Adrin Neatrour

A Prophet (Un Prophéte) – Jacques Audiard (FR 2009) Malik el Djebena; Niels Arestrup

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 2nd Feb 2010 ticket price £7.00

The vision of the amnesiac

By the end of A Prophet (AP) I felt underwhelmed by its gangster story inanity and its duration. But I was struck by something else in the film, a theme that underlies the movie but that mostly remains in the background. The theme that dare not speak its name: the emergence of Islam from out of the shadows as a potent collective social and moral force to rival the West and Christianity.

The length of movie (155mins) has nothing to do with any attempt in the film to find a language for the experience of the passing of time in prison and more to do with Jacques Auriard’s (JA) stretching out his rite de passage theme to cover issues outside his main concern. Like many contemporary directors JA only seems to feel secure with his material if he packs out his script with a series of extraneous references to personal problems, social issues etc. (in contrast compare Robert Bresson’s Un condamné a mort s’ est échappé) So AP is bulked out with the ‘apparition story’, the ‘cancer story’, and titled chapters dealing with a array of lesser and mostly forgettable characters.

TP as film, in its settings and lighting, the camera work, the nature of its acting and dramatic rendering, is simply an inflated TV experience. The film’s creative style is premised on heightened replication of its realised setting – the prison. The prison is then exploited as a melodramatic background against which to project an acting style built on cliché and sentimental exploitation of the narrative. As in TV the use of the camera as the indexical tool is restricted to changes of angle, in particular shot reverse shot, and the consequent use of this limited vocabulary to pace the action. JA makes little alternative use of his camera other than to set up opportunities to manipulate the action in the edit. In particular this limitation of filmic vocabulary is exposed in the interactions between Tahar and the apparition of his victim in his cell. There is so little filmic understanding of the relationship that all JA can do is repeat the contrivance. The repetition quickly exhausts interest in the relationship (which seems to have nowhere to go) . The final shot of ‘the victim on fire’ seems little more than a heavy handed symbolic event contrived to mark the point of change in Tahar’s consciousness of his situation. A shot deployed to arouse flagging audience indifference. With his limited filmic sensibility AP seems to run out of ideas and energy in making the narrative of AP work. Dramatically the film is reduced, like many French gangster films, to endless repetition of dramatic motifs and emotive vamping.

What works in AP, is JA’s continuous return to the core situation: the prison. It is here, in the non action, in the ebb and flow of people through the psychic currents in the exercise yard and the corridors that the potent forces in the film reveal themselves. The prison as an allegorical setting: a substitute for the social matrix. This allegorical use of the prison is only a half glimpsed and has to burrow its way through to the surface of what is otherwise a wash of mediocre cliché’s rendering of gangsta’s in gaol. JA’s film works as an allegorical vehicle commenting on the West and Islam. As an allegorical vehicle it succeeds despite the banal style in which it is shot.

AP feels like it is a film that is really about a phantom narrative that develops alongside and in parrellel with the initiation story. And it not the Oedipal drama suggested by the relationship between Cesar and Tahar. If Tahar is not a naïf what is the story?

I think that the narrative concerning the rise of Tahar as super criminal is a feint, a decoy that overlayers the interesting concerns of AP which are the effects of Islam on French society. In actual fact, given the way he is portrayed in AP, a man with no past ( he can’t even remember his parents) Tahar is in effect an amnesiac. A device in effect for exposing the familiar. Tahar remembers nothing. He awakes in prison as if from a dream. He has no religion. He has no social background. He is placed in an environment where there are two groups. The old tired corrupt and corrupted Europeans ( represented by the Corsicans) who have lost all moral bearing; and the followers of Islam who are upright, uncorrupted spiritually and justified in their faith. A group bound by a hierarchic ethos of destructive individuality; the other group defined by collective worship. The prison of AP is an allegorical setting in which the amnesiac Tahar is put in a position where he has to make a series of decisions and eventually take up an allegiance with one or the other group. The West is spent old and corrupted. It is the vital moral claim of Islam that wins him over: Moslem corruption may be social but it is not spiritual. The depleted and morally exhausted state of the West, of Christianity is laid bare in the allegorical setting of the gaol. Perhaps this is why Tahar is the prophet: he chooses the path of righteousness even in crime, and crime is not the same as corruption. This is the message of a Prophet.

Of course like all allegories to be effective it is simple. In this case the allegory refers to only half of humanity. This is a male parable. Perhaps we need a female prophet.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Hi ya folks. Back again with a wry look at a blockbuster film I caught out there on the ether.

You know what I really like?

You don’t.

Well I’ll tell you. A nice 3 litre box of cheap red wine, a fat, raw black pudding and a good vampire flick. Actually I lied, I can’t stand wine and being a Jew black pudding is a no no. But hey I’ll lie, just like the makers of Daybreakers cos it ain’t a good vampire flick.

The premise had such potential. The year is 2019 which for those of you who don’t care for calendars that’s the future. You know a time where phones don’t have cords and TV goes past midnight. Oh no shit that’s now, I’m still stuck in the 70s. Anyway I digress it’s the future and the planet is populated by vampires you know those pretty traditional ones, drink blood, suffer severe melanoma (Actually this is an Australian made film, maybe it’s a documentary about Aussies.), explode with stakes in the heart, some of them even went to Bela Lugosi’s school of vampire etiquette, especially Sam Neill. It seems the best thing about this future is that vampires live forever making it….. Now wait for it. Making it cool to smoke again and boy do they smoke, everyone smokes so much in this film I’m surprised it doesn’t come with a message from the surgeon general and a picture of someone with their throat turned inside out. Sadly it’s not the future yet, smoking comes before a long, painful death and you still have to do it in the pissing rain.

Anyway vampires everywhere, driving cars, drinking posh Italian coffees with extra blood, catching the subway and taking their vampire kids to sports to watch overpaid vampires play them. The problem is there are so many vampires they are running out of food. Humans are being farmed for their blood but they are getting less and less. Obviously they never met me ma because she would have forced them to eat liver, because it is good for your blood.

The plot is a blah, blah thriller, sci fi, horror do da that just can’t hold it together. Ethan Hawke is a Haematologist (some sort of a blood doctor for those of us who only got a YTS in lawn mowing.) who is a reluctant vampire that wants to save what’s left of the human race. The survivors’ leader, ex-vampire Daniel Defoe who it seems based his face on Guy Fawkes Is a boring ex-vamp

There are 3 main issues I have with this film. Firstly everyone who is a vampire seems to have forgotten only a little while back they were potential food. They just don’t seem to acknowledge that the person who was human who has become a vampire is still them. OK maybe that is a little picky. The next one is a bit way out there as well. OK I am a simple person but all this stuff gets in the way of suspending my disbelief of things. What I felt about the whole thing is it tried to explain this in some quasi-scientific way. I can’t put my finger on it UV, Haematology (which sounds like some expensive rich peoples religion.) but it just seemed like they were trying to justify stuff with science. This just ain’t necessary, science is theory’s and formulas and crap while vampires are legends. You know what I mean? Understanding stuff about DNA doesn’t really give you any insight in to the mating habits of trolls.

Anyway if you don’t like those 2 reasons for not liking it you’ll love the third. The third act is crap. The plot goes all over the place then decides to abandon the film. Everything just get stupid and confusing which I think the film makers knew because by this point they said what the hell is going on and decided just to kill lots of stuff. This turned it in to a vampire film done in the style of a zombie flick.

My advice stay away from cheap wine, blood pudding and this flick.

As always love and kisses

Whakapai

The King of Marvin Gardens Bob Rafelson (1972 USA) Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, Julia Robinson

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 24 01 10; ticket price £4.00

Adrin Neatrour retro crit: no backgrounds only space

The King of Marvin Gardens (KMG) opens with a long heightened monologue delivered by David Sadler (Jack Nicholson ). It’s one of the pieces he broadcasts live on radio as a late night talk jock from a small sound booth; stories that borrow heavily from his past and his brother’s personal life. It forms the pre-title sequence that opens the film, and cues up the rest of the movie. It’s a key scene in a film in which Atlantic City provides the setting against which the characters act out the gestural processes of their relationships.

KMG is an exceptional movie in that Bob Rafelson (BR) succeeds in making the setting of the film its prime expressive and active agency. Atlantic City shot and realised as an otherworldly dimension releases in the characters the seeds of their own fate as the forces of disintegration overtake Jason Sadler and his girlfriend Sally. David and Jessica are pulled into this entropic maelstrom, helpless collaborators in the theatrical endgame and incapable of playing any role other than true to type: she the goading competing female, he the mildly joshing critical audience and collector and keeper and spinner of the stories.

In KMG there is no plot as such, or what plot there is simple drifts away on and off camera in a series of staccato and incomprehensible exchanges before finally dissolving into another chimeric phantasm. Instead of the processes of disintegration being stamped into the story line, they are instead scratched onto the topographical map that is Atlantic City. The beach the boardwalk the amusement park rides, the concession stands the exhibition centre the drifting bus tour day visitors the hotels with their private and public parts all become spaces and effects that incite and excite in the players increasing hallucinatory states of mind. The illusion of agency issuing from structure. But why not? Settings and architectures, palaces cathedrals White Houses and Skyscrapers can all create impossible subjectivities, psychic megalomanias and other instabilities in soul and vision.

KMG doesn’t work by continuity in its action; rather it works by a series of set pieces

that pitch the protagonists from one setting to another each with its own logic of execution that leaves each of the characters further adrift from each other and the anchorage of the real. Perhaps the main cop out from director/writer BR is his choice of an easy ending option with the gun. Perhaps he pandered to the Hollywood Preferred Ending of Climax, so that in the end the gun goes pop and the executives could go home knowing that something had happened. This particular climax in relation to the preceding development of the film wasn’t really necessary and imposed a simple reductionist solution on a complex situation. Perhaps this is the American way.

KMG is underscored and made possible by very strong supportive acting, in particular from Nicholson as David whose repressed yet manipulative presence underpins the whole project. He’s only there for the story to be hoarded like gold and like gold easily workable and chased into many forms for many different functions.

Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Red Shoes Powell and Pressburger (UK 1948) Moira Shearer, Marius Goring

Viewed Tyneside Cinema: 22 Dec 2009 Ticket price:£7.00

Retrocrit: Red for locked

Hair’s a big thing in the movies. I think of Lauren Bacall’s hair that transmutes into undulating waves; Marilyn Monroe’s peroxide message of seductive untouchability; and to the case in point, the stupendous and overpowering red mountainous shock of locks adorning Moira Shearer. In both painting and film hair has an iconic function: iconic used here to mean a pictorial sign pointing to an idea about itself not the actuality.

Hair is a feature that can set an individual apart from others, or divide off an ordinary personage from an extraordinary. In film, and in actual life, we are talking ‘coiffure’. It seems to me that the defining feature of ‘the coiffure’ is that it is a physical sign of ‘that which may not be touched’: a statement of a complete self containment. The outer perfection of hair in this form forbids or warns off physical engagement or psychic entanglement with the hair by any other party. As a sign, the coiffure is a statement by its wearer of their heightened consciousness of their elected function or appointed role which is expressed with a claimed state of physical and psychic apartness.

In this respect hair, big style hair, is the natural adornment of both the Goddess figure and fairy tale figure. Screen goddesses and those taking on the role of female fairy tale characters are girls/women who are complete in themselves. They are immune to any other defining forces such as social status or male characters. In the case of the Screen Goddesses (such as Dietrich, Monroe) whilst they are on screen their hair allows them to carry themselves with little reference to either story or plot machinations. Of course their appearance in any given film is cued by the narrative, but what is actually happens is that they command the camera and our attention. On screen their presence expands to fill out consciousness. Plot usually has to move along when they are off screen or else be co-opted only with their gracious consent.

In the case of the fairy tale movie (Garland; Shearer) the female protagonists, the fairy tale characters marked out by their hair, are enfolded into their fate by the relentless and immutable unfolding of the narrative, a predetermined mechanical vehicle that allows of no escape. As Vicky, Moira Shearer’s pile of red hair in the Red Shoes encompasses the elemental idea of her role; her assignation is with the fateful path pointed to by the story. There is no possibility of happy ending such as marriage (male force) or by herself somehow deflecting her fate away from death. The film simply follows her inevitable career from its beginning to its end. There is no possibility of either rescue from her situation or the setting in motion of forces that would free her from her fate. And Vicky’s hair is the signifier of her role as a being who cannot be touched except by the psychic elements built into the logic of the story. For Vicky Red Shoes, as with the little Mermaid and the Tin Soldier, there is no overcoming; there is only submission.

It was Powell and Emeric’s (P and E) strength as film makers to understand the nature of their material, and what their material made filmically possible. They never try to make of their subject matter something that it is not. There is no conflict in the filmed story. There are only the forces at work within Vicky’s psyche. When Vicky replaces Baronskaya, the situation is not used as an opportunity to introduce a back stage melodrama. The process of her replacement is carried through without tears or resistance from Baronskaya,. In the fairy tale world of P and E. Baronskaya has in effect escaped Bluebeard’s castle in leaving the Ballet Lermonov, and thereby avoiding his psychic enmeshment. This also highlights the fact that the Red Shoes film script contains elements of the Bluebeard’s Castle story. Its narrative line is a sort of hybrid of the two tales, but with the fateful element drawn from the Red Shoes. But what P and E understood was that they were not making a Hollywood movie in which the characters invoke a pseudo ethos of optimistic self determination as per Debbie Reynolds in Singing in the Rain They were dealing with darker material; hence perhaps their lack of success and recognition in the US, and also their difficulty in a post war Europe eager to buy into the hope of the American dream.

P and E always use colour as a base element in their films. In the Red Shoes, constantly changing sets of colour wash through the film creating a world of enchantment. Although Technicolor is the medium, its purpose is not as in the Wizard of Oz to create the synthetic brash patina of the nursery; the hues and tones the greens yellows reds and blues of Red Shoes are muted, absorbent in nature, taking the viewer into the emotional grain of the film. The colour concept of P and E embodies the dark telling of a dark fairy tale.

The visual highlight of the film, Vicky’s dance of the Red Shoes is a breathtaking montage of colour light sound, with changing morphing sets, that equals if not surpasses the sequences danced by Gene Kelly in Minnelli musicals where plastic film form creates a series of worlds out of a fluidity of images. “Dance is no longer simply movement of world, but passage from one world to another, entry into another world, breaking in and exploring”. (Deleuze – Cinema 2 p.63) Though the Red Shoes dance sequence has a different filmic function from An American in Paris, it does serve as the final initiation of Vicky and confirms her entry into the embrace of the fairy tale: something we knew all along because of that hair, but confirmed for us by an extraordinary sequence, that one imagines was studied by both Minnelli and Kelly.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte)

Michael Haneka (Germany 2009) Christian Friedel, Leone Benoed

viewed Tynesdie Cinema 1 Dec 2009; Ticket price: £7.00

Looking from the outside

I see lots of stars in the advertising of this film. Awarding stars, a la Guide Michelin, is the current method adopted by reviewers for rating films. Five stars seems to be par for the White Ribbon (WR) so it’s attracted a lot of positive crits, complemented by the usual hyperbolic adjectives. And of course it won the 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. I have to say that after viewing it I couldn’t share the star gazers certainty about the movie.

There is much that I enjoyed about the film. Perhaps most of all that Michael Haneke (MH) is making movies with a European sensibility in which the viewer is not hammered with the arbitrary violence of crass connections but given the option of relating to the form of the film, both through the manner in which it is composed and shot and in relation to its subject.

WR is shot in black and white. I think the decision will have been made both for both aesthetic affective reasons and also so that the project was not distracted into becoming a BBC style costume drama. Shot (or perhaps printed) on Black and White gives WR the expressive feel that it is a distillation of events that are being presented to us. Bergman’s films shot on black and white have a similar effect. Further in that the film is presented on black and white stock, contrast becomes an elemental force in itself, working through the film. As a force I don’t think contrast is a purely visual affect. Its use in defining the visual style of the film transposes into other areas of the film’s content affecting the reading of the social and emotional forces in play, creating a heightened awareness of their interaction within the world of the film. The elimination of colour, if the filmmaker understands the nature of the project, generates an intensification of a film’s intrinsic concerns. MH, like Bergman, has certainty in the expressive form he has chosen for WR.

I associate MH’s films with the images of doors. As in the Piano Teacher, WR makes full use of the doors as visual motif. Doors opening and closing: doors marking public and private space, doors opening and closing space to us and the camera. Doors as framing devices through which we are permitted to half see: but no more. Doors informing us that perspective is always limited to a particular point of view. This use of doors as screens and impairers of visual fields tells that much is hidden, was always hidden and will always remain hidden, from us. And that much of what is hidden is hidden by us from ourselves. Hidden is both a social and psychic relation. It is part of us and it is perhaps this relation, between the open and closed, what we chose to open and choose to close, that provokes Haneka to make films. In Western culture committed to the chimerical values of transparency and openness, the concept of closed off and hidden is deeply inscribed into the grain of MH’s films. MH observes the closing door; closed door: an ironic filmic riposte.

As in Hidden, WR is restrained in its exploitation of its endemic material. What is important is the psycho-social movement of the theme which like a music composition MH allows to build up slowly to its moment of truth. The moment of truth isn’t as in Hollywood movies a great set piece, or melodramic explosion of emotion. It is simply a moment which like realisations that occur in the middle of the night, come in the great and lonely space of silence.

The full title of the film in German, omitted in the marketing of English version, reads: The White Ribbon – a German children’s story. I suppose that this immediately points up MH’s central object in making the film. Much as in Funny Games MH shows that a society, a culture, produces the demons that destroy it. In White Ribbon, forces of repression and oppression create the psychic condition within the children to strike out at the adult world. This hitting out by the children is opportunistic and random. Action designed to provoke reaction in a rigid hierarchic patriarchal world. It is not revenge so much as an archetypal provocation and desire to uncover, the primal chaos beneath the surface of a smug social and religious ordering.

My reservations in relation to WR concern MH’s script and his direction of the material. The script feels like it is premised on society as an apparatus, as a fully operant machine. The film feels to me as if it is mechanically following through the complex permutations of the script. I felt I was watching a film that had some of the same concerns as Bergman, but unlike Bergman movies, WR failed sustain a committed interest on my part. The plot and its playing out seemed over determined and predictable.

I was talking about this to my friend Ana Marton who pointed out to me that whereas Bergman was a filmmaker who drew on the personal; MH as a filmmaker draws on the social. This simple insight explains the source of my critical reservations with WR. MH starts from the outside; Bergman starts from within. In WR, MH’s concern with the social, together with his large cast, representing 5 families (the project started life as a TV mini serial) has the effect of turning his characters into roles, people whose only purpose is their function. Each role is simply a cog in the WR apparatus. Each of the roles is played out automatively to lead us from one social situation to the next, to guide us through from the situation at the start of the film to the situation at the end. In WR there are no real surprises; the playing out is almost impersonal; there is in the intrapersonal dynamics, nothing to command attention. WR is interesting in the same way as watching a machine is interesting. In contrast for Bergman, everything begins with the personal. The personal has social and political implications but they are subsumed in the person. Bergman arrests and demands attention because movement is within the psyche of the characters. It is they who move, or try to move in opposition to the inertia that surrounds them. For Bergman it is not the playing out of the script that is critical it is how the characters play it out. Hidden is I believe MH’s most successful film because the ‘social’ concern addressed does not take on a highly individuated form. The French TV producer, in his denials and moral insecurity, stands for a Western condition: in our privilege and denial we are all being watched. After the same criterion, The Piano Teacher, like WR fails to engage, its exteriority and documenting of social relations produces a film that operates as a closed mechanism rather than a creative opportunity.

Of course MH’s signature is the closed or closing door. He might well reply that states of mind are closed to us; we have no way of penetrating them other than self indulgence or recourse to the social. In that he is operating with a neoBrechtian sensibility This is a valid position, but one which works best with levels of theatrical flamboyance and detached irony that are evident in Funny Games but absent from WR with its low key commentary by the teacher.

A final note: it is strange that whereas the very month and year in which WR was set was precisely determined by MH, the explanatory commentary, delivered as a Voice Over by the central character, the teacher, was never given a date. The film is set in 1913, just as WW1 breaks out and when the teacher was 31. But when was the teacher’s retro voicing done? After the WWl? Or at the end of WWll when teacher would have been 63? The lack of a time line in relation to the Voice Over seems like an insecurity, an unresolved problem that lies at the core of the film’s problems. Without a temporal perspective there can be no moral point of view. Without a moral point of view the subject of the film lacks significance. The man, a teacher commenting on these events after the carnage of the WW1 or the disaster of the Third Reich, would surely, in calling up these memories from long ago, have had some moral intent in mind? MH’s failure to solve this ‘moral problem’ is a core dilemma for WR. It is an omission that detracts from the films authority and indicates a debilitating uncertainly at the heart of the project. An uncertainty which undermines any neoBrechtian ambition.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Cleo de 5 a 7 Agnes Varda (1962 Fr) Corinne Marchand

Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 12 Nov 2009 Ticket: £4.00

retrocrit: laying the cards on the table

Cleo de 5 a 7 is a film about a situation, the relationship of woman to herself, and Agnes Varda’s realisation that the mythic as well as the social is a valid response.

The opening sequence of Cleo de 5 a 7 (C57) is a breathtaking series of shots, all in colour, all from a camera, positioned directly over the action of a Tarot reading. With alacrity and machine precision the reader snaps down the cards on the table in front of Cleo. According to the cards turned over and their relative placement to each other, the monotonal voice mechanistically assigns them significance and meaning. In this sequence, as surely as the cards are signs pointing to Cleo, so Agnes Varda (AV) is using the oracular cards to anticipate key elements and concerns of the film.

The cards indicate a space between different zones of experience. The cards in themselves are a sort of in-between world, dividing time off into a before and after the moment of oracular signification. The film, also takes place in an in-between time: two hours in a space between life and death, a mythological region like the antechamber to Hades. The cards whilst they have subjective implications, have in themselves no subjectivity, no desires goals or intentions. They are sets of interrelations that have to be read according to rules and demands of individual necessity. C57 chronicles the movement of Cleo as she explores existence according to a new set of conditions. The situation she is in, the fears and doubts that she has lead her into a space outside the subjective personal emotive domain. This space, in the same way as the cards laid out on the table, allows her to experience her life as a totality. For Cleo her two hours are not a descent into subjectivity but into necessity: the condition of seeing her own life and its relations. in and for itself.

It comes as a shock that when the card sequence ends, AV reverts to a black and white world. A structured discontinuity that AV exploits to throw the viewer off balance, and let us know that now we have begun the descent into a different world. A world in which there is a new situation in which the subject will be experienced in a new and different manner and form.

C57 has the feel of being modelled on ideas gleaned from stories of the Classical world of ascents out of Hades and its antechambers by a figure such as Persephone. Corinne Marchand, beautifully costumed glides through the movie as a Goddess, a being from the place of the dead visiting the land of the living. In representation AV realises Paris as an in-between world. It is filmed to capture a vision of a city that exists in a gaseous haze between life and death. It is a shimmering realisation of interiors and exteriors characterised by shadows, or their absence, mirrors and faces.

The sequences in the hat shop and in the bars make use of mirrors so that they become channels recreating these spaces as possessed places with otherworldly qualities. The mirror is a constant motif in C57, shot: to suggest multiply realities, to act as conduits to other dimensions and as crystals to imply a challenge to the continuity and organisation of time.

AV shoots the streets and parks of Paris as alternating striated plays of light

and dark where everything tends to be defined in either too much or too little light. Streets and allies as a sprite from the underworld might experience them. And in the streets and bars random faces loom into the camera caught in the web of the dream. The manner in which these images caught by the camera press into consciousness suggests not so much faces rather souls: trapped souls. In C57 there are no extras only presences. Every presence glimpsed by Cleo by the camera, whether in street or in bar, is captured like one of the souls in Hades with their stories and sins stamped on their features.

The camera work is endemic to the C57’s mythic form. AV structures the camera work into the film as a specific force in play (as in Well’s Kane). The dominant shots are slow tracks or pans: some from an exterior film-telling angle: some from the internal point of view of Cleo. There is I think a difference between the two angles and how they contribute to the film. The speed and movement of both types of camera movement are similar, what is distinctive is our reading. In general the camera glides through the film as movement in a dream. The camera work simulates in pace and intentionality a gaze from another dimension: a looking that sees everything as novel and different; a looking that is impersonal and without fear.

However when the camera takes on the point of view of Cleo something else happens. The pace is similar but the expressive feel of the movement is quite different. In particular the pan in her apartment over and around the piano; and the track, from Cleo’s point of view, into the sculpture studio both have the quality of a caress, a yearning to reach out mediated by the simultaneous understanding of the impossibility of touching. The pan or track as a caress is expressive impossibility at the core of the film. The caress as a gesture the dead make towards the living, the sick towards the whole, a caress that has no envy but is rather contains a lament and a wonder for and of the other.

In C57 AV undertakes a mythic recasting of the role of the feminine. It is an indication of her sensibility to the psychosocial issues in the content of her film that the scenario easily survives the passage of time, the 45 years since it was written. None of Varda’s concerns have dated. We still debate and engage in dialogue in respect of the relations between the sexes and a key area of that debate often neglected is the need to define ourselves not just socially but mythically.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Katalin Varga Peter Strickland (2009 Rom) Hilda Peter; Tibor Palffy

Viewed Tyneside Cinema: 22 Oct 09 Ticket Price: £7-00

The Nature of Revenge

There is a shot in the middle of Katalina Varga that commands attention. Filmed from behind we see the forms of Katalina and her son Urban in the box seat of their cart. They are completely still. In the traces in front of them their horse moves its head in impatient agitation. Before the cart a long straight road leads through the corn across the flatness of a plain. Peter Strickland gives this shot unhurried full temporal weight to allow us to read it, to absorb it. A shot to absorb: presaging a movement towards immobility in space and time and the movement of immobility itself, for immobility does move. Unsurprisingly the shot is reprised as the final shot of the movie over which the end credits roll.

Katalin Varga (KV) is a film about retribution grounded in people, culture, landscape, time and state of mind. Peter Strickland (PS) as writer director has made a film in which these elements cohere in an odyssey that left me with questions and insights about the nature of revenge: its necessity its logic its stillness. It has the quality not so much of a story as a working out of fate.

Traudi Junge Hitler’s secretary tells how on 1st of September 1939, after dinner, a small group gathered with Hitler on the balcony of the Berchtesgarten and watched the sun set in a blood red slomo explosion of colour. All present she recalls felt it an augury of what was to come.

KV is structured as an intercutting of the human and natural: an interplay of call and response between the social and nature. KV is built on necessity both in its script and in its filmic quality and PS has the singular understanding that necessity engenders its own inexorable logic. It is a logic built on state of mind rather than action. In that the acts of revenge are engendered by specific states of mind, the land and skyscapes of Romania are filmed not as encompassers of action but rather as projections and reflections of the state of mind of the eponymous KV. And the viewer is absorbed by and becomes complicit in the unfolding of fate as nature is cast both as a mirror to and co conspirator of KV in her quest for revenge on the men who raped her. In the final act of the film, as on the eve of war at Berchtesgarten, the sky turns oracle projecting into consciousness the event that is to come.

Filmed on S16 film stock, the landscape shots have an intricate indistinct numinous quality that draws in the eye as it is enchanted by the oscillation and vibrancy of light. The filming renders land and sky as soft impressions which blur and merge detail. The way film is used by PS is in itself a force in the film, as is the controlled performance of Hilda Peter. Both determine how we are able to understand the elements in play: the social and the natural. Shot on 35mm or on HD the mountains mists and clouds would have looked more like external elements of the film characterised by intricate detail and boundary lines. Shot on 16mm and transferred to digital format they have a shimmering interiority that deflects the light inwards into the structure of the film rather than outwards as a framing device for location. Although we are in Romania, the force of the filming renders the film’s setting as universal.

The sound concept that interlinks and offsets the visual track is an integral part of KV’s movement of ideas and associations. Sound is distilled from three different sources: the film’s electronic score, human sourced sounds: voices, bells of livestock, churches; and natural sounds: soughing. animal noises. The sounds are all subtly graded and interpenetrate and extricate themselves to create a world of association and resonance that both relate to the visuals and at the same time have independent life. The effect of the sound track is to reinforce the sense that we are experiencing a set of stimuli that are assimilations of mind; yet a dynamic sound cut, with or without picture, pitches us back into the world of the social, and its immanent human associations.

The proposition that KV develops is that the woman who is destroyed socially, sets out to revenge herself and destroy those who have destroyed her. A key element in Greek tragedy is that those who wreak revenge on others for the wrong done unto them, inevitably unleash the furies who pursue their own crazed daemonic careers. Some ten years after being brutally raped KV spurned by her village sets out with her young son, also rejected, to find the perpetrators. Events run out of control and she finds the death that perhaps she had been seeking. Nevertheless in its bleak outcome I think the film points to redemption and hope. In that the film defines KV by her immobility rather than her action, there is understanding and meaning underlying the events that unfold. KV is not defined in her actions; rather in her state of mind. At the point of her pain she is locked into the past. She cannot move and neither can she understand that time has moved and left her behind. The violence is not something that is indulged as spectacle; it issues simply from a frozen situation that has no escape; its necessity arises out of the nobility of despair. Her reactions are moral rather than amoral. Her moment of supreme command as she confronts the rapist in the boat on the river is quickly understood by her as a terrible delusion for which she must accept responsibility. Redemption lies in that she realises this and accepts without compromise, her ultimate fate.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Peeping Tom – Michael Powell – UK 1960 – Karl Bohm – Anna Massey – Moira Shearer

Viewed: Star and Shadow 17 10 09 – Ticket price £4.

A film about the end of the world.

Most contemporary reviewers saw Peeping Tom (PT) as a sordid and unpleasant film, (as they did Chaplin’s M Verdoux [1947], also about a serial lady slayer.) a nasty story about a killer (Mark) with a compulsive need to film women as he drives a skewer into their throats.

PT’s narrative takes the form of an extreme provocation that is justified by an overdetermining mechanistic psychological linkage. Mark’s obsession with killing women by his chosen MO, is driven by his memory, relayed on tape and film, of being the subject of a series of sadistic experiments by his father who was ‘researching’ the nature of fear in children. (This ‘research’ makes the same sort of claim to a spurious legitimacy as the ‘Nazi experimenters’ at Auschwitz. Interesting that Powell cast a German actor, Bohm, as his lead).

Although sensational I think that the plot is a mechanical vehicle upon which MP overlays a deeper and perhaps darker issue . PT’s storyline incorporating formulaic slaying, is of necessity extreme in form because PT is a sort of theorem, an experimental proposition for testing out Powell’s insight into the relationship between film and truth. As the concentration camps were extreme testing grounds for examination of the relationship between science and truth so PT, as a theorem about the nature of recording, is also necessarily tested out in extreme events. And MP lived in the shadow of the camps as well as the shadow of his own nature.

This is why PT is a great movie. The plot is a pretext for a film project whose real concerns underlie and interpenetrate every scene but are rarely overt. PT is a spacial exercise looking at the limits of what we can understand from what we perceive and apprehend. PT is a red blazoned, wry satirical meditation on the meaning and nature of truth and the means by which we arrive at truth. PT asks in what ways film makers photographers and others, who justify their work through claims to seeking truth, are similar to Nazi death camp experimenters in their self delusion. The one thing that the camera cannot see and never can see is truth. If truth is pursued through the means

of objective recording, as if it can have objective meaning, then truth is corrupted twisted and becomes the source of obscene practice.

Sometimes claims are made by film makers (and others) that the object of the process of filming/recording is get to, to apprehend the truth of the subject, to penetrate a subject so deeply that the nature of its truth is revealed. Claims were made (certainly pre-postmodernism) that camera and recording technologies in accessing the spontaneous can split people open so that their inner mental state and functioning is revealed. That through inspection of ‘image’. we have access to ‘others’ states of mind. Cameras, both still and moving, create images that can be analyzed and from which valid deductions can be made about the real. I think that PT is a test bed that attempts to destroy these types of assumptions. The banality of the image is laid bare. At the end of the movie everything is shown to be Marks projection of his own fear. His recordings reveal nothing more than his need to pass his own fear and pain onto his victims, to see himself in their mirror. There is nothing objective. The camera is a false witness bestowing the form of externality on subjectivity.

Mark, using as a killing device, the sharpened spiked leg of a tripod with 16mm camera and close up mirror attached, impales his female victims through the jugular in order to see in their faces the exact nature of their fear as they witness their own impaling. But on viewing the material Mark is never satisfied with the results of his filming. Each time ‘the moment of truth’ “the face of truth’ seems to elude him and evade his apprehension.

At the core of PT is the idea of using mechanical technologies of reproduction – film and tape – both as recorders and as intensifiers of moments of truth. What Powell shows in Peeping Tom (which is ultimately a metaphysical parody) is that these types of technologies can only serve to alienate us from experience by making us vulnerable to the projection of our own needs into these situations. Technologies of mechanical reproduction do not lead into zones where truth is immanent: it is self that is immanent. Mechanical systems of image reproduction whether of picture or sound risk taking us further into our own projections and distancing us from understanding and meaning. Experientially there is no ‘truth’ in or of: sex fear death loneliness etc. except the truth of our own desires. Hence in PT the eye is the highway of desire: the big close up of the eye is the opening shot of the film. Hence the only character in the film (Helen’s mother) who ‘sees’ is blind. She has no retinal images to project.

And doesn’t PT ravish the eye? MP abuses the retina of the viewer to the point where the film’s narrative form is submerged beneath an ocean of visual detail. It is a submarinal liquid experience, a film of undulating surfaces, dense closely patterned planes of colour that wash through the film in its sets, costumes and lighting. The red lights of dark room and studio (sic) the red costumes of the prostitutes ( including the death wrap), the deep red decor of Marks flat and the red hair of the principle actresses. The film has a fluid restless deadly quality which dissolves both the story line and the cod psychology of the back story into a vacuous gaseous matter. PT is MP’s watery crucible in which the nature of filmic truth is distilled.

Peeping Tom describes the full arc of the worlds invested by MP. It is the last world he explored. Many of MP’s films are about worlds – both real and make believe. Real world in The Edge of the World – his first film as director about the abandonment of St Kilda. Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus are displaced worlds that are real (in some sense) but fantastical. Red Shoes is the meeting point of an unreal domain and a mythic world, fairy tale and ballet company. These two worlds, both narrow and self contained in their own right coexist driven by compulsion; two worlds mutually inclusive are locked together in a contrapuntal tension: the dancer and her shoes.

In Peeping Tom it seems that Michael Powell had come at last a place where the world has finally closed down behind the eye. In Peeping Tom, except for the vision of the blind woman there is no other world other than Mark’s movie of fear. Everything is subsumed into this – which is why the mis en scene works as it does – like a watery grave – everything is part of Marks’s movie which is made in isolation from the rest of the world. Mark is alone with his projections which are leading him straight down the road of his own death, with no possible escape. (not even Anna Massey in blue outfits) With Peeping Tom, Powell seems to have come to the end of a certain logic inherent in film making in which it is necessary to understand that all images threaten to slide towards or degrade into acts of solipsism.

Adrin Neatrour 21 10 09

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Jailhouse Rock Richard Thorpe (1957 USA) Elvis Presley, Judy Tyler

Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 4 Oct 09; Ticket Price: £4

Retrocrit: On the form initiation into the Godhead.

Jailhouse Rock (JHR): some people see a movie, I see an initiation rite. A rite de passage through which Elvis (EP) storms into the new age of cool. In an early part of the movie we watch EP punished in gaol with a beating. We’re shocked to feel the lash of the whip on his body: flesh purified in preparation for entry into his Kingdom. Hail the King! And as we watch his initiation our intimations of his suffering open up an era where body style and state of mind define identity and image.

The hazing of EP takes us into the new epoch where we’re not producers; we become consumers of attitude. EP’s career into the cool might speak the more directly to the male but the values justified adopted and flaunted by EP in JHR, are for everyone to take internalise and imitate. The shock of watching JHR is achored in its structure which mimics religious forms of justification through suffering. This is what jolts us out of our seats as consciously or unconsciously we feed back into the movie EP’s reincarntion and migration into a realm of pure image.

This was the third film made by Elvis and the earliest I’ve seen. In look and style JHR clearly owes something to Nick Ray’s Rebel without a Cause. But JHR in contrast defines itself through the medium of a new career: Rock Star celebrity. In JHR although EP may have ‘the voice’, this is not the critical medium of his success.

As EP says to Peggy when his singing bombs at the club: “ Anyone can sing like that.” The medium of EP’s success is ‘Attitude’. Attitude built on cool detachment, a ‘demand for ‘Respect.’ This is how to succeed in the jungle of the music business which is American society. At a time when class barriers were weakening, in particular in the entertainment industry, the musicscape enters an era of individualistic competition a Hobbsian war of all against all. A new kind of man is born fashioned to succeed in a vicious changing social environment.

EP embodies the natural realisation and celebration of this process with the invention of a bastard form of neo-Nietschianism characterised by the will to succeed. Hence JHR as a kind of initiation ceremony, the scarification of body and mind that is a necessary precursor to the entry into a deified status. A psychic journey that purifies and justifies the attitude of one who is above judgement and legitimises the overarching goal of success. EP blazes in film a trail that will be followed by almost every other male rock star act: to engage in a process of overcoming whether through drugs or behaviour that justifies and serves the claim to an altered identity. This ‘rite’ both with Presley and others also effects the fusion of role and image in manner that is radical and new. God as pure attitude.

It might be said that EP’s passage was only through celluloid not a real passage as travelled by Morrison Reid or Cobain. But this misses the point that it is image that is perceived as reality. Real in terms of perception ceases to have any means of objective validification.

The model for the new male had already been developed in Hollywood. It was the gangster as personified by Raft, Robinson, Cagney. The gangster’s image as projected in films like Scarface and Little Caesar combined extreme narcissism, triumph over poverty, conditions of birth and ethnicity with a murderous ruthlessness and an expressive life style built on conspicuous consumption that commanded respect. (Note that at the heart of the process lies a regression to infantilism. Many aspects of the gangster image, like the rock stars comprises the continuous state of narcissistic desires demands and needs of the child.) Although the gangster image as presented by Hollywood was an obvious source of imitative modelling for young males, the image lacked mainstream cultural legitimacy. The flaunting of life style was OK but the methods through which it was achieved were criminal and not easily justified. Further although there was some confusion (in particular with Raft) between the actors and their gangster roles, by and large these were perceived as separate; image did not fuse with identity. With the era of the rock star this changes; but for it to be effective there must be a transforming, a rebirth. Enter EP your time has come. Make the movie. Shock us into your new reality. You are the first of and perhaps the greatest of the many who were to come

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Fish Tank Andrea Arnold (UK 2009) Katie Jarvis; Michael Fassbender

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 19 Sept 09 ticket price £7.00

Text from Kyleland….

I am less convinced by Andrea Arnold’s (AA) Fish Tank than some. And the reason for this is that I think the drive underlying her narrative, the fairytale, is attenuated and almost destroyed, by overdriven and overdetermined concerns that are external and extraneous to her story. The movie lacks a full commitment to the endemic forces that are locked into the core of AA’s ideas.

Some might think of AA as a British Chabrol. But Chabrol has contextual certainty. AA looks like she has contextual certainty but this is to see her location choices as real rather than mythic. By this I mean that whereas Chabrol’s absolute knowledge of the place and culture generated by his locations, lend to his films an enveloping social carapace. For Chabrol locations are not just background for events: they are determining. In contrast, in relation to its settings and locations, AA’s Fish Tank (FT) is more like a postcard.

The backcloth setting of the high rise low rent estate is initially characterised by a specious funky realism. Evrifinks in yerface: the council flat, the private and public areas, the relationships, the interactions, the dialogue. As the story line develops, the realism is revealed as a simple set of props and gestures: the backcloth to a recast fairytale. And the fairytale is the source of AA’s filmic daemon. If Red Row owed its vision to Bluebeard’s Castle, then FT owes a similar debt to the Red Shoes. The which fairytale takes a cautionary approach to the joyous allure young girls feel towards dancing (alone); a thinly veiled allusion to the pull of sexual awakening being accompanied by the push of the dangers inherent in this state. The ‘estate ‘ for all its actual semblance, is no more real than the palaces and undersea worlds of Hans Christian Anderson. The estate is indeed fairytale land transposed. The danger for FT is AA’s casting of the film into a sort of cod realism relocates her story in Jeremy Kyleland. Which not only works against the energising force of the movie; but is not a very interesting place; we can go there every weekday between 9:00 and 11:00am (or to Tris if we want).

I think that the weakness in FT lies in an over elaboration of the story, exemplified by its tacked on revenge motif. It’s a post modern feminist coda that allows the female in the plot to take on the proactive role, but in so doing it stretches the fairy tale core of the film to a point where it finally loses its coherent urgency. It’s as if AA wants to interweave a series of consciously affirmative polemic statements into the fabric of her tale. I think that the consequence of this is to disassemble her film into a series of statements that flag up positions and concerns that abandon the vision.

In itself, the revenge coda that is the penultimate sequence in the film is wonderfully conceived and shot. But my feeling is that the form, in which it is finally resolved, adds little to the film. It functions like an appended text message: that Mia is a ballsy modern woman who takes life and its decisions in her own hands. But we’ve already seen this side of Mia in the horse episode. The revenge coda draws back from taking the path of an absolute filmic and mythic logic; that Mia’s abduction of Conor’s little girl should lead to the death of the child. Which outcome would have taken Mia from dance to death, and kept FT within the form of the fairy tale. The Red Shoes is a story which connects life death sex. But AA abandons the mythic for a kind of cod realism, the Brothers Grimm for Jeremy Kyle.

I think that in FT AA has made a film which is conceived and shot with passion and invention. The problem is that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Stories that become trite through tying up all the lose ends; and end up hung about with messages, don’t seem a necessary means for AA to express herself filmically.

If she has the vision, she has to trust in the inherent power of her material.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk