Adrin Neatrour

Blood on the Moon Robert Wise (USA 1948) Robert Mitcham; Barbara Bel Geddes

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 13 01 2011; Ticket price £4

Never got why this movie is titled Blood on the Moon? Either a silly title or perhaps some obscure menstrual metaphor is implied.

Blood on the Moon (BM) opens with a series of shots of Robert Mitcham (RM) making his way across a ridge in a downpour of rain, an atmospherically pre-emptive opening that anticipates the dark opening sequences which set the scene for a series of complex plot developments.

It’s a long time since I’ve watched a Western, and Blood on the Moon delivered with varying degrees of success, some typical attributes associated with the genre: the lone gunman, the encompassing role of nature; and typical oppositions: different social groupings and gender. Under Robert Wise’s (RW) direction BM handled some of these elements better than others.

The structural core of BM is the performance of RM as ‘gun for hire’. Unlike the toilers of the land, the hired status gives him the freedom to move on and to make his own judgments and RM’s laconic presence and babyface ultimately hold the uneven scenario together. RM’s performance as Jim Garry is detached and amused, cool, like gumshoes in Chandler and Cheyney stories. No matter what is going on, or who is employing him, the Man for Hire imposes his style on situations; he sees what is happening and in action plays out his moral code. In movies characterised by fast moving action scripts, the affect image of the gun for hire/gumshoe face is unchanging: the constant source of reference. No expression of emotion; only the expression of ‘a knowing’. Whoever supplies him with an excuse or explanation or account, whatever the outcome of action or information, the world view of the man for hire remains the same: tired cynical but knowing, prepared to do what is necessary by the light of the code. For this reason we keep coming back to the face: the referent. In BM, RM’s small baby face is an expressive medium that we can read and against which we can measure our own reactions to what has happened. In Hollywood movies featuring the detached male the face is the constant: Mitcham’s, Wayne’s. Bogart’s. The scenario, the backgrounds, the characters may change at ferocious pace but that look the look of wry detached amusement becomes our talisman the movie incubus that directs our perception: some one knows what is happening and can do something about it. The detachment and coolness expressing the code, assure us that it is power without arrogance; power that will not by its nature be abused. RM’s performance in BM is a low key deterritorialised statement of power in a complex world where we are often powerless to act. it ispart of a cinema of benign vicarious resolutions.

BM is noted for its high key noir cinematography. It’s a filming style that certainly characterises the opening half of the movie and that works to create a mood of prevailing conspiracy. Whilst the ‘noir’ sequences are establishing a psychological atmosphere in the town, they stand in opposition to the exterior establishing shots. It has to be said that in BM these are a little formulaic often comprising stock shots of Monument Valley. Still they establish the idea of another world, of nature, of land as a domain that is a force in its own right. Even if that force is never actualised in the movie. In gumshoe movies, shots of the city are often effectively used to establish a suggestive context for the action. shots of the city by night depicting a chaotic multitude of lights automobiles and people. These kinds of city shots provide context for complex narrative and even suggest an evaluative framework that story can be seen against the idea that it is part of this slippery shifting ever changing world. The background, the natural shots in Westerns serve a similar function but have a different meaning. The encompassing sky, the great stacks of Monument valley dwarf the affairs of men setting man and his machinations against the passing of aeons. They also remind that whereas man can take on man it is quite another matter to take on nature, as in the end she always endures whilst we pass away.

The point at which BM starts to lose tension is where the romantic interest starts to irrupt into the structure of the film, changing the opposition on which the movie pivots about from the good evil axis to a male female axis. The good evil axis continues but is severely handicapped by the romantic angle. In BM, RW never integrates these two defining psychic forces. It is as if there are from a given point in BM two different scenarios at work.

The best gumshoe movies integrate the good evil and male female axes by merging the oppositions so that the male female axis was also opposed on the good evil axis, thereby sustaining tensions. The best Westerns probably don’t introduce a male female axis, preferring to rely on the tensions of good and evil in the context of nature.

Many Westerns though do introduce male female romantic notion; it usually leads to a downbeat reduction in dramatic tension. The reason for this is the usual (there are exceptions) casting of the female ‘role’ as a suburban housewife. In Westerns the female role often has to epitomise the mission of civilise the male. The men and the women come from different worlds: the male from the world of primal action set against the natural order; the female from the interior world of the Readers Digest. Producers and directors obviously had difficulty with the real women of the West. They were probably often too similar to the men. What was needed for the film industry, at a basic ideological level, was womankind who embodied the idealised values of America that were not found in the men. Individuality had to be opposed by family values, directness by respect for feelings, risk taking by carefulness, action by leisure (church). The core here is family values. Hollywood post Hay was highly committed to establishing the family as the key pillar of American society and values. The tendency was to build the family into nearly all productions, in particular those story lines located in primary male worlds, as an ideological statement of intent. BM is an obvious example of this ideology at work, and the crude way the female role is built into the movie gradually undermines it until at the end all its tensions have collapsed into pottage of romantic sentimentality, about which not even RM’s glassy eyed demeanour can do anything.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Catfish Henry Joost Ariel Schulman (USA 2010) Janiv Schulman

Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle; 19 Dec 2010; Ticket: £7.50

city slickers or reel seekers…

Catfish (C ) presents itself as being an exercise in actual film making. A documentary embedded in the process of uncovering a situation and shot as events and reactions to events that were filmed, unfold. It looked and felt more like a retro construct (you take an underwater camera on a doc shoot?) in which directors Joost and Schulman (JS) were able to bring coherence and a certain moral conviction to their material as part of a filmic act of containment.

Moral debate lies at the core of C as a project. The directors, JS and subject Niv, who is S’s brother, are anxious to present their film not as an exploitation flick of a sad woman in a sad situation, but rather as a commentary on the problematic nature of evaluating claims made to identity in contemporary web based personal communications. They also want to anticipate objections to the movie on the basis of exploitation of its naïve subject, Angela by claiming that Angela as the naïve subject was the better, in a psychological and moral sense, for having her web based fabrication exposed and that she would benefit from the recognition she gained for her paintings through their exposure in C.

In documentary film making there is the moral issue of process which of course often relates to the moral issues of content. At the core of any documentary film is the issue as to what is going on here? Dramas based on fiction don’t usually have the issue of process as problematic: what is happening is the realisation of a scripted doing by actors. The process of filming documentaries raises fundamental issues as to whether what the viewer experiences are scripted or unscripted doings; and the extent to which the film makers allow these layers and laminations of film to be visible. A documentary of course may be scripted in the sense that there is a coherent schedule of events the director plans to record: interviews and action. The nature of the interviews and actions as responses may be highly predictable as is often evident from docs. But predictability of content is different from content being scripted by the film maker. The use of scripted interview responses acted out as if spontaneous and faked footage presented as actual, breeches the tacit pact of trust between film maker and viewer, that each shares the same understanding as to what is happening. In docs where the filmed material is in some way faked or scripted but not transparent as such, the viewer misframes the material, and is contained in this misconstruing by the film maker(s). The viewer is placed in a situation where they may think one thing is happening, when in fact something entirely different is going on.

In documentary films there are often blurred lines in recorded interviews and action that make the question as to whether the index material breeches endemic trust, difficult to assess. This appraisal is made more problematic by biases and fabrications that can be perpetrated at the editing stage, in which mistakes, failures, anomalous statements, judgements and opinions contrary to the approved line, can all be cut from the film to present a homogenous ideologically succinct product that misrepresents the world that it claims to depict. Again where this type of presentation is systematically effected, the audience is contained: what is actually taking place is containment.

C claims to be a film process recorded sequentially by the filmmakers, in which they uncover a series of fabricated claims sourced from the pages of Facebook. The story starts with Niv receiving an attached painting that is claimed to be the work of a young child called Abby. The film follows up clues and leads, about the child and her family through detective work on the Web and Facebook until the story unravels as a series of false claims in relation to identity made by a middle aged woman called Angela. Angela is married to a man who has two severely disabled older sons from a previous relationship and she spends much of her time caring for them and yearning to escape.

The uncovering process which is the core of the film’s structure and its basis for making a moral claim upon its audience as a true record, looks on close analysis to be a retro-construct. A construct about which we are given no information as C is presented as being actual when, some parts are not. Documentaries used to label scenes that were filmed retrospectively to provide the viewer with an image of events that had taken place as: reconstruction of actual event. This allowed the audience to interpret what it saw correctly to trust the material in that they were not being contained by fabrications of the makers.

JS in making C seem to have followed the adage never to allow truth to ruin a great story. Or perhaps they opt for belief in a post modernist philosophical mantra that all reality is a construct and their only duty is to plurality of the construct. But I think that this understanding of truth as being many sided and of multiple perspective conveniently omits the situation of the viewer who is contained by the one perspective of the film.

JS in making C decided to present as a continuous process a whole series of what appear to be different inputs: rehearsed events, scripted events, re-enacted events and perhaps spontaneous actual events, with no way of discriminating between these different kinds of material. The film in effect collapses material of different ontological status and presents them as a seamless stream of actuality filming.

The area in which the film is vulnerable to questioning is the degree to which it documents a bunch of young media savvy city slickers manipulating simple unsophisticated people in sad situations for the sake of making their mark with a movie. The suspicion is that by adroitly mixing their material from different sources they were the better able to control readings made by the audience as to what was happening. Source material of different but undisclosed status together with control of the editing process, gave the film makers maximum leverage in the film to present themselves sympathetically and to minimise chances of their film being read as a piece of cynical opportunism. The film could be read sympathetically as a fable of the media age – which is the way most reviewers covered C – rather than as a cautionary take on city slick film making.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Monsters Gareth Edwards (2010; UK) Scoot McNairy; Whitney Able

Viewed: 5 Dec 2010 Tyneside Cinema; ticket price £7.50

Octopussies assoap opera

Monsters( M) is billed as a horror movie, tagged as made on a low budget, tagged as an allegorical commentary on American paranoia, tagged as the creative output of the director Gareth Edwards (GE) who as well as directing, wrote, did camera and CGI work.

The overall result is a badly written, badly acted, badly directed and shot movie, lacking in tension and intensity, a movie that has found favour with the usual British reviewers who lap up any UK film with a low budget price tag.

I found myself thinking about other low budget horror movies: Blair Witch Project and Dan Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Blair Witch although ultimately one dimensional had a grunge stylised look that gave it a verve that almost carried the day. It also took care to keep the camera as an edgy ambiguous recorder with shifting perspective, and, not to allow the viewer to see the scary things: glimpses perhaps but no more. ‘Invasion’ is a triumph of it’s ‘noir style’ camera work and central plot idea, in which we see ‘the aliens’ all the time but they are indistinguishable from humans, which makes you think. Also ‘Invasion’s’ multi layered dimensionality relating to human I.D. and its effortless allegoric referencing of US society, produces a powerful schizo-political statement, that still has resonance.

M’s film style is reminiscent of low budget soap operas. Filmically GE’s camera does no more than frame its objects adequately. It makes no use of camera frame to suggest different perspectives or as an entity introducing an edgy point of view. This is box brownie stuff not cinematography. M’s look is HD soap: a hard edged look lacking luminescence, presenting a flat ‘you see what you get’ image.

The sets and settings are dominated by a small palette of ideas that through overuse ultimately lack conviction. Big signage is the principle means used to give us information about the locations, Everywhere large public notices have been slapped into place relating to the INFECTED ZONE. There is nothing wrong in itself with this dressing, except that repeated use throughout the film, calls attention to them as an increasingly desperate device.

The signage is the main source of coherent information during the film which sets up its backstory with a couple prefatory intertitle cards. Besides the signage M has two other conduits of visual information: the ruined blasted buildings and the omnipresence of military hardware that frets throughout the film: planes, tanks ‘copters either zipping through the settings, or zapped dead hulks part of the conflict torn warscape. The problem is that these affects function as signs without signification. Neither the weapons nor the military paraphernalia mean anything. They present as affect without purpose; likewise the warscapes of shattered and ruined structures. They don’t signify at any level. They have neither an absurdist reading nor purposive meaning. They are banal locations, empty sets, characterised by formulaic apocalyptic imagery and the desire to convey, in a kind of visual shorthand, an atmosphere of apocalyptic conflict.

The ‘monsters’ element of M, is increasingly relegated to being an incoherent background story against which the main event, the love story between Sam (fiancee’d heiress and she of the mysterious injured hand) and Calder (photo journalist) plays out. All that can be said about this romantic narrative core is that it is laboured and uninspired in its development. The acting is pure ‘played out preppy style’ soap, lacking filmic sensibility. The terrible acting is handicapped by leaden dialogue that leads the two characters by the nose. In particular the scene where the two protagonists barter for a ferry ticket is memorably bad, as are Calder’s little lecture to Sam about dolphins, a telegraphed message that Calder is really an OK type of guy.

Unless a film is pure SFX, putting monsters on screen is difficult to realise effectively. M is a case in point, where the appearance of the Monsters falls far short of anything we might imagine. When seen in the film, they look just like many other movie creations: big octopussies full of tentacles. GE lets them loose in the film with full Jurassic Park sound effects, just as image (except in the final section they have no other role in M other than as image). As image simple, they generate neither intensity nor tension. They are nothing more than a necessary gesture used by GE to complete his film. In the final sequence, set at an abandoned gas station (every cliché in the book in this movie) we watch with the protagonists as two of the Monsters have a Brando moment and light up each other with fairy lights. In the context of the movie, the performance seems nothing more than GE’s genuflection to political correctness, suggesting that Monsters have feelings too! Or perhaps setting up a sequel told from the monsters point of view.

There have been a number of movies, sort of installations, built on the idea of movement through an apocalypse scenario: blasted landscapes blasted dangerous people. In this ‘apocalypse’ genre either pure incoherence of affect has to totally characterise the scenario, or the film has to take on some signifier built into quest orthe relations in which the final days setting also has to have meaning. Incoherence in itself does not equate with apocalypse as GE seems to think.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

I know where I’m going Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger (UK1945) Wendy Hiller, Roger Liversey

Viewed: Side Cinema ( Newcastle) 30 Dec 10; ticket price £5.00

What’s a nice middle class girl like you doing being absorbed into myth…?

Pressburger and Powell’s (PnP) film can be read at many levels, but, ‘I know where I‘m going’ (IKWIG) creates a filmic rite de passage for its protagonist Joan whereby she moves from a world ruled by individualistic desires into a mythic realm governed by necessity. PnP’s scenario guides Joan’s movement between these worlds, negotiating her progress with gentle wit. They also demonstrate their understanding of the self sufficient role of the female psyche which is never patronised degraded or sold short to assuage male pride, but allowed to develop through its own mistakes and recognition of its own power to transform itself

The thought occurs that in writing their script, PnP will have been conscious of a certain analogous parallel path between Joan’s career and that of Britain at war with Germany. To survive and win the war Britain had had to disinvest itself of its self serving individualistic class obsessed apparel and take on the mantel of myth. Investiture in mythic identity permitted the political forging of a unified national spirit necessary for victory. This mythic cloth was woven by many hands and interest groups. PnP as film makers and propagandists were actively involved in the process, fashioning films out of the historical rattle bag British institutions literature and music, the equally valued diverse nationalistic identities of the Union, and of course the idea and core value of ‘decency’ ( a loose conceptual shorthand for tolerance and democracy). But this level of allusion is marginal to understanding and enjoying the material PnP brought together to fashion material for their film.

IKWIG delivers something of a running cosmic joke, the mythic bride who tries but fails to get to the church for her wedding. A wedding that never takes place. Powell certainly seems obsessed with the Bluebeard story. Both Red Shoes and Peeping Tom play on the idea of the betrothed lured to the castle of male fear, not for her wedding but as blood sacrifice.

Joan’s personal enterprise is to move up the social scale, from middle class, to upper middle class, through marriage. She is successful as her wealthy boss, old enough to be her father, proposes to her and asks her to travel to Killoran a remote Scottish island where he has taken up residence. But the Gods conspire against this arrangement. The elements, forces of nature, prevent the little ferry that carries people over to Killoran from sailing. First fog then storm delay her passage. As she waits she is confronted with the social world of Scottish islanders, a provocation to her individualist subjectivity. A world where collective identity and solidarity govern being and desire. A world which opposes her will to reach the island at any cost.

As she waits for the weather, she is also confronted by McNeil the true owner of Killoran. Not just a product of the collective ethos but a figure conforming to a mythic imperative. Joan struggles to resist being overcome by the collective will and the mythic web into which she has fallen. She struggles in the fear that what she understands as Joan the individual self, will die if she yields to these forces. In panic she seeks to avoid ‘death’ and mythic ‘rebirth’. In desperation she makes one last doomed effort to assert her will and sail to Killoran. and. in the extraordinary sequence in a small boat, she is hurled back by the cosmic fury of the elements that she has raised against her by attempting to escape her fate.

Her fate is not be a sacrificial victim on Bluebeard’s altar, but to raise a curse laid on the house of McNeil, for an ancestor’s terrible act of bloody revenge. The significance of events is finally understood by Joan after her epic attempts to resist and she allows herself to be absorbed into the necessity of myth. Dieing as a middle class aspirational English woman; reborn as a woman who understands her role in the weaving of fate.

I don’t know exactly how PnP worked together and divided the tasks and responsibilities of film making. I feel, that the expressionistic high key look of some of their films might have been Pressburger’s input, typified in IKWIG by the overnight train montage. Inspired surely by Jenning’s Night Mail, it is funny inventive and a slick reworking of the visual and audio ideas. The core scripting I imagine to be Powell’s. His understanding of island communities evident from the Edge of the World; his fascination of women and myth, driven by the deep seated anxiety triggered by the female. Anxiety that in films such as Canterbury Tale Red Shoes and Peeping Tom, drives Powell the evolve script ideas based round disembodying and disempowering women through real or symbolic death. Castration anxiety or what? With IKWIG Powell seems to have mastered the need to feed his inner demons a sacrificial victim and contrived (with Pressburger) a scripted resolution that is mythic and affirming of the female.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Hiroshima Pablo Stoll (2009 Uruguay) Noelia Burle

Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema 18 Nov 2010; ticket £4.00

Peregrinations in a voiceless landscape

I was fortunate the week before viewing Hiroshima (H) to have seen Buster Keaton’s 1923 movie The Three Ages. It alerted me to some of the latent ideas that Pablo Stoll (PS) puts into play in his structurally contrived and motivated film.

H is structured as a ‘silent’ movie meaning that dialogue is mediated through intertitles. The rest of the sound track is filled out with music, of course deafening mind battering music, and fx. Some of the fx are also registered through ‘intertitles’. H is a latter day take on the silent movie which uses this form as a means of structuring comment about the nature of the contemporary world which is flooded out with communications.

Thinking about the comic ‘silent movies’ in particular Keaton’s, they often take the form of a walkthrough script. The character starts at one place and in the course of the movie walks through a number of different settings that present and develop situations which allow for various visual gags before the character moves on. The settings are usually rich both in background and in the persons that occupy them. Detailed sets and larger than life characters in the films of the ‘silent’ age reflect the richness of the era with its classically monumental buildings and structures, and its bewiskered and finely apparelled citizens.

Juan is the comic figure in H. Like Keaton he is po faced, keeping a solid inexpressive mien in response to all he experiences and those he encounters. A reflective surface feeding back the reflection of his world. In H the viewer accompanies Juan in his series of peregrinations from one place to another. In contrast to the fullness of the sets and settings of the silent comedies, Juan experiences the impoverished milieu of the suburbs. Depopulated empty zones that are devoid of outer life; inner zones occupied by the absent. Instead of spaces that teem with life as in the ‘silent’ days, the contemporary world feeds back an impoverished experience. Engagement with this world causes contraction not expansion of consciousness, de-amplification of intensity. The hurley burly and anarchy of bar scenes with their stereotyped drunks in the ‘silents’ , is replaced by the solitary ritual of the smoking of the ‘joint’, internalised movement replaces externalised experience.

The joke is that the ‘silent’ era reached out to the human voice for completion. The age of person to person communication, the mobile reaches out for silence. With all the means of communication and technologies of extension of voice there is nothing to say.

As Juan meanders through his day we hear what he hears: the chaotic cacophony of the sound that he feeds into his head through his set. A music that simultaneously eradicates the world and is ignored.

H is a one joke and one dimension film, but the dimension explored by PS is broad and filled out in space and time so that as viewer you are directed into the movie. In H (as in the apartment shots in Rear Window) your observations and your understanding of what you see is as much your experience as it is Juan’s. The opening shot is a long follow track accompanying Juan from his work place in a bakery to his home. The real time movement as we walk along pedestrian paths and across suburban streets factors into our consciousness: we experience the walk as our own. We experience the lifeless ordinariness of the setting for ourselves, without intermediary.

H is a movie where the content is built into its ‘silent’ structure. The gags the jokes as in ‘silent’ movies built into ‘seeing it’. Each setting generates a situation and each situation calls forth a joke which is structured into the situation. In its final pay off, the movie exploits the silent structure of the film in a manner which is predictable but very funny. It relies on the old adage about how to make ‘em laugh: tell them they are going to laugh; make ‘em laugh; then tell them they’ve laughed. Anticipation is the fulcrum of slapstick and perhaps also of cerebral humour, as is the ability to be really laughing at yourself. PS I think understands this.

H was screened at Rotterdam 10 film festival but hasn’t found a distributor. This is a pity as it is an unusual clever and engrossing film. It was fortunate that Star and Shadow members had seen the film at the festival and screened it at our cinema.

What I don’t understand is why PS has called his movie Hiroshima? Is it because the atomic age has left us as mute shadows? Or am I way of target….somewhere?

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Police, adjective (Politist adjectiv) Corneliu Porumboiu (Rom 2009) Dragos Bucur

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 5 Oct 2010; ticket: £7.50

From a psychic space where there are no full stops or colons only commas,

Having decided to see this movie I was thinking that it had a strange title. What did the comma mean? You don’t come across them often in film titles. By the end you know that the title is taken from dictionary usage in which police is defined first as noun: police, noun; then as adjective: police, adjective. The comma operates in the syntax of the dictionary as a device separating the use and meanings of the different parts of speech. So Porumboiu’s (CP) title points to the adjective, and its function in Western languages, which is to give attributes to nouns; the adjective gives the noun a specific quality. As in: police state. In western Europe we don’t think much about adjectives, we just scatter gun them into our language. In Police, adjective (P,a) more thought is given to these matters.

And P, a is a film about state of mind, or rather the work that has to be done to have no state of mind. For mind to be dead: to make people blank. CP in his earlier film 12:08 East of Bucharest (The actual Romanian title was: Happened or Not?) used the simple set up of a TV talk show commemorating the December 1989 revolution to show that the belief people invested in the idea that a revolution had happened in their town, was the simple function of their delusion. In fact the nothing of a sort had really happened. On the surface there were certain signs and indicators that a revolutionary event had occurred. But on inspection this was simply an hallucination fostered by propaganda of vested interests, vanity, and an inflated sense of self importance. Surfaces are prominent in CP’s films, in the way doors are prominent in Haneke’s movies. They say something about the filmmaker’s ideas about the act of seeing.

If 12:08 E of B is about belief in occurrence that is mediated through non occurrence. P, a follows the consequences of this belief. P, a is about the oppression that is made possible by a false belief system; an oppression which leads to a blanked state of mind. The consequence is a deadness, mediated in the film through the policeman Cristri. who as protagonist is supposed to have a suspicious state of mind, perhaps even a conscience which directs his work. But suspicion, the archetypal state of mind of the cop, is not required in Romania. It might lead to the gangsters at the top. What is required is obedience induced by cognitive deadness. And that is where Cristi is pushed. In Romania, and perhaps other places, everyone should stay in their own coffin. Including the police.

P, a is about the state of mind necessary for the sustaining of totalitarian state. Under Ceausescu there was deep seated corruption underpinned by a secret police and sustained by a cognitive strait jacket, in effect a self justifying and self policing dialectic mechanical system of thought. A cognitive system whose moral circuitry ultimately justified all ends, whatever the means, to the teleological triumph of the workers and peasants state: the victory of the proletariat. The actual was justified through the dialectic schema. The victory of diagramatics.

In the penultimate sequence, which is almost achieved in one shot, CP shows that present day, nothing has changed. Dialectical materialism has gone; cod Marxism is no longer invoked to justify tyranny and corruption in the name of the victory of the revolution. But in an unchanged dynamic of power the needs of the political apparatus remain the same . It requires a thought system that functions so as to cognitively demonise and oppress any inner resistance of the individual mind. The individual mind is a critical battleground where the war is won or lost. Post Ceausescu dialectic materialism has to be replaced with another system to regulate thought. Another dialectic is needed. It might be the Bible, the Koran whatever: the important point is authoritative text rigidly interpreted and backed with threat of enforcement. CP in his script uses the dictionary as the cognitive enforcer. And in this extraordinary sequence we see the meaning of key words rammed down Cristi’s throat as he attempts to protest and rebel against the command he has been given. The dictionary dialectic is a system that involves an interrogating agent, a subject and the achievement of a specific idealised state. The dictionary can be used to invoke a system for the categorisation of words according to their ideal qualities. Morality becomes a thing; conscience becomes a thing, the law becomes a thing. There are no processes just things defined in themselves: without the context of the individual experience. The humble dictionary, in the hands of authority becomes the prefect rod with which to beat the resistant back into submission. Nothing has changed in this society. The self serving cynicism of the controllers defines the game.

The consequence is that everything dies back. There is no life just a continual cycle of oppression which kills the ability to think the ability to feel. As CP’s camera holds still or gently pans across a scene we have plenty of time to see the surface of this society. Seen through its surfaces, Romania looks like a country where nothing has changed. These same surfaces would have met the eye 50 years ago. Surfaces that are tired old and cracked reflecting back only a blankness. There seems to be no way to penetrate these surfaces which are everywhere.

The style of shooting uses long takes, composed often as wide or medium shots. The long duration shots effectively take us into real time experience. When Christi endlessly stakes out and watches, so do we; when Christi waits so do we; when Christi tails a subject so do we. when Cristi eats so do we. The point about the shot duration is that it releases the viewer into the space. The nondescript walls, the streets, crumbling buildings, the drab interiors are spaces we have to actually confront and experience as actual, and through these surfaces we are taken deeper into the film into thinking about what lies under the surfaces that we have been seeing.

P makes much use of two shots, two people together in wide or medium frame. What is remarkable is that the sense of isolation of individuals is heightened in the use of the two shot. Individuals never seem more alone that when they are with another person. Christi with a colleague, with his wife, seems more desolate and alone than when he is on the stomp or staking out his quarry. We are shown situations where not only is there is no communication between people, there is no possibility of communication between people. Contact between Cristi and his wife is a arid dry dialogue broken only once when she tells him that there is something not quite right between them. It’s as if all that is left is for the people to watch each other until they die, and they die very young correcting each other’s grammar and speech.

But the plot fascinates. As we follow it, all seems surface: small time marijuana users and dealers, a couple of crummy kids, trailed and staked out by a low level policeman. We see the surface traits of the operation. And yet gradually and sporadically a number of facts bleed up from beneath this surface to suggest that what is really going on is the result of a deep seated corruption. Corruption that holds the key to life in this small town.

Following 12:08 E of B, and now viewing P,a what I call film, not installation, not life style advert. not music video, not text message, is alive and kicking in a town in Romania called Vaslui. adrin neatrour adrin@yahoo.co.uk

The Secret in their Eyes (El Secreto De Sus Oyos) Juan Campanella (Argentina 2009) Soledad Villamil; Ricardo Darin

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 20 Aug 2010; Ticket price £7.50

The cocked leg shot that says it all

For me it was the cocked leg shot that gave Juan Campanella’s film away. The cocked leg shot revealed that the ambition of The Secret in Their Eyes (SITE) was limited to being a filmically inept piece of soap opera. The shot takes place early in the movie in the first (1970’s) section of the time spanning narrative. Prosecuting magistrate Benjamin attends a scene of crime where the battered body of the raped and murdered young woman lies face up on the floor of her bedroom. Given the title of the movie we don’t really need to see the body. Nevertheless we see the body. JJC might suggest we have to see her body to understand Benjamin’s outrage. We certainly don’t need to see it either so often or so long as the camera drifts across her belly breasts and face. JCC might suggest: that’s the movies, the audience want to gaze.

What is false in the scene of crime shot is the posture of the body. The woman’s body lies in the narrow channel between her double bed and the wall. If as natural her whole body lay prone in this restricted space it would be photographically uninteresting. Not cinamatagraphic. To resolve this issue, JJC decided to pose the dead woman’s body so that her legs are cocked up on the bed. The body in this position has a dynamic line but it’s a position at variance with the violence of her assault and death. The cocked leg position of the cadaver is a theatrical contrivance to improve the quality of the audience’s gaze and a calculated manipulation by JCC to secure the gaze. His cocked legs shot is a piece of fakery the characterises SITE as surely as the crumbling talc beneath the eyes of the cast which is supposed to signify their ageing. The moral starting point of SITE the shock of a beautiful life destroyed is founded convenience and contrivence.

Viewing JJC’s movie it’s clear why SITE clinched best foreign movie in this year’s 2010 Oscars. It’s a calling card film from a director who wants to show that he can make Hollywood product. Michael Haneka’s co-nominated film, The White Ribbon was European in form and style with a sensibility independent of and indifferent to Hollywood values. JJC chimes with the Tinsletown vibes. SITE is characterised by: mechanical plot driven action, laboriously contrived romantic subplot with a smattering of political correctness and political comment, dialogue comprising one liners cod philosophy and street wise obscenity; and actors required to span 25 years so caked in plaster and talc that their faces almost come off.

Characterised by Hollywood style production values, SITE comprises complete filmic bankruptcy, an expressive capitulation of film form to TV standards.

The narrative of SITE relies on a series of TV plot devices rather than dynamics of structure to develop the film. Devices involving the dead woman’s family photos and the coded references embedded in a letter written home, drive the film, not character world or moral issues. Likewise the manner in which JJC has shot SITE is in replication of soap opera motifs. There are two prime shot ideas: the laborious use of shot followed by reverse shot to cover the dialogue; and the use of long affect images of eyes staring out of make-up caked faces to convey the emoting without words. The problem I had with these shots is, not only are they repetitious seemingly used by JC when he didn’t know what else to do. They are also used manipulatively to tease the romantic sub plot rather than as a expressed perception.

Benjamin is writing a novel about real events in his past: recasting fact as fiction. SITE’s use of flashbacks is crude but also confusing: some flashbacks may be actual and some fictive from the writing of Benjamin. At the beck and call of a banal plot line JJC is not in sufficient control of the structure of his film to be able exploit this fact /fiction potential in the material, which is simply left irresolvable. In the best Hollywood tradition of abandoning initial structures that prove too complex for movies whose main purpose is the simple manipulation of the audience.

SITE is I think about a state of mind: regret, regret for what is lost. But JJC film approaches regret from the exteriority of faciality: big on faces. There are few expressive long shots in SITE and JJC is unable through the vocabulary of his film to do more than go through the motions of replicating the stereotypical idea of what regret is supposed to look like. JJC is unable to transform regret into a language of relations, or place or interiority. We gaze on the regret as we look on the only expressive device JCC uses in the movie to mediate his expressive message: the Big Close Up.

Perhaps it is because they are so heavily made up, but the main protagonists seem lifeless and overburdened with their roles. Perhaps it was the direction of JJC . The performances seemed to me to be leaden and over directed evincing a series of monodimensional responses. For me there was nothing of thinking in the acting. nothing of the creative. Only doing and playing to camera with an affected elusive look. Running more than two hours SITE the actors long exhausted their expressive play.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

I Hired a Contract Killer Aki Kaurismaki (Finland/UK 1990) Jean-Pierre Leaud; Margi Clarke

Viewed: 15 July 2010 Star and Shadow Cinema; ticket price £4

retrocrit: sound as essence

Aki Kaurismaki (AK) understands music as a portal into other dimensions. I think that his work as a film maker consistently testifies to his ability to use the music as a track that creates mood and state of mind independently of the picture. This is particularly the case with I hired a Contract Killer. Without its use of music I Hired a Contract Killer (IHCK) would be a film that was rather less than the sum of its parts.

The parts are in themselves finely tuned in a sense of being fluid stylistic statements in relation to film composition. AK’s London is a decontextualised zone comprising any-space-whatevers, inhabited by a supporting caste of geezers and wizzened old gits. The main characters are affectively cool and non emotively engaged in the material which AK has fashioned for cognitive clarity rather than manipulation. The characters lines comprise a series of distancing alienated offbeat observations. The statements by protagonists Boulanger and Margaret are pared back, announiatory, declamatory: statements about situation rather than discourse. As in Film Noir and Godard’s takes on film noir, the dialogue is grounded in bleak sociopathic humour and the absurd, and the action follows filmic logic rather than narrative rules.

AK’s characters in IHCK work within a set of frames both interior and exterior in which colour provides the affective key note. The city, as it is shot and framed, and the interiors, lobbies rooms bars nondescript entrances and exits, all have an ochre key note. The film look is dominated by the muted colours of autumn, the keynotes of a melancholia that pervades the film and is complimented by AK’s placement of his camera. The ‘still’ shot dominates the film, trapping the audience and the characters in the atmospherics of the sparse mis-en-scenes, giving them and their ochre colorisation, an inescapable dynamic presence in the structure of the movie.

The problem with IHCK is that it feels like a series of TV sketches, skilfully stitched together. The film seems to be structured as a sequence of discrete scenes. These sequences can almost stand alone each comprising a thesis and an antithesis, an event that is developed within its own logic to its pay-off. The jewellery store robbery is a case in point. Boulanger interrupts the robbery and after a series of gags, ends up the prime suspect. There is a sort of self contained element in this episodic structure which recalls TV comedies such as the Young Ones and Monty Python that perhaps AK viewed at a impressionable time in his life. With the film viewed as a series of linked events a feeling of repetition intrudes and the logic becomes mechanical, each section of IHCK like a contrived device to move the film on until it comes to the point AK decides is the last device and the movie ends. Yet the music and the way it is used by AK changes the dynamic; without the music it is difficult to see what AK is trying to achieve.

The music changes everything. From the first sounds of Billie Holliday through to the series of songs by Joe Strummer and the blues numbers, I understood that this is a film about loneliness. About the experience of being inescapably alone in the world; about the world being an inescapably lonely place. Billie’s voice, in Time on My Hands exudes the note of personal desolation, a tone that is sustained by Joe Strummer’s plaintive performing of his songs culminating in the number he performs to camera in the pub. His performance here is an extraordinary intensifer of mood: a lament for all that is lost . The only logic for the incorporation of the whole song into the sequence is as an statement of the films emotional colour, blue, and of its alienated existential philosophy.

Without the music, the ideas supporting IHCK are at risk of being flooded out by the mechaninics of film making however fluid they may be. It was this route that Godard, as thinker auteur, determined never to travel. With his sensitive use of music IHCK is a film that travels. But it it is a problem for AK, as evidenced in his next movie “ La Vie de Boheme.” in which he tries to pull of the same trick with a cod rendering of La Boheme. With this film AK ends up with a less convincing pot pourri of mechanical scquences, showing that to be a film maker is not enough. It’s about ideas. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

I am Love Luca Guadagnino (2009 It UK) Tilda Swinton; Eduoardo Gabriellini

Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle; 27 April 2010 Ticket price (for matinee) £4.50

Junk food in a glossy package

I am Love (IAL) reminded me of the sort of fashion shoot images you find in glossy women’s life style magazines. The model is photographed in front of a series of backgrounds: domestic, grunge, hi-tech industrial etc. The idea behind the shoot as in all advertising, is to associate the product with some quality represented in or by the setting. The model is in effect a superimposition, and the setting is an affective decontextualised alienated space, a backdrop, without linkage to its key expressive component, the figure in the foreground

IAL takes the form of an installation featuring desirable life style choices. Luca Guadagnino’s (LG) camera tracks and pans continuously as a structural cinematic effect leading the viewer on a guided walk through his movie which features nouvelle cuisine, bourgeois domestic settings and idyllic natural phenomena. These elements are stitched together by a narrative that is that is less acted than mediated by a series of mannerisms and gestures, and which espouses the cause of cliché’d individual freedom as epitomised by sexual relations.

Luca Guadagnino’s movie feels labouriously dated both in its concerns and in its expressive style.

Emma is the wife of Tancredi an Milanese industrialist who rediscovers her Russian origins and her real name Kitiesh in the course of her ‘liberating’ affair with a friend of her son, Antonio who is a chef. Antonio’s occupation is a cue for LG to turn over meters of film in shooting his gloopy gastronomic creations. Why are we presented with so many long filmed sequences depicting food? I think that the reason has to be LG’S endemic insecurity with his material. As LG has nothing to say, everything in IAL, as in an advert, has to be literalised. As if by filling out the movie with streams of images that might or might not have symbolic connotation, he could compensate for lack of meaning in the material. When Emma reads a letter revealing her daughter is a lesbian, she is filmed reading it on the roof of Milan cathedral (she takes quite a number of shots to climb up) ; there is talk about industrial relations, the film cuts to the factory; there is talk of food, and it has to be shown as a close-up gloopy image.

The problem with IAL is that there are no ideas in the movie. It’s just a stream of images that are supposed to represent something more than their presenting banality. It feels like LG has looked at Visconti and Rossellini and imagined that by imitating external aspects of their movies that he could emulate them. GL has failed to see that the externalities of these directors were held together by an inner core of strong concepts employed in the pursuit of purpose.

The impoverishment of idea extends into the structure of the film. ‘Marked off’ fantasy sequences are used to illustrate Emma’s desires. Like a bad ‘60’s movie when LG cuts to Emma’s fantasy, LG goes for out of focus and soft visual effects. When LG wants to film something real and to communicate the feelings aroused he opts for the montage of signs, as when Antonio and Emma (Kitiesh) make love. This sequence is composed of big close up’s of the flesh of the lovers intercut with close up metaphoric suggestive shots from the natural order: flower stamens, insects, thistles, ants etc. Like the shot of the train entering the tunnel this sequence is no more than a parody representing physical love, and announces LG’s cinematic bankruptcy.

When Antonio fucks Emma (Kitiesh) what he wants really is her secret Russian recipe for clear fish soup which Kitiesh was taught by her grandmother. Is that an idea or a narrative device? If Kitiesh hadn’t made love to Antonio she would never have given him her recipe and so her son Eduardo would not have died and she would not have been liberated and gone to sleep in a cave.

The filmic composition through the camera work looks like it is based on the old adman’s adage of: keep the picture moving. In LG’s tracking shots and in the innumerable camera pans, there is little to no purpose in relation to the dynamics of the film. The motive for the camera movement seems to be the director’s fear of allowing stillness to be part of the frame. The audience may get bored. The panning shots in themselves are often slow and devoid of point, to such an extent that many have been aborted in mid movement. in the edit. You can imagine the scene in the editing suite as the editor watches yet another laborious pan meander its way through a setting in order to set up a sequence; the editor politely points out to LG that it might be better to cut out of it and get into the action. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Luis Bunuel ( 1972 Fr ) Fernando Rey; Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier

Viewed 24 JUNE 2010, Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne:

Ticket price £4.00

retro crit: From inside the mind…

Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie (DCB) isn’t top of my list of the films by Luis Bunuel(LB). But it’s outstanding as an expressive medium that reveals to the viewer the immanent world of LB. Through DCB in both its form and its content, LB is experienced as a personal film maker. The material with which he works is his: there is nothing extraneous. LB as a writer/director is not selling anything. What he is doing is opening up to the audience his state of mind his way of seeing his obsessions. LB approaches film making as an act of faith, in which he uncovers and peels back the layers of his thinking and perception. Without apology or self censorship within the course of a shot or short sequence, he juxtaposes ideas and interposes values from divergent sources and remote ends of the cognitive spectrum: from the heightened to the venal, from the ‘awake’ to the ‘dream’ from the chaste to the erotic, from the cerebral to the visceral, from the tender to the cruel. In the mind of LB ‘life’ whether it be personal or collective is in constant tensile vacillation between these forces. But the working out of these relations is a moral issue the which underpins LB’s work both with DCB and with most of his other movies.

In the key recurring sequence of DCB, we see the bourgeois group walking purposefully down a long straight flat road that leads between fields. Normally we only see them move if they are in their limos. But in these shots they are walking: stripped of their normal outer shell. The group seem to come from nowhere and to be going nowhere. There is nothing in their manner or gait to suggest anything other than that they have complete self assurance in their journey or destiny. Within the logic of DCB they may be someone’s dream; they may be playing out a statement of their complete belief in the efficacy of appearances which is central to both the self image of the bourgeois and their claims upon the world; they may be looking for their automobiles. Who knows? But each return to these walking Bourgeois is an opportunity to wonder what is going on in LB’s mind: what’s he pointing to…? We’ll never know for sure.

DCB like the best of LB’s films is a sort of filmic mortification, a flaying of the skin in order to reveal what lies underneath. The veins and nerves under the dermis: society as a cadaver écorché. Underneath the veneer of exquisite manners, of apparent goodness, savoir vivre, fine apartments and beautiful accoutrements lies the corruption of drugs and gangster money; scourge the façade of religion to reveal that the real concern of this organisation is not with the souls of the poor but rather with the wallets of the powerful rich and cruel whose corrupt money buys the endowments. In DCB, in a brilliant coup, the Bishop of the diocese applies for and is granted, the position of gardener to the drug baron. What is at work beneath the surface is the fear of the Bourgeoisie: their fear of losing their money. Everything follows from this one simple observation.

It is the genius of Bunuel’s thought in film, that he can never be caste simply as a social satirist. Life is too complex to be formulaic. LB’s mind is claimed by kingdoms other than the social and DCB like other of his films enters the realms of the flesh the dream and the dead. These realms define the actual cognitive ground explored by LB. In DCB dreams radically break up the patina of the depicted ‘actual’ erupting as psychic forces, when least expected to smash open the controlling narrative. But the structure of DCB interweaving ‘actual’ ‘dream’ and ‘dream within dream’ calls in notions and ideas, the seeds planted by LB, that life itself, with its narratives of death, its smug rewarded killers, and its persecution of the innocent, may be a nightmare. That if life is what we make it then we have made of it a bad dream from which there is no escape, simply eternal recurrence.

LB is a very cool director and DCB is a very cool movie. Cool in the sense that he does not invest his images with emotive significance, au contraire he is careful to empty the image of emotional resonance as image in itself. He does not use image to manipulate: his image is about meaning and it is to the meaning that we react as we may. He films situations and sequences so that they propagate a world of ideas in the imagination of audience. DCB is LB’s vehicle of mind transference: his mind, his players. The incomparable Rey Seyrig and Ogier glide through DCB as ectoplasmic emanations of an idea: perfect in form and in execution of their roles as rulers of the cesspit. DCB in its control economy and audacity is an act of intentionality by a master.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk