This idea built into the grain of Ran is the deepest level of communion with his times as AK understands them. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Dictator
Larry Charles, script: Berg and Cohen (USA 2012) Sacha Baron Cohen; Anna Faris; Ben
Kingsley

Viewed: Empire Newcastle upon Tyne 29 May 2012; Ticket: £3.50

The Dictator (D) opens with a dedication to Kim Jong ll issuing a spoof claim that it’s a film that is designed to be a satirical political vehicle for Sacha Baron Cohen’s (SBC) performance. But it’s not; D is SBC as a vestigial archetype a repository for a recurring psychic type: the trickster.

D is uninteresting from the point of view of its formal filmic qualities. As film it simply lurches from one cameo set up to the next, to drag the plot line through its beginning middle and end. The plot is a rigid mechanical structure that lacks the fluidity improvisation or relational complexity that characterise other filmic comedians such as Chaplin, the Marx Brothers or Woody Allen. D is a crude construct, but a construct that reflects, in script and performance, the essence of its core intent: transgression. The eruption of the forbidden and the shocking out of the shadows into consciousness.

The cinema was full (it was the Tuesday cheap seat night) and the crowd had come in expectation of a laugh. But what constitutes a laugh? SBC is not a clown. He never really gets into the shit in any meaningful sense. SBC is the nightmarish emanation arising out of the tension between the animal and culture: grossly sexual, stupid, and although not really evil he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and unrelated ness. He is saved by his almost divine animal nature. SBC’s role is that of the Trickster, the violator, a serial malicious profane transgressor.

Violator of the sacred.

SBC in all his films plays: the Trickster. A psychic figure who occupies a latent place in our psychic functioning and who spontaneously manifests in external expressive representational form when the gap between the stated values, the cant and shibboleths of civilised culture and our own animal nature, reaches points of extreme tension.

The phantom of the trickster haunts us….a faithful reflection of an undifferentiated human consciousness that has barely left the animal level. (Carl Jung: Four Archetypes)

The Trickster manifest is a projection of our needs.

At a time when Western Liberal Culture is characterised by discourses of quasi religious intensity in respect of: human rights, women’s rights, individuation, the sanctity of mother family and children: enter the trickster to hold up to us the reversal and opposing debasement of these values. To allow us smash through the tensions of civilisation in the darkness of the cinema.

In the same spirit as in the Medieval church where a simpleton was elected anti-Bishop during Epiphany and presided over a mass attended by donkeys where the congregation brayed in liturgical response; so BSC sticks his hand up the vagina of the mother whom he has just helped give birth, and retrieves his ringing mobile phone he’s left in her uterus. Both actions stem from the Trickster role as a mythic archetype: manifest violation of the sacred. And both actions are part of a psychic reaction to a dominant cultural imperative. They transgress or reverse carefully defined spacial borders as a radical gestural performance that is aimed specifically, if temporarily at sabotaging the psychic legitimacy of the dominant discourse.

D’s main effect is not to be funny but rather to shift psychic response from the unconscious to the consciously maifest. A cathartic shift that is often necessitated by an overwhelming of our defences and resistance to the stimulus of the antics of the trickster If D is not by and large actually funny the movie nevertheless educes laughter from the audience. Laughter that is the expressive ejaculative response that we have recourse to when we have no other immediate means of release from physical and emotional tension.

The Trickster’s radical transgression, even in ritual form, causes a sudden rise in psychic/emotional stresses as we witness a sacred phenomenon systematically assaulted. The releasing outlet for this tension is laughter; remembering that the rictus of the laugh shares a common physiological root with the rictus of aggression, which is also consequential to a sudden rise in unbearable tension.

Tricksters, as mythic characters have very crude natures. There is no point in expecting subtlety from them. They are physically gross and sexually explicit, their sex organs prominent and dominant when and where least appropriate as when the Dictator is taught how to masturbate himself by Zoe the health food store manager.

The targets of human rights, feminism, United Nations, democracy, mother and apple pie have no political significance, only a collective mythic imperative to debase and upend.

Superficially D tries to lay claim to making some form of political statement. It’s opening dedication to Kim Jong, and in the penultimate sequence when BSC as the Dictator delivers a speech to UN officials satirically praising democracy as being the most desirable form of government because in democracy: 1% of the people own 99% of the wealth, in democracy the poor pay all the taxes and the rich pay none, and in democracy the gaols can be full of specific poor ethnic grouping. I think the claim to be a political satire is spurious. SBC’s delivery of his UN speech is the weakest part of his performance, as if he realised the speech/diatribe was of course undermined by the nature of his role as Trickster. In this sequence SBC’s delivery seems mechanical formulaic and underplayed. It’s not political rather the weakest part of the Tricksters repertoire of transgression.

SBC in performance has strong representational qualities kin to the Trickster. The beard and the thinness of his body both play a part in suggesting a manifestation from the depths. The beard (and its loss) is a wondrous cheap device perfect for the guise of trickster and SBC’s thinness has a menace such that although a tall man he’s thin enough to slip inside your defences and unbalance you; slim enough to slip inside your urethra. And SBC’s delivery has a quality of the ventriloquist’s dummy, the removed insinuating of a wicket schoolboy automaton.

According to Jung The Trickster is a vestigial figure surviving from a barbarous consciousness of aqn early phase of human consciouness: a collective shadow figure. As architype the Trickser remains pyschically close to us often revealing his presence in popular culture. He can be repressed but never goes away, never entrirely absent from our collective life. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A Kind of Loving John Schlesinger (UK 1962) Alan Bates; June Ritchie

Viewed: dvd 14
May 2012

retrocrit: The past as a crystalised image

John Schlesinger’s (JS) Kind of Loving belongs to that category of drama (both theatrical and film) that were at the time called ‘Kitchen Sink’. This phase is less a description of settings more a sleezy put down, a piece of cheap journalese, designed to demean a series of expressive dramatic outputs that laid bare the hypocrisy of an old social order that resisted change.

To me, A Kind of Loving (KL) is like a still photograph. A film that freezes a particular time, the year 1962, after which inexorably the increasing momentum of social change of the ‘60’s would systematically undermine every certainty that featured in the picture: biological cultural and ideological. The certainty with which JS (with sure guidance from Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse’s script) handles the themes of Stan Bairsow’s novel causes me to believe that JS was sensitised to the ‘lull in time’ during which his film is set. He knew that the forces in play in the becoming consumer societies would wreak such a storm as to blow away the rules and behavioural certainties that that held together the façade of gender and class that controlled individual behaviour.

A film made at the cusp KL is set at the cusp of the social shift in the UK from a collectivist to an individual ethos; and at the cusp of the psychic shift in the balance of forces between male and female in the social sphere. A point where the discourses defining the social domaine were rapidly and radically changing, responding to and shaping irreversible change.

KL is both structured and shot to make the situation that the film depicts absolutely clear. Shot in black and white, KL exploits visually the tension between the naturalistic atmospheric containing settings of the industrial North – the huge factory – the terraced housing – the semis – the railways – the grime and the smoke – and the unfolding social changes that are destabilising and demolishing these structures so that they are no longer able to contain people. The certainty with which the tension between the visual and psychic is handled, made KL a popular film at the time of its release. It has also made it an enduring film. It engages a stylistic motif and themes to which JS would return.

KL is conservatively structured with a theatrical filmic perspective so that the audience watch the drama being played out. It’s strengths are directness and economy. Every setting is cued as a statement, the factory, the suburban semi, the canteen, the park where what is public space is annexed by individuals for personal business as ‘home’ is not private space (a situaion which was changing rapidly) Every scene has a purpose, or rather an event, which is to develop audience understanding of what is happening at different psychic levels. The scene in which Ingrid loses her virginity is both a statement of the pressure of changing social mores but also the starting point for a different sort of discourse in relation to sexual relations between men and women.

The film exists in a sort of time-out when in the social domain nothing seems to be happening. But KL makes clear that this time out, this lull, is an artefact of fear. By 1962 the economic and social changes were already in play effecting change. The ethos of the collective life was cracking and breaking in response to the demands for an individuated life, based on consumption. The strengths and obvious benefits of the primacy of collective values, cohesion in the will to survive, were no longer tenable in a consumerist matrix emphasising desire and self determination. The social edifices of both working class solidarity and middle class respectability are maintained by the application of social tyranny and repression: the last resort, the sting in the tail of moribund cultural structures. We see this application of fear in the factory where Vic works as a draughtsman; its patriarchal punishment system threatening dismissal to those who don’t obey. KL shows the way fear is used as a weapon most vividly through the agency of Ingrid’s mother who in herself and through the medium of her controlled daughter, attempts to terrorise Vic into subscribing to the dieing value system.

This lull is an illusion. Vic’s fellow workers, his male co-workers quit their jobs at the vast factory, which is dependent on their collective labour, to become salesmen: individuals wheeling and dealing in the interstices of desire. And Vic is pulled in this direction, realising that the factory where he works, with its rites of work and leisure, is already slipping into the past. But more: he also rejects the sham morality of appearances that governs the solidarity of class. The film opens with a wedding, filmed by JS to emphasise its social function as a community ritual of solidarity. Vic already intuitively sees through this; he knows that it is part of a social pact that is breaking up. Vic wants to move outside the collective certainties and falls for Ingrid a middle class girl who is a secretary at the works. In the KL scenario, initially we see the romance between Vic and Ingrid solely from the male point of view. Ingrid figures as a trophy as much as a person, a trophy that comes at a price: marriage. And marriage comes at the price of becoming the subject of a regime of terror and repression through the agency of Ingrid’s mother who expects the price for her daughter to be paid by the castration of Vic. A castration that is desired not just by the mother in law, but also by Vic’s working class parents who refuse to support him.

Ultimately it is Ingrid, who moves from being desired flesh to a voice with moral force who abandons her class credo and sides with Vic in his refusal to lie down and die. The forces of change also work through Ingrid’s body and mind to make possible the transition to a new start for the couple outside the inert social matrix from where they came.

The other discourse JS expresses in KL is the gender discourse. The movement in position of men and women as a consequence of the loosening of the gender roles as apportioned by class and ideology. The movement of women out of private space into public space, the movement of women from being primary reproductive machines to being consumers. KL makes it very clear that Ingrid’s position is intolerable. She is trapped in a double bind of contradictory expectations which bear no relation to her changing situation. KL is pre-the pill era, yet even so change in gender relations can be seen as an imperative. As the males move away from the controlling systems of class bound marriage, so the women become increasingly pure objects, defined by their flesh not their place in the social system. Ingrid desired by Vic for her unattainable beauty which in the new order becomes accessible to him. At the same time as Ingrid becomes an object for Vic, in the eyes of her class bound mother, she has to stand and uphold values that are no longer of any use to her in a rapidly changing world. KL makes it clear that Ingrid’s situation is intolerable, and whilst it notes a change in Ingrid’s state of mind and the way she sees her situation it is the clear presentation of the evident instabilities in her life that makes the film radical.

KL may be a filmic theatric device but it is not a mechanically driven plot. Both Ingrid and Vic are moral players. The solutions to their dilemma are not given them, rather they are wrested from the situations in which they find themselves. As a discourse the sub theme revolves around the nature of relationships not based on traditional foundations of shared social class and milieu, on intimate relations not necessarily defined by marriage vows. As the reality of her changing situation is assimilated by Ingrid she starts to understand that relations based on ‘love’ rather than shared circumstances, are different but more difficult, and engender the need for mutual respect without which there can be no relationship. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Kid with the Bike (Le Gamin au Velo) Jean Pierre et Luc
Dardennes (2011 Be. Fr) Cecile de
France; Thomas Doret

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 5 April 2011; ticket price: £7:95

Bad child archetype: what’s locked up in our heads

The de-industrialised zones of Belgium have spawned their
own recent depressing history of serial child abuse. It is possible to
caricature the place as a smashed landscape of twisted sexual desire, a carnal
parody of the dominant consumer culture that sates its appetite on the flesh of
its children.

Of course it’s probably no different from anywhere else in
Europe.

The Dardennes’ Rosetta (1999) seemed to me a philosophically walled off world. Its eponymous heroine was trapped in
the mechanical process of a scenario that seemed to have been created in order
to show the role of deterministic principles in the playing out of fate. The idea of freewill in Rosetta’s
situation was demoted to some sort of fanciful propagation of the ivory tower.
After Rosetta something changes in the outlook of the brothers. Perhaps some consideration of the
serial crimes of Marc Dutroux sensitised the Dardennes Freres (DF) to look
again at the underlying philosophical direction of their scripts and the relationship of their scenarios to the
fate of their child subjects,
particularly from the underprivileged areas where they choose to locate their
films. The determinist notion
leads only to darkness. With children there needs to be at least the notion
that there is the possibility of avoiding complete blackout.

With their next two films, Le Fils and L’Enfant, the collective Dardennes’ philosophy of
mind has moved on. In particular
Le Fils has at it centre an exploring of the idea of free will. Focusing on
Oliver the protagonist and carpentry instructor at a training centre, the film
is a subtle probing from without
of his state of being as he struggles to make a series of critical
decisions. The viewer doesn’t have
access to Olivier’s state of mind, that has to be inferred or more correctly
interpreted, from the signs given out by him in the film. DF don’t engage the
audience with certainties only with possibilities. The characteristic feature
of Le Fils is that we are in Olivier’s world; it is in his world that the film is set and develops.

In contrast KB seems to have too many worlds competing for
attention.

The signs and wonders that constitute the opening section KB
indicate that we are in situations where there is the possibility of free will,
where the players decisions shape and change the course and outcome of
events. However in KB there are a
number of significant worlds put into play, which crowd each other and engender
confusion. The world of the kid,
Cecil dominated by the absence of his father, the world of Samantha, which is
in fact two worlds a personal one and professional one as the owner of a hair
styling salon, the world of the gang, and the world of the community where the
action takes place. All these vie
for primacy. DF might contend that
life is like this; a myriad of worlds surround and confuse us; but I think this
would be a weak defence of the film’s structure.

Film is not real life, or rather it is like ‘real’ life in
that it is selective and the ‘real’ is accessed through one operating mind or
consciousness.
Consciousness of another we can observe but never penetrate, a fact the
Dardennes use as the basis for their film practice As in Le Fils where the fulcrum is Olivier, so in KB the
fulcrum appears to be Samantha, the small business woman who fosters Cecil. But
her operations and capacity to inform us an emitter of signs, is simply crowded
out by a scenario that is more interested in following the mechanics of a
script which is driven by the idea of the gang and a botched violent robbery
(the which is not very credible). In Le Fils as we follow Olivier there is the
possibility of understanding his decisions and actions, which sustains the life
of the film. In contrast when Samantha is ‘followed’ in the scenario, she is
immediately blocked off or taken off stage by different events. The consequence is that KB loses the
possibility of a deepening and operates only in the shallow waters of affect
signs, rather than in the deeper zones of actions and gestes. Too much happens without
anything being revealed. Although Samantha’s outer behaviour
suggests an underlying free will, as the film progresses, in the confusion of
competing worlds, she diminishes rather than increases as an intensity, and the
film dwindles into an inconsequentiality.

Le Fils was characterised by a distinct visual style that
incorporated in its look, the paucity of the environments: the training centre,
the bachelor apartment. Everything looked sparse rather bleak, worlds that offer no encouragement to the soul. The film’s visual look is an important
part of its story. KB in contrast
lacks the complement of a strong visual statement: it looks like any other
product originated on 35mm film and screened on HD. There is little to detain or attract the eye
everything is big and clear and in a way uninteresting. For a film whose
intention appears to have been to engage the viewer as a seer, the visuals are
counter productive, acting as a barrier to rather than a gateway for the eye to
enter. The film is composed using shots of long duration, but that’s not unusual
these days, so the film looks like everything else, when in fact it certainly
intends not to be like everything else.

I think if DF continue to produce films, built about the nodal points of their socio-philosophical interests, they will have to attend to the business of film makers in making their productions visual filmic quality relate to the content. KB and Le Fils share a certain mirror symmetry from the point of view of the male and female relationship with the bad child. Both titles imply that the subject of the films is a child. In fact in both films, the male children are devices that infiltrate the adult psyche. The adults are the subjects. The children in this sense are not so much actual; rather they are archetypes. They are archetypes that play complex functions in the inner life and movement of the two adults. The incorporation of the bad child or rejected child into the psychic life, implies a process of development completion and healing of the wounded soul. These ideas complete the cycle of this piece of writing which began commenting on the spectacle of Western culture’s sexual abuse of children, whether real or imagined. In their films DF point to the deep resonance of the bad child archetype within the adult soul, as potential healing force. This function is clearer in Le Fils than in KB, but is the underpinning strength of their recent work.

adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Viva La Muerta Fernando Arrabel (Fr 1971) Anouk Ferjak; Nuria Espert;
Mahdi Chaouch

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 16 March 2012
Ticket price: £5.00

Imagination as the primary act of resistance

Fernando Arrabel’s (FA) Viva la Muerta is a full frontal assault on Franco’s Spain, a country with its back broken by Franco’s fascist death machine; the people murdered or driven to madness and denial by repression and fear.

FA’s assault on the terrible damage wreaked by Franco and his allies the forces of political/religious conservatism, harnesses the intellectual and visceral power of savage satire exploiting the intermeshed expressive elements of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, Dadaism, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd, to fashion a filmic expression of deep passionate anger.

The opening title sequence comprises a series of panning shots across a large scroll of sequential organised drawings, economically penned cartoons of distorted figures caricatured in bestial form and depicted in cameos of cruelty and sadism. The film starts with these disturbing images of body laid over a soundtrack that comprises the voice of a child who nonchalantly and brazonly sings a repetitive rhythmic refrain: to my ear a sort of crazy nursery rhythm. The repetition of the song chews into the consciousness of the viewer. I didn’t understand the words, which are in Danish (but may be ‘nonsense’ like all the best child’s rhythms) but this child’s voice is saying something that anyone can understand within the context of VM. The song is a challenge: it sets a mood and opens up a mental space through which the film can filtered and understood. This song defines VM. Repeated as a ritornello. a leitmotif, it carries the film’s key message. In its provocation, its invariance of tone, it communicates an indominitable mocking spirit. However deep we are in the shit, however they kill us and subject us to lies oppression torture and violence, we have within us the means to fight back. The song links our consciousness to the possibility of resistance and struggle. It is a challenge to view the film in the state of mind that spits in the face of the dealers in death.

This is the message FA has fashioned. A film grounded in a child’s song.

After the song the first words we hear are those of some fascist soldiers on the back of a truck, singing they will murder half the people if necessary in order to ‘save’ the country. Viva la Muerta!

A defining character of VM is that it is autobiographical. In terms of structure, VM is episodic in form, but intimate in content. And it is the quality of intimacy that colours and fills out understanding of FA’s film. Episodic films, employing dissonant disturbing images that define the content are usually remote and distant as socio-political critiques. L’Age d’Or never feels intimate; it feels produced to broaden consciouness as an ideological act.

Employing every technique in the agit prop lexicon of surrealism and theatre cruelty, VM is up close and personal. Using this broad palette of deranged imagery, FA is always in control of the effects of the images he creates and releases. I think this is because he knows these people. They are not abstract or abstracted tokens representing the forces of death. In flesh and blood they are the people who killed his father and wanted to kill him. What in episodic films can seem arbitrary and disconnected, in VM is hot wired to emotional necessitythrough the umbilical cord linking his life to that of his mother. The personal and the political are one.

The mother is the hub of VA. She is woman as living flesh. We feel her hand, smell her skin and witness her charged repressed erotic relation to fascism, the Roman Catholic Church and the forces of death. The film starts with a structured narrative core that connects through the eyes of the child (Fando) his mother’s betrayal of the father and her embrace of Franco. Interspersed in the key narrative (though the narrative is never absolutely straight in its telling FA is too supple in his conceptualisation for such restriction) are fantasial /dream sequences. In the film they are presented as hazy colour washed sequences, often savage and beautiful, psycho/temporal events in which cruel insights and visions are perpetrated and experienced. As VM progresses the distinction between the two strands breaks down, cracks up. The sequences characterised by the narrative ‘look’ open up to extreme expressive material, (the priest eating his own balls, the mother bathing in the blood of the slaughtered bull). In the world of Franco’s Spain there is no longer any means of distinguishing different aspects of life, the real – the imagined.. The deployment of systematic violence and cruelty has taken over the whole of the national psyche: everything is nightmare.

VM is a totality of commitment by FA to record what he saw and heard as a child, with nothing unobserved through the scales of innocence. But this commitment, to stand up to fascism ( when it was still a live force in Spain) communicates through all who took part in the realisation of VM. In answering the need to oppose Franco’s Spain VM is part of the creative will of all those who contributed to its making: the mask and prop makers, the cinematographer, the editor, but in particular the actors who were prepared to undergo privation and undertake provocation for the film to be made. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Honour of the Knights (Honor de Cavalleri) Albert Serra (Sp 2008) Lluis
Carbo; Lluia Serrat.

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema (Newcastle AV festival) 15 March 2012; ticket price £5.00

Touched by immanence

Honour of the Knights (HK) is about the immanence of vision. I note that some critics have commented that Serra’s (AS) interpretation of Don Quixote depicts an aimless rambling. But I don’t think this is the case, it is simply that the film’s actual movement is not so much upon the earthly domain rather it is on the metaphysical or celestial plane.

HK is grounded in the contrasting physicality of the two principle actors. The squire Sancho presents as a mass, a mountain a colossal being of the earth, a man of the clay. That he can move at all seems in defiance of gravity, an act of will to move when his physical nature seems to demand immobility. Yet when he moves he has a lightness of foot, a nobility of demeanour and when in water the effortless motion of the cetacean. The knight is a being almost without body. A body that is ethereal even when strapped into his metal cuirasses and pauldrons. It is as if he were not there, an immaterial being locked into the material. With his whitened hair, pale skin, white chemise, Quixote, a shimmering luminescence.

And there is no doubt as to who leads who follows. The earth bound, head bowed squire follows the knight who head up moves upward released into his vision. AS takes Cervantes tale and extracting a critical motif, makes it his own. AS recasts Don Quixote as a fable from an age now past where spirit guided the body. Not always successfully perhaps, but nevertheless a fabled time when the desires of the body ultimately ceded primacy to the yearnings of the spirit. A fable of course, but in an era defined by the over arching imperative of consumption and the circuits that amplify individual desires, it’s a shock to be presented, even in fabulous form, with a simple statement of another possibility, another way of being.

Quixote is of course moving, and moving with huge acceleration towards death. It is not a death that is oppressive of life. It’s a death that is at one with life. Death that Quixote equates with the oneness of God. God is all creation in immanent form. To die is simply to experience this oneness. Quixote is a becoming more luminous as he moves through the keys of nature into vision. It is vision that attracts Quixote and vision is the metaphysical gravity that attracts him upwards pulling him out of his body out of the skin bones and white chemise, that contain but no longer delimit him.

The world is an evil place corrupted by actions of men but the chivalric calling transcends it. As Quixote moves on his journey he realises the presenting power of water, the presenting power of the trees of the moon and the sky. Their intensity signifies the nature of the world and of man, as being God given. It is an insight that is mystical whether in the Sufi Christian or Hindu tradition, where life is union.

HK is realised with defining simplicity by AS. The film comprises only of exteriors which are shot both day and night without lighting. The shots sequences and dialogues are refined to simple gesture both of body and speech. The editing decisions are never based on match cutting or continuity in reverse shots, but seem to have been made to affirm the integrity of ‘the moment’ whether it be Sancho’s bodily integrity or Quixote’s translucent integrity as his voice affirms the presence of God and his body and face reflect the affect of this realisation.

I think for AS Sancho follows Quixote because he realises a lacking a void within himself. Sancho does not perhaps understand the transformed state of mind of Quixote. He does not understand or share Quixote’s vision of immanence of life and death. Sancho does understand that Quixote’s vision is something that is important and that if he can be of use to Quixote then this will have been of worthwhile importance. Perhaps in time Sancho will understand things better. Or not. But for now he can be useful in an ultimate sense of the term, helping a man to die well. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Carnage – Roman Polanski (2011 Fr, Ger, Pol. Sp) Jodie Foster, Christopher Waltz, Kate Winslett, John Riley

Viewed: Tyneside Film Theatre 16 Feb 12; ticket price £8.00

carnage = verbiage

I think that the failure of Carnage and Polanski (RP) is that the film never makes the audience feel uncomfortable. Either with the film or with themselves. It’s relentless blandness makes it comfortable viewing for the arts film set. RP sticks relentlessly to the surface of a script which, as a comedy of manners, holds out for our inspection two married couples as stereotyped representatives of contemporary professional strata.

I think the event which triggers the situation is wonderfully chosen; the assault by the son of one of the married couples upon the other’s boy. Following the incident, the consequent visit by the perpetrator’s parents to the victim’s parents provides a psychic and emotional setting for a penetration beneath the visible surface of the protagonists. It sets up a possible scripting, both filmic and in dialogue, where conflict, ambiguities, ambivalences, competition, uncertainties can be explored; where states of mind and body can be probed and brought into play.

But in Carnage, with everything primed, nothing critical happens at any level. By the end it feels it as if these people didn’t really exist: except as dialogue bubbles. Not flesh and blood but a series of attitudes and opinions defined by a stream of scripted positions that starts to resemble after a time, the delivery of amateur theatrics.

Although occupying similar middle class positions, the couples represent quite different strata within this broad category. One couple are corporate in ethos; the other a mix of aspirational blue collar sales and creative careerist, whose income and artistic identity has levelled them out as arrivist bourgeoisie. The tensions of the two different strata are occasionally visible, as when the two men exchange dialogue about toilet flushing mechanisms, but overall this is not a seam of tension or ambiguity the script explores.

Carnage rather prefers to reinforce the specifically America notion that these people are all basically the same, and all subscribe to the same value systrem and live under the same American moral and legal codex. So that’s Ok then, it ain’t about strata/class, Carnage is going to reassure its audience that these differences are not significant in contemporary US urban experience. So what happens?

The script tails into an excuse for a number of running jokes: the mobile telephone, the hamster joke, the vomit joke and the Africa and good intentions joke. Each of the running jokes concerns one of the four characters, but the jokes never really take on a life an intensity a immanence that marks them out as a realm of experience. None of the jokes amplifies or becomes filmically real, even when the bleed of the corporate lawyers (Allan) conversation about drug trials reveals that Mike’s mother is taking a potentially hazardous drug. The information is assimilated and after commencing with a preliminary spike, in the end the drug issue is pleasantly dealt with to the satisfaction of all. Everything is eventually pleasantly resolved and perhaps this is the point of the film: to show that contemporary Americans are pleasant non violent beings whose principle objective is conflict resolution with minimum pain. The avoidence of anything real like unpleasantness. Perhaps RP hopes that his own little contretemps with the US law enforcement agencies might be so engagingly resolved.

The debate about the respective roles of their sons in the incident takes a circuitous route visiting the same issue and resolving different solutions. The proceedings involve multiple exits and re-entrance’s for the visiting couple which reminded me a little of the Avenging Angel, but without Bunuel’s moral passion and dark humour. It also brought to mind a sort of parody of the US legal system: a soft parody of the endless repetitions, adjournments, characteristic the US legal circus.

Technically the film’s insipidity was re-inforced by the manner chosen by RP to edit the material. Most of the cuts in ‘the shot -reaction shot sequences’ which typify the film’s stimulus response structure, are hard cut, either on the first phonome of the response or within a couple of frames of the reply. The film is typified by a lack of space, a lack of significance given to any other input other than the dialogue. The preponderance of hard cutting into the dialogue turns the players into robotic acting machines voicing out preprepared positions. At the start of the film this might work; but as the dynamics develop, there is a failure to introduce any other film scripting resource into the development of the situation. RP used to understand how to handle mood and silence, the resonance of image and the somatic physical traits of the actors. He seems to have forgotten. In Carnage there is little sign of RP’s filmic muscularity. RP seemed happy to let the whole project slide into soap opera, characterised by playing the material for cheaply won laughs. Where provocations such as the drowning the mobile phone, the hurling of the handbag to the floor might have brought to the surface undercurrents of a repressed psychosexual violence, in Carnage they simply come across as moments of theatre: theatrical parentheses of humour. The audience can cope with a bit of cheap theatre; it doesn’t disturb us.

Perhaps that’s RP’s point. America exists somehow to reassure not to frighten. But to get that message somewhere at some point in Carnage we need to feel or to see what is manifestly absent: fear.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk