Adrin Neatrour

A Separation (Jodaeye Nader az Simir) Ashgar Farhadi (Iran 2011)

Peyman Moaadi; Leila Hatami; Saret Bayat

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 5 July 2011; ticket £7.95

Filmed from within the machine

Opening shots in a film can work in many different ways: to establish a geography, to set a mood and sometimes as is the case with a Separation (aS) to anticipate something about the substantive theme of the movie. A pre-emptive distillation of the thought processes that have moulded the expressive devices set in play.

Ashgar Faradis (AF), writer director of aS opens his film with a shot from the interior glass surface of a photocopier. Identity documents are being copied prior to the divorce hearing of Nader and Simir. We watch from within the closed lid of the machine and see their ID papers brilliantly illuminated for a moment before being caste into darkness and the top opened and another document inserted to replace the one that has been copied. We are in close contact with the process of replication: an imperfect business. AF in choosing to open with this shot, indicates this interior type of space is where his film will work: very personal intimate, close, constrained and focused on process. aS is a film concerned with processes particularly those used by the social machine to replicate itself and how replication both breaks up and breaks down. aS is a film from within the machine. It is a film not about image but about being, not about facts but about states of mind.

The situation – the thesis or proposition – created by AF is that the couple Nader and Simir want to divorce. She has an opportunity to leave Iran (the movie is interestingly vague about this) and wants to take her daughter with her. Nader her husband doesn’t want to go abroad as he says he has to stay to look after his elderly father who has Alzheimer’s. He prefers his daughter to stay with him. Simir and Nader have no wish to divorce other than their incompatible view of the future. Played and grounded in the present the actual, the film is directed towards the future. It is a discourse about what might be: the possible and the putative.

The film’s story develops round a hired woman helper who is paid to look after Nader’s father whilst he is at work. The story, strong as it is, is simply the basis for allegorical laminations that AF lays over the surface of his material. The presenting domestic situation is richly layered with embedded readings that give the situation significance beyond the mechanics of the script. The layers of meaning suggested by AF develop into a satiric moral critique of the Iranian social system in the Islamic republic. The power of AF’s satiric critique lies in the fact that it is not simplistic. The story’s matrix with its religious, social moral, gender and class elements allows AF to portray the complexity of Iranian society and all its uncertainties. But centred on Nader’s old father with Alzheimer’s, the allegorical core of the movie remains solid. The Alzheimer sufferer is reduced to being a body without a brain. As we watch the film and see the mechanisms of power in this society, the thought occurs that this society is also a body without a brain, or a brain that has long ceased to function. As we watch the father in his terrible condition, it is he around whom life, both real and psychic, revolves. He is the centre of the family. There is an interchange between wife and husband:

“He doesn’t know you’re his son.”

“I know he is my father!”

In Iran, no matter how dysfunctional and inadequate the power system may be, no matter how unfit it may be for a technologically based society, the people are in thrall to a brain dead patriarchy that holds onto and controls the relations of power. It is incapable of relinquishing power or hearing seeing and understanding real change in social relations. Power, and its replicants repeat traditional catch phrases and shibboleths to justify and enforce its decisions and to maintain its hold on life. The men are obedience mechanisms in thrall to the belief systems of their fathers. What is significant in the AF’s film is that his moral critique is not one sidedly directed at the men. The women too are implicated in the sustenance of a failed ideology, they too are nervous of change in the public realms. Unable to change, to take responsibility for a different and non-submissive role for women they too become dead. Men and women are in this society together. A heavy dead hand lies over this land.

Gender relations are at central to the film’s concerns, but by no means its only focus. Class plays a pivotal part in the narrative, and AF understands that there are two classes in Iran: the educated predominantly urban strata, and the uneducated rural and urban proletariat. The former committed to change, the latter resistant in part because they believe the current power relations protect them from the middle classes. The implication is that if the forces for change are to prevail they must also understand that they have take responsibility for just relations between the classes.

Although it starts with a situation, a proposition, aS is a film about process. All through the film, in the person of the daughter, Termeh, there is the idea of potentiality. In her presence there is process. There is movement towards the idea the thought, the possibility, of a different relationship between men and women, a different relation between classes people and their society, other than that governed by the strictures of an authoritarian religious tradition. AF recognises the breadth of social relations and incorporates class religion and state institutions into the script, satirising them but also acknowledging that through the mediation of individuals that they can bring something unique and of value to Iranian society. AF’s does not use a one colour palette; he understands and honours complexity, even when working in an allegorical language. As the film develops and deepens in its allegorical play it becomes clear that the central protagonist is Termeh because it is she who will be called on by the future to make choices. In her is potential and through her aS becomes a statement of positive intent.

aS is shot in an explicit stylised manner which gives filmic context to its allegorical form. The camera work creates another lamination laid over the story through which the allegorical heart of the film is transposed onto the visual look of the film. The shots, all hand held, are composed so that a world is created where there is no perspective, no depth of field no field of vision. It is a world of intersecting focused and of out of focus planes. A world which is like a thought experiment in which there are only near sighted people: no one has long vision. Through AF’s camera the world is realised as series of flattened surfaces. A world inhabited and occupied by figures moving at speed through intense domestic or institutional situations against the flattened plane of their existence. aS communicates optically a world of insistent endless agitation in which the business of living life or answering to life squeezes the energy out of people. The camera, the editing indicates that there is no time to stop or to be: there is only time to react to whatever it is a situation demands. The scenes at the family home, the corridors of power the hospital and the court are all filmed as a chaos of movement. In seeing this you understand that just to survive in this city (Tehran) is achievement.

But in as much as the filmic quality creates this world of relentless demands, the structure also allows for the possibility of stopping. In the case of Simir it is clear that, bound up in the contradictions of the culture, that she has stopped and she wants to get out. But to get out is to abrogate responsibility The daughter, witness and observer of the madness of domestic situation also slows down and starts to ask the questions that relate to being not doing. As she questions her father about the madness of the events that have overwhelmed him, you know that something has happened to her. She has stopped and begun to think. She has moved outside the agitation machine become a completely different type of possibility. And the last scene where we wait with her parents for her decision, the film becomes a complete opening up of her potential. For otherwise what would be the point?

Central to aS as an allegorically contextualised satire is the nature and quality of the acting. The acting takes its cue from the situation (s) not from the emotionally charged imputed feelings of individuals in their situations. In aS the actors’ first duty is to their situation in the Brechtian understanding of the demands of drama. The work of the actor is not to indulge emotive charges but to work through process. The intensity of the processes set in play by AF requires a disciplined approach to the material by the actors for the issues in the film to retain their clarity and dignity. Within this paradigm the performances are finely tuned to this end, filled out with situational intensity but not bloated and distorted by emotive overloading of affect.

AF is I think a film maker who in the form and concerns of his work carries forward the particular powerful voice of Iranian film.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Gigante (Giant) Adrian Biniez (Uruguay 2009) Horatio Comandelle; Leonor Svareas

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 9 June ’11; ticket £5

Love conquers all….

Gigante (G) won its director Adrian Biniez (AB) a Silver Bear at the Berlin FF 2009. An award that tends to confirm the abandonment by the German film industry of any semblance of maintaining or taking forward the particular expressive language developed by German film makers. Mainstream German film has embraced Hollywood as its model and exemplar of how to put image onto screen. G is a ‘cute’ film.

The final shot of G says everything about its underlying message. Final shots are sometimes irrelevant to a film’s actual purpose and impact. It’s often the case that final shots are grafted onto the body of a film as a formulaic means of gratifying an externalised power such as government censors, executive producers broadcasters etc. This is not the case with G whose final shot confirms it as a bourgeois apologia that fails to be consistent even in terms of its own script. The eponymous protagonist, G, finally makes contact the woman he has been stalking throughout the film. At the beach he approaches her from behind makes eye contact with her and sits down beside her. Cue: fade up music which comprises a sort of mushy latino pulp rhythm which sees out the shot and is laid over the end credits. But what we know about these two people is that they are both big heavy metal fans. The film’s logic points to a heavy metal soundtrack over the final romantic shot. But the film has sold out to a soft focus romantic closure. Heavy metal at this point might suggest other outcomes and ways in which their relationship might be defined. AB goes for the cute message.

The initial sequences of G establish the protagonist in locations and situations that are familiar yet ‘other’ in their potential. We see the world of the gigantic hypermarket at night with its phalanx of cleaners, bakers, stackers supervisors and security men. A world of the night, a hidden world, veiled from the sight of the consumers who shop there during its opening hours. A night time world with its own values and perspective. Contrasting the world of night is the night worker’s world of day, dominated by daytime TV through which portal streams a culture of undifferentiated babble of image sound and information.

These initial locations and situations are not developed expressively for their innate potential to form or suggest significance. They are simply devices. The Giant’s job is to monitor the screens of the cctv security system. Like Andrea Arnold’s similar protagonist in Red Row, cctv screens, acts of surveillance are just mechanisms exploited to put the plot into drive. In Red Row and Gigante surveillance has no filmic purpose. Unlike Coppola’s Conversation where the act of surveillance probes state of mind and forms a sheaf about the content.

On the evidence of Gigante AB shares Hollywood’s core values in relation to drama: it functions to normalise life and to absorb the other into the mainstream. The typical narrative framework involves a personal overcoming. It is all subjectivity.

AB in making G uses the mechanics of his plot to appropriate the ‘other’ and massage it into the mainstream schema of appearances and affects. The world of the alienated and marginal is neutralised and rendered comfortable. The core of the film is G’s obsessive pursuit of the cleaner, Julia or rather the image of the cleaner, because this story is about image not the actual. The cleaner is an image emptied of meaning, a figure from a poster who might step out of the billboard and walk the streets. Except of course she never loses her mono dimensionality.

G is obsessive not just about the cleaner but also about his fitness regime. A daily sweated work out and the image of a pin up girl: it’s like the guy’s in prison, And in significant ways he is, but Gigante ignores this layer of possibility opting to show that the way out is through a romantic relationship AB’s purpose is not to explore state of mind or context but simply to show that a force called love can transform situations and redeem. The world of alienation and marginality is annexed by Hollywood’s favourite mechanism: falling in love with a one dimensional being. In which state the smitten is endowed with the ability to overcome. It’s a fake proposal from a film that twists the reality it establishes into Hollywood fantasial tale.

Obsession with the image of another can never have a good ending: there is only the possibility of frustration disappointment disenchantment. Psychic investment along such a narrowed channel can only lead to an explosion of some sort, not necessarily externally violent, sometimes internally shattering. Gigante as a film grounded in obsession with image but content to ignore its implications, is a malevolent fabrication, a lie.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Audition Takashi Miike (Jap 2000) Rijo Ishibashi. Eihi Shiina

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 19 May 2011; ticket: £5.00

Cherry Blossom Time

“The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from the epoch’s judgements about itself. The surface-level expressions…provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things.” ( S.Kracauer, the Mass Ornament)

Takashi Miike’s (TM) Audition is a film stylishly but not particularly well made or shot that lacks even internal coherence. But it is remarkable in its unrelenting expression of one controlling idea that gives it shape force and relevance: the abandonment of history. Specifically the abandonment by the Japanese of their cultural legacy.

Item: in his wooing of Asami, Shigeharu dines her in the sort of high class anodyne restaurant that could be located anyplace in the world. As she responds to his personal questions what we are most acutely aware of is not so much her reply rather the crashing sound of the passing traffic outside. The pervasive white noise of the 21st century Japan threatens to drown even personal history.

From the film’s opening sequence in which Shigeharu’s wife dies in hospital hooked up to high technology, through all the establishing domestic and work locations we see a culture that looks and feels Anonymous/First World/American. Shigeharu’s home could be in suburban Boston: the offices, the streets, clothes shoes and food eaten are all replicated American forms. Japan as a culture has been obliterated: Japan is become transposed USA. The scored musical soundtrack is sometimes strange but although there are subtle hints of the pentatonic scale, it is characterised in the main by Western diatonic harmony. There is nothing in main establishing settings in which Audition is located that that even hints at cultural historical or eidetic memory. That is until Asami attends the audition.

In setting up the audition Shigeharu talks to his friend about Japan who comments that all Japan is lonely; Japan comprises only of lonely people. This society exists in aloneness. As Audition develops it seems that this comment probes deeper and beyond reference to the networks of lateral ties that interweave relationships and create couples families and groups. The deeper significance of the comment is that Japanese individuals have become detached from the culture that previously defined them and was part of their identity. They have become people without roots to anchor their individualities into the social matrix. They are lonely because they are incomplete: they have no past, only an eternally renewing present. Loneliness is a psychic state endemic in those without a past, knowledge and belief in which psychically validates both the present and the future. If there is no past who can have belief in the future which flows from the past, a time that itself was once itself the future of a preceding present. Without the past vital interconnections are severed in the social matrix conditioning a persistent and default state of anxiety about identity and neurotic existential loneliness.

Without a past there are no Japanese. There are mutated replicants condemned to live out an eternal present without meaning.

Audition’s idea is given expressive mediation through the opposition of Shigeharu and Asami: the male and the female who stand structurally opposed in their reactions to the dilemma of their deracinated culture.

Shigeharu’s solution to the problem of ’no wife situaion’ (loneliness) is to search for form without content. (a quest also undertaken by Western men and women who look to foreign cultures to find spouses) Shigeharu wants to be a tourist in his own country free to gaze upon images of the other without understanding. For an audience ballet is form without content but for the performer it is form with personal meaning: pain. Shigeharu solution to his loneliness is to create a two dimensional simulacrum of the traditional characteristic cultural traits and to locate a personal reality on this surface as if it had depth. Asami’s ideas are quite different.

Our first impression of Asami from her resume are that she embodies traditional Japanese traits and this impression is confirmed when we see her walk into the audition room as a physical statement of Japanese female ideal. A long white dress suggesting a kimono; immaculate long brushed black hair; submissive presence.

Asami of course does not have the resources to resurrect the culture from which she is cut adrift. She is aware that the surviving elements of her cultural legacy are only forms retained as a phantom acknowledgement of the past but without substance. Asami’s solution to this dilemma is different from Shigeharu’s: she does not want to denigrate the past by resurrecting it in the form of a cheap advertising image.

Asami’s idea is to relocate the past, the legacy of Japan, on and in the body. In actions of desperate psychic resonance she displaces the history of her society onto the body in the form of pain and mutilation. The logic that is at work is psychotic but it has a rationale. The past and images of the past cannot be bought and sold cheaply. There must be protection of these things and Asami is the gatekeeper. If Shigeharu desires contentless simulacrum of the past, it cannot be without a price. It can only be had at personal cost to him. He cannot have Asami and all her image represents except on her terms. He will have to pay with his body and perhaps his life. As he experiences fear pain and mutilation at her hands he will have to understand that his desires are being satisfied but in a manner he did not anticipate. The message from Asami is that these things are not to be played with like toys. They are real forces. Audition is ultimately about something real.

Audition looks like a typical Asian torture porn movie. But as Kracauer observes it is precisely in its surface level expressions that it expresses a deeper and more disturbing vision of contemporary Japan.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

How I ended this Summer Alexsei Popogrebski (2010 Rus) Grigory Dobrygin; Sergei Puskepalis

Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle 2 May 2011 Ticket price £7.70

Chekhov in No Man’s Land

How I ended this summer (HETS) is a film made by Alexei Popograbski (AP) that in its opening sections takes the manner and form of a Chekhov short story. Chekhov’s short stories (and his plays) are structured using the classical unities of time place and character. Chekhov writes with deceptive simplicity often introducing an event to create a dynamic interpolation in the situations and characters he has set up. The event provokes change, sometimes but not always remarked in the state of mind of a character; often this change, described as it takes place is externally imperceptible. An event in a Chekhov short story in induces reflection, both in the character and in the reader. In the Chekhov mode the short story shares some qualities with neo realist cinema in that events often have contrasting readings. Firstly by the characters involved and then as a powerful secondary dynamic is released, readings located only in the mind of the reader. The reader is left to consider those things that are unsaid and those things that may come to pass after Chekhov has closed the story.

HETS, like a Chekhov short story, is initially based on close careful observation of its situations and subjects: a chamber piece, set in an artic meteorological station, for two men and voice. Whilst it stays true to its form as situaTion and character piece it has coherence and tension within the terms of its own structure. But suddenly, AP betrays the intelligence of the set up, abandons reflection and state of mind and opts for the banality of narrative form as a means of rounding off the film. In the characteristic manner of many contemporary film makers AP betrays the traditions of his Russian roots, betrays his own historical cultural forms and allows Hollywood to dictate the style and nature of the second half of the film.

The critical weakness of HETS is that it subverts its own structure, for no gain, by introducing into the body of his film a lengthy chase section that is filled and tricked out with the clichés of this kind of cinema, using ambiguity of camera framing as a device to scare the audience. Initially AP sets in play a number of psychic forces: The old school meteorologist steeped in personal and collective history opposing the young tyro scientist fresh from college and living outside history in the virtual world of computer games.: the static decaying location of the weather station and the archaic radio system that has to be used for communication. These powerful resonant psychic assets are suddenly ditched as the films lurches into another zone: the section of the film where it suddenly deviates from its anchoring in character and situation into a cod horror chase sequence. The flight of the young man from the real or imagined fury of his colleague. The tone of the film changes; the unity of place and character are fractured. HETS becomes Hollywood gothic, with the older guy, as real or imagined pursuer, caste as the bogey man. HETS loses its key in the realm that it first establishes; the psychological interactions between the two guys are replaced by the crudity of the action. Chekhov is ditched by AP’s meaningless transposition of his material into an alien key. A change that leads nowhere in relation to the psycho-social realm that has been previously established. This psychic dead end has to be resolved by a dramaturgic revenge device that is practically meaningless in terms of the dynamics set in play in the establishing sections of the film.

The problem may lie in the calculation of the director that in order to justify the use of film as an expressive form he needed to produce a feature film length product . AP may have felt that without an action sequence HETS natural length would be somewhere about ±60 mins: short story, novella length. AP, to qualify for feature film status, may have felt his script should follow ‘the guidelines’. The rules for feature films taught by all those script writing courses (based on the Hollywood template) that have been peddled round Europe brainwashing people for the last 20 years. AP’s script conforms almost slavishly to the received wisdom of Schrader et al: the liminal phase, the change, the plateau the resolution the new situation. A formulaic product that ultimately is the negation of imagination and creativity in film. Initially the HETS held out the promise of a film of pure creative delight. By the time it had run its course HETS looked like a movie that conforms to the rules.

I was uncertain about the use made of time lapse photography in the film. It is a common feature of many of contemporary films that they contain long shots of landscapes. Where there is an enfolding of the scape into the reflective body of the film, this can work. But often these shots function as little more than travelogue style fill: the pretty sunset shot. Their insertion into films is simply as a time slug to help fill out the material to feature length. In HETS the location and nature of the oppositional characters provides a setting where time and place have meaning located in the relations between the two men and the social vistas that their separate and conjoined experience of life call into play. But the use of time lapse for many of the landscape shots seemed little more than another gimmick. The land – sky -sea scapes were remarkable in themselves and didn’t need tech make-overs to emprint their significance. Did AP use time lapse to try and suggest an analogous grounding for the relationship between the two guys and the passage of time? If so why? I don’t know and HETS slides into an exercise in banality….

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Circle (Dayereh) Jafar Panahi (Iran 2000) Nargess Mamizadeh; Fereshteh Orafely; Maryiam Almooni

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle, 21 April 2011 Ticket price: £5.00

Life in a concentration camp

In retrospect the Circle’s (C) last shot, a long circular pan is an ominous anticipatory journey, a portent of Jafar Panahi’s (JP) own chosen destiny. In the police cell, the camera pans off the disdainful supercilious look of the whore whose arrest we have seen and with whom we have ridden in the paddy wagon. The camera moves across the walls of the room. At first it appears the cell is empty. But as the camera continues its course it reveals the presence in the cell of all the women who have been in the film. Their faces stare out at us. The face of those who have lost the power to direct their own lives; the face of those upon whom the force and logic of power exercised. Faces whom power despises and punishes. A face that JP recognised even then as his own, ten years before he was handed a 6 year sentence of imprisonment for making propaganda against the regime.

I think the extraordinary feature of the Circle is that JP takes complete ownership of his film in the sense that the film allows only for one unequivocal reading of its meaning. As an expressive medium the Circle is shot using long takes in which the camera typically accompanies the women: as they watch as they hide as they flee as they walk as they wait. As the women move through the film JP’s camera is always with them to the extent that they no longer appear as objects of the camera lens. Rather the women are themselves the lens through which we can see the political system that they sustain through their degradation as in the extraordinary penultimate long shot where in a medium close shot we sit with the arrested whore as she is driven to the cells in the police bus. We partake both in her humiliation and her contemptuous response.

The Circle is an uncompromising attack on a country whose present political system bases its actual legitimacy on a systematic suppression of women. A political system that functions by the containment of women within the prison of the male psyche. Claiming a spurious religious provenance, the State has set up a repressive apparatus to encode and enforce the inferior status of women. This comprises a legislative code covering all aspects of their rights and behaviour in the public and private realms with specialised agencies tasked with duties of enforcement.

This system using a major group of a society as a ritual degraded scapegoat has a parallel reference in the use made of the Jews by the Nazis. It is different of course in context and intensity. I’m not saying that there are industrialised death camps in Iran. The points of similarity are in structured legally based and policed segregation. The similarity to which I point is located in the creation of apparatus of subjugation for some social groups. Twisted and distorted power systems can stabilise through demonisation processes. In Iran women are not quite seen as demons; but in their sexuality their emotional volatility their uncleanliness, they are seen always as potentially demonic entities. Women are projected threats to the pureness of the Male: Jews projected threat to the purity of the Aryan. The system at a stroke creates a self fulfilling psychic sense of superiority for the ‘pure group’ which has at the same time a given a stake in the social mechanism of vicious violent repression. This is what we see in the Circle.

With the Circle JP does not pull his punches; he makes no concessions in this respect to the sensibilities of Mahout Ahmedinejad and his psychotic cronies because there is no point: any more than there was any point to pander to sensibilities of Hitler and his henchmen. JP sends a message without compromise: Circle is an indictment of a political system and the cowardly forces mainly male, that sustain it. The system is rotten and criminal. As in Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes Iran operates, in particular by rewarding psychotic violent types of individuals with them secure and profitable employment as part of the apparatus whose purpose is the subjugation a particular social group. And in general Men are rewarded by giving them hegemony over women, giving them a sense of their right to an unalienable superiority.

Circle’s message is bleak and unforgiving of the ‘system’. But the Circle is no polemic because of the extraordinary way in which the film is shot and the complexity of the central metaphor, the circle, which is incorporated both in the narrative strips of action and in its style of the filmic composition. The circle is a female symbol and the narrative strips of action take the viewer from the long opening shot, with its wide parabolic pan, of the birth of a girl to the final cell shot already quoted. We go from the birth of a new being, a new soul within this system, that is immediately damned for being the wrong ’sex’, to death of spirit by crushing and pulping it through the repression apparatus. And yet, in the contemptuous demeanour of the whore as she rides in the bus there is a residual of hope.

The defining shots of the movie are all long, many of them huge circular 360 degree pans. These circular shots are in themselves composed as complete orbits of Iranian society, so that as we move through the circle we can see everything. The busy public agitation and movement of the men; the dead static shrouded nature of the women; the confidence of the male hunters the fear of the hunted women, the bride and the whore existing at different points of the same circle, the freedom of the men the imposition upon women to adhere to multiple legally sanctioned restrictions. We glimpse all of these fashioned into the slow interlocking circular shots, chains woven together that bind the women to the male social order.

Whilst not over stated sexuality lies at the core of the film. Repressive regimes that wish to operate like replicating machines are usually anxious to channel sexuality into approved forms. Sexuality as a strong individual subjective force resists. Such States usually operate dual standard morality based on appearances and disclosed or revealed infractions. Infraction is Ok as long as appearances can be maintained, (plausible deniability being the last line of defence) or if in the case of disclosed or revealed infraction, pleas for mitigation are sustainable. In Iran the woman as ‘ by her nature potential demon’ offers the male who ‘strays’ a solid stand-by excuse: he was corrupted by the insatiable sexual wantonness of womankind. At the same time women denied access to the employment market, or unmarriable perhaps because they are no longer virgins, are forced into marginal prostitution as a source of income. In seeking sex work, because of their marginalisation, they are caught in the double bind: the work towards which they are economically pushed has in this sexually repressed society many employment opportunities; at the same it makes them even more vulnerable to men, confirms their status as demons and legitimises the ideology of this society and its apparatus.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams W. Herzog (2010; Fr. USA) Camera: Peter Zeitlinger

Viewed Tyneside Cinema: 31 March 2011; ticket price £8.50

Did Herzog forget something…?

At first as I watched The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, it seemed to me a TV doc tricked out with 3D wow factor imagery to enable a pedestrian but worthy documentary to be screened theatrically and make some money. As it developed its theme it seemed to do no more than go through the regulation art archaeological genuflections, a routine sweep with music through the Chauvet cave complex with its ice age paintings. Destined to succeed as a cinema release because of its core subject matter, the paintings and because it came stamped with the Herzog imprimatur.

What is difficult to evaluate is the extent to which WH has structured into the Cave of Forgotten Dreams (CFG) a laminate structural parody which overlays WH’s sense of serious intention declared in the film by both his voice and the interviews he conducts with the scientists. To some extent most of his recent work seems to have an element of parody, taking standard filmic structures and then undermining them by use of expressive content that deconstructs the overt claims of the film to be about what it appears to be about. An overlaid parody is a type of fabrication, perpetrated first on the contributors and later on viewers (who may fail to get it). If WH has filmed CFD with a shadow parodic form overlaying its the primary structure, it looks like WH have given himself an intellectual fall back position. This is a stance acceptable where film is made under politically censorious conditions; but it’s a position which under other conditions may betray the lack the moral courage to say what it is that you have seen. Or of course WG may be on the level, and intended to make a film with one consistent level of meaning: the proto-reverential.

In heavily hushed tone, archly emphatic of wondrous nature of the Chauvet site, WH leads us on a tour of this complex. Intercut in the course of the tour, WG talks to scientists whose work is centred on the caves. In fact the caves are only open to the scientists: they alone have access to them, they alone have the key to open the massive steel door that leads inside the cave; they alone have access to the interior of the site which contains the beautiful paintings (and many other fragments and traces of ice age accretions). All who gain entry to this hallowed ground, including WH and his crew, are subject to strict rules governing all aspects of movement and behaviour, the which severely circumscribes the positioning of the cameras.

As the cave’s human and archaeological narrative is hypothetically unpacked by the scientists from the clues they have found, the possibility suggests itself that the cave was a place of Shamanistic ritual. The paintings are all found in the deepest and darkest recesses where no light would have penetrated, A sort of holy of holies, an inner sanctum which few were permitted to enter, where idle gaze was restricted: a place bound up with religious practices whose purpose and meaning is now lost.

And when we consider the present situation at Chauvet, not much has changed. What has happened is that the scientists have become the new priests, the new shamans and voodoo practitioners. As WG’s voice informs us only the scientists have access to this place; only the scientists may gaze upon the wonders of the cave, only the scientists may tread where no other foot may step. The scientists it is who explain and reveal to us the meaning of all this. With their monopolisation of access they alone caste the chicken bones and read significance into the patterns. Like the shamans and priests of old, they control the sources of the readings. Technology is technology: whether magical or scientific. And the success is to a large extent defined by the control of meaning. In CFD, WH’s scientists take on the de facto mantel of a religion. They have their technical apparatus and processes which reveal to them the hidden aspects of matter which legitimises the statements and assertions they make about the nature of what we are seeing, and by extension, our own nature. As we are taken through the CFD the overlaid lamination suggests that nothing structurally has changed here in 32,000 years except belief systems with scientists supplanting shamans. The ‘public’ is excluded by the series of rationales relating to the delicate state of the cave as previously they were perhaps excluded by a series of religious rationales related to profane violation of the mysteries of the sanctum. We are bound in an irony that ice age man and information age man operate parallel systems.

I think that in making CFD, WH is using the film to make the claim for himself to be an artist guide, a sort of light bearer into the cave of the collective human soul. Either that or he is playing the trickster spoof to the hilt. The film has a tone and style of conceited self importance. It is a feature of contemporary Western culture that religion, with its complex psychic technology and it’s interpretation of meaning for man has been superseded by the arts. Scientists may be the technical shamans, but in the West it’s the artist to whom we look to reveal meaning; whose function it is to tell us who we are or who directs our sensual and psychic engagement with the world. Art from being the servant of God, becomes the source in its own right of sustaining self belief, to the extent that some people will tell you that they ‘live’ for art or music etc in a manner in which they seem to believe these forms can be embraced without context or meaning.

In this sense the paintings in the Chauvet complex are presented in the film as a sort of Garden of Eden moment. Not in the sense of the Fall: in this story self awareness replaces sin as the defining moment; artistic activity is presented as being co-existent with a key development of human consciousness. There is perhaps the defining moment at the end of the film, when WH puts a ‘question’ to the wise old scientist: “Were these paintings the beginning of the human soul?” Of course it is a question that cannot have an answer. The scientist takes the bait and replies. His answer is little more than intellectual babble (I found it impossible to understand), but the emotional glow in his response tells it all. He believes in art: he is a believer. He looks for meaning and finds it.

The aura with which the film is shot, the hushed tone of enunciation, the music on the sound track all conspire to create a mood and tone of revelatory importance implied in the moment when ‘art’ was born. In particular the corny use made by WG of the sound of a ‘heart beat’ laid over the paintings was presumably intended to reinforce in the viewer the idea that the paintings were made at the cusp of life’s beginning, the birth of ‘art’ whose beat continues to pump the life blood of meaning through the social body for ‘liberal’ humankind in the 21st century.

There is a strange postscript which takes place in a large structure, containing a tropical environment that is heated by waste water from a nuclear power station. WH uses this short sequence to introduce strains of thought that are typically whimsical. WG films the crocodiles lazily basking in the warm waters, and using the shared time framework with the paintings, asks what the crocodiles might make of the cave? Then zooming in on the mutant albino crocodiles asks the rhetorical question: “Are we today’s crocodiles looking back in time when we see the paintings?” The stupidity of this po voiced question, asked raised the issue for me of WH’s purpose in making the film: one lamination or two? A straight documentary or a spoof? And who cares?

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

La Dolce Vita Frederico Fellini (1960 Italy) Marcello Mastroianni; Anita Ekburg

Viewed: Side Cinema, Newcastle 22 March 11 ticket price: £5.00

retro crit: Mirror Mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all? Sylvio Berlusconi

of course!

Filmed as a series of psychic fragments Fellini’s (FF) film is an oracular vision of the shape of things to come: the transformation of all areas of life into hallucinogenic spectacle with no distinction between the participant and onlooker. Spectacle fed into the amplification circuitry of the media who both feed off and feed into the images they produce. Fellini’s Dolce Vita is an initiation rite into a Western World driven and controlled by ‘image’ whose present dynamic takes the form of Berlusconni as a demonic hybrid apotheosis of the world of politics and media. As I watched Dolce Vita unfold I was awed by FF’s visionary clarity in relation to the convergence in shape and form of the control apparatus.

The opening sequence of the movie is a statement of intent. We see, flying low over Rome, a helicopter with a huge statue of Christ slung by ropes beneath its undercarriage. The apparition causes everyone to look up at this giant airborne caricature. La Dolce Vita (DV) introduces Christ as the clown of the skies, a cosmic Christ for our entertainment and amusement Ladies and Gentlemen…… The flying Christ merges publicity stunt with religion, marrying the two worlds in a spectacle that presages the movies underlying theme.

A thought: where did FF get this statue? It looks like it was made for the movie, for the brave new world of 1960. More interesting where/ how did he get the idea? Perhaps it was something he actually saw or heard about; anyway, ‘as idea’ it perfectly and succinctly predicates what follows.

In DV, FF uses the structurally broken filmic fragments of action as a mirror to catch Marcello’s reflection as he is transformed and bent into shape by the images and social forces that come to define his life. An early fragment of the film sees him, an inveterate womaniser, spend a night trying to seduce and bed the American film star Sylvia (Anita Ekburg who’s a shoo-in for Marilyn Monroe). In the mirror fragment we see clearly that narcissistic narcosis induced by publicity and media attention have totally absorbed this Diva. Marcello discovers (he takes a little time to get it) that Sylvia is not really of the flesh. She has a body, central to her image but an appendage to her life. She may seem present in the flesh but actually she lives inside an endlessly projected movie of herself.. She isn’t really present; sex with her can only be a two dimensional movie. Sylvia is machine for absorbing fantasy and projecting desire onto the white walls of life. For people like Sylvia life doesn’t flow; rather it takes the form of a sort of eternal recurrence: the same people sets and situations repeated time and time again. This recurrence is only broken by the momentary irruption within Sylvia of fleeting impulses that are for an instant totally insistent, but immediately fade. Time in her life doesn’t flow rather it is compressed into a crystallised everlasting and overwhelming present, bolted like the image of the flying Christ, to an unchanging image of herself.

Marcello has the chance to avoid being trapped in the recurring movie of his projection as an image in two dimensional photogenic space. He has a chance to chose to live through time as he is pulled by his girl friend to accept her love to share her carnality. But each glimpse in the DV mirror fragments shows him drawn further into the spectacle by the fascination of himself as an operating image. Through the shattered fragments of time Marcello develops the idea of himself as an increasingly self referential and narcissistic object. An increasingly emptied out self, refined through the rectifying forces of the media, into a being of pure surface. A centre of attraction and repulsion in the endless parade that he joins to replace the tedium of life.

The music as in all FF’s films complements in form the content of DV. It’s surging rich gorgeous encompassing. Parade music that is intended like the Pied Piper’s flute, to draw in everyone who hears it, to disarm resistance and allows the children to completely abandon themselves to the show. The music is an amalgam of mood feeling and thought swamping and bypassing the human mental faculties as FF fills out DV with sequences of extraordinary fluid shots that capture small and large crowd situations and scenes.

DV opens up worlds as spectacles that absorb, disarm and finally infiltrate the individual. The world of religion filmed as a hysterical fusion of media frenzy and religious hysteria. Catholicism experienced as a testing ground for experiments that would later be internalised and finally replicated by the profane secular order. Marcello cannot see the hilarious farcical religious and media circus caused by two young children claiming to have seen the Virgin. He is absorbed by it, and excited by the prospect of living and working outside time. He breaks (or rather the mirror fragments suggest that he does, for there is no convention of continuity in DV) with his girlfriend and joins the parade of partying which is the gateway to a sort of immortality. The movers and shakers the money and the power exist in a never ending spectacular that engulfs life and pulls everything along with it in a frenzied dance lived out in image and gesture, a saturated narcissism that ends in death. But of course death does not stop the show.

The final sequence on the beach shows the party goers descend onto the beach to gaze at the lifeless form of a huge dead fish. A young innocent girl, introduced earlier in the film as working in the beach café also looks on. Both exist outside the spectacle,

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Journal d’un curé de campagne R. Bresson (1951; Fr) Claude Laydu

Seen at Film Forum NYC Ticket price .50

Film blanc: grace as a circuit of amplification

At the end of Bresson’s film the witness to the curé’s death reports that just before he died the curé clasped the hand of the witness and cried out “ What does it matter? All is grace.” An utterance that brings Journal d’un curé de campagne (Journal) to a close and suggests a vision of the union of body and soul. If you have been ‘in’ the movie it is shattering moment, a striking moment that demands an attempt to understand the forces set in play by the movie and what they might mean. It requires thought. This is difficult.

Here are some thoughts.

In its primary structure Journal is based on the strong oppositional paradox of body and spirit. Much of the curé’s writing (though not all) concerns his sick body. The physical condition of the body is mediated through his thought. In contrast the appearance of the cure’s body in particular his face, shines out with the intensity of his spirit: face photographed so that he radiates a white burnt-in intensity. The inner state of the cure is mediated through his body. The mediated through thought. It is this oppositional structure that drives the film and makes it difficult to approach intellectually. It is understandable intuitively. At the end with his final statement of reconciliation in relation to ‘grace’ I was left speechless, trying to order the turmoil of my thoughts.

Viewed from this scratch end of the 21st century ‘Journal’ is an alien world, a filmscape without Desire. In today’s filmscapes such a thing is rare almost inconceivable.

In relation to Desire, the curé seems to me to be a sort of ‘priest clown’. In the same way that the clown’s whitened face glows out in the circus spotlight, so the lighting set ups give the curé a similar allure. The nature of the clown that is pertinent to the identity of the curé is his primal innocence. The core quality of the clown’s innocence is lack of Desire a want of extrinsic motivation in relation to others. The clown doesn’t manipulate, or scheme or preach. All the cloen does is show what he is, reveal his identity and accept his destiny. The clown is pure being. As we see the curé move through the world we realise that his destiny is not linked to systems of belief or social apparatus: his destiny like that of the true clown belongs to himself. Only he can find and accept what is to come. If others are touched transformed or made to laugh along the way, then so be it. But that was never the point. I think this is different from fatalism; destiny has to be consciously embraced.

The opening shot of ‘Journal’ shows the newly appointed priest of Ambricourt starting his diary and declaring in voice over, his intention of keeping a record of his thoughts as he goes about his work. A daily confessional. The filmic form Bresson adopts for the ‘Journal’ the world as if in a pure optical or sound situation: the images and sounds exist almost as separate entities mirroring the body spirit opposition which is embedded in the structure of the film.

‘Journal’ is a film about what cannot be seen. Bresson shows the physical context of the film: the village, locations events and situations. Everything else has to be surmised, the significant movements take place in another realm: the trials of the body the workings of the spirit. We have some access to the unseen through the curé’s diary: his struggle with his failing body, his doubt and lack of worth. But the curé’s reading of his diary is in many ways oblique; or where it is clear leaves open the issue of interpretation and of integration of what has been said with what has been seen. ‘Journal’ is full of sounds, the indicators of worlds that lie just beyond what is visible: hunters, dogs, gardeners, who announce their presence. Grace and spirit haunt the screen in the image of the priest, their unseen presence felt but often met with spite. Everywhere in Journal the curé meets with fences gates and doors, people who avert their eyes, symbolic obstacles that seem to resist his presence, his showing of himself. The cure is unlike the other country priests whose role is to gently police the community, demand conformity to dogma but practice and preach a relatively uncensorious forgiving faith and bless the people with reassuring homilies. The cure is an intense experience: given to prayer, initially torn by doubt and racked by illness, finally, at death, overwhelmed by inner psychic certainty.

Journal is not about systems. It is about the destiny of an individual who is filled with a force that overflows out of him. This force within the curé does not emanate either from the Catholic Church or its teaching. The Church may have provided an expressive form for some of the curé’s outer psychic emanations; but the power that drove him came from a deeper inner light. That Bresson’s subject is a catholic curé is an accidental: he might be a protestant pastor or even a heroic soviet proselytizer.

I think that what streams forth from curé’s presence is an inner intensity that is powered by his connection to an immanent absolute purity. This he calls ‘God’. There are other names. Whether he is wrestling with doubt about his connection to the Absolute or in union with it, the effect is to distance him from other mortals except those in a similar extreme though perhaps temporary state of receptivity, such as the Contessa..

The dialogue between the curé and the Countess focusing on her hatred for God is central to the film’s moral core. Her final acceptance of the death of her son followed by her sudden death are Bresson’s statement of a moral imperative, and perhaps one of the reasons he chose to film Bernanos’ novel . There are no cheap solutions to the problem of our separation from the absolute. In principle, no miracles. What is of the earth will not save us, it will probably mock us. The world of the flesh and the spirit, the world of hate and love, are separate spheres each operating according to their own light, their own logic. The two worlds never meet in the outcome of events. Where they do meet it is through the medium of the individual who at the point of contact experiences a shattering of individuality which never leaves them even when the experience is subject to the processes of doubt and questioning.

Journal was shot by French cinematographer LH Burel. Burel was Gance’s cinematographer on Napoleon (1929) and went on to work with Bresson on another three films. Burel films the image of the curé so that his face appears almost transfigured, his face burns out an intense inner light. Yet although Burel must have used an assortment of filters and high key lighting set-ups, the film seems to have few strong shadows. Visually the film is shot using the lighting set ups to create light as an affirmation of being, and to avoid the caste of shadow with their metaphorical symbolism of encroaching darkness. A symbolism that is traditional high key lighting genres such as film noir. But this is film blanc.

adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

We Need to Talk about Kevin Lynne Ramsey (2011; UK) Tilda Swinton
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 25 Oct 2011; Ticket: £7.95

Kevin seems like a Christmas tree. Instead of being decorated with baubles and lights, he is festooned with the markers of his otherness.

In Lynne Ramsay’s (LR) film We Need to Talk about Kevin (NTK) the past isn’t so much a foreign country as a place we visit by using Eva’s press button text message service. I think the manner in which the past is accessed by Eva indicates that NTK uses time, in the form of the flashback, as a purely mechanical device triggered by image and gesture. LR focuses on the mechanics of the recollection image. The sentient organic field of meaning, and the search for meaning is not probed. The situation, the otherness of Kevin who is characterized as a Daemon, is presented through the eye of the director and Tilda Swinton as something that has to be coped with: not as something which has to be understood. LR’s flashback structure is designed to be exempletive of the difficulty Kevin presents to Eva but it’s too crude to engage with strata of ideas and possibilities that lie under the surface of the situation. By the end of the film its mechanicality exerts a deadening effect on consciousness. Closed off and characterized by its temporal mechanism. NTK has nowhere to go. In evading the realm of understanding LR has little to say about the situation it brings to the viewer’s attention except the banality that is is hard being Kevin’s mum. Nothing is revealed.

Kevin is conceived as a Daemon a soul born with ‘destiny’. Born to be a mass murderer. Born to have a mechanical path through life. There are hints that Eva is knowledgeable about Eastern religions (the early sequence that looks like it might be a Hindu ceremony) but the film is oblique about this as a context as it is about everything else governing the film’s placement in time and space. As NTK doesn’t engage with Eva at the level of understanding, which is an organic process, she is reduced to a series of affect images, looks that the viewer is expected to read that point to her distressed state. The affect images are presented both as expositions and explanations of her mechanical trauma.

The temporal relations in the film, its flash back structure, are used to manipulate rather than to open out the time space of the situation. The film flicks back and forth like demented text messages between Eva’s post massacre situation and the times before Kevin’s rampage. These time flicks are mediated by the affect images of Eva, ‘her look’, as some event or action engages her recollection images of: Kevin’s birth, his childhood and his adolescence.

As the movie develops the mechanicality of this recollection device becomes evident; the predictability of the connection produces diminishing returns. It becomes apparent that Eva is a memory machine. Eva sees something hears something – looks: cut to – Kevin’s birth – Kevin learning – Kevin something or other. The film is overdetermined in its structure, unable to negotiate Eva’s state of mind as part of the film’s structure. The audience are relegated to the status of one who gazes rather than one who sees. If this was a typical Hollywood action movie, fine, it’d be appropriate to the ambitions of the genre. In a film with NTK subject matter, it’s disappointing that LR betrays and throws out the European line of filmic sensibility for a crassly Hollywood solution to the problem of what film to make. It feels like a sell out to the money, another calling card movie.

This Hollywood style of film making through image manipulation deadens the film’s energy which LR trys to revive with a groovey sound track. The viewer engaged only in gaze, is treated by LR as a passive agent to be toyed with in the classic action movie manner: exploitation of the edit point. Cutting back and forth through time in the editing, works in NTK as means to catch the viewer off guard. LR’s uses the flashback edit points as shock devices to short circuit the audience’s critical faculties. The incoming edit is often fashioned to disturb, to have immediate visual or sound impact. LR presses a button, audience get a shocking image. The reaction triggered in the audience is: “Woah this is weird!” rather than “What is happening in this situation?”

Lack of any contexts is a logical consequence of need to keep the material contained and controlled. NTK which exploits temporal relations to suppress wider timeline context (in this respect similar to Malick’s Tree of Life) . Temporal context is not important for films that engage with the forces of interiority. But in NTK there are only exteriorities. Experiencing only filmic temporal self referencing in NTK’s actions and images, the viewer is left hanging aimlessly in time unable to relate the fictive events on the screen to other contexts. Are we before or after 9/11, before or after Colombine? NTK takes place in a carefully contrived time vacuum, a bubble world where the filmic design carefully expunges the actual world.

With the exception of the suburban setting and the implied values of the American home, LR barely develops the social and cultural matrices which contain the events. The massacre is an event not just without a chronology but also without a social context. The school the community his father’s job have no place in the film. Kevin and Eva are deterritorialised characters, without interiority or exteriorities, persona onto whom anything can be hung. Kevin seems like a Christmas tree. Instead of being decorated with baubles and lights, he is festooned with the markers of his otherness.

There are a number of films, where ‘WEIRD’ in itself is central to the movie as a conceptual device. NTK is replete with ‘the weird’: fingernails, gloopy sandwiches, little balls of matter. In some American films (there is almost what one might call a WHIRD genre) weird plays a pivotal cognitive role as a signifier of the discontinuous incongruous relation between individuals and their culture, between the conformist culture and the outsider. Image driven food. personal habits, odd remarks made, all serve to give off signs in their own right. of an individuals fundamental psychic disengagement and detachment from the core. In NTK ‘the weird’ in particular weidness food, plays a key role as a signifier that there is something visibly disconcerting about Kevin. The problem is that Weird is a signifier without significance. Kevin is treated in the film a bit like a Christmas tree. Instead of being decorated with baubles and lights, he is festooned with the markers of his otherness.

In comparison with Gus Van Sant’s 2003 movie Elephant, also about a high school massacre, NTK’s seems conceptually and structurally impoverished. Elephant taking its cue from the Columbine killings set up a psychogeography of space, a situational analysis of the event. The film characterized by long takes in the physical environment of the school, used the filmic possibilities of the camera rather than scripted dialogue to contrive a parallel resemblance between the design of the school and the design of video games. The school had many of the special characteristics of a video game: long corridors, 90 degree turns, series of rooms and spaces that were all the same. The killing sequence was carried through with the same detached quality that players bring to the video game, dispassionate killing in order to score. Elephant builds up slowly and inexorably, makes the situation visible to the audience, allowing them to see. In contract NTK is characterized by a heavy handed determination which shows us little and leads us nowhere.
adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Black Swan Darren Aronofski (USA 2010) Natalie Portman

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 1st Feb 2011; ticket: £7.85

Adrin Neatrour writes: the view from inside the bedroom

The cinema was full, ok it was the small screening theatre, but full of 18 to 23 year old women. This was their movie and anticipation was palpable. I wondered what had they come to see?

They had come to see Desire.

The triumph of Desire

Fixated on the close up of the face (mask?) as the key index shot, Aronofski’s (DA) movie Black Swan (BS) takes its form from Madison Avenue’s key understanding about how to sell: adverts link personal success to product. Aronofski’s film replicates (BS can also be seen as parody) the key elements of this advertising form in Nina’s (Natalie Portman) quest for success and perfection in her journey from home via the subway to work. As in soap opera these spaces are linked through the face which is realised as an expressive mask. This mask is the medium, an emoting plastic object through which the audience participates in the movements and cross currents of desire. We see Nina’s face travel not just through space, from home subway work, but also through a series of trials by ordeal as her desire is tested in a series of inner conflicts before her final assertive triumph.

In the Madision Avenue version, the use of the right product leads to the object of desire: success. We follow the face of an actress (or actor – but women’s hair is a particularly strong visual fetish of success) as she is transformed from being unremarked to being remarked: some attribute of the body attains an expressive public perfection, allowing self to attain completion.

DA takes the advertising premise of an outer transformation leading to success and inverts it. Success comes through a series of symbolic inner ordeals ( many of them fashionable) which create a psychic justification for the narcissism which is the pivot of flaunted contemporary lifestyles. The self centred world is validated on its own terms.

Nina the protagonist the Black Swan, instead of having something simple like a zit cream to thank, is symbolically loaded with an incoherent jumbly rattle bag of psychic states which somehow (thanks to the wondrous filmic possibilities of shot juxtaposition and editing) simultaneously inhibit, amplify and contribute to the final perfection of her Desire. Borrowing heavily from better film makers such as Polanski Powell Russell, using the visual tricks and clichés from schlock horror school of filmmaking, DA symbolically attaches to Nina every intra personal affliction in the book. The Vampire mum, hallucinations triggered by predictable objects (mirrors!) and situations, altered physical states, paranoia, self mutilation, cutting, bulimia, anorexia and a few more I shouldn’t wonder. Heavy handed editing and shameless homage ( lets be kind) make anything possible as DA loads these ‘states’ onto Nina as casually as Dietrich drops a hint.

These tribulations do not deflect or inhibit the Desire. They are part of the truth of the desire because the Desire only has internal referents. There are no external referents in the movie. It takes place in the solipsist world of the adolescent girl’s bedroom. Ballet functions as a site of the projection, a useful one because of the costumes, the haircuts, the masks etc which generate image, but the site of projection might be any world: sport, music biz, fashion, opera etc. The backdrop’ selected is just a site onto which project the fantasies reflected back from the bedroom mirror.

As intimated BS is crudely shot mostly shot reverse shot and acted out as a soap experience. This is no more than was either necessary or demanded as we are watching a crude narcissistic fantasy, different in content but not in form from run of the mill pornography. The desire reflected in the mirror of solipsism is the desire of the crippled mind to retain it’s crippled nature, secluded in its crippled world and yet able somehow to achieve the dream. The desire that the bedroom door never be opened, that the world outside the door not exist yet everything outside the door be possible.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk