Adrin Neatrour

The Killer Inside Me – Michael Winterbottom (USA 2010) Casey Affleck; Kate Hudson

Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre; 8 June 2010; Ticket price £7.00

“There is something inside every man that keeps him going long after he has any reason to.” ( Jim Thompson)

Viewing The Killer Inside Me it is evident that Michael Winterbottom has not understood the bitter sweet words of Jim Thompson, and continues to make movies long after he has any reason to. However deranged and twisted it might be, there is self knowledge in Thompson’s losers that is beyond this director.

“I like it when you hurt me….!” drawls Amy in her best throaty breathless voice, as Lou straps her. And her words in Winterbottom’s (MW) rendering of Jim Thompson’s novel The Killer Inside Me (KIM) become a sort of literal strap line, selling the idea of the movie as if it were a designer label or brand of leather goods accessories. The movie instead of finding a form to transpose Jim Thompson’s voice from word to image, is mutated under MW’s direction into an extended glossy advert which could have been shot for Prada or Comme des Garcons, but instead is selling fashionable rough-stuff sex, a classy looking snuff movie

Jim Thompson’s dime novels are telegrams from the nether world of US society. The works are tersely written, often in the form of monologues delivered by rogue males from the internal space of paranoid violence that is America. Characters created by JT were actualised by damaged rootless loners such as Perry and Dick who massacred the Clutter family in 1959 and were chronicled by Truman Capote with his book, ‘In Cold Blood’. The world of the deterritorialised schizo, the damaged product of a society that with no place or function for them, cuts men lose with their internalised pent up resentments, both imagined and real. Desperate psyches often with smooth exteriors painfully and expertly forged so as to be able to pass through life without attracting too much attention.

The qualities expressed through the characters of JT’s writing, are informed by a level of self knowledge, fear and surprise at the world which feed into intense feedback loops that drive the men to action. The action is always precipitated from within the psyche; never as in Chandler’s work from without. The worlds occupied by JT’s protagonists are not high definition or glamorous in character; they are messy stained fucked up streams of thought that are punctuated by action that is mechanical but filled out with observational detail. MB just doesn’t get it. His approach seems to be that he has a text to adapt and to fill out with image. He is unable to do anything more with his film than replicate the Hollywood Coda. In MW’s hands KIM is delivered as a life style statement.

Remove the internal thinking from JT and what’s left is a series of mechanically contrived events. In sum: nothing. And despite the use Lou’s voice over to inform the images the core of ‘thinking’ eludes MW’s movie leaving only the autopilot of the plot line as a basic structure. The camera makes no contribution to the film beyond obeying the strictures of central casting and getting into the action, leaving nothing to the imagination. The violence and the sex are graphically communicated in image, as MW has nowhere to take his camera other than into the banality of depictation. Intercut into the plot structure are a series of flashbacks: some to Lou’s childhood, some to his relationship with Joyce. But the flashbacks delinked to any core expression of Lou’s voice, seem to me a tired device, indulging a need to break up the monotony of the plot rather than giving any substantive expressive form to Lou’s state of mind. Likewise the sound track is dominated by a farrago of ‘50’s pop music that is supposed to ironically underlay and counterbalance the drama. In fact the music comes across as the equivilent of a musical tourist bus tour. It’s symptomatic of the project that MW choses style over substance, opting for facile authenticity rather than the tough option of finding a note for his film

KIM will probably be very popular movie. The dead speak to the dead. The explicit and gratuitous are favoured as categorical imperatives, justified in themselves, because they sell. MW in a sense is a cultural product, reinterpreting Jim Thompson’s internal dialogues as easy viewing for burnt out male castrati. The dead are not alive in themselves, they live in the image. Psychopathic killers living out images of themselves in the movies as they cut their murderous swathes through life. In early June Derek Bird just killed 12 people in Cumbria. What movie was he in as he took his guns and aimed point blank at his victims and blew them away? Perhaps it’s a movie MW will make. A lifestyle choice.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Rear Window A Hitchcock (USA 1954) James Steward; Grace Kelly

Viewed Tyneside Cinema: 29 May 10; ticket price – £6.00 ( Matinee screening)

Castration angst

Under the polished grain of Rear Window’s surface (RW) Hitchcock (AH) has produced a film built on a matrix of interlocking psychic states that still resonate with contemporary concern. Concerns in relation to: the way in which we see, affects how we live our lives; concerns that pivot about the balance of power in sexual relations. Ideas which are worked into RW’s narrative structure and which in their filmic development form the substance of the film.

AH has made RW into something that is experienced by audience as a series of intensities that are never quite resolved, that is until the relatively uninteresting mechanical finale that wraps it all up the end of the movie. These experiences in RW are fashioned out of the opposing forces that AH sets into play in building the states of mind that are at the core of the film: obsessiveness, ambiguity, conflictedness and inadequacy. These mental states characterise not only James Steward as the protagonist, Jeff, but also the audience as they are captured by the structure of the movie and drawn into AH’s psychic cobweb.

RW is based on a primary opposition of place: inside Jeff’s apartment, and the view outside from inside Jeff’s apartment. The life Jeff experiences and the lives of other’s as perceived by Jeff. The opening shot of RW is a long pan of the apartments across the courtyard from him, which finally ends with a track taking the viewer inside Jeff’s place and revealing him asleep with his back to the window. He sits propped up in his chair with a broken leg supported out in front of him. The shot not only shows opposing sides of the courtyard, the different worlds about and across which the film will be structured; it also implies the potential conjoining and subsumance of each world into the other. The shot implicitly sets up the viewer as a collusive agent: not only do we gaze as invisible entities on the courtyard world; we gaze on Jeff and his apartment. This puts us in the same relationship to Jeff as Jeff has in his gazing out upon the worlds of the courtyard windows.

The story is premised on the immobilisation of Jeff (James Steward) who in his helplessness spends his time looking out of his rear window at the flats opposite. A function of this devotion of his time to gazing at the lives of others as they are played out in the windows in front of him is that he is drawn into their theatre and starts to live their lives and their dramas rather than his own. To the extent that he starts to premise his life on this vicarious experience, he becomes ever more helpless. In some respects AH’s idea anticipates the relentless rise of continuity TV experiences whether Soap Operas or ‘Reality TV’. in which the lives of the actors take on greater meaning for many viewers that their own lives. But I don’t think this is enough. The wiring of RW into Jeff’s psych is deeper and darker than this superficial layering. There comes a point where it is as if he ceases to exist as Jeff. He is there physically and in the habitual sense, but the spark of energy of the real man, has been extinguished. None of his close acquaintances, in particular his girlfriend, seem to notice. Or if they do notice what is happening, in a ghoulish way they accept and abet the death of his life.

AH makes RW work on its audience almost without let up. Through most of RW’s sequences AH uses his film to stream to the audience two tracks of information. These opposing tracks cause perception and psyche to split and alternating between the two different streams of information, the viewers perceptive abilities are pushed and pulled in different directions. In the sequences that comprise the gazing at the lives in the windows opposite AH exploits the use of the separate nature of the picture track and sound track. In key sequences of RW they work independently to create heterogeneous disturbance, a conflicting perception of what is perceived and how it is perceived. The vignettes, taking place through the apartment windows, are viewed over the soundtrack of a telephone call; the views into and pans of the windows are accompanied by sounds emanating from different and heterogeneous worlds creating again a dislocation of information a break between sound and image which film, particularly on a big screen can exploit to cause a level of ambiguity in the viewer rather than certainty.

As well as using the physical characteristic of film to split sound and image tracks, AH also exploits a psychic track in the main protagonist: Jeff’s obsession with the other. So central to RW is the ‘obsession’ track in Jeff’s mind that he is unable to free himself from the attraction of his rear window. His need to gaze overrides everything. This state of mind allows AH to compose sequences in RW in which whilst Jeff in image is imagined by his girl friend as being absorbed in making love to her, he has in fact detached from this activity and has entered the world of the gaze. As opposing psychic tracks Jeff and Lisa ( Grace Kelly) when together create a conflicted message and state of mind both in the film and in the viewer.

There also seems one last opposition that AH has built into RW. I have alluded to it but it is that divide between the active and the passive. In particular in relation to the male. At the time of RW’s production the trend towards an increasing number of sedentary male workers employed in offices was evident. AH picks up on the angst of passive man and the symbolic emasculation effected upon those who neither hunt nor gather. Jeff’s immobility which at the start of the film is balanced by his ability to run his own life, in the course of the movie, runs down. By the end of the film this immobility is anchored not just in his physical body but in his psyche; he has been castrated: lost symbolically not just one leg but two as Lisa takes over not just control of his life, but also of the gazing. The female in the film has become the active agent, the male the passive. The years of Hollywood stereotyping inverted in one movie. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Dogtooth (Kynodontos) Giogos Lanthimas (Greece 2009) Christos Stergioglon, Aggleki Papoulia, Hristos Passalis

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 11 May 10, Ticket price: £6.50

Toothless or what….

By the time Dogtooth reaches the dark humourous final shot of the daughter trapped in the trunk of Papa’s Merc, it‘s too late. Dogtooth has lost the plot. As it progresses through sequence after sequence instead of embracing its subject matter the more surely and firmly, Dogtooth (DT) becomes increasingly evasive in treatment of its chosen theme. The problem with Dogtooth is that it finally opts for parody as a response to the situation rather than allegory; it develops into an extended sitcom rather than a satire. Guiding his material down the road of cheap laughs rather than the terror of absurdity, director Giogos Lanthiman takes the easy option and his film drifts into inconsequentiality. An outcome that betrays the intelligence of the camera work and the finely moulded nature of the performances.

Giogos Lanthimas’ (GL) subject matter is envelopment. Envelopment by a ma and pa of their children in a home environment in order to render the occupants immune from the vagaries and threats of the outside world. The home in DT becomes a filmic realisation of the gated communities that are characteristic of a particular response to living in late era consumerist capitalism.

I think that the intention of GL was to hold up to the lens of his camera the absurdity of believing that sequestered life behind walls is a solution to the problem of being in the world. House and family in DT are absurdist exaggerations of those suburban ‘communities’ found in contemporary society. Life behind gates and walls is elective isolation that entails the creation of a supportive belief system whose function is to justify enforce and reinforce, the blocking out the world. Gated communities, are reactive, based on fear and the desire to protect possessions illusions and desires from unwanted intrusion and desecration. GL’s script at the beginning sets up the Dogtooth situation with the creative demonic élan of an Ionescu , so that a familiar architectural and social world is turned on its head by the perversity of the expressed cognitive logic of the situation.

What is interesting in the idea of the gated community is the underlying issues that are raised. These issues can be internal relating to the dynamics of the group, and/or external relating to the dynamic of the group and the wider encompassing society. These issues have an inexorable logic that has to be met with an equal and opposing logic on the part of the gated community. Logics which Ionescu knew and analysed in different contexts. Logics unleash forces of contradiction and paradox which for survival require extreme responses: anti-logics, dishonesty and brutality.

Dogtooth establishes as its starting point, a logical fulcrum on which is balanced on the absurdist world of extended childhood in which silly stories, euphanisms and lies provide the basis of continuations communication and identity. But GL does not permit this logic to shape direct and drive the film. Sex is a central concern of Dogtooth and a concern around which much of the action is organised. But there is no tension in the play out of these concerns; no iron logic driving the sexual developments that exert pressure on both the characters and the plot line. DT instead of allowing logic and underlying tensions to give shape to the content and plot, substitutes a sequential structure. The film, like a soap opera is divided into sequences, each of which has a sort of resolution but through which there is no development of the controlling logic. As DT is abandoned to episodic sequences, it slides into parody and increasingly played for laughs; tensions are quickly resolved and defused and not permitted to direct the narrative. Instead of taking us somewhere, a journey in systematic twisted logic, DT goes nowhere and leaves us almost where we started.

The most distinctive device shaping DT is GL’s use of his camera. The film is composed using certain key shots that in themselves suggest the presence of alien logic at work. The lens favours a narrow depth of field; and the framing favours tight close ups, often favouring body parts such as feet or hands. The defining key shot mode is the still immobile camera, which frames space that is filled with close ups or medium close up shots of faces, body sections, objects (the opening shot is a cassette tape recorder). The perceptions engaged by the cinematography in relation to framing are several. Firstly the creation of film space that compresses the characters into a box, a filmic special representation of the family’s situation; the immobility of the camera also works to suggest that we are watching lives frozen in time, lives that are still, with no temporal development. Also the feeling given by the camera is one of disengagement: the family are detached both from there own body parts and from each other, and from their environments the house and garden. The house is a space which we never really see. It exists as a segmented reality a detached remote otherworldly space. In relation to the opening sequences, the establishment of a logic, the camera is a dynamic element nurturing the proposition of an ‘other’ logic in play.

The performances are also critical to the film. The children in particular project the quality of aliens, as if they had just stepped off a spaceship. Their disciplined acting works because it is always controlled and structured, part of the look and style of the movie. Likewise the playing of mama and papa is characterised by a furtive purposefulness that is underplayed and understated. As DT’s scenario fails to develop the ideas implicit in the logic of the material the expressive potential of both camera and acting is under-realised.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Brief Encounter David Lean (UK 1945) Script: Noel Coward: Celia Johnson; Trevor Howard

Viewed: Riverside Studio London; 12 April 10; Ticket:: £7.50 (double bill with Letter from an Unknown Woman)

Adrin Neatrour writes retrocrit: Love in a mechanistic country

In filming Brief Encounter, David Lean (DL) took Noel Coward’s play Still Life, and re-cast it as a dream, a dream subjectively experienced as one of those bitter fairy tales. Dl worked his material so as to make the idea of a hallucinatory ‘world’ the centre of the film. In concept and design Brief Encounter (BE) is imagined as a world, or rather worlds. Brief Encounter is designed as a vehicle for a female voice and following Laura’s the voice (Celia Johnson) we track her migration through the different states of mind triggered by the film’s zoning. Lean’s decision to realise BE through the creation of worlds gives Coward’s moralistic fable of Middle Class mores a nightmarish emotional depth that endows the original material with a mythic quality.

BE is fashioned around the three distinct loci as witnessed through ‘Laura’s voice’: the trapped, represented by Laura’s family home; the station which is the transitional dream zone; and the town/country locations, hallucinatory spaces, Arcadia, where Laura and Alec are together, and like spirits released from Hades, allowed a short respite from their doom.

The heart of the film is the railway station. A conceptual area realised in the creation of a number of different discrete spaces. The station works as a setting that mediates a dream world. A fairy tale which creates intensifies and transforms the impossible notion of two comfortably married people falling desperately in love. The sets, the atmospheric effects the composition and camera movement are all exploited creatively to extend the viewers’ perception from the surface of the film, the dialogue and voice over, through to the psychic forces underlying the action: primal instinct and repressed desire.

The opening shot comprises a slow track along the counter of the tea room to find figures of Laura and Alec sitting together at a table. The gliding camera immediately introduces a dream quality into the film and comprises a sequence that will be repeated at the end of the film. The tea room is a purgatorial space, a zone where the lost and damned must wait to discover their fate; an antechamber to the unspeakable that recurs in dream and nightmare. It is where Laura meets Alec for the first time as he restores her sight to her by removing the mote from her eye. Outside the tea room lies the subterranean passage to Arcadia through which you must pass to enjoy the illusion of freedom; and the terrifying mechanics of the platforms where the business of the station occurs mired in hissing steam and smoke: a diabolic region of flesh eating monsters The station functions like some terrible in-between place, a diabolic machine that processes peoples lives and determines their fate. Woe to the soul trapped here.

Laura’s nightmare does not only trap her in space. She is also trapped in the mechanics of time: a tyranny

of clockwork timetables and rigid temporal matrices. In dreams, time is never an ally; it is always a fiendish element. In dream there is never enough time and it is always too late to avoid fate. In BE time is an enforcement agency cut into the grain of the film. DL resolves the structure of film about the railway system: the iron hand of its clock formatting the schedules and timetables that drive everyday life. Centred on the station Wilford Junction, Laura and Alec are depicted filmically by DL as pawns in a mechanised system of dispatch delivery and retrieval. They have no will of their own but are products of a linear temporal programme, a steam driven conveyor belt system which summons and calls them at set and specified times; there are serious implied penalties for non compliance. The couple’s fear throughout the film is centred on ‘missing the train’: you have to catch the train, it will save you. The railway timetable as an apparatus of course extends through life itself. Laura and Alec are tightly controlled by schedule. She can only come to town on Thursdays; he can only work in town on Thursdays. They both live by inflexible temporal imperatives, deeply internalised and unquestionable.

BE works as film because of DL’s interlayering of a mechanistic temporal structure over a filmic creation of worlds. The effect is make a fairytale out of Laura’s subjectivity. The form of BE has the necessary elements: time, as an enforcer is often a critical feature of the fairy tale (Cinderella for instance). And fairy tales are also set in particular worlds or series of worlds: the forest the palace the cottage ( the Twelve Swans). Lean’s filmic vision led him not to centre BE about the somewhat everyday (but very well written) melodrama of an unrequited love affair, but to resolve the story about the setting and timetables of the railway system. Instead of focusing attention on the social and personal moral dilemma of Laura and Alec, he uses film to transform the material into a fairytale set in the dark restless world of the of the railway station where yearning spirits live in fear and trembling of the span of mortal days. BE as an updated and rejigged Little Mermaid.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Screening at Star and Shadow 23 May 2010 Ticket: £4 ; £3(c)

Retrocrit: What’s in a name….

The Birth of a Nation wherein we see white men ‘black up’ and pretend to be niggas. . What’s it all about? The Clansman was the original title of the film which is about Ku Klux Klan and their heroic and daring do deeds in lynching assaulting and intimidating blacks jews and stupid whites who didn’t know their place. Of course what was at issue was the place of the Klan in history, and soon after the release of The Clansman the movie’s name was changed to Birth of a Nation. With the stroke of a pen the film became something more than grown men dressed up in white sheets with traffic cones over their heads, riding out to attack blacks. With its title change the film was claiming for the Klan a critical role in the history of the nation; it was a calculated attempt to justify racism by showing white supremacists as ‘the saviours’ of the Nation in the aftermath of the Civil War. It also held out a promise to its white protestant audience.

The movie did not get away with peddling its racist story without opposition. On release Birth of a Nation (sic: which nation) was seen as an unacceptable portrayal and vilification of blacks; an interpretation of US history that deliberately misrepresented the role of Afro-Americans in the development of their nation. In particular in the industrial towns of the North where there was strong black political and social organisation, the film’s opening was met with riots violence and protest for its shameful insult to a people. The film was banned in Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, Kansas and St Louis.

D W G professed surprise and shock at this reception, but perhaps he did protest too much. His expression of bewilderment at the response by blacks to his movie looks like a pose of cynical innocence. Viewing the film with its overt racist message makes it hard to credit that this experienced and urbane director would have been unaware of the film’s effect on Afro-Americans. The title change may have been motivated by the need to ensure the success of the film. Using the idea of ‘Birth’ as part of the title and linking it to the fate of the nation, Griffiths was subliminally pitching the idea of ‘Birthright’ to the majority white audience. The film’s title became a overt promise to the whites that their supremacy over and superiority to the Blacks (and other races) was a legitimate part of their American ‘Birthright’. Opponents picked up this claim both in title and content, and little wonder bitterly opposed it.

If the promise of supremacy of whites was part of DWG’s audience contract in re-titling the Clansman then this ploy was an undoubted success. DWG was almost bankrupted in producing the most expensive movie ever made, but was rewarded by the biggest box office returns in the history of cinema. Of course publicity a few riots indignant black objections all helped to sell the movie to the whites: who of course saw nothing wrong with it.

It is a magnificent epic movie, with superbly orchestrated battle scenes. A film that was innovative in many ways: its use of close -ups, tracking shots, parallel editing and other areas. But it is most conspicuously a social product of a milieu where racism was embedded deep in the grain of America’s psyche and social structure. As such this is something to understand and assimilate as you watch the film. And O yeah those ‘blacked up’ whites playing niggas? The reason for this was probably that Hollywood 1915 was as strictly segregated as anywhere. This means separate toilets, separate changing rooms, separate canteens perhaps even separate entrances for blacks Without segregated facilities white actors and technicians would have refused to work. It’s likely that DWG’s production company didn’t have segregated facilities, so the easiest solution was not to employ black actors, but get whities to ‘black up’.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

In the Realm of the Senses (Ai No Corrida) Nagira Oshima (Japan 1976) Tatsuya Fuji; Eiko Matsuda

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema, Northern Light Film Festival 26 March 2010

Ticket price: £4

Les Enfants Terribles

‘I had resolved not to make that kind of film if there were no possibility of complete sexual expression. Sexual expression carried to its logical conclusion would result in the direct filming of sexual intercourse.’ Nagira Oshima (Writings on Cinema)

Nagira Oshima’s (NO) film, ‘In the Realm of the Senses’ (IRS) is a film from which the audience emerge looking slightly bemused hushed and avoiding prolonged eye contact. What they have seen is a dark fable which is hard to understand. There may be a few prurient comments or bald dismissals: “It’s just pornography”. The film is hard to discuss because it is not a film that’s fun. It’s a film that has a point to make, and like most of NO’s work it is made with a moral purpose. NO’s choice of film to exercise this moral purpose is deliberate, exploiting the use of a sexually explicit mis en scene whose purpose is to provoke thought in the viewer.

I think that responses to films like IRS can only be personal. What I saw on the screen was not pornography although graphic sexual activity did occupy a considerable percentage of the film’s time. I don’t think IRS is erotic, though it is so described, because nothing is left to the imagination, and eroticism needs completion in the mind. The reason IRS not being porn has I think to do with NO’s moral purpose and his understanding of sexuality and its effect upon human behaviour. NO understands that sex when detached from instrumental fertility, becomes potentially a force in which the emotional needs of the child quickly rise to the surface and form the affective language of the adult sensual response. In sex there often is a process of becoming at work in which the adult becomes child, the adult psyche slips into an expressive infantilisation of desires.

The movement by individuals into the realm of sex initiates relationships of dependence that revolve about stimulation of erogenous intensities which expand to fill and become the sole object of consciousness. Look at the baby with its lips clamped to its mother’s tit. It is in a world is totally filled out by that physical relationship, where the child’s consciousness is reduced to the experience of satisfying its body. Take it from the breast before satisfaction: screaming rage and anger. As adults, one of the common ways(sic there are many forms of sex) in which we use sexual relations is to make a sort of return to being a child. Sex as a kind of parachildhood. In this parachildhood we have license to be child: to engage in baby talk and treat give and take our bodies freely and innocently as the untroubled child. It is a special realm where we have no responsibility except to the desires of our body; a special realm partitioned off from the rest of the world; a special realm where we have the privilege of children to exist only in the immediate here and now, there is no time. (lovers resent the clock, or the disguised glance at a wristwatch). Which brings me back to the lovers in IRS, Sado (sic) and Kichizo. They don’t watch the clock.

As we watch S and K’s behaviour, their genital play, their lips and eyes, the totality of their pleasure in each other, we are watching two children engaged in creating a world in the den of their sexuality; a world that comprises a game of gestures, calls and responses: game with serious intent. As Cocteau and Hartley understood, children are natural obsessives, able to close down the world and exclude everything extraneous to the current dominant game. When S and K meet they renounce everything except the game, which like the child involves the whole of their consciousness and its expression. Everything is reduced and focused upon mutual satisfaction of needs. It is this pact of the child, or the child archetype as made by many lovers, that NO takes and exploits without compromise and develops it to its ultimate logic, death. And what is death to a child? A child in the game does not understand death as something that happens outside the game: nor can Sado. K realises he has committed and penetrated too deeply into the game to even begin to understand how to escape: all he can do is surrender to its logic.

Watching EOS, I do not see pornography because I see and recognise in S and K, the child. In their performances and in their direction, it is this quality of child innocence that is realised and expressed throughout the film. It is impossible to reconcile innocence with pornography. As I watch K and S, I see something of myself, not in the external acts of masturbation fellatio penetration strangulation, but a self who recognises the nature of the world they have chosen, the type of game they elect to play. And like all gameworlds of the senses, or indeed spirit, it contains the seed of its own destruction.

Starting from an old Tokyo story of the 1930’s about a demented woman found wandering the streets holding in her hand her lover’s dismembered penis, NO has fashioned in film a contemporary parable. Observing the world about him he witnessed a change in the nature of society: in the mid 1970’s people were turning inwards on themselves. Society changed from being an active space to a passive space. It became a world of consumption, a world of material desires; a world in which sex was the prime driver of the selling of self identity. Society was turning away from politics and social functions towards the satisfactions of the body. It was the dawning of the era of the YUPPIE. As the world looked to find identity in lifestyles patterns of consumption and relationships, so NO saw an increasing infantalisation of the people and the culture. It is all in the big sell of tits ass and cock, and we are become children, like Sado and Kichizo without even realising it.

IRS is a dark fable. Not an erotic tale or a piece of porn. It is NO’s fable of psychic regression and its consequences. If we allow the game of the child to overwhelm us, if we allow consumption to subjugate us to its erogenous play, we will end up castrated or mad or both.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Lebanon Samuel Maoz (2009 Isr, Fr, Ger, Leb) Raymond Anslem, Oshri Cohen, Ashraf Barhorn

Viewed Tyneside Cinema, Northern Lights Film Festival, ticket price £7.00

What I had heard about Samuel Maoz’s (SM) film Lebanon (Leb), was that it was all shot from within a tank that took part in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). The idea held out the prospect of a statement about war, in which the tank as a setting, with the armoured isolation of its crew from the outside world, could engage with its audience as one of the forces at play in the movie. There was the prospect of a film that might explore ideas.

Leb is not so purist that it all the action takes place within the confines of the tank; and tanks have always seemed to me to be like steel coffins. But most of the action is located either within the steel hull or viewed through the cross sights of its cannon. Some war movies, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory use the theme of war to deepen thought and emotion in relation to armed conflict. Leb fails in this respect. We have an interior situation in Rhino (radio code name for the tank) which is ultimately just a pretext for individualised stories, individuation that is a standard Hollywood device for humanising ‘our side’. By featuring the crew’s subjectivities SM moves the film out of the hard death dealing carapace of Rhino softening the interior with sentimentality. Recoiling from the implicit hard implacable the idea of ‘ tank’, the film takes on the business of reconciling oppositions: the hard and the soft. Good men bring death. War as a story of sentimental enterprise.

The action, outside the tank, mostly seen through the cross hairs of the gun sight, comprises mostly of the ‘face’ of war. With its formulaic parade of burnt mangled corpses, smashed people and buildings, and mutilated bodies, Leb is just another Spielberg type war film relying for its effect on image fetishism and faux realism. In its own way a sort of pornography of simulated effect, but which is often used by film makers as a justification for their work with the claim to be bringing the “true” uncensored horror of it war to the audience. The tyranny of the action-image. As if we didn’t know that war is terrible; as if our eyes might consume these images in any different manner from which they consume an ice cream advert. Our perception of the image is guided by desire. In looking at simulated realism, we are dealing with sign language.

The other issue that interested me in relation to Leb, is that ingrained in the production of any war film is a political point of view, an ideological understanding and statement about what is happening in the conflict. How would this be expressed in Leb? Would it take the form of an outright justification of Israel’s action and position; or would Leb take a more oblique more nuanced less direct but no less propagandist line, as for instance in Ari Fisher’s Waltz with Bashir?

Ari Fisher’s film represented the Phalangist massacres of Palestinians in the Shatra and Chatilla camps as taking place over one night. It is a matter of historical UN record they took place over 2 nights, thus irrevocably implicating the IDF as complicit in the killings of thousands of innocents. One key concern of Israeli propaganda in relation to the ’82 Lebanon war is to suggest a critical gap between the acts and intentions of the IDF (representing Israeli policy), and their Christian allies, the Phalangists. In simplistic form IDF are presented as good and honourable; the Phalangists unavoidable allies, but pretty bad people. It is interesting that this is exactly the line taken by SM in Leb. The second half of the movie revolves about the captured Syrian prisoner Rhino is forced to take on board. This soldier’s presence is discovered by a couple of Phalangists who first try to take him. Failing this, one of them has a long unpleasant, one way conversation in Arabic about what he is going to do to the unfortunate man when Rhino gets to its rendez-vous point. This is vicious stuff which the Israeli crew, not speaking Arabic, don’t understand. As the shackled Syrian does not speak Hebrew , the crew’s non understanding is convenient as they are exonerated from responsibility. As director/writer SM does not permit the Syrian to use basic communication of his fear of the threats made to him and his penis by the Palangist. The viewer is left with the message: bad Phalangists, they bad men, and the Phalange are the villains the evil force in Leb. The oblique delivery of this message is of course in perfect tune with Israeli propaganda in relation to the ’82 Lebanon war: the Israelis represented the forces of moderation and fairness. Unfortunately their approach was sullied by the savagery of their unavoidable allies, the Phalange. At a propaganda level, Leb toes the Israeli line, and the film is part of a long term strategy by Israel to control the definition of its wars with its neighbours.

The opening shot of the film, a still shot held for a considerable time of the field of ripe sunflowers suggested a film that might be rich in associations, but the body of the film didn’t develop into anything beyond standard Hollywood fare. Though interestingly the last shot of the film shows the same field, but now occupied by the stranded Rhino. My mind again drifts to the association of Van Gogh and his last picture before his suicide.p

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Salo Pier Pasolini (It. 1975 150 mins) Paolo Bonicelli, Giorgio Cataldi

Viewed as free computer download 23 March 2010

Adrin Neatrour writes: QED

‘It is only at our moment of death that our life, to that point undecipherable, ambiguous, suspended, acquires a meaning.’ Pasolini

Salo, Pasolini’s last film, is based on the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Like the book (not published until 1902) the film also experienced censorship and was banned in most countries, as indeed it still is. Salo’s significance is coloured by Pasolini’s brutal murder, his body burnt and mutilated, by a male prostitute shortly after the film’s completion. Conspiracy and teleological theories compete in trying to explain a death that remains a mystery. On seeing the film I found it hard not to think about the state of mind of Pasolini when he went out to meet his death, the director who had just meticulously orchestrated this filmic take on the Theatre of Cruelty. Salo is a series of savage sadistic events unequalled until Michael Haneka’s Funny Games (both versions): no surprise that Haneka cites Salo as an important influence on his filmic thinking.

Sade’s 120 days is transposed by Pasolini from revolutionary France to Salo, the fascist occupied portion of Italy in 1944, an area well known to Pasolini who actually lived there in 1944: Salo has a real provenance in Pasolini’s own experience. The film like the book is based on the idea that four fascist libertines accompanied by four middle aged prostitutes, kidnap 18 young people, nine of each sex. They proceed to lock them up and imprison them in a remote chateau where with their armed guards they subject the young victims to a series of degradations tortures and death. The film’s narrative is divided into four acts, based loosely on Dante’s rings of hell in the Inferno: the Ante-Inferno, the Circle of Manias. the Circle of Shit, the Circle of Blood.

Salo, like Sade’s book is premised on a mathematical logic. It takes place in an enclosed world, governed only by its own laws. However perverse it may appear it is ‘a pure world’. What takes place in this world is a series of operations, of increasing intensity, that are conducted not on ciphers but on bodies. Of course the operations are designed to reduce bodies to the status of ciphers, sites for the imposition of manipulation and power. Using Cinema as his blackboard, Salo is Pasolini as demonstrator of the theorem of the total corruption of society through inequality. Most evident in Fascism, but exactly the same forces at work in the Abu Ghraib Guantanamo, Bagram as well as the realms of BerluSconi SarKozy and BrOwn. With Pasolini the circuitry of amplification between the personal and the political is always evident: his own sexuality in constant mutual dialogue with his political instincts.

There is something about the music in Salo. Aside from the beguiling and haunting 30’s foxtrot which sounds like a Cole Porter composition, most of the music is present in the film, played as an accompaniment to the events by the lady pianist in the big hall. The music has an arch-presence which has a direct effect on the psyche as we watch the horror in front of us. The discordance between the harmony of notes played on the piano and the action perhaps has some equivalence in the classical orchestra that played in Auschwitz. The music, and I include the Porter style Foxtrot which is a sort of leitmotiv, is physically nauseous. It releases powerfully ambivalent and conflicting emotional responses. The tunes played on the piano follow familiar harmonic cadences, yet something in the form of the individual notes, in the hammers striking the wires, in the working of the dampers, is discordant and painful. The sound creates a demand coming out of the pit of your stomach, for the music to stop. Shoot the pianist!

I think that the way Pasolini shot Salo was intended to make the film an experience the audience cannot deny. It is shot front on and full on, in effect incorporating the viewer into the film: trapped like the victims in the chateau. There is no escape, no lines of flight, either emotional or spiritual. You dear viewer are IN the film and you must live thereafter with the consequences of this.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Black God White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol) Glauber Rocha (1964 Brazil)

Geraldo De Rey; Othon Bastos, Maurico do Valle, Yona Magalaes

Viewed: educational theatre of MOMA NYC , 26 Feb 2010: free complementary screening

retrocrit: zombie apocalypse

Black God White Devil was made in the early 1960’s, a turbulent period in Brazil’s history with a military Junta taking over and ruling the country at the prompting of the USA. The internal references in Glauber Rocha’s (GR) film are to the 19th century history of Brazil but the issues are contemporary. Further both content and the form with which GR assembles his material in the film, take on a prophetic resonance in relation to the post colonial era of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; resonance that neither Europe nor America can ignore.

The English title of the film Black God White Devil (BGWD) is meaningless in relation to the GR’s film. The Brazilian title which translates as, God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun, points directly to the heart of the film. When conditions prevail that lead to the break-up of critical social and economic ties, God and the Devil both lay claim to men’s souls; God and the Devil, good and evil become indistinguishable as the people become bewitched emeshed in their self disintegration.

BGWD is set during a catastrophic drought, that breaks the earth, cracks open the people’s psyche. The response of protagonists Rosa and Manuel to the break down, physical psychic and social, is flight into the altered state of trance. Trance the operative state of mind of those cut off from all their previous realities and entering a world of new perceptions and imperatives (survival) in which previous self is redundant. Cheated by his boss Manuel stabs him and has recourse to flight which in the chaos of the country can only lead to the hallucinogenic alternative realities of rationalised death and destruction. The forces in play in this devastated land that are ready to absorb the flight of Rosa and Manuel, are movements deleterious to the individual identity: in effect crude apparatus that demand complete submission to a destructive belief system. They first join the group led by the messianic figure Sebastian, whose response to the catastrophe is to preach the tenets of an externalised religious faith twisted and corrupted to subject his followers to an acceptance of their personal guilt and need for collective atonement: “..washing the sinners’ souls with the blood of the innocent”.

Perhaps taking Sebastian at his word, Rosa kills Sebastian by stabbing him with a knife and she and Manuel flee again, this time being absorbed into the army of Corisco, a scavenging psychic entity who has moved beyond good and evil into the land of the dead. There in the land of the dead there is no logic but death since life is by definition intolerable. The way to save the world from hunger is to kill the hungry, and Corisco brings his trance logic of death to the people in the barren desiccated landscape.

Taken as one force the apocalyptic vision of Sebastian and the murderous logic of Corisco, the absorbion of the deterritorialised into trance states, can be understood as a response to people’s hopelessness and powerlessness endemic in the post colonial era. The Lord’s Resistance Army of Alice Lakwene and Joseph Kony, Al Qa’ida in its various guises, are coalescences of justified warped religious righteousness given form by an armed nihilistic mission. The mission is always death. The deterritorialised followers, stripped of all that is familiar, transform into an undead horde, existing in state trance; zombies, whose final justification is to refine their beliefs to the simple act of killing for its own sake. Let the sins of the innocent be washed in blood. For the zombie killer, killing becomes an existential rationale for life. The bringer of death is the bringer of life. Life exists only in the trance of the apparatus: all else is illusion.

GR’s insight was to understand the forces released by powerlessness and destitution in a post colonial situation. The opening shot, a long aerial track of the dried out land provides the setting for the film. But the setting of the film in the extraordinary interior of Brazil, barren and desolate, is not a background. It is more than even a context; the land itself is a presence with a key role in the film. In the same way the encroachment of the Sahara into Northern Uganda is a player in the world of the Lord’s Resistance Army, and the waters of the Jordan, a player in Palestine. Parched land together with demeaning social relations create the conditions for releasing the murderous psychic apparatus that overtake and bewitch the people.

BGWD is composed using many shots of long duration often with medium or wide lens. This works to bind the individuals and their relation to the settings and to the land which forms them. The final shot is a long tracking shot that conjoins us with Rosa and Manuel as they run across the land towards their vision which remains always out of their sight out of their grasp.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Headless Woman (La Mujer sin Cabeza) Lucretia Martel (Argentina 2008) Maria Onetta

Viewed: Tyneside Cinema 6 Mar 10; Ticket: £7.00

No head for consequences

Veronica the protagonist in the Headless Woman (HW) seems to be one of those middle aged women who fucks not because she’s alive, but to confirm to herself that she is not dead.

Lucretia Martel (LM) premises HW on an idea about an ‘event’ that may or may not have happened. In this, it is in some respects similar to Antonioni’s ‘L’Aventura’ (1960) which starts with the ‘event’ of the disappearance of a woman on an island. In both Antonioni’s film and LM’s HW the initial provocations are never resolved but both movies deeply internalise the events (or perhaps non-events) into the psychic grain of the films; albeit in different ways.

With L’Aventura, the disappearance of Anna falls out of focus, new relationships new connections form and take her place. In Italy still shaken in defeat and trauma of war, Eros is sick and there is a consequent emotional and intellectual alienation cracking through the shell of the bourgeoisie, the professional classes and the intelligentsia. Individuals have no centre only surfaces and edges.

In HW the forces LM unveils at work after the (non) /event are different. Veronica is the name of the Saint who gave Christ her headscarf to wipe the sweat from his face, and whose image was miraculously transferred onto the surface of the cloth, the sudarium. I think it is Veronica herself in HW who is the impressionable sudarium, a character who in her dieing back has become a sensate surface, reactive to the past of the ruling caste of Argentina. A living re-agent to the forgotten: children stolen, victims disappeared, crimes covered over that no one knows for sure actually happened as darkness falls over the past. Veronica, as a neorealist heroine cannot react with action: she is simply overwhelmed, watching her own life as her own passive spectator.

The film’s setting is within the bosom of the wealthy middle class of Provincial Argentina. The spaces are filled with children, family, Indian servants, and the men who know how take care of things. The atmosphere is one of closeness, in particular closeness of a sort of neo-colonial control by a social subgroup unchanged for many a year. A group of people well equipped to absorb and subtly mould forces to serve its own needs: to erase the past and continue ‘life as normal’ as if nothing had happened.

LM’s reference to ‘Headless’ in her title refers, I think, to Veronica’s lack of a mind of her own; an incapacity to chose her own moral direction. Fixed in a social class that has no moral compass she is not able to say “No!” to take a moral stand based on memory, because no head, no memory. Put on the spot by a feeling that something has happened Vero is unable without a head of her own, to make any coherent move forward. And she is appalled and tortured by this inability which she sees but does not understand and which she is unable to counter. She withdraws into a sort of distracted trance and allows others to take the decisions, ‘ Nothing happened you hit a dog…’ and to take any actions thought necessary. Veronica distracted and scattered by the ‘event‘ at first watches over the reactions of others then retreats into a social cocoon from which at the end of the film she seems to emerge with a change of hair style and colour ( blond to black) . As if these cosmetic changes might redeem the past for her; as if the change from a military junta to a loaded social democracy could at a stroke redeem a class of people for responsibility for their past. Perhaps the change of image will succeed and disassociate her from the past she finds so difficult so disturbing so immobile.

LM with its mis en scene of rain and forgetfulness, its subtle plotting of events that dissolve upon inspection, its soundtrack skirting the film from somewhere just out of frame is wonderfully composed piece of filmmaking. My uncertainly about the film centres on its inconsequentiality and the extent to which it is allegorically layered. Perhaps it is a film about the neurotic responses of a middle aged woman to a driving accident. But the film only became interesting to me when I began to feel (right or wrong) that this was something more, a deeply layered portrayal of a world. Without the unpicking of allegorical cues the film became so much the less engrossing. It is also unclear whom it addresses. I think the film needed some break out from its carefully moulded unities. It needed a moment of revelation to open out to and to address the gaze of its audience with a moment of the real.

As it stands LM’s HW is almost completely self referential closing down the images into a narrow spectrum of concern. The danger for LM as a film maker is that she will disappear in the cloud of her own unknowing and our indifference. .

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk