Adrin Neatrour

Shame Steve McQueen (UK 2011) Michael Fassbender; Carey Mulligan

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 24/01/2012; Ticket price: £7.95

Shame about shame

My reading of the opening shot of Shame, is that it
was faked. We see Brandon (Michael Fassbender) lying on his bed. Brandon’s torso is naked his lower body
entwined in white sheets (Christ-like ?). Eyes open he lies completely still: still as death. At last the eyes tremble; he
moves. I think this is a shot faked in the editing, using the freeze frame tool
to control the immobility of the opening part of the shot. Why does Steve
McQueen start his movie with an image set up by the editing software? Is it a
structured statement about the film’s concerns; or a device used to create an
affect to make the shot appropriately dramatic; an unwitting
sign that this movie is be about image not substance.

Given
Steve McQueen’s (SM) reputation after his first movie Hunger, it is appropriate
to probe into the film’s form structure and content, and to conject as to purpose
and intention behind the project: to appraise the moral content of the
movie. By moral I am not referring
to a code of ethics or morality but to a consistency in internal logic, a
refusal to compromise a line of vision.

Hunger’s key
attribute was that it was locked into specific context: the death of Bobby
Sands in the Maze Prison. The
historical biographical context provided the basis for the three chapters,
which explored the realms of Body Mind and Spirit that SM incorporated into
Hunger. The situations in the film
developed out of these categorical loci. They were grounded in the real. They
were not metaphorical.

The first two
sections in Hunger were based about body and mind (dialogue) presented as
filmic installations. The images
proposed a series of oppositions that allowed the audience to see and make
their own interpretation of what was happening. Two shots, both scenes in themselves: the long
duration shot of the warder using a janitorial squeegee to sluice the piss down
the length of the prison corridor; the 17 minute dialogue between BS and the
priest on the morality of the hunger strike. The audience are put into the
position where they have to look and listen in order to understand. SM’s film did not manipulate the viewer
but open up for the viewer a process of understanding.

I thought the
first two chapters of Hunger much better than the third which sloped into
sentimentality. Nevertheless on
viewing, Hunger has a consistent moral line: the inexorable logic of oppositions in action. In exposition and discourse it
does not indulge either in emotive sub prime acting or the politics of
pre-formed and implied judgments.

There are perhaps
some specious similarities between Hunger and Shame. Hunger about a man imprisoned by external forces moving
inwards; Shame a man imprisoned by internal forces trying to move outwards.

Unlike Hunger,
Shame completely lacks context.
The film is set in New York but it is not a context, it’s a symbolic
backdrop for the events that take place in the film. In relation to subject matter the background to these
events might be anywhere: Clermont Ferrand, Birmingham or Boston. Shame might have benefited from a
lower profile background. But New
York it is; chosen for its symbolic resonance, its streets and skyscrapers
ready made code for contemporary alienation. It’s a city that Shame castes as a
metaphysical entity with a population of replicants and lost souls. There is even a performance of the
Sinatra hit ‘New York New York’ as
a set piece in the film: it’s deconstructed but sung for affect. (the piano accompaniment was great but
I didn’t catch who played it on the credits) SM exploits New York as a city that is already a cliché and
defaults in the film to shots of the city that simply reinforce this
image.

The key settings
of Shame are all metaphorical rather than real. They are all decontextualised, with substance extracted
leaving a sort of filmic shell within which the film’s events take place. The subway system with its sexually
charged rides is a metaphorical underworld of id; the office whose function we
never learn, is a little like the superego – a place where Brandon’s represses
his sexual needs (except in the toilet);
and his apartment, painted white like a Swiss sanitarium is where
Brandon is himself. Metaphorical
psychic zones rather than real spaces.

Shame comprises
metaphorical zones contained within a metaphysical city. It’s problem is that
within all these unreal spaces Brandon never seems real. His problems are never
real and he is never interesting from the point of view of giving the audience
something to contain. Had Von Treer
made such a movie he would have understood that the film needed an
uncompromising moral line to work. The film might have been about: becoming Cock. Brandon literally
overwhelmed by, flooded out both internally and externally by sexual desires
becomes: Cock. A epic line with the possibility of
deadly mordant humour that would overwhelm devastate and destroy Brandon and
all those he touches. With a
script that takes a line, the viewer is presented with a situation which they
have to confront.

Instead Brandon
wanders about the non-spaces of the movie becoming… a non entity. SM uses a sort of sub plot to try and
rescue the movie . This involves
Brandon’s sister, Cissie, who’s a singer (and a cutter) who has an affair with
his boss. The brother sister stories intertwine. (perhaps they are supposed to
intertwine as schizoid individuals?) But their relationship fails to energise
the movie. The extent of
their synergy in the film is to reveal, unsurprisingly, that they are both
trapped in infantile sexual circuitry; there again so is the whole
country. Brandon realizes in the
course of another coy subplot that he is unable to have a normal loving relationship. His response is an orgy of fucking.
This scene is particularly crude.
It looks like SM asked
Fassbender to overact, so that during the orgy with two whores we have to watch
as he pulls back his mouth in a rictus of pain and grimacing throughout the
whole fuck. The loaded emotive
gesturing kept this viewer bored but cued him as to what to think.

A significant
feature of addiction is tolerance. Alcohol drugs sex: for users all have the same equation of need, you always
need more of what you want to get the same effect. There is a core to sexual activity that is about
control. The sexual imposition of will can easily lead to
sadistic violence, and constitutes a line of action a line that is visible for
example, at Abu Ghraib. This is the
line, part of the becoming cock line, that Shame never takes that SM seems to
inhibited to explore.

Shame ends on
shots of the brother sister reunion/reconciliation. The which doesn’t seem to mean anything, but is presumably a
measure of SM’s desperation as to what to do with his material. Some of the dialogue, especially in the
public interstitial spaces captures the banality of the social strata of the
settings. But coming out of
familiar soap opera provenance
‘Oscar acceptance speech exchanges’ are parodies of parodies.

I found the use of
the Bach compositions interesting.
They related to nothing that I saw or experienced in Shame. Bach’s selection for the sound track
seemed an attempt to exploit the
music so that it would lend a sort of spiritual lamination to a film in
which spirit was otherwise honoured in its absence. I found its use more annoying than relevant

The film might have been made out of the cynical
motivation that sex sells. Any movie preceded by a clinical disclaimer about its
concern with sex addiction, yet featuring a measure of full on tits bums and
cock will make its money back. It
panders to the conceit of the art house crowd who like sex in films to be
presented with a veneer of mitigating intellectual legitimation. I think SM’s initial ambition may
have been to make a statement about how sex has become twisted and
depersonalized in strata of our society.
On the evidence SM didn’t have the artistic or intellectual flair to
make such a film. Instead he
produces Shame which comprises a jumble of images and sounds put together in
the hope that they might have the hoped for effect. They don’t.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Artist Michel Hazanavicius (France 2011) Jean Dujardin; Benernice Beja

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 10 01 2012 Ticket: £8.00

Soap without the verbals….

Of course Hitchcock knew what a MacGuffin was and made ever more intensive use of the idea to drive his psychosexual obsessions into the heart of the films. The plot to Michel Hazanavicius’ (MH) movie is a Macguffin with an empty centre. When you look for the driving force there’s nothing there. A meaningless plot encircled by vacuous framing devices that signify to the audience that this is a ‘take’ on the silent movie form. We have silence on the dialogue and the effects tracks, (most of the time) but not on the music track. There are intertitle cards for the dialogue, iris fades, other period wipes and vignetting (fuzzy or dark edges at corners of frame) for the picture These outer markers of form enclose a sort of voided centre where the main action consists of a series of old ideas raided from the history of Hollywood, which history has already been heavily quarried by other tomb robbers. The film is premised on the conceit ( accurate) that the fake form of the Artist is sufficient for the films commercial success.

You can fool some of the people all of the time….(Abe Lincoln: attributed)

The acting style in the Artist is not so much of the ‘silent ‘ era, but rather of today. This is not surprising. Contemporary audiences would have little patience with the etiolated expressive gesturing of silent movie acting. They are more comfortable with the exaggerated but cursive expressive gesturing of the TV soap opera: so it’s no surprise that this is what the producers give them. Soap without the verbals.

As regards plot the team behind the Artist decided against a plot line generated by an original idea: they chose to exploit plot as a feeble vehicle for retreading bits and bobs of Hollywood movie history. The decision is of course at one with the rationale behind the movie of playing to audience conceit. We have film as a: ‘spot the references/hommages game’. Film as quiz night. So we have a parade of movie ghosts: Fairbanks Jn, Chaplin (which ref gives Georges Valentin the unconvincing line: ‘I am an artist) Jack Warner, Gloria Swanson, Rin Tin Tin (a major Warner 20’s Star) Lubitsch, and of course Hitchcock.

MH ‘ borrows’ the sound track from Vertigo to try and locate the Artist in the psychotic key that is core to Vertigo’s impact. It’s significant of course that MH has to use the Vertigo sound track to try and point his audience towards the emotional zone he wants to suggest. The decision to recycle the Vertigo soundtrack might have been masterful but the film simply cannot live with it, or rather live it out. The point MH wants to locate in the material seems to be an inverse replication of the fetish sexual fixation that Scotty has with Madeliene. In the Artist we have Pappy and George, and it is the female who is driven to possess the male by her fetish, the magical means of possession through object relations. But the idea doesn’t work in the movie. There is no room for darkness in the relations, and the force of the fetish is only feeble expressed and alluded to in a flimsy sort of way before the mechanics of creaking plot drive the couple on to their last movie reference point: Ginger ‘n Fred.

The role of ‘the dog’ is interesting (real name Uggie – I didn’t notice any credit for his trainer).

The dog is accorded an ambivalent role in the film. He exists for his mechanics and his cuteness but is not allowed to make any other claims. Without these other claims his role becomes that of an automaton, not a personality. By claims I point to the fact that there is not a scene in the film where Georges relates to or engages with the dog. He never feeds it, we never see him talk to it (all pet owners talk to their animals), train it or reward it. George never worries about the animal or cares for it. It is simply an automaton that does as it is bid; aside from the Rin Tin Tin sequence when the dog fetches a cop to rescue his master from the flames. Of course audience love the dog. His performance (enhanced by CGI?) is wondrous, but his role is anomalous. Peppy never relates to him nor does the Chauffeur, and in the last Fred ‘n Ginger sequence he seems to have vanished. Has Peppy murdered the dog as part of her pact with her fetish? The dog in the Artist has a highly circumscribed role: as if the actors, aware of WC Fields dictum, had a contractual clause that limited the role of the mut: no emotional baggage allowed only trix.

The pacing of the Artist is dire. It is relieved by some structured wit as when the film breaks into sound, and the occasional amusing use of a intertitle. The pacing is leaden and accompanied by an original score that is monotonous in both rhythm and tempo. The sequences and scenes grind through the material, without tension or counterpoint. The grim mechanics of the plot, the progress from reference to homage to reference make this a dire filmic experience. It is the triumph of marketing over merit and personal judgement. Sales: it’s the old story: you tell them what they’re going to see; you show it to them….and then tell them they’ve seen it…

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

This is not a film Jafar Panahi,
Mojtaba Mirtamash (Iran 2011)

viewed IDFA 21 11 2011

Why is this is not a film….because it’s a life…

All the films I viewed at IDFA were mediated and or
laminated productions. Mediated
through cognitive design as products of
a particular nature, using specific filmic structure shooting schedules and
more or less planned shots to present a view point , an issue or to exercise a
polemic. Laminated with voice over
and editing techniques to ensure a multilayered moulding of the material to
present a cogent statement about a subject.

It seems perhaps impossible or very difficult as a conscious
being to make reflective statements either in prose, media, film whatever without some pre-idea of
form or putative statement, even if these are subject to continual flux. ‘This is not a film’ seems to be
that rare entity: an unwitting product, a production made without specific form
made almost as a documentary doodle. It does of course, and it was intended by
it’s prime movers Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtamesh (MM) to show a situation:
the situation of house arrest. A
film shot as strips of action;
filming that was carried out
in defiance of the conditions of Jafar Panahi’s bail. A film that is little more than the
tapes that comprise it, recorded without much planning and with only the most
nebulous idea of what it should be.
The editing looks to have been sparse, most of the shots are long
sequences, that have only been topped and tailed. Perhaps this material would be used naively sent out as
a diffuse statement about JP’s situation or incorporated into another more
clearly planned film. That’s the
way it appeared to me.

But one sequence filmed as the last long shot changed
everything. We have a situation: a
famous Iranian filmmaker, known for his opposition to the regime is at home
confined under house arrest. He is in the course of appealing against a 6 year
prison sentence and a 20 year ban on leaving the country and making films. He mooches round his apartment
recording himself on film: waiting.
Finally his friend Mojtaba Mirtamash arrives: more filming; unplanned,
undertaken almost as a means to relieve JP’s tedium of days. Underlying everything there is: the unsaid, the uncertain, the encircling and the threatening. Then without announcement quietly in
one shot the final shot of the film all these forces reveal themselves as
immanent and omnipresent.
‘This is not a film’ opens as a simple strip of actions. A series of events taking place in a
situation whose outline we only dimly appreciate, then in this one and final
shot we see that what first seemed inconsequential in this film actually
encapsulates all the tragedy of a life.

JP is not so much in a situation; rather he is the
situation, JP is in a state of
conditional being and the film is undifferentiated from this condition. Jafar
films himself, on the phone to his lawyer; MM arrives and films him in the
apartment as JP acts out an unrealised script; JP talks about film and shows a
couple of shots from his output; his daughters pet iguana majestically stalks
the living room. Then the time
comes for MM to part. It is fireworks
night in Tehran, and sporadically we have heard the crack of the
gunpowder. JP is left alone by MM
who leaves the camera running un the kitchen table.

As MM leaves he talks to the man outside the front door who
is a nephew of the concierge and says he’s standing in for him whilst the
concierge attends a wedding in
Esfahan. Camera still
turning over, JP invites him in and talks to him as he collects the trash. Perhaps bored JP accompanies the guy,
still filming same shot, to the lift as he collects the trash from different
floors in the building. And at
this point in the closeness intimacy and banality of the lift, there is a
terrible realisation of what is happening….no edits no tricks just states of
mind revealed in the transport of tape across the record head.

Everything in this shot is unseen, the thoughts unsaid. Slowly inexorably there is the
realisation that the stand-in concierge is a government spy. He is spying on JP
and will report everything back to his controllers. The net of fate about JP has tightened. JP has been seen filming in defiance of
the Court. He is doomed. The appeal, the one possible hope, slim anyway, is now
dashed. The shot has the
inexorable movement of destiny. There seems a point in the filming where JP
realises exactly what is happening.
His voice hesitates and his questions to the ‘concierge’ falter and
stop. As if his mouth is drying
up. It might be that JP realises from the top of the shot what is going on; but
the feel from the interplay in the shot is of a gradual

realisation by JP of the actual situation and its
consequences. It is a slow motion
awakening to the terrible nature of what is happening in the intimacy of the
elevator.

JP crammed in close physicality to his betrayer, close
enough to smell his breath falls into the silence of the damned, falls into the
abyss.

After making the film ( said to have been smuggled out of Iran in a cake) MM was arrested and is currently in prison. JP’s appeal failed and he is in prison serving a six year stretch.

So this is not a movie; it’s a life Jafar Pahani film and
life interchangeably burnt into image.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

IINTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL AMSTERDAM

NOV 17 TO NOV 27 2011

I attended IDFA and was able to view some 23 films in five
days.

One of the issues highlighted for me at IDFA:

How to
transpose active relations into the life of a film?

There are various ways in which an idea or notion of reality
can be shaped and given substance
in a documentary film.

Among the films that I viewed in Amsterdam one form of
documentary film making in particular caught my attention. Films shot from within a process. This particular way of making a film
attracted positive responses from audiences perhaps because by their nature
these films demand a critical engagement and shape an interaction with the
material that tends to be more passive than active. These films elicit a need to respond to what has been
seen.

This particular group of films that interested me took their
form and salient characteristic from being shot (or in the case of 5 Broken
Cameras the significant defining material) by individuals strategically placed
in a dynamic and changing situation.
These were films shot from within an unfolding of relations and made
possible by lightweight cameras and simple but powerful editing systems that
enabled a lot of material to be shot using different systems and simply controlled.

Examples of the films situated within a matrix of relations
were two from the Middle East, one from Iran (This is not a Film by Jafar
Panahi which I will consider separately in another piece of writing) , and one
from Europe, Fredrik Gerrten’s Big
Boys Gone Bananas, a very strong example of a European film that is total
process, embedded in a context that is filmed as it develops and plays out.

The two Middle Eastern films that interested me were located
in Palestine. Five Broken Cameras
(co directed by Palestinian Emad
Burnat and Israeli Guy Davidi) and
Marcus Vetter’s Cinema Jenin both articulated a process that was part of
a wider fateful working out of both individual and collective destiny.

Cinema Jenin was directed by Marcus Vetter who as well as
directing played the lead role in the eponymous project of renovating an
abandoned and dilapidated cinema in Jenin. Although credited with one director and one editor, Cinema
Jenin has the feel of a collective project in which individuals such as Ishmael
(a previous subject of Vetter’s work in Jenin) and other political and social
groupings in Jenin, are core to filmic making and unfolding. Film maker Vetter takes on the lead
role in the cinema project and locates himself at the heart of the complex
interplay of the social and political relations in Jenin which shape and mould
the process of both rebuilding the cinema and making the film. As film maker Vetter is committed to
the actual project and plays a key part in the process that engages the
resources and enters into the critical social and political relations that make
a successful outcome possible.
Marcus Vetter is in Jenin.
And that ‘being in’ has the effect of engaging with dynamic relations
that the camera not only captures but affects. There is a sense in which the camera itself becomes a
player. The camera in the continuous action of filming
creates a feedback loop. It becomes not just a point of reference, but also
part of the questioning and decision making processes. Perhaps in itself the camera becomes an
attitude/behaviour modifier at the individual level as an immediate source of
image feedback. The knowledge that everyone is ‘in’ the Jenin movie is a
fateful realisation, which turns the camera into a force that affects
individuals so that different realities attain a certain visibility
particularly in the political domain. During the editing of the film, Julliano one of those
in the process, in the intensely political dialogue which is a defining element
of relations in Jenin is shot dead, murdered outside the cinema. Was this part of the film or an event
that we can bracket outside the film?
I don’t know but I felt that the core questions that unfolded in the
process of filming were central to what was happening in both in Cinema Jenin
and 5 Broken Cameras.

Being in the situation and filming from within a process
creates films that pull on emotive cognitive and intellectual responses of
those within this unfolding. Participants
are confronted by themselves presented as image in film. They are accompanied by a constant
mirror image which crystalises their movement through time. In the recoding of the unfolding of relations
there is no hiding place either from the virtual audience of the self or from
the wider projected world of viewers. The unfolding of relations in the movie
creates situations of a completely different dynamic from the normal artificial
and controlled interview situation typical of most docs, where the interviewees
are easily able to present the facets of issues that suit their purposes. Seeing material from within process,
even allowing for the controlling aspect of editing presents a more
contradictory but more challenging picture for audiences to understand. Audience response indicates that this
is a challenge to which audiences respond very positively.

Burnat’s 5 Broken Cameras, each of which is smashed or
broken during his filming of the Israeli occupation, develop into more than
just tools that record the terrible and unsettling events that he films. His camera, as an invariable
presence recording the Israeli incursion, becomes part of the developing
dialogue within the Palestinian community in Bil’in. The core dialogue in Bil’in and amongst the Palestinians is
about how they can best resist the Israelis and what relations they should have
with sympathetic Israelis.
Burnat’s camera becomes part of the thinking about the situation. His
camera is part of the process of understanding what is happening to the village
and the effects of their response to events. Viewed by the villages Burnat’s footage becomes part of a
feed back loop, feeding into the villagers understanding and evaluation of
their actions as they oppose the Israelis, and effecting modifications and planning about actions they have
taken and will take in the future.
The camera as thought.

Both Jenin and 5 Broken Cameras seem to be part of a
re-evaluating by Palestinians of the means by which the Israelis can be
opposed. Confrontation with the
Israelis by force of arms is not the only means of fighting; in certain
situations such as those in Bil’in it may be counter productive and other
strategies using other tactics may be more effective. With the addition of
filming as a feed back loop, opposition using techniques of civil disobedience
and non violent protest become effective in affirming Palestinian self
belief and in achieving the goal
of forcing Israel to look at itself and even to make concessions. The actuality recorded by Burnat is
shocking; but the film ennobles
the Palestinian cause and strategy of non violence and communicates it not just
to the world wide audience but also to Israelis.

Filming to the extent that it is part of the thought
processes in the Palestinian discourse becomes a conduit for reaching out to
Israelis. Film as part of the way
of thinking about what is happening, can work to legitimise intra-Israeli
resistance to their own government and empower some Israelis to actively
support Palestinian resistance.
The act of filming in both 5 Cameras and Cinema Jenin, becomes reflection images that reach and penetrate into Israel. As a strategy it is controversial but
as a development it proposes another type of path towards Palestinian self
determination which has the possibility of breaking down the Israeli mind set
from within: a Palestinian Trojan Horse.

From the point of view of the audience these two films,
Jenin and 5 Broken Cameras demand a level of active engagement with the
material. They are not shot from a notional point of neutrality. There’s no
doubt about the point of view from which the film expresses itself. There is no
doubt about the partisan nature of film making. Because this is completely transparent the audience
know the grounds on which to base reservations or criticism and are also
sensitised to bias and fabrication.
They are put on the alert to evaluate what they are presented with. The are challenged to view the material
with critical tools of appraisal.

The viewers are exposed in these films to self believed
Palestinian utterances and discourses.
The viewers are in a position where neutrality or even indifference in
respect of the relations revealed is challenged. Relations of power, territoriality, hierarchy and politics
and social concerns. 5 Broken Cameras (5BC) through the continuous filming of
Burnat over 6 years, is part of the process of witnessing and resisting Israeli
development of illegal West bank settlements, occupation. land theft and wall
erection. The film and the
film makers are part of the forces of opposition by the villagers of Bil’in to
the mechanical forces of Israeli occupation. Burnat’s camera is not just a tool not only a means to
record. Through the medium of the footage the audience also becomes part of the
thinking about the process of resistance to what seems to be a superior
physical force.

To deny what the Burnat’s camera films, as some will do, you
have to think about the material in a specific manner. You have to believe either that 5
Broken Cameras is a perverse project, whose objective is distortion and
fabrication. Or that it is an unwitting project, in which a naïve subject
Burnat is exploited for his limited capacity to see and film only from one
limited perspective. The beauty of
the documentary film is that the evidence is in the film. However much these films may be edited,
the integrity of the process in which they are enfolded remains. All viewers are equal in viewing and
evaluating the relations with which they are presented. And it is this integrity to which
viewers respond.

adrin neatrour

December 2011

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Gun Crazy
Joseph H Lewis (USA 1950)
John Dall. Peggy Cummins

Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle UK; ticket: £5

Need another fix…?

Gun Crazy (GC) opens in a small town with a sequence set in
torrential rain, a relentless
outbursting of water drowning the streets in a metaphoric flooding of despair. Amidst this emotional and aquatic
torrent Brandon lurks in the shadows
before smashing in the window of a store to steal a hand gun: a beautiful handgun. But the storm that made the crime
possible also betrays him; trying to get away, he slips in the treacherous
conditions and is caught.

Joseph Lewis (JL) uses the opening rain sequence to
introduce the main thematic concerns of his movie. The desperation of obsessive desire and the emotionally encompassing
conditions in which such desire has to be satisfied.

Viewing the tense superbly crafted film, the thought
occurred that JL was not concerned with a couple on a criminal rampage. Rather GC was a film about addiction.
All the way through this road movie probably inspired by the Barrow Gang, I
felt as if it was foreshadowing the tidal wave of heroin addiction that was 30
or so years later to overwhelm the vulnerable strata of blue collar
America. GC holds up the mirror to
a shadow America, holding in the present a crystal image of celluloid, that
portents the future awaiting realisation of a drug culture.

This is blue collar land, economically and accurately
sketched out by JL. Broken family,
narrow vistas of vision, no future: a wasteland. A world of vulnerable people.. Vulnerable to the apparition of a specific stimulus that
seems to fulfil all the criteria of an individual’s needs and desires in the
lost generations.

Brandon’s answer to the problem of identity is the gun. The gun is a means. Not an end. An implement, not a goal. It’s tough in the rush of affirmation of sexuality and power
to understand this. It
affirms a means to identity, maleness and endows the one who has the gun with
implied power in mastery of technique and willingness to exercise.

But Brandon hooked up to Laurie, is unable to disentangle
ends and means. He becomes implicated in her need for
gestural deliverance, for the implicit to become explicit and for the gun to
extend out of the confines of the demonstrable, into the real. For reality to become an ever
diminishing high voltage circuit linking gun and desire.

The movie’s script plays on the seductive role of Laurie’s
in leading Brandon onto the road of crime. GC invokes the tired old story of a good man led astray by a
bad lady. Although this causative
mechanism can be read into GC, I think it does less than justice to JL’s
movie. The opening sequence
establishes Brandon’s need for the gun

(obvious Freudian/ Jungian sex /power symbolism) He cannot resist the allure of the
fetish that he needs to resolve his identity. The logic of Brandon’s situation was that he was always
vulnerable TO THE WAY OF THE GUN (OR THE WAY OF THE NEEDLE) because he needs a
solution to the blue collar dilemma: emotional damage no hope a dead end society culture. For Brandon it was a natural
progression from gun prowess to gun use; from marihuana to heroine.

Brandon and Laurie’s progress the form of their criminal
career is drawn by JL in a very
different manner from Penn’s movie of Bonnie and Clyde. Penn emphasises the visual and
emotional allure of the life, it’s a caper. Penn uses his material to peddle a romantically alluring
aesthetic of death. Bonnie
and Clyde are canonised as symbolic rebels. JL
depicts Brandon and Laurie’s path towards their final destiny in the
swamp ias a vicious downward
spiral of addiction. Their
robberies and crimes are quickly seen not so much to have an economic rationale
but rather to satisfy psychic and
physical need. The robberies
yield very little money; what each of the crimes provide is the next fix. The rush and the high to which Laurie
and Brandon are addicted to get them through time, the unending presents in which they are
trapped.. Living in the
present, no past no future but living with the junkies dilemma of decreasing
returns from each fix of action.
The circuitry of gun and desire tightens round them like a noose and
finally they acknowledge their dilemma, which of course leads to the well
trodden road of the final idea: lets do one more heist and get out of the game
and put our lives back on track. They are of course so far off the tracks that their navigation systems have
taken them out of space time coordinates.

Much has been said about JL’s filmic rendering of the
script. It is highly economic in
construction, building scenes with attention to details rather than production
values, in particular the bank robbery scene filmed in one shot from outside
the car with the participants, Laurie, a little old lady and a small town cop
positioned and manipulated by JL with the precision of a chess grand master. I
thought his use of tracking shots was particularly strong, meeting Truffaut’s
dictum that the track should have moral purpose. The tracks in GC are not random mechanisms used to keep the
picture moving. When JL tracks
into he face of Brandon or Laurie the use of the movement powerfully evokes the
perception, state of mind of the character or the fragility of situation. One
track that was very powerful saw the camera pull back from Laurie and Brandon
as he draws a plan of the last robbery.
The camera movement from CU
to WS reveals the nature of Brandon’s
plan which he has drawn on
an old newspaper. The shot
implicates not only the poverty of their resources but the couple caught in
what we see in the fragile light caste from an ornate glass lampshade seems
foretell the mayhem that isp to come, again to cast the shadow of the present
into the future.
adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Melancholia Lars von Trier ( 2011 Den; Swe) Kirsten Dunst; Charlotte Gainsbourg

Viewed: 6 Oct 2011 Tyneside Cinema Ticket price: £7.99

What planet is Lars von Trier on?

When I tried to think what Melancholia was about, I arrived at the idea that it was about nothing. From its filmic form to its expressive content there is vacuity, a stylised vacuity, but still an emptiness that characterises this movie.

Melancholia (M) points to the metamorphosis of Lars von Trier (LvT) from film director into brand.

M has the look and feel of a photo installation. It’s a film that makes its statement through stylistic expression rather than content. A film that has apocalypse as a theme but is not about dieing; it’s about the look of dieing. Or perhaps just ‘the look’. A film for people for whom the important thing is always to look cool. A film for the sort of people who are always an advert for themselves, dieing or being, level or bipolar.

M, in particular it’s opening pretitle sequence, reminded me of the work of Bill Viola. The selling point is that hyper realistic images lock the viewer into the immanence of presence, a presence in which context and other determined social criteria are excess baggage. I think that this works because the hyper real rendition of image, in particular the face, determines that the focus of cognitive attention as an empathic imperative. As when we gaze at ourselves in the mirror our attention is transfixed to the surface. Some think that surface is all there is. That’s OK.

LvT’s M is a filmic installation structured on the idea of stylised juxtapositions divided up by title cards named after the two female roles: Justine: individual state of mind and set piece social ritual; Clair: cosmic disaster and family. The characteristic feature of the expressive elements is their overwhelming visual hyper presence and the abandonment of history and context. All that matters is the now and the watching of the performers go through the motions of projecting an image of the now.

The set piece reception is put through its formulaic paces: the bad behaviour of a dysfunctional family, the intimation of the corrupt business underlying the event, linked to a highly visible falling out between two of the occasion’s central parties, and a less visible falling out of the newly weds. Justine’s behaviour is erratic cool, alternatively accommodating and disruptive.. . of course whatever she does she continues to look drop-dead gorgeous. And the event continues to look sumptuous. Nothing really happens. Everything is cool. Perhaps this is LvT’s point. With everything anchored in the hyperreal we gaze on image. The beautiful people remain the beautiful people. Dead and unchanging. Beautiful people like it this way.

What’s in it for the audience ? Unless you’re one of the ‘cool set’, once the eye ceases to be bewitched by image, there is little else to attend to. Even the handheld camera work, which initially lends a stylised cinematic life to the sequences, becomes tedious. It offers only repetitive movements, with its sound led splicing overlaying too many shots composed in the same way: a whip pan off action onto a talking head. Again and again and again.

Without context to anchor events, M’s reliance on associative juxtaposition is similar in to TV advert for an anti-wrinkle cream. There’s a before and after structure (in M’s case inverse to the ad structure as the mood movement is from confidence to depression); and LvT’s cosmic physics is as wonky and suspect as the science behind anti wrinkle products.

A key element of the second section of M, intertitled Clair, is the house where the action takes place. Characteristically it has form without history, it’s is located nowhere without space time or social referents. It is (I think) the same house where the reception was held. It looks like a house in a hotel ad or a real estate brochure. A house in the middle of nowhere, occupied by people in the middle of nowhere; a situation in the middle of nowhere. And then! A planet from nowhere!

Justine’s precognition of the final catastrophe is very detached and melds imperceptibly with her utterances – the earth is evil (wow!) – and behaviour which indicate she is a very cool person in particular when she and LvT indulge in a little ‘Melancholic light’ naked bathing. She looks so good and ravishing, really cool thing to do that!

Of course in the past where societies were attuned to a religious cosmology and demonology there was typically a collective response to catastrophe: mass flagellation, mass gatherings. On planet Earth today in the West there is no collective belief to sustain life. Only denial or mute acceptance. Apocalypse now will be experienced as a family occasion like an advert for a family holiday in Florida. To this extent LvT makes a point, but it seems a secondary afterthought to his primal concern, the image.

LvT ensconced in the Zentropa may feel like his little pretend household at the end of the movie. They seek out the sanctuary of the child from cosmic disaster in a little birch frame wigwam. Is Zentropa LvT’s little magic cave? A bubble world from which he can look out and comment on the world. Insulated from the world remote from its concerns, he has little to say. It worked for him with Antichrist because of the psychic forces he set in motion were intertwined from a ruthlessly internalised re-mything of Freud. In Melancholia it is mere arrogant indulgence.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Vertigo Alfred Hitchcock (USA 1958) James Steward; Kim Novak

Viewed: 24 09 2011 Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle; Ticket: £5.00

retrocrit: sex and the cripple…

Vertigo’s plot, its settings and locations are of course all typical macguffins. They are the elaborate devices and visual mechanics that only serve to frame Alfred Hitchcock’s (AH) core obsession in this movie: the ritual of the fetish. The slow build up of the film, its ramshackle flaky story line with its cod parapsychological exploitation of the idea of possession and its ring a roses visual rotation of San Francisco tourist attractions, delivers the pay off in its finale: the sexual completion of the cripple. This final section in which Scottie rebuilds Madeleine ( interesting choice of character name; it is the Madeleine cake that energies Proust’s erotic memory journey through time) is a pure erotic act of film. The audience (this male one anyway) shares the complicity of Scottie’s psychic fixation, feels the tumescent race of blood fill out his limp erogenous tissues. Of course we see nothing; we don’t have to. We are seeing with Scottie.

AH seems to have understood the consequences that the development of corporate man had for the psycho sexual functioning of the male. Both Rear Window and Vertigo explore aspects of this schizoid detached objectifying state.

The opening sequence offers a banal explanatory back story for Scottie, who at the starting point of the film’s narrative is immediately presented as a ‘crippled man’ (symbolised by acrophobia) racked by guilt, inadequacy compounded by a sense of personal and career failure. It is during the opening section at Midge’s apartment that AH lays out his key concerns. In a phallocentric culture, Scottie is a castrated impotent, incapable of sexual functioning and all too aware of it. The scenario presents Scottie and Midge (Barbara Del Geddes) as just ‘friends’. Reading the interaction between them I think it’s evident that this presentation of their relationship is an assured scripted feint, the old conjurer displaying his mastery of misdirection to distract the audience from what is actually happening. The couple are man and wife and they have problems with their sexual relationship. As a good wife Midge (small blood feeding mosquito = wife?) tries to help him. But he cannot be aroused by her; she doesn’t pump his blood, she sucks his blood; she has no power over him. He is a castrate in a phallic corporate regime which dictates the rules of the game for both of them. He denies her both physical intimacy, of which coitus is a most powerful sign, and fertility.

This opening sequence has I think another necessary input besides the establishment of the cripple: it also brokers the appearance of the fetish.

The sexual functioning (phallic arousal), of corporate man has been conditioned to respond not to the stimulus of the body; but to the stimulus of the object or body part as object. Of course this starts with his own cock as object. But the process of objectification in particular pervades most aspects of sexuality where shoes, lingerie, breasts, legs, arse etc are projected as potent signs of legitimate sexual arousal. In linking the idea of sexual functioning to objects such as, cigarettes (at least until recently in the West) cars, interiors, fragrance, leisure, commercial interests through advertising and other channels, detach sexuality from the body onto the object fetish. In the first exchange between Midge and Scottie, AH effects the extraordinary appearance of a cantilevered brassiere (pronounced by Midge as brazeer) mounted on a stand. In response to Scotties puzzled question about it, Midge explains this new invention; its purpose is to aggressively push the breasts up and forward, accentuating their prominence making them into object signs of sexual potency. Of course for Hollywood in the ‘50’s women’s breasts were the most powerfully exploited object sign of the female stars, Monroe, Russell, Dors etc. (the maternal function of the breasts was not advertised). With the cantilever bra (possibly invented by Hughes) breasts become fetish, detached from the body and released into an independent existence available for development exploitation and celebration by Hollywood and the fashion industry. But Scotty is not fixated on the breast fetish; Midge is unable to arouse him with her cantilevered brazeer. Scottie the cripple needs another sort of object sign to enable him to find his erection.

Who better than AH with his intimate knowledge of himself and Hollywood to understand this? Hollywood as a parallel world where sex is welded to and defined by image. Image mediates sexual desire through body shape, hair style and colour, breasts, facial make up. Hollywood with its consistently ambivalent contradictory message of the sexual fetish: a magical thing available to the gaze yet simultaneously distant and inaccessible. As sex detaches from body and attaches to image, sexual functioning undergoes a significant re-conditioning process.

Fetish in contemporary English has dual (and sort of related) meanings. Firstly it points to an object believed to have magical power regarded with superstitious reverence; secondly a fetish is an object or body part that is psychologically necessary to achieve sexual gratification: no fetish no sexual arousal.

In Vertigo AH combines both meanings of the word. As a fetish it is her assemblage as sex goddess that causes Scottie to worship Madeleine. He is like a man wanting his wife to dress and look like Marilyn Monroe. From the first time he sees her with her peroxide blond hair, her demure beige clothing and shoes, she is a vision, a fount of magical power. Madeleine is constituted as pure image. Much of the film is composed of sequences of shots in which Scottie watches her from a distance. Even when he rescues her from the sea, there is little he can say to his object of worship, who at the same time becomes his object of desire, a fetish image without whom he cannot connect his mind to his sexual awakening.

On losing Madeleine , Scottie changes from cripple to dead man. He is as one dead, and only restored to life by his recreation of the fetish as the psycho sexual salve. It is an astonishing filmic realisation as Scottie item by item detail by detail recreates Madeleine. Watched by the complicit eye of the audience, he moves with increasing assurance towards both the image of the goddess and the arousal of his own crippled sexual functioning through the fetish of the image. The final assemblage of the image of Madeleine has an orgasmic intensity.

Interestingly AH was not happy with either of his stars’ performances. Both players seem detached and uncomfortable with their roles. It may be that the implicit obsessions of AH in making Vertigo acted as an inhibitionary factor because the explicit message was so close to the film’s surface that both Stewart and Novak were uncomfortable with the forbidden areas of psycho sexual functioning that lay at the heart of the film and of which they were the key expressive realisators.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

King Kong Merian Cooper Earnest Shoedsack (USA 1933) Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema: 4 Sept 2011, ticket price £5.00

Retrocrit: From King to slave an American journey

King Kong (KK) is a spoof mythological epic that gave Hollywood and American culture this new synthetic genre. KK exploits some of the expressive elements of the literary myths of European culture and overlays them with a exteriorised detached cool stylistic gloss. KK is constructed in such a manner that engrossment in and detachment from the material are interspliced, a structure that allows the film to commit to and follow the lines of action and simultaneously step aside from and comment on the action with contemporary externalised parentheses.

What we see in KK is the present taking control of the past. After KK, contemporary American culture led by Hollywood, is no longer in awe of the traditional mythologies of the European forebears. The dynamic Hollywood entertainment industry took the heroic components of these ancient stories and fashioned them into statements of American cultural and social values: democracy, embracement of change, can do attitude. Transforming the elements of these myths through a stylised and structured filmic detachment enabled the viewers to laugh at and detach themselves from their historical origins. Becoming American: a synthesis of engrossment and detachment.

For KK is surely fashioned from mythologies such as Beowulf and Siegfried both in content and expressive style. In the second section of KK the boat approaches the island. But as in the Niebelungen the place of destiny is fog ridden, and the boat has to negotiate a path through a defensive mist. Once on the isle a barrier separates the terrified people from the monstrous past that is sealed off behind it, the mountain has the shape of a skull, and when Kong is tracked he is finally, like Grendel. traced to his lair in a cave. Without being specific these are all classic elements of hero myths. Kong isn’t one mythic entity but is synthesised out of the components of different mythic strands. Kong can be seen as a primal force, an ancient God, a monster. Mythically Kong is doomed because his time is over; a new race of dynamic people have arrived, unafraid and who want to capture his image.

Unlike Cortes and the old colonialists the new invading ‘heroes’ don’t seek conquest. They seek power through the image, the symbolic camera that they carry everywhere. They come to capture images in order to exploit them. For the new colonialists, the image is a critical aspect of their power, enabling their manipulations and control. In fact in the movie they capture Kong himself, at which point the film takes on another lamination. As captive, Kong elides into a different image, he becomes another deterritorialised other. Kong is transformed from a God into black slave.

The curtains open in the Broadway theatre to reveal captured Kong standing mid stage on a platform. As in the illustrations of the restraints and manacles used on Africans in the slave trade, Kong’s arms are pinioned back by chains to a metal bar across his shoulders. Kong becomes African slave. From a God in nature to black slave, an American journey. And his escape and flight is an old time Southern manhunt in which the escaped slave is hunted down and killed by white men, Of course the man hunt is a lamination as the affect of the killing, the expressive despair of the Kong model, is attenuated by the spoof nature of the action.

I think that the spoof form adapted in Kong is made possible by the ‘30’s technology that used ingenious models to animate Kong and his Jurassic pals. One element of spoof is for the expressive elements to take seriously what is self evidently flawed to the external viewer. The investment of emotion and intellectual analysis by players on phenomena that are clearly representations creates space for both the scenario and the players to adapt distancing mechanisms from their engagement and involvement in the action that is legitimised by this structured component of the form.

The players have to respond to the material by adapting an acting style that is dedicated to surface gestures and malleable allowing them to move through different keys of relationship and commitment to the script. Using CGI makes it far more difficult to spoof epic heroic genres, and has unleashed an endless output of ponderous forgettable movies that are trapped within their own rigid logic. Steven Spielberg obviously watched KK up close and in his Lost Ark techno archaeological epics brought the Kong ethos up to date.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Playtime Jacques Tati (Fr 1967) Jacques Tati

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle, 31 07 2011 Ticket:£5.00

… Yes it’s a film from another planet….

Francois Truffaut on seeing Playtime wrote: it was “… a film from another planet where they see things differently.”

Playtime is a film that is simply about seeing. Seeing what’s going on. There is no story. Playtime is not grounded in the passivity of ‘looking at’ or ‘watching’ images unfold. It’s a film that places the viewer in a position where either they’re actively with Tati’s creative movement through frame and time as ‘seers’; or they miss the movie.

The opening sequence is located in the sort of typical modernist architectural structure where the construction and organisation of space provides no statements about the building’s purpose. The space is expressively functional but not expressively purposeful. It’s an example of Deleauze’s, “anyspacewhatever”. In the opening shots we see: two nuns; a nurse appears briefly, and then we see a woman asking a man if he has got his pyjamas. Perhaps we’re in a hospital: in fact it’s an airport. Playtime starts to open up its logic. On Tati’s filmic plane, appearances, the things that we see on the surface are what he/we can play with. That’s all there is: surfaces; that’s all we can see, but it’s enough. Meaning in Playtime is extrinsic not intrinsic.

In the first sequence the airport comes to life. The frame fills with people and the audio track makes itself heard, takes on a life of its own independent of all the comings and goings of people bustling through frame. Groups gather round desks, airline personnel move sharply to their duties and the screen is animated by arrivals of large groups of tourists, who herd-like shuffle and trip through the space seemingly immune them from the surrounding world. As they crocodile out of the Arrivals Gate we see that they are simultaneously an amorphous and implacable force. Overlaying the optical spectacle the sound track creates another stratum of reality, employing heightened ambient sounds from the environment which are normally disattended: the roaring of the air conditioning, the call signs of the PA system, the public announcements for elusive individuals. These naturally occurring effects are an alternative channel through which apprehend the situation and which exert a specific contextual psychic grip on the space.

Playtime’s key concept is disassociation and its main structural element is the disassociative splitting of the optical and sound situations. This splitting must have been prompted by observations that Tati made in the 1960’s. Today the disassociation of the optical from sound situations is even more radical. But there’s no Tati around to find a form to express it.

Tati’s realisation of the inexpressive nature of contemporary spacial organisation and the concomitant radical separation of sound and visual perception are the core of the Playtime thesis which most vividly played out in the sequence that takes place in a large glass fronted office block. Contemporary life is seen as afflicted with a state of mind in which disassociation/disconnection/discontinuity are the prevalent and sometimes dominating characteristic of urban experience. Disconnections of ends and means: the massive modernist transparent glass structures of corporate capitalism are the places where fateful dark secret decisions are made. These structures are haunted by beings who struggle to remember why they are there and who lapse into discontinuities of being and intention as their purposes languish and are replaced by other needs. Spaces which you expect to be silent, which you think are silent, roar with the sound of the machinery that operates their microclimate. Tourists, deterritorialised gaggles of people wander through the space their agitation and continual motion disassociated from any initial intention, and left only with an occasional reflected glimpse or souvenir of the city they came to visit.

Instead of a plot, Playtime follows lines of intensity in establishing its core proposition and then testing to destruction its logical consequences. The script moves through a number of settings in which various situations are presented seen and allowed to evaporate rather than culminate. The ultimate locus of the movie’s circuit of intensity is the restaurant sequence which is the site of the complete disassociation of food from eating. Tati sees the restaurant is simply theatre where both the diners and the staff perform. The clients go the restaurant not to eat but to be seen, not to be seen eating but to be seen having ‘fun’. Dining becomes a spectacle where the waiters chefs and manager’s take on the ritualised role of priests facilitating and enabling appearances. As the scene intensifies the music, high energy jazz takes over as the driving force of the restaurant; the clients abandon all simulation of dining and as the restaurant’s façade falls apart about them they party hard whilst at the same time behaving as if nothing were happening. Psychic discontinuities proliferate: doormen open doors that don’t exist, people come and go, waiters adjust their clothing and the manager sports a mien of apparent insouciance.

Tati in his films is obviously fascinated by the way in which white middle class women walked in this era. In Mon Oncle and Playtime their walk is frequently centre frame. In the ‘50’s -‘60’s era middle class women were almost uniformly dressed in fairly tight skirts hanging just below the knee and wore shoes with high heels of about 2 inches. I think what attracted Tati’s attention was the biomechanical disassociation between women’s bodies and their clothes. To walk properly, from thigh to toe wasn’t possible for these women; they had to resort to a number of strange mechanical stratagems to pull the walking trick with feminine elegance. This is what Tati sees as strange fascinating and ultimately very funny as an everyday unremarked phenomenon.

In Playtime as in his other movies Tati’s uses the fullness of his frame to compose the organise filmic events. The action is not limited to centre frame but often dynamically dispersed to the edges. The frames are full of action but the action is not passively presented to us but demands that we search the frame in order to see what is happening. Frames become an assemblage of possibilities that Tati had the visual verve and confidence to exploit and manipulate in manner that demands the audience to be active.

In Playtime, Tati strolls though his script, appearing then disappearing in a series of discontinuities, allowing the logic of the energy that the scenario create to carry the film. Nothing he does ever demands the lime light. His presence is always self effacing and minimal, yet like the greatest minimalists, his less is always more. On screen, whilst never exuding dominance, he attracts the eye like an optical magnet. His presence like his films is full of grace.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Tree of Life Terrence Malick (USA 2011) Brad Pitt, Sean Penn; Jessica Chastain

Viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne: 26 Jul7 2011; Ticket price: £3.50

Love as a sort of corporate blancmange (Opaque jelly of corn flour and milk, usually sweetened and flavoured)

At the start and end of Terrence Malick’s (TM) the Tree of Life (ToL) there is an image of shimmering moving filament, brightly llt against a dark background. It reminded me of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, JM Barry’s fable written for children in which his child characters are asked to close their eyes and say: “I believe in fairies!” Mallick’s ‘Tinkerbell’ moments upgrade this banality and pitch a similar message at adults, infantilised adults. ToL tries to persuade through the ponderous manipulation of motion picture imagery, that if we say (breathlessly like they do in the movie): “..the only way to live is love….” all will be well in Tinkerbell-land. aka USA.

I think that TM in many ways has taken on the mantel of Frank Capra. In Capra’s films it is the core American values of decency democracy and civic duty that underpin the actions and belief system of small town man, TM judges that these virtues have failed to sustain the suburbanite in corporate America. What the little man now requires in order to endure is cosmic consciousness. A complete melding with the one that is the universe: love.

The movie, filmed in Smithtown Texas, dramatises the upbringing of two brothers, and plays out the thesis that the male dominated ordering of life in this culture, is a failed project. The culture needs something more feminine more transcendent to balance out and to resolve its tensions and contradictions. The result is that ToL is not a movie rather an advert for the wild and wacky touchy feely new age belief system. An advert based on the old school Madison ploy of the before/ after script set-up. Before the O’Brien family is touched by new age consciousness they are trapped in old Hollywood stereotypes, trapped in linear time; consequently they are not very happy people. Once touched by this New Age stuff they are released into a new Hollywood script where they are free from the bonds and ties of tyrannical linear time, released into an ecstatic non linear everlasting present, where they can smile touch and kiss each other whenever they feel like it. That’s the message: get into new age or be sad and grumpy old men.

Some folk of left field persuasions will object to the naïve simplifications endemic in this message. I found objectionable the banality of the shots used by TM in his advert to demonstrate or suggest the intermeshing of cosmos and spirit. It felt to me like a master thief at work as I watched a series of familiar images drawn from the realms of geophysics ( mantles and volcanoes) biomorphics cosmologies etc, stuff we’ve seen on TV many many times, indiscriminately assembled into montages and juxtaposed with his suburban soap opera material. These pictures of natural processes are accompanied by highly emotive manipulative music (much of it religious and featuring large angelic choirs); and the even more manipulative dramatically whispered voice overs (usually female voice) making sure we associate the image with the product (just in case the music doesn’t make it clear enough). As when Mrs O’Brien whispers of the dead son she has been mourning: “I give him to you ; I give you my son” and we see images of a sand-scape with people dancing in ecstasy.

There is a commonplace observation about film music that whatever music track you lay behind a sequence, it looks OK. TM seems to subscribe to a similar view of film editing: that whatever images and sequences are juxtaposed it will work. On the basis of what I saw in ToL I don’t subscribe to this idea. Most of the radical edits that move the viewer from the drama to the cosmos are crude and despite trying very hard TM comes nowhere near to the making the sort of connection that Kubrick fashioned in his movie 2001 where one brief image montage links all the tools that mankind ever has or ever will use. BY comparison TM’s attempts to create links between different worlds are dull plodding and lack inspiration. A number of people walked out of the movie about an hour in perhaps unimpressed with TM’s attempts to link the everyday with the cosmos.

The version of the 50’s that TM creates in ToL is peculiarly sanitised. There is no TV, no music. No one drinks alcohol; no one smokes. In other respects the era (sets and cozzies) is replicated with the minutest attention to detail. So where is this place? Where has TM set his movie? It’s just a set, like the Truman show, which exists without real context, ( OK Mr O’Brien is located as a power plant manager but this is a gesture) where there is a lack of reality behind what seems real. Where are we? Inside TM’s head? Yes! inside his detached director’s bubble.! And what does he see from within the bubble? The answer beside the TV pictures, is affect images. This is a film of affect, located in the personal- to-the-director which TM externalises as his characters, filmed in a relentless gliding press of close ups that register only their reactive emotive and psychic states. The solutions to these states comes not from a working out from within of their destinies. Rather it comes from without, from the adverts which like soft drinks or beauty products make their promises of redemption. TM’s characters are deterritorialised individuals whom TM wishes to claim for his own blinkered cosmic vision. No drugs allowed just blancmange.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk