Adrin Neatrour

A Woman under the Influence – John Cassavetes (USA 1974) Gina Rolands; Peter Falk
Viewed: Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne; 12 Feb 2009;
Ticket price: £4-00

retrocrit, Adrin Neatrour writes: accept me as I am or leave the cinema.

The wondrous nature of Woman Under the Influence (WUI) is that in its form, as film, WUI replicates in itself the actual state of its subjects’ (Mabel/Nick) responses to the stimuli to which they are exposed.

Created out of intensive workshops involving players director/writer and technical crew, WUI in the nature of its conception, comprises a parallel filmic track of Mabel/Nick’s symptoms of disturbance so fashioned as to mimic its subjects behaviour. WUI does not proceed by orthodox sensory motor linkages but rather by a series of scenes which alternate in presenting to the audience what are predominately pure optical or sound situations. Both WUI, as a film entity and Mabel/Nick, as characters in the film, present what initially seems a disbalanced juxtapositioning of responses. The structural shifts between the world of work and the citadel of home, between her silence and his vociferation seem initially disjointed. However the structure of WUI finally overcomes audience resistance and reveals itself as an intensely vital reaction to the cultural nightmare of individual entrapment and the usual clichéd melodramatic media representation of individual disturbance. The consequence is the audience leaves the cinema with a deepened sense of foreboding about what it has witnessed.

A key scene takes place in the first part of the film in which Nick (Mabel’s husband), in the morning brings home the 8 men of his work gang to eat after a hard nights emergency work. (He tells them she’s a good wife but sometimes acts a bit strange) The men turn up at the door, like Medieval warriors, and enter the house where Mabel cooks spaghetti for them. The long scene takes place in the dining room where Mabel presides at the head of the long table. These are all people who know each other to some extent but are not necessarily comfortable with each other. In the typical Hollywood sensory motor schema the scene would be characterised by the banter of naturalistic dialogue. But Cassavetes solution is to treat it initially as a pure optical situation. It is what we see that is important: the body language, the clothes. the shapes and ethnicity of the faces, these are what stamp their impression on the first part of this scene. Something is happening. The scene then suddenly switches in form. WUI changes from being a pure optical into a pure sound situation as one by one the men take turns to sing starting with one man’s rendering of a Verdi aria. Drawn by the power of the voice, Mabel gets up and approaches each of the singers, mutely, getting so close to them that it is as if she wants to get inside them to discover where this beautiful music is coming from. Her behaviour engenders what Nick sees as inappropriate physical contact and triggers a terse verbally violent control move on his part. WUI presents a pure optical situation transmuting into a pure sound situation that leads to a dramatic resolution.

WUI uses this splitting of optical and sound situations to realise dramatic form throughout the film. The children’s party sequence, the committal sequence, the family parties are all constituted as separations of sound and picture. The creation of composition out of sound and optical elements changes the experience of time. The long takes comprising only compositional elements become time images, sequences in which we are as conscious of time as a dynamic in the process rather than action. It seems to me critical that both of understanding both WUI and the mental disturbances which it answers, can only be understood in the context of time – the dimension missing from most action/image films.

Mabel and Nick’s behaviour like WUI’s form is also composed through explorations of discrete optical and sound representation. Roland’s presents a predominantly optical presentation of Mabel, a characterisation she has created to be visually experienced by the audience. Her dresses, her faces, her positioning in the room (standing on the couch for instance) and her gestural responses constitute a filmically pure visual series of statements. When she switches to a vocal mode, as when playing with the children, the sounds she makes are emitted as a series of nonsensical utterances: an abstracted sound. The strength in the film lies in the playing of Mabel as a pure optical situation, a series of responses that render her mute as her dilemma is a classic double bind of the expectations laid upon her (also in the same way as there is no defence against the accusation of witchcraft, so there is no defence against the accusation of insanity). In contrast Falk plays Nick as a sound events. Nick is constituted out of utterances composed from bewilderment, aggression and violence. There are a couple of occasions in which his uncomprehending rage bursts out into a physical assault on Mabel. But for the most part he is a pure sound system in as much as what he says matters less than the tone, the pitch rhythm pace of his utterances. His meaning (though not always unimportant) is less significant than his expressive vocal mode.

In a radical filmic manner, John Cassavetes actors and crew are saying that to understand what is going on you have to be there looking listening, observing the forces in play.

When I wrote about the workmen as being like warriors and Mabel’s silence reminding me of the witch’s dilemma in defending herself I was alluding to something within the film that suggested to me a phantom Medieval dislocation that is inherent to the film’s dynamic. I think there is a powerful medieval logic working through the film. WUI points up one archetypal situation that can arise when power relations between men and women go out of joint: Demonisation. The spaghetti banquet, the children’s party (‘the child is naked’) and in particular the committal sequence are all pertinent sequences in the film portrayed as in the evidence and process of a witchcraft trial. In the committal sequence, Nick’s mother in allure and expression takes on the mask of an embittered old female accuser, a turncoat informer witch, accusing and giving evidence against her enemy as revenge for Mabel’s threatening sexuality (wearing short skirts); the doctor figure looks like a fanatical Dominican monk exorcising demons. The actors, in particular Rolands may have consciously modelled their Medieval witch trial interpretations of these scenes as part of their workshopping of the material. For instance at the height of the committal scene Mabel uses the index fingers of her right and left hands to form a cross which she holds up to protect herself against the encroachment of the Doctor.

The use of a Medieval paradigm to drive the drama not only corresponds to the contemporary sensibility of understanding witchcraft as a question of gender politics but also makes of WUI answer to a moral rather than a medical question. WUI as created by Cassavetes Roland and Falk is a moral concern with the catastrophic social developments of contemporary USA and the terrible personal price paid for a culture and society that has gone terrible wrong. A society that has taken from people the core of their collective and communal life and given them in return the empty shibboleths of American individuality.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Slumdog Millionaire Danny Boyle, Lovelen Tanden (2008 UK India) Dev Patel, Anil Kapoor, Medhu Mittal
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 26 Jan 09 Ticket price £6.65

Disneyfication of India

Watching the early establishment sequence in Slumdog Millionaire (SM) where we are introduced to the Mumbai slum background of Jamal and Salim the tone the look and style of the film immediately referenced Disney and the Jungle Book. The doe eyed innocence and the stylised quality of innate goodness with which Jamal is imbued by script and camera suggested a filmic reincarnation of Mowgli. SM on reflection presented as a farrago of borrowed qualities taking its characterisation from a Disneyfied Kipling, its narrative form from Dickens via Lionel Bart and its structure from the pop video. No wonder it’s so popular. But this mare’s nest of creative inputs makes it a film driven by production values and stylistic gloss, abetted by its intercut structure, rather than a film with the energy and authenticity of voice that characterised some of Danny Boyle’s (DB) earlier work such as Train Spotting. And the price paid for this treatment is a cheapening of a country and its culture rather than a deepening of understanding.

The current solution to story structure adopted by much of the mainstream film Industry is to construct film narrative along parallel strips of action comprising of a number of ‘presents’ or different ‘sheets of past’. The director is then in a position to use montage to exploit and manipulate the viewers, through the shifting of the film’s focus. The parallel story structure also provides an endless stream of opportunities for directors to energise their films through the manifold cutting opportunities offered by the manifold permutations of time and place. This is precisely the structural solution adopted by DB in MS.

This form of filmmaking takes its current inspiration from the pop video which adopted the form of twin or multi track parallel visuals to manipulate and hold attention in the adolescent market place. The rapid cutting style solves the problem of keeping the audience attention. The opening sequences of SM intercut the Game Show with the torture chamber, deliberate choice of radically contrasted settings which as well as getting the film of to dynamic start also gives a message that it is the director who will pull all the strings: there is not going to be much for the audience to think about.

As is it is in the beginning so it is throughout SM. The film cutz from the Game Show to the interrogation to the long back story which links all the story tracks. The problem with the structure is that it never allows any of its sections the space to develop organically; the sections are all reduced to being component parts of the SM machine. Mechanically scripted and played out by the actors so that the SM’s final scene can be delivered in its wrap. In consequence The Game Show and the torture /interrogation sequences are little more than leaden badly acted parodies. Except for their role as parts of the SM machine, they have little intrinsic value. Of course the structure of the film is used to hide this bare mechanicality as audience attention is manipulated by the way the film is cut. But even so the continual cutting does start to obey the laws of decreasing returns, as the cuts back and forth to and fro became increasingly predicable and automate.

The back story itself the childhood and adolescence of Jamal and Salim is simple cod Dickens. It is supplied. naturally, with appropriate villains, an evil Mumbai ‘Fagin’character, and realistic settings. Like the sets in the musical Oliver, the SM settings, slums, modern day Mumbai, have the ‘wow’ factor but no context. The SM settings are no more than theatrical backdrops which have become the dark side of a world cinema whose production lust for confective atmosphere drives producers and directors around the world in search of ever more authentic sexy locations for the gaze of the audience, that lend themselves to decontextualisation. For instance although Indian audiences will understand the nature of the mob violence that kills Jamal and his brother’s mother, Western audiences will not understand that these were Hindu led pogroms against Moslems and that this is critical to knowing some of the social strains defining India. Although it exploits the real, the real is not DB’s concern any more than it is Disney’s concern in Jungle Book. What we are watching is in fact are the forces in play in the Disneyfication of India. India, a land of poor but essentially happy people, where the bad people get their comeuppance and the good folk live in a haze of music and happy endings.

As SM develops it is clear that the music and style are heavily influenced by the pop video and in the last sequence what had been threatening to happen all through the film finally takes place; the film breaks out , like a butterfly, and shows itself as pure pop promo. As In Zatoichi its an all singing dancing finale which castes all that had gone before it as a sort of pupae for its ultimate destiny.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di Biciclette) – Vittoria de Sica Italy 1948; Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 23 Dec 08. Ticket price: £6-65

Retrocrit: seeing as thinking

There is one shot that takes place in the first reel of Bicycle Thieves (BT) that serves as a concentration and encapsulation of the film’s creative endeavour and as a visual realisation of its creative concerns.

Maria Ricci hands her husband Antonio her wedding dowry, their quality cotton and linen bed sheets, to take to the pawnbrokers, so that he can use the money to redeem his bicycle. He hands over the bundle of bedding to the ledger clerk in exchange for 7500 lira. Going through the building on his way to redeem his bicycle he passes a doorway that leads to the cavernous interior of the pawnbroker’s storage area. As Antonio stops and looks in the film cuts to a point of view shot. From Antonio’s point of view we see a huge set of storage shelves, perhaps ten or more meters long and nine stacks high filled with nothing other than bedding. A figure enters the space with the bundle of bedding that Antonio has just pledged; using the foot rests attached to the mountain of shelving the figure climbs up this huge structure and deposits the Ricci family’s wedding dowry in a space on a shelf near the top.

The characteristic feature of this shot is the way it is executed and editorially structured to represent the point of view of Antonio. Antonio doesn’t say what he sees. He does not tell us what he thinks. The premise of the movie is: we see what he sees. And in seeing what he sees we are given an opening into his state of mind as he carries on with his business at the pawn broker. We are present with Antonio, experiencing his thoughts and ideas, even though they may perhaps be unformed. We, audience, in seeing as Antonio sees also have thoughts, perhaps also elusive and unformed about what we are seeing. And in this tacit dialogue with Antonio the film allows us to experience a state of mind and related emotive responses that are triggered by the world of the pawn shop. The stimulus of this world engenders different sorts of thoughts. For instance from one point of view there is some reassurance that the vast bureaucracy that comprises the pledge business looks after your property and knows where to locate it when you come back to get it out of hock. Another thought triggered by the experience is the overwhelming nature of need served by this business, which reflects the desperate situation of the country where thousands of people are reduced to having to sell their bed linen. The thought occurs that the individual is simply one amongst millions struggling to survive; an insignificant cell in a body of poverty and social deprivation. Yet for all that an individual in the world making sense of the world.

Bicycle Thieves is about thoughts and states of mind that are engendered through visual and audio situations in the worlds that are discovered uncovered and explored through the course of the movie. The psychological linkages are weak in the sense that it is the audience through what is framed by the camera and who through the medium of the main character, have to make connections between thoughts ideas emotions and actions. The determining elements in the film are weak and the audience cannot be certain about their understanding of what they see; though BT’s structure of opening up worlds, allows them the privilege of entering into open dialogues of possibilities through and with the characters.

By contrast in a recent Italian film Gomorrah (G) by Matteo Garrone, all the connections are strong. The characters and the situations allow of no ambiguity; they are simply stereotypes with the usual strong linkages. The meaning of Gomorrah is simplistically located within the action; in the main the banality of gangsters killing gangsters. In BT the worlds do not impose themselves, they insinuate themselves into the viewers consciousness through medium of the point of view of the actors. which allows a number of potential meanings to be construed. The housing estate, the pawn shop the markets the church the faith healer the restaurant are all worlds about which the audience can make their own evaluations. But we do so tempered by the state of mind of Antonio and Bruno. We will bring our own prejudices to understanding these worlds; but in BT they are never locked down as clichés in the main because their salient features take meaning from the particular point of view of Antonio and Bruno. In G worlds are presented in a quite other manner. The architecture for instance is presented not through the eyes of the players but as a determining background to action which establishes buildings and locations as having significance. The film bestows signification upon the depicted brutalist architecture, which becomes a sign pointing to a particular cause and effect: brutalist buildings create brutal conditions create brutal people. Lacking in Gomorrah are any mechanisms for linking the characters thoughts and ideas and states of mind to the situation in which they find themselves. The poorer for it, G is simply little more than a sausage machine churning out action image sausages.

BT under de Sica’s direction (and there are also seven credited writers) is a strip of action exploring through a period of some 48 hours Rome in 1947. In a way there is no story just a human situation which allows some of the many worlds of Rome to be opened up to us through the instrument of a human dilemma. Central to the enterprise is not the social setting of the film, the hard condition of the working class, or its use of non professional actors and actual locations. What is central to BT is the way it is shot to release a dialogue between the players and the audience in which the state of mind of the players and the meanings and emotions felt are central and the use of worlds not as signs, but as sources of pure audio and visual experience.

When I left the cinema I met some friends who commented that the film had a sad ending. The last sequence in BT shows Antonio’s unsuccessful attempt to steal a bicycle, witnessed by his young son Bruno. He is caught red handed: a humiliating experience but one from which Antonio escapes without police involvement. The final shot shows the rear a large crowd of people moving slowly away from the camera. The crowd: everyone ultimately in Rome is part of this huge shuffling moving social body of people. However I didn’t think that you could construe sadness from this final sequence. Or at least not a sadness that might have lasting and defining impact on the relationships in the film. The reason being that BT had woven far too complex a pattern of reciprocating ties between Antonio and Bruno, for Antonio’s failed theft to be understood as having only one meaning in relation to emotional construct, either in relation to his own psyche and state of mind or the relationship between him and Bruno. Without going down the path of imagining other possible interpretations that might arise out of the incident of the failed theft (for instance a deepening of wisdom and compassion in Bruno for the situation of his dad) all that can be said is that the films ends at this point and nothing more is shown. But in the course of the film we have learnt something. And so perhaps have the characters.

There are many intensely enjoyable vignettes throughout the movie; characters glimpsed from other worlds: the lovers by the river, the wife of the suspected bicycle thief in the market screaming at Antonio that she didn’t ask him his shoe size so why should he ask her the serial number of the bike; the rich boy in the restaurant. But one small piece of action I particularly enjoyed was the incident when Antonio sets off from the apartment to go to work. He tries to take Maria by surprise with a kiss but she fights him off with vigour and energy. When she has stopped him they face each other, look each other in the eye and then kiss, with passion. Maria is the type of woman who will only accept a kiss on her own terms: terms of equality.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Waltz with Bashir – Ari Fisher (2008 Israel) Animation using testimony from Israeli soldiers who fought in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Not so much Waltz with Bashir, rather Tango with False Memory Syndrome.

AT the heart of Waltz with Bashir is a fundamental philosophical problem. If you have lost your memory of certain traumatic events, how do you know whether any of your ‘retrieved’ memories of the events are true or false?

In Waltz with Bashir (WB) I have to conclude that Ari Fisher, in failing to address even obliquely, fundamental issues relating to memory retrieval, uses animation as a means of reducing history to a Disneyfication process. That is to say WB turns the real events and the people involved into displaced de-intensified images that tell a story that is a travesty of truth: in effect he uses graphics imagery to muddy the real and to misrepresent the actual.

I noted that whereas the film tells its story of the war, using the metaphor of memory retrieval, reliant only on animation, Fisher lays aside this stylised format at the end of the film when we see the consequences of the Israeli sponsored Phalangist massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The final pictures of this slaughter are not ‘toons’ but actual images. The stylised animation of WB cannot ‘contain’ the real human effects of the Israeli sponsored slaughter: any attempt to convey these scenes using ‘toons’ would at once reveal the immoral impoverished and dishonest nature of employing animation to retrieve history. Hence at the click of a mouse, for the final sequence, Fisher abandons animation and cuts to archive footage of the bodies and the mourning broken Palestinian women. Of course once the cut to ‘the real’ is made, there is no way back to the funky little line drawings that represent ‘the human’ in the film; so the movie has to end.

Before WB begins there is a statement of intent, a sort of disclaimer, that reads, white on black: “This film is an attempt to recover the memories of a young soldier in the 1982 Lebanese War.” Of course memory retrieval here feels like a metaphor for a wider forgetting by Israeli society, perhaps not only of the atrocities they sponsored during the invasion of Lebanon but also of the traumatic psychological damage done to their young men who were both invaders and witnesses to the criminal activity at Sabra and Shatila. Memory retrieval however is not a straight forward process. It is a process in which there is no guarantee that memories retrieved and lodged in the mind will be truthful. In fact there is strong evidence from clinical studies to show that false memories can be easily absorbed and assimilated into identity by compliant minds. Judging by the evidence presented in WB, this movie is about the absorbion and internalisation of false memory.

The reason for this conclusion is that at the heart of the movie is a major provable historical error. There is a lie at the heart of the film. The memory retrieved by Fisher of the Palestinian camp massacres was that they took place over one night. This allows for a plausible Israeli claim that, by the time they realised that a massacre had been perpetrated by their allies the Phalangists, it was too late to prevent. The Israelis would still have to explain: their use of flares to light up the camp so that the Phalangists could see their way around; the Israeli blockade of the camps to prevent any Palestinians escaping; and the presence of senior Israeli officers on the roofs of strategically placed high buildings overlooking the camps. But the time factor as represented in the film is critical to the Israeli plea for mitigation of their failure to stop the Phalangist revenge. But the duration of the massacres is misrepresented in WB. The massacres took place over two nights; two nights of killings and Israeli collusion with the slaughter. There is no plausibility to Israeli claims that there was not time enough for them to comprehend that massacre was taking place in the Palestinian camps. They had all the time they needed to intervene if they had chosen so to do. They chose not to. So WB is exposed as a metaphor not for memory retrieval but the Israeli need to implant false memory into its collective history to shield itself from the shame of complicity in the slaughter of defenceless innocents.

The use of filmed animation technique to paint a picture of and hear the voices of historical events is I think highly problematic. WB has an opening that shows us a pack of bestial dogs running wild through an urban setting. It is sequence that would not be out of place in either Lady and the Tramp or 101 Dalmatians. The dogs, figments of a dream, eventually lead us to the main character, represented as a two dimensional line drawn figure, the main character author and film maker Ari Fisher, whose quest is to recover his memory of the 1982 Lebanon war. Fisher’s journey through the ‘toon’ landscape of war leads him back to his ex-comrades, and their witnessing and testimony; and like him rendered in the form of drawn simulacra. These simulacra, the ex-soldiers give accounts of their experiences in the war. And as they so do, they assist Fisher rebuild his own memory (or perhaps false memory) of the events.

The problem presented by these line drawn simulacra is one of credibility. Animated figures, testifying on film can be given little credibility by the viewer. The problem is that each of the individuals, represented as simulacra of themselves, carry as much resemblance to themselves as human entities as do the drawn dogs to a real pack of baying hounds. However the dogs are drawn they still look like Disney creations; the vital animal nature of their dogness is absent. Anthropomorphic qualities displace and abstract their dogness. The problems presented by animal simulacra are replicated but compounded many fold when we try to appraise the testimony of the animated interviewees, the avatars of ex comrades that Fisher seeks out in the two dimensional world of WB .

Words are fragile things. The more so when we want to appraise and evaluate their worth and weight, and when we know that those speaking the words may have good reason to mispresent or distort what they say, either with or without self belief. When we see actual people interviewed we can appraise their responses and statements by some monitoring of body language, by observing pauses and hesitations, verbal errors etc. With the use of simulacra in WB none of this is possible. There is in fact little of the human in their spoken transcripts: no humour, no irony no uncertainties. Just a two dimensional flat line phonetic rendering of testimony as monotonous as the picture. Further when we see interviews on film conducted in the flesh, we can at least see where there have been cuts and edits of the material. When the interview is represented in animation everything in the editing process is opaque, hidden from the scrutiny of the viewer who has no means of re-marking anything in the editorial process.

For myself, WB represents a distressing mode of quasi-documentary form. The film is caste as a heroic quest by one man for the truth But with actual human input represented by the use of line drawn figures and all the tricks of drawn facial manipulation to depict emotional honesty and candour, Fisher has produced a film in which the heroic national quest is for false memory and the fake replaces the real at the core of historical experience.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Hunger – Steve McQueen (UK 2008) Michael Fassbender; Stuart Graham, Rory Mullen
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 4 Nov 08; Ticket price £6.85

Film morphs into installation

Steve Mc Queen’s Hunger takes as its subject Bobby Sands (BS) IRA commander and prisoner, who elects to die on hunger strike rather than to bow his head to the will of the British political establishment. With its bold use of close-ups and mounted camera to frame its subject it looks like McQueen has paid close attention to Carl Dreyer’s 1928 movie the Passion of Joan of Arc. Hunger might well be titled The Passion of Bobby Sands, as flesh transmutes into spirit. This Passion is divided into three distinct parts each of which emphasises both an attribute: body mind spirit; and an outer form based on: opposition, dialogue, unity.

It is the first section of the film that takes on the structure of installation. By this I mean that it resembles an assemblage of elements which are ingenuously offered to the gaze of the viewer to connect understand and interpret. Also Hunger as installation creates for the viewer temporal space to absorb and understand what has been shown. Hunger uses time images such as the long shot of the screw in passing down the length of the block using a squeegee to clear up the pools of piss thrown out of the cells. The camera is still as the screw works his way down the length of the corridor into the eye of the camera. We need real time, our own time to understand this shot.

The installation section of Hunger is defined by a series of oppositions that define the visual and audio fields: clothed and naked, the flesh and the will, inside and outside, cleanliness and filth. Hunger as an installation located in an infamous setting at a time now passed. A film set up in an H block of a present now past where the fittings fixtures and authentic props are frozen forever and the corridors landing and cells are haunted by holograms and soundtracks of the prisoners and screws locked into the eternal recurrence of their enmity. Walk through Auschwitz. Walk through Abughraib. See. Listen. Walk thru. Walls imprinted with collective memory.

The installation section is charged with the key idea that the Maze prison ( like so many prisons, what a strange yet appropriate name) contains both the prisoners and the guards. There is no escape from the confines of this gaol. When the screw exits the gates of the prison to go home he never escapes its shadow; he is held ever closer in its thrall. The Maze confines and contains always and everywhere. It is defining in the same way as the Court Room in Rouen contained and defined Joan and her enemies and tormenters. In Hunger the prisoners and guards in this situation are bound together by ties of blood piss and shit, in unwanted inescapable intimacy. The Maze isn’t metaphor. It’s microcosm. It is the political situation in Northern Ireland compressed to its unbearable essence. Casual cruelty and cold murder. The body politic of intimidation denial and forceful suppression is faithfully replicated within the confined space of the prison onto the form of the human body.

The body is at the centre of the opening section. The body as an instrument of the collective will of political power. The body as an extension of the singular will of the individual, a protoNietschean statement of an overcoming. Hunger opens in the home of a screw with a series of big close ups as in the morning he washes his hands in the wash basin. His grazed knuckles rinsed in the pellucid water. The sequence proceeds through his breakfast and the shadow that falls over him as we see the security procedure he follows before getting into his car. This opening sequence, with its series of close-ups comprising: tap wash basin plughole fried egg underside of car, set up a set of heightened oppositions against which we are able to understand the forces that are in play. In the Maze the IRA prisoners are ‘on the blanket’ – naked. They refuse to wear issued prison clothing and demand the right to wear their own clothes. Denied access to the toilets ( in order to slop out) by the screws (government) they exist in the putrid conditions of their own piss shit and bodily filth. Their bodies are caught up in a system of constraints privations obligations and prohibitions which their will refuses to acknowledge. In their nakedness, with their shit daubed on the cell walls, and their piss spilt out into the corridor, they oppose the political will of Margaret Thatcher.

As Bobby Sands notes in the diary he kept at the beginning of his hunger strike, “ All the power of the British Empire never broke the will of a single man.” In performance the body lies at the epicentre of volatile concerns, a signifying system that is a battle ground for competing ideologies. Hunger works on the bodies of both parties in the Maze capturing them in their oppositional systems: the clean and the dirty, the shaved and the unshaven, the naked and the clothed, the beaters and the beaten, the alive and the dead, the inside and the outside. The screws break the bodies of the IRA; the IRA can kill in revenge culpable screws. In Hunger Mc Queen testifies to the separation; he also gives witness to the greater terrible unity of which both sides are also a part. The prison of Northern Ireland contains them all forever.

The second section of the movie is a 17 minute long dialogue between Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest. It seems to represent mind as BS and the priest verbally joust over the morality of BS’s intention to go on hunger strike. Again there are echoes in this section of the verbal jousting between Joan and her interrogators in the interplay of subtlety and mental strength that characterises the exchanges. The only section in the dialogue which I felt was suspect (others might not find it so) was the long story BS tells about an incident in his childhood which is intended to justify and explain his nature. It falls into a long line of such stories told on screen ( and to lesser extent on stage) such as Brando’s Kurtz telling the story in Apocalypse Now. BS story in this situation seemed formulaic, hence uninteresting. A sign the film was flagging.

The last section – spirit – the culmination of the Hunger Passion, with its medical ritualisation and all white spiritual ‘production look’ is the culmination of the film.
I think that this attempt to transpose the medical into the spiritual doesn’t work. We have a series of images, all immaculately posed and framed with that ‘white look’ taking us through the stages of BS’ death. The section never transcends or becomes anything more than a series of medical shots. McQueen has not found a language or an image that expresses the final stage of Sands’ Passion. In the final part of this section Hunger abandons its premise of staying with the BS in the now, and filmically elects to take us on a fake trip, supposedly his final vision complete with natural sounds, back to an arcadian reconstruction of Sands’ childhood (are we in the final section of 2001). This finale fails to do justice to what has preceded it; it feels like a cliché. The final section of the Passion needed a huge coup of bold imagination to complete. It probably might need to be short in duration and comprise of very few shots, as was Dreyer’s manner in finishing his Passion of Joan of Arc.

For all its perceived weaknesses, McQueen’s Hunger remains a film bold in concept that remains true to a governing filmic idea that is mostly executed with stunning confidence and filmic awareness.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Gomorrah – Mateo Garrone (2008 Italy) Salvatore Cantalupo, Carmine Paternoster, Alfonso Santagale
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 21 Oct 08 ticket: £6.80

Location Location Location Location Location

Gomorrah has been flagged as a realist portrayal of the situation in Naples where whole areas of life are under the control of the local Mafia the Camorra.
The film is structured in what seems to be the favoured fashionable form of the moment as: five intercut stories. Five stories that involve different characters unrelated to each other except that generically the characters are all either part of the criminal network or member of communities in which the networks operate. The characterising feature of the stories is that they are not interrelated or interlaced rather strips of action that serve only as exemplars of types of criminal activities: trash disposal, drug dealing, garment industry etc that define the relationship between gangs and populace. As such the film is a simple transposition of some selected elements of Roberto Saviano’s book that adds nothing filmicly or challenging to his propositions. Indeed this film of book, like most such adaptations detracts and cheapens the substance of its original form.

In effect the film is an impoverishment of the books thesis ( the toxic effect of gangster control of areas of society) because lacking the book’s facility to support its point of view and journalistic incrimination of the Camorra, by piling up detail and statistics of the effects of a criminalised culture, the film is reduced to a banality of affective detail in which the links between action and effect are mechanically transposed onto the screen only through the medium of expressed violence. In Garrone’s Gomorrah there are no cognitive or ideational linkages through sound or picture allowing the audience to make connections that characterise a sick culture. The links in Gomorrah are all through the glamour of the gun; not through the effects of what happens after the gun. The realist settings are just a type of architectural backdrop to what is just another gangsta movie.

When I say that the linkages in Gomorrah are mechanical I mean for example that the connections that the film suggests to its audience mostly film stem from either violent action or architecture. We are given simplistic film generated cause effect relationships that gloss over the latent forces at work.

Linkage in relation to action. Gomorrah shows us men with guns. They shoot other men whom they see as opponents or in their way. The men with guns deal in death and fear, they get their way and assert control over whatever: drugs trash garment industry. The film is a simple fable of the ganagsta means: the ends of the gangsta in Gororrah are actually unclear. By repute I understand that the Camorra liked the movie. Of course they did. The gangsta loves the exercise and demonstration of his original power which stems from force and violence, and he approves of its filmic celebration.. What Garonne has achieved is a celebration of the gangsta through banal mechanical linkages. What Garonne has not filmed, and what was object of Saviano’s book are the consequences of the gangsta take over of social mechanisms, and the freezing (through fear) of social response to these consequences. The ends rather than the means. What we don’t see in Gomorrah are the piled up mountains of trash and filth that are caused by this situation; what we don’t see are the effects in disease caused by dumping of toxins in landfill. The corruption. Garrone sticks to the banality of the action, which we all know from long series of gangsta films. What the gangster’s fear, and what has caused them to run Savione out of Italy is the exposition and detailing of the real price people pay when the gangsta moves to take over vital areas of economic and social activity. The bang bang your dead bit is the least of the interesting connections to be made. The other mechanical connection made in Gomorrah is ‘architecture’. I think that the film fails because it substitutes, or perhaps confuses a concern with architecture for a concern with ‘world’. At one level this looks like copping out. It is much easier to send out a location scout and find fruity sexy backdrops for the action than to undertake the filmic chore of creating a sense of ‘world’. The function of architecture is fundamental to the working of Gomorrah. The exteriors and the interiors work as metanyms. In particular the main setting of the concrete housing project where the turf wars rage. The concrete structure of the housing project is used as an encompasser, a building that literally doesn’t just contain the life within it but also defines and orders it. In this sense the building is a metanym: its function in the film is to stand for something rather more than what it is. Gorarrah is using this structure to say that the compression and squalor that it represents mould and contaminate the people whom it accommodates. The problem is that I think that Garonne was content to leave the housing project as a symbol. We never get closer to the people who live there than this statement of architectural determinism. The people, except those busy killing each other, are sort of phantom entities who fill out the crowd scenes the way dust fills in cracks. The huge housing project is ultimately an empty shell, just another setting, a theatrical backdrop against which action can take place. Even in a film like Meirelles’ City of God which has a gangsta action/ revenge core, there is more of a feeling for the texture of Rio favella life. In Gomorrah there is an absence of anything other than fat men wearing T shirts of gruesome taste. It’s not enough. Likewise with most of the other locations: the quarry, the marshes, the subterranean car parks. The filmic objective seems to be to overwhelm rather than inform. The five strip intercut structure of Gomorrah seems to lead nowhere. The structure is a favoured shape for contemporary directors and such a structure it should give to the film some dynamic. A dynamic that might reveal itself in many ways: some emotive such as interdynamic bathos or pathos; some cognitive such as exemplative or understanding complementing or contrasting or both. There might be connections such as colour, geometry or auditory. The problem with Gomorrah was that the five action strips were all of a muchness. They had few characterising idiosyncrasies or distinctive features other than the architecture. The individuals populating the stories were often difficult to distinguish and the only character whose name I could remember was the tailor, Pasqualle. The only purpose served by the intercut sequences is to provide a series of dramatic cutting points. Even this has diminishing returns as the film progresses through its two hour plus duration. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Fall – Peter Whitehead (UK 1969) Doc with Peter Whitehead and Alberta Tiburzi

Viewed 16 Oct 08 Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle; ticket price £4 In the beginning was the image

The final shot of The Fall (TF): Peter Whitehead (PW) is peering down the viewer of the moviola and looks up at the camera; the camera pans to the right bringing into view an early reel to reel black and white Sony VTR which displays on the adjacent monitor a grainy image of PW; the picture is poor in definition but strong in its etched solidity as an image of PW. PW has become an image and as we look at his image, the tape runs out and the screen turns blank radiating a white picture noise; there are no sound effects. A shot that is in effect a condensation of the film journey.

It feels that through both the political uprising and social excess documented in TF, as if PW in the course of making his film has stumbled upon realisation about the nature of the image in the media. That at the very moment of filming TF, PW sees that image poised to take over the channels of communication: to pervade and invade our senses distorting consciousness and corrupting perception. TF, at some point in its making (edit stage?) becomes PW’s personal journey in which his camera as a scalpel opens up the vista of a multiplication of new types of manipulated realities which like cancerous tumours will overwhelm and destroy us.

‘The Fall’ is of course a reverberating Biblical idea. It encompasses both the Fall of Lucifer and the Fall of Man. Differentiated events but both conveying a similar idea: the establishment of a new situation in which the forces of evil and malice are let loose in the world, abroad in the cosmos to do as they will. Lucifer and Adam and Eve, fall from a state of Grace into a state of sin. Both are caste from the numinous all embracing presence of God into a world of dark putrescent matter, in which they must survive howsoever they may. Alan Ginsberg who features in TF published a collection of poems in 1971 entitled the Fall of America.

I think that PW’s camera probes not only America’s fall from Grace, the political inability to see or accept the evil that the US was perpetrating in the name of democracy (in particular at this time the war America was waging against Vietnam). His camera also probes the advent of the image and the fall from Grace that this moment heralded, as Western society and culture embraced the image as a primary source of perception, as a primary tool upon which judgements would be made and opinions formed. A situation developing where no one is innocent and also where no one is guilty.

TF is shot by PW at the moment when democracy is shifting from the shibboleths of class and party, to a new situation in which everyone can form an opinion: or more presciently, have their opinions formed for them. In the beginning is the image: and in the image is manipulation. In the media ideas persons places start to exist as a sort of intensified concentrated iconography: nothing else. Increasingly form this point in ‘time’ (and I mean PW’s time. TF is his film; it has guided him to this insight) things would be judged not for their intrinsic worth, but for their extrinsic value to interested powerful parties. Perhaps the crystallising event was PW’s participation and presence at Columbia University student occupation and his witness to the distorted way images of the event were to be manipulated by the media and political establishment. But the PW’s disquiet goes deeper than this specific instance and broadens into a general realisation that this is the way things are and will be.

Amidst the rawness of the footage of a New York in turmoil, PW is the star of his own movie. At first I found his mannered acting out, in particular of the relationship with his ‘girlfriend’ Alberta Tiburzi (AT) annoying and over deliberated. As if PW had seen Blow Up and had decided to make and perform an affected fashionable homage. As the film progresses this relationship declines in prominence, overtaken by PW’s documenting the New York streets and his confessions and ruminations during the edit. However as the film develops, I began to think that perhaps there was a point to the manner in which the personal had been incorporated into the film. For instance there is a ‘Blow Up’ type sequence in the first part of the film when AT models’ a ‘Peace’ dress made up from fabric whose pattern comprises the multiple replication of the CND anti nuclear peace symbol. The CND symbol in its multiple replication becomes a pure pattern, loses its power of protest as it is sinuously subsumed, through the curvaceous posing of AT, into fashion statement. Likewise the relationship between AT and PW also feels like a fashion accessory rather than something real. Relationship as gesture. The director and the model. An exemplar of the media marriage, consummated for effect not affect. In this situation gesture is empty of everything except the selling of the self. Narcissism. It is possible that PW accepted even enjoyed this casting of his relationship with AT; but that he was aware of the process both at a personal and social plane. The process leads directly to entrapment in the appearance of things not the actuality of things: entrapment within the self for the self rather than life for the world.

Looked at from an historical perspective PW documents the streets saying ‘NO!’ to what was taking place in the US. And in this respect the film shames us today. Comparing the anger and ferocity in New York in ’68 and comparing it to reaction to the Iraq war between 2003 and 2008. The question is posed, ‘What has happened to us today? ‘ Why did protest against the Iraq invasion barely register? In’68 with wild swinging camera PW documents an uncompromising rejection of this system that makes war on the world: whether it be Vietnam or students demanding fairness and justice in education. Today we seem so much more contained. Unable to break out of the confines of an intellectual and mental prison in which we are trapped. Our responses tend to be more self absorbed and distracted from what is happening about us in our ‘democracies’. And there is an answer to our shameful contemporary inertia that is located deep in the fold of the Fall as the second half descends into a gloomier mood and PW analyses with his camera and talks through with his Moviola what is happening and what is to come. We are now trapped in the image of someone else’s movie, the movie of the government the big corporations and the media.

In a sense the pivotal point of the film is PW’s documenting of a piece of performance art. PW is filming in a small room where something’s going on. Who are the people performing in the small room? Who (besides PW) comprises the small audience in the small room watching the performance. We see a man and a woman on a ‘stage’ with an upright piano. The woman has a chicken on her lap. The man takes the chicken from the woman and using its feet plays a series of rills up and down the keyboard of the piano. The man returns the chicken to the lap of the woman. He picks up a long handled axe and sets to demolish the piano. The piano is destroyed. The steel wires of the sound-board remain upright amidst the shatte0red casing and frame. The man replaces the axe and takes the chicken from the woman. Holding its body firmly under his arm to prevent it struggling he drags its head back and forth along the piano wire until it has been decapitated and reduced a bloodied stump. He gives the chicken back the woman. The camera pans to the audience who watch in silence. gazing at the stage area. PW has filmed what has happened: we still do not understand what has happened. It was real; the suffering brutal. We have no language to describe what we have seen. Perhaps we reject what we have seen. In TF this scene is the pivot. The mood darkens. We do not understand what is happening.

The film turns to on the unravelling of political events. In particular the revolt by Columbia students and the occupation of the Columbia University faculty. But it is not straight reportage. PW is now aware (at least at the editing stage) that this is an event that is the subject of media manipulation. This is the moment when PW peers into the future and the events are documented not only dynamically as they unfold in the presence of PW’s camera, but also accompanied by PWs insights and reflections as he edits and reconstructs the events of which he has been a part. Looking through the viewer of PW’s moviola we see an empty white screen. Blank.

Finally filmically PW shoots his film to deny himself the fake authenticity of the documentary film maker. There is no match cuts no formal continuities. It is in the spirit of the time. The camera is used in a wild libidinous frenzy denoting more an intense emotive subjectivity that is true to itself not any externalised objective statement of fact. PW’s camera is a statement of the truth owed to the self: to thine own self be true. But there are powerful filmic statements built up within the body of the film at the editing stage. None more powerful than the creation of a pure sound picture of the retaking of Columbia by the military and the police. Shot at night the picture is almost black nothing can be seen but edited onto the picture are the ritualised sounds of the men preparing themselves for violence beating their shields with their night sticks and chanting in unison. It is a moment of the promise of death intended to be heard by the students in the darkness behind the barricades waiting for their own destruction.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Adrin Neatrour writes:Everyman as nowheremanLinha de Passe   Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas – Brazil – 2008;
   Sandra Corveloni
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 30 Sept 08 Ticket price £6-80

Everyman as nowhereman

With Linha de  Passe (LP) Salles and Thomas have produced a curiously ineffectual and anodyne movie.  LP is based on the idea of threading together five separate stories of one slum dwelling family. Each story leads to a moment of epiphany or revelatory realisation.   Where Salles and Thomas falter is in the creation of a filmic world of the slum in which their characters can move.  The consequence is a movie that is possessed by a sense of emptiness, in which meaning depends on the audience filling in background and making connections that only exist symbolically on the screen.  

For the individuals and their stories to carry the weight of authenticity(why else  unless your name is the Disney Corporation, film a story about poor slum people?) the film would have express something of the palpable nature of the compressive forces exerting pressure on the individuals in this environment.  A place which has moulded them and  encompasses the horizon of their vision.  Bunuel’s Los Olvidados is one obvious example in which the texture and weight of the inner city shanty works as a defining force on the characters and permeates their stories.  The environment in Los Olvidados doesn’t delimit but it is elemental to the filmic project:  the closeness of man and beast, the closeness of man to man, the bounded nature of the individual’s perception. This sense of world is weak in LP.  Sao Paulo is depicted rather than experienced.  It is understood more as a background against which the stories unravel, not a milieu in which they take place. From time to time LP cuts to very wide establishment shots of the city which we see splayed out in its vastness.  But it’s as if Salles and Thomas were unable to figure out any other way of signing to their audience that their stories are actually linked to this city other than by this iconography. 

Without a world to contain them, the five stories in LP are detached from any source and float in bubbles of a discrete internalised relevance.  The effect is for the individuals in the stories to lose the very singularity which place lends body and psyche to form character.   The characters in LP come across as individuals who are construed as modern types.  They are reduced to being examples of urban slum stereotypes: defined by religion, race, sport, motorbike  unending serial pregnancies. The characters become sort of anyperson anywhere.  The perfect human counterpart to the modern development of urban space which from city to city is anyspace whatever anywhere: the mall the skyscraper, the contemporary piazza the inner city highway with its decks ramps tunnels and bridges.  Now we have anystereotype whatsoever fitted out in jacket trainers and jeans.  The trouble is decontextualised types can generate interest only through their doings. 

It is possible that Salles and Thomas are trying to communicate this observation to us and  have developed LP as an expression of the characterless nature of the modern.  No one is singular space and time: there is only anyone anywhere; there are no stories just general patterns.  But if this is the point and intent of the LP, then it lacks wit and intensity of vision in its communication. To make their points, in relation to their stories, the ultimate expressive recourse of Salles and Thomas is the mordant sentimentality of the soap opera rather than structural rigour and intelligence. 

The recurring image:  the mother attacks her blocked kitchen sink with a rubber suctioned plunger.  An ineffectual remedy for a deeper malaise; a shot that repeated half a dozen times exemplifies the poverty not of the woman’s resources, but rather of the film’s thinking.  It feels as if the film makers wanted this shot to work as a sort of metaphor, saying that underneath what you see in LP there is a compressed solid of rotting matter that blocks anything that tries to flow away.   And now I understand why LP is so ineffectual.  Metaphor and the metaphoric replace the actual:  and the film is the poorer for it because the viewer is given a symbolic interplay of  filmic material that invites the audience to invent an interpretive schema to understand what they see.  In LP impression is favoured over expression as the film’s currency.  The problem is that everything in LP slides inexorably towards the disaster area of metaphor as the film lurches towards  the interpretative and everything comes to stand in for something other than what it is: the buses, the sink, football, Episcopal religion, the motor bike the pregnancy.

In making LP Salles and Thomas have chosen to structure the film using linkages of a conventional classical Hollywood manner. The sensory motor linkages within  and between the stories are charcterised by conventionally shot and edited images: action, perception and affection images.  Use of images which build a conventional form of relational narrative dynamic, a dynamic that fosters the idea of continuities and the consequent interpretation of those continuities.  In creating filmic worlds that represent particular moulding and encompassing environments (such as the slum or the monastery) it is in fact the discontinuities that comprise the strongest formal elements of expression, discontinuities of both sound and vision that pitch the characters and the audience into an expressive world of compelling signs.  Interthreading 5 stories does not create discontinuities it simply gives an unending supply of editing points and invites the viewers to create an interpretative schema for understanding what they have viewed.

LP seems to have been produced the wrong way about. The project looks like it started with the question of how five stories could be inserted in the slum milieu of Sao Paulo, rather than asking how the milieu might surrender its secrets in the form of the wondrous characters that haunt its streets.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes:Machine gun dreams: a moral taleBilly Liar   John Schlessinger   UK  1963; Tom Courtenay ; Julie Christie
Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 18-09-08  Ticket price: £4-00
 
adrin neatrour writes: a body without organs – a moral tale

retrocrit
Billy Liar (BL) is usually described as a movie about a habitual dreamer fantasist called Billy Fisher.  Billy the young man with ambitions to be a writer trapped in a small Northern industrial town.  The usual explanation of the film is that Billy gets away from his actual reality by escaping into a world of his own imaginative longings.

But Billy doesn’t escape reality through his fantasial life; his fantasies in fact bind him more tightly to the reality he wants to put behind him.  Each indulgence in his imaginings commits him the more deeply to what he opposes.  And each indulgence increases the need to feed the habit of escape that is no escape.  The device of fantasy Billy uses as a means of escape is actually the path to deeper entrapment. Billy is a dreamer: a body without an organ: a pure psychic effect.

Billy is usually described as a ‘dreamer’ without however the nature of his dreams being examined.  The core of BL is Schlessinger’s (JS) filmic realisation of  Billy’s  dreams and JS’s understanding of the context of the fantasy. Billy’s fantasies don’t centre on pleasure but on power.   There are two main motif’s in Billy’s fantasy sequences: the obliteration of his enemies; and Billy as dictator: the leader of a  military machine.  As in the case of Hitler, who is certainly parodied here by JS, the powerless often have their psyches colonised by the very forces that they perceive as constructing their personal humiliation. The warped internalisation of the very forces that are seen as destroying the self, has ironic and often unpleasant consequences.

Set in the encompassing thrall of a small Lancashire industrial town, Billy’s fantasies of death and militaristic power point not so much to Billy as dreamer but to Billy as a frozen entity.  A Billy who is frozen into the  economic and social matrix of a  culture defined by mechanical hierarchical relationships.  A culture where the machine form defines all the  areas of social interactions: life and death, family and work.  It is a culture in terminal decline captured at the point in time where the machine will start to breakdown to be replaced by cultural form based less on constrained cohesive relations and more on organic/desire relationships.   Where failure will be a personal rather than a collective responsibility.

 Billy appears not as a young man escaping through fantasy but as a young man whose fantasies reveal that he is actually a psychic projection of  the encompassing mechanistic regulatory system.  His fantasy world doesn’t oppose the machine; rather it seeks to control the machine and thereby is of course controlled by it.  Lacking the resources to build an opposing fantasial apparatus Billy simply appropriates the machine’s hierarchic and mechanical form for his own ends and  satisfactions.  People are reduced to puppets under his control and those who oppose are exterminated.  The concentration camp and the execution squad, the logical extension of Billy’s imaginings, are the frozen products of a society built on mechanised life and death.

 
BL  is not structured on plot but rather on state of mind:  the frozen fantasy.   The film comprises a series of strips of action, triggers that fire Billy’s subjectivities.  The action strips are located in different parts of the social/economic machine but the fantasial responses from Billy indicate an internal time mechanism in which the hands on the clock are immobile.  In a sense it is replication of the state of mind of Adolf Hitler whose pent up frustrations during eight years in Vienna taught him ( according to Mein Kampf) everything he knew.  The years in Vienna, a hierarchical mechanical apparatus taught Hitler to hate and project the sclerotic forms of the Austro-Hungarian empire onto a solution of  the Jewish question.  Hitler frozen into his fantasies carried forewards his fantastic hatred into an eventual programme of mass murder.  JS’s Billy has similar artistic ambitions to Hitler ( Billy wants to write) but like Hitler suffers from an internalisation of the very institutions that humiliate him.  An internalisation that sabotages both development of ability and vision.   

Billy fails to see that he is living in a form of social organisation that is in its death throws.  The sequence which comprises the opening of the first supermarket is a filmic tour de force, but it works to indicate the development of a new form of social contract based on desire rather than mechanical obedience.  Billy sees nothing of this.  Death riddles his psyche boring through outer carapace of the film like the worm with a message.  Billy himself works in the the death industry, his gran is dying and some of the most effectively shot sequences in BL take place in the municipal grave yard as death itself watches over life.  Eventually Billy offered the chance of life by the charged vital ( but irrelevant ) presence of Julie Christie, chooses death. There was never any other alternative and JS remains true to moral intent and purpose rather than giving way to a faked ignoble open or ‘happy’ ending. 
adrin neatrrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk