Adrin Neatrour

adrin neatrour writes: Fiction passing for fact or fact passing as fiction?
Man on Wire – James Marsh – UK 2008  Doc (with dramatic reconstructions)
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 16 August 08;  Ticket:  £6-80

Fiction passing for fact or fact passing as fiction?

Marsh’s Man on Wire (MoW) is interesting in that it poses heuristic questions concerning the nature of the documentary tag.  Of course it isn’t the first film to sell itself on its documentary status but leave open issues pertaining to the validity of its claims to be factive.  MoW opens up the debate as to what constitutes a documentary film?  After viewing MoW with its archly crafted dramatic story and  finessed style I was left asking if it had any more claim to documentary status than films like Dam Busters or The Great Escape. 

Like the Dam Busters and The Great Escape, MoW  is about an Event.  It is event filmed as a pure discrete occurrence which is set in a time stream that comprises a deeply mythologised past and closed off future.  Marsh apparently got the idea to make a film about Philippe Petit’s (PP) epic wire walk across  the Twin Towers of WTC, after hearing PP on Desert Island Discs.  (Desert Island Discs is a staid BBC radio show, a vehicle that allows celebrities to select the music they’d take with them to a desert isle.)  Marsh in putting together MoW has in many ways modelled the film on the Desert Island Disc ethos.  Celebrities on DiD are interviewed in an uncomplicated manner, and unchallenged are allowed to be ‘celebrities’.   Likewise  MoW  permits PP to present his take on the Event, his heroics undisturbed by any awkward questions.  MoW celebrates the crossing as an event preserved in aspic drawing an iconic and decontextualised image of Petit, decontaminated from the forces of life and time.  The  film is constructed so as to present a unidimensional and consistent picture of PP.  PP is given a concentrated form as pure heroic image.  Like John Wayne, Bogart or those propaganda biographies of Stalin.  And yet life itself is never like this.  Even in MoW, with its carefully composed and edited contributions from friends companions and colleagues, there is a discernible darker shadow that lurks behind PP.

The Event, the wire walk, is transposed into a sort of mythological Great Time by allowing PP to present the crossing as a occurrence that was destined to happen from  his earliest days.   Destiny and the hero.  It is a common feature of myth that the subject is preordained to achieve their fame by signs that can be read in their childhood.  By the child shall you know the man (or woman).  Hercules is an obvious example but people like Houdini were also quick to claim childhood provenance. MoW encompasses time within the heroic fold of destiny. In an early sequence we see PP, as a boy at the dentist reading in a magazine about the proposal to build the Twin Towers.,  PP claims to have been imaginatively fired by what he read on that day, and at that moment somehow knew that these proposed gargantuan structures would one day play a defining role in his life.

And yet right from its opening, MoW seems to need to distort unwelcome facts and to bend them to the film’s project of mythologizing PP.  The sequence at the dentist appears to be falsely presented.   According to WikiPedia, PP read the article on a visit to the dentist in 1968 when he was about 19 years old, an adolescent (PP was born 13 August 1948) .  In the film’s reconstruction PP is represented as being a boy, certainly not an adolescent. This type of misrepresentation is grist to the mill for Hollywood film biopic vehicles that claim to be a dramas; but for a movie vehicle claiming to be a documentary it simply poses the question as to what terms and conditions are in play in regard to the validity of the product?  And what is the relationship of the validity of the material in a film to its claim for documentary status?  And how the intentions (as they reveal themselves on screen) of the film maker relate to the claim to documentary status?  The answer of course may be that like the wire they are highly elastic and that, for instance  misrepresentation of fact is no bar at all to documentary status. All that matters is that you intend to make a film and claim that it is documentary: either as a marketing ploy or because you believe it to be so.   
 
 Marsh uses much of the first part of the film creating the myth of PP.  PP’s childhood is structured as a hallowed pathway leading to the Event.  In re-constructed sequences we see soft focus recreations of PP learning to walk the wire and evidencing the necessary personal philosophy, firmness of purpose and purity of intention that will be necessary to meet the demands and strictures of the Event.  The key to the nature of the film is Marsh’s decision to represent PP as a mythic image.  The consequence of this decision is to decontextualise PP and construct his persona strictly according to the needs of the Film.  

MoW tells nothing of PP’s past, his family parents or geography.  All these are subsumed into the halo effect of the Event.  PP emerges from nowhere, stands alone and proceeds through the success of Event into a future that is nowhere.   Marsh exploits  PP  as a celebrity frozen in celestial space and time, like the figures in the great constellations of the night sky.   We are not informed in any certain manner about how PP earned his living.  We see ( in reconstruction) that he busked the streets in Paris with his act: but did he make enough from this to fund the Twin Towers walk?  His financial affairs about which there are legitimate questions of interest are left unprobed.  PP is a figment of the celebrity heavens and nothing sordid or earthbound, the money or the rent, is permitted to sully him.   We see PP, throughout the film interviewed in 2007, 33 years after the Great Event.  We find him frozen in time, defined only by this one action, the Event.  Nothing has changed, we have the same folksy quasi superman philosophy, a man who has learned to wear his media mask with ease.   As if he were a prisoner of the Event, and 33 years have passed in this prison.  PP has grown older ( more slowly than some), but nothing else seems to have happened.  

Marsh has made a film according to the old rules:  you tell the audience what is going to happen: they see it happen; and then they are told it has happened.  MoW is like the classic film of the man slipping on the banana skin.  Marsh has carefully stylised MoW to give it a contemporary feel.  He exploits the convention of tastefully filming the respondents with high key lighting against black or greatly dimmed settings to decontextualise their inputs. The interviewees feel like people playing themselves, taking on pre-agreed roles  in describing the Event. It feels as if they have been well rehearsed (or possibly edited by Marsh) in the course of their responses.  They only exist in relation to the Event not in relation to PP the man. They avoid or are edited by Marsh, so that it appears they avoid, really talking about PP as a person rather than as the projection of the film.  Two of the respondents – the ex girl friend Annie and Jean- Louis, intimate some deeper psychic reservations and ambiguities that caused them to disassociate themselves from PP.  But they remain covert, guarded intimations that are not allowed to disturb the polished reflective surface of  PP the celebrity. It feels like we are experiencing the careful construction of a lie, the filmic reduction of life to myth.

 Marsh appears very confident about the film he wants to make.  However there are odd signs of a latent insecurity.  The use of date and time intertitles.  These titles, which are typically used to lend a spurious authenticity to dramatic reconstructions may appear either as title cards or superimpositions informing the viewer, for instance, that a particular establishment shot represents:  New York –   4th January 1974 –  09:21.  This technique is now so hack and incorporated into spoof and mockumentaries it is often avoided.  In particular what should be avoided is specificity in relation to the minute hand of time.  But Marsh uses this device on a couple of occasions in reconstructing the Twin Towers preparations.  On both occasions it was unnecessary since minute by minute planning was not the order of the day (as it might be in a heist).  

Another sign of Marsh’s insecurity with the material is his decision to reconstruct the sex scene as a mock humorous silent movie. The humour in the sequence being reinforced by shooting (or editing) at 18 fps and projecting at 25 fps creating out of the action, funny jerky movements.  What happened is that after the sky walk the conquering hero PP was propositioned by a young woman – nymph(ette). In terms of Marsh’s mythic recasting of PP this is perfect.  All earthly women desire the seed of the hero.  PP as the hero gets his lay.  But there are indications in the interviews that this tryst was a turning point: a time when everything changed and old relations fell apart. Instead of celebrating the success with his friends and supporters he went and fucked a strange woman.  A God-Hero can do as he pleases.  Perhaps it was the final straw, the final act of arrogance perpetrated on his team by PP.  PP is allowed to get away with explaining what happened with a shrug of the shoulders.  This is his privilege.  But Marsh takes things a step further.  In filming the sequence as an opera bouffe,  he reduces it to a silent comedy.  In pandering to the viewer’s prurience MoW effectively minimalises the importance of what happened in personal terms and effectively folds the seduction and sex scene into the mythic.  A filmic act of displacement.

The film often seems to fall short creatively. For instance, the score is undemanding and emotionally honed to induce in the audience a certain compliance with PP’s iconic status.  The music at one point seems to me indicative of creative bankruptcy when Marsh for the film’s highlight, the Event, the Walk Between the Towers chooses to regale us with Satie’s Gymnopedie ( the usual one that is all the adverts and all the films) .   To exploit such an overworked piece of music belies either insecurity or lack of imagination. But that’s show business folks!

Man on Wire (MoW) celebrates an extraordinary event with a very ordinary film, a sort of standardised glossy re-enactment and recapitulation of the event that asks no questions and gets no answers in an exercise in stylistic misdirection.  Ultimately it is not in principle distinguishable from a regular biopic such as Reach for the Sky or Bonnie and Clyde.  All the news that fits, all the material the fits the film.

Of course MoW has been very popular, popular because it is built on an extraordinary event which the public want to believe in.   People enjoy believing the myth and Marsh has made a popular film fictionalising  the situation surrounding the Event, fashioning of the Event a feature film of crass simplicity and little integrity.  I might conclude that it falls into a category of degraded documentaries.  However I think MoW raises deeper questions about our confidence in our abilities to discriminate.  The category or even genre of documentary panders to the conceit that we can tell the real from the fake and fact from fiction.  In the world of endless manipulation of image and information our facilities are increasingly unable to make these distinctions.  But the sake of our self esteem and self image we cling to the idea embedded in the word ‘documentary’ as a sort of protective shibboleth.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: Retrocrit: pleasure for pain; sex for death
Kiss Me Deadly – Robert Aldrich  USA 1955:   Ralph Meeker – Maxine Cooper
Viewed Star and Shadow Newcastle  13 July 08 Ticket price £4-00

Retrocrit:  pleasure for pain; sex for death

The Kiss Me Deadly (KMD) opens with a disorienting travelling shot that is dominated by its sound.  We are in almost complete darkness.   We’re in the back seat of a car, behind the driver and his female passenger and we’re driving through the night.  Our attention is fixed not on the visual field which comprises of poorly defined shapes outlined in the blackness, but on the sound issuing from the woman.  At first I thought that the panting and clonic gaspings of the woman were sexually stimulated which given the year of production surprised me.  It was only when the film cut to the reverse shot, face on to the couple, that I realised that in fact the woman was crying. 

The mistake had the effect of making me feel self conscious for being so palpably wrong footed, for completely misconstruing the sound effect and interpreting pain as pleasure.  Was I conditioned by the sexual crudity of contemporary drama so that I automatically equated rhythmic female panting with sex? Or did Aldrich exploit, as his opening gambit, the ambiguity of the sound made by the woman,  intending to put the viewer on alert, to induce latent uncertainty as a core premise in the working out of the movie.  Beware:  pleasure is uncovered as pain; beware what men covet and prize beyond value is deadly and worthless: it will lead us into doom. 

The female passenger in the car – a hitchhiker on the run – is the first victim in the film: the first of many.   And the opening sequence, the unrelenting drive through the hell black night, ends with her words –“ Remember me!”  The drive has a dream like ominous quality that engendered in me a gloomy and oppressed state of mind, a mood that remains imprinted in the film till its explosive eschatological ending.  This driving sequence is a powerful filmic device, a metaphor that anticipates the terrible drive into the future, and its cost in human dignity and lives, not just in the play out of the mechanics of the plot of KMD but also for the  future of a planet driven by consuming desire to possess nuclear weapons that ensure mutual annihilation. We are on the road to the doomsday machine of Strangelove.

“Remember me…!” the hitchhiker commands Mike the gumshoe as they drive through the night.  The film lingers and worries about the meaning of her words, the words of the first victim, underlining and reemphasising them in the course of the plot.  What did she mean?  But where else do we have we heard and read these words?  “They shall not be forgotten…”   “Remember!” is the rubric that adorns the graves of the war dead, the headstones and walls where the names of the Fallen are carved in stone so that they are not forgotten but remembered.  “Remember me” is the command of the war dead lest we forget the reason for their dieing.  The young woman’s words are a sign pointing to the potential bleak future where millions of innocents might be annihilated in nuclear war.     

Neither the mechanics of the plot nor the acting are any more than accessories to the real dynamic of the movie which is the strategic use of the camera set-ups and movements to create both worlds of immanence and amplified circuits of tension that inform the states of mind of the viewers.   Two long sequences in particular stand out (the sequence establishing the swimming pool at the gangster’s house is also very fine) that are composed in one single shot: Mike’s visit to the gym; and his visit to the garret of opera singer.  The in-frame edit of the action through camera movement engenders in both scenes an amplified spatial tension.  And as the camera tracks through the spatial axes it works as a force amplifying and transforming the spatial tensions in relation to the verbal intercourse that takes place between Mike and the other players.  This heightened tensile awareness could not have been created through use of the  traditional montage device of cross cutting which generally through action cutting increases pace and attempts to induce tension through juxtaposition opposition etc but at the cost of losing durational time dynamic.  In KMD Aldrich has produced a movie that creates its spatial tensions not through action cuts but through time images. Having noted above that the mechanics of the acting are accessories to the film it must be said that all the players, in particular Meeker, have the fine technical sense of timing necessary to the delivery of the film in this particular form. 

The set-ups used by the camera are also definitive of he KMD.  The consistent framing of shots so that they conceal rather than reveal. The framing of feet and legs is integral to the style of the film.  This has of course been done before, but integrity and panache with which the shots are et up and incorporated make them part of what KMD is expressing, a world that is corporate rather then individual.  Likewise the use of the camera set-ups from surveillance angles points to more than just a Hitchcock conceit: it seems to be saying something a society which is in the process of developing  collective paranoia.  Likewise the most noteworthy prop on the set: Mike’s early prototype Anasphone which is a ¼ inch tape recorder fixed into the wall and tripped by the phone.  It’s prominence and position in the film rather than its role in the plot suggest that like the rubric ‘Remember me!’,  it is a sign not a symbolic function.

Some Hollywood films have gone for fiery Armageddon types of endings – White Heat for example. But as far as I am aware although the visual effects were uncompromising the message of such endings is always moralistic.  Aldrich in KMD brings down the curtain with a holocaust, a nuclear explosion from which his protagonists vainly flee.  There is nothing moralistic, only the moral that the technology that we have brought into the world is indifferent to our desires and works on the simple logic of being a force for universal annihilation. No prisoners are taken. There is no salvation.  There is no hope. I imagine Antonione watching KMD with some interest.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: Film as installation: first there was drive in now we got walk through movies. There Will Be Blood – Paul Anderson – USA – 2007   Daniel Day-Lewis, Dillon Freasier, Paul Dano, Kevin J O’Connor
Viewed Tyneside Cinema Newcastle   30 June 08  Ticket: £6-80

Film as installation: first there was drive in now we got walk through movies.

There Will Be Blood (TWBB) is a Hollywood gloss on Upton Sinclair’s big novel, Oil!  One of the most politically radical of America’s 20th century writers, Oil! is written on a broad historical canvas taking in the Great War, the Russian revolution and the tide of socialism in Europe and setting it against labour and political strife in the oil fields of Southern California.

Oil!  Chapter X11 The Monastery: ‘It had become clear to him that the present system could not go on forever – the resources and wealth of the Country carried off by the greediest.  And when you asked who was going to change the system there was only one possible answer – the great mass of workers who had learned that wealth was produced by toil.’

Anderson’s solution as to how to film Oil! is to replace Marx with Freud, to deflect the shaping of the narrative away from  political concerns inwards into psycho familial dynamics.  Upton Sinclair’s observations that chiliastic religious fervour de-energised and deflected American labourers from more pointed class concerns is taken up by Anderson, but then twisted and deformed to serve his own purposes in  providing TWBB with a final gothic  tableau:  the death of Eli bludgeoned to death by Daniel Plainview in private bowling ally of his mansion.  In TWBB religion justifies the final cryptic setting for this contemporary take on American Gothic involving the oil business –  fire – murder – blood.

Anderson has styled TWBB as  modern American Gothic, and it is Gothic script which provides the only opening title of the film, the date 1898  (white on black field)  which opens up the first of Anderson’s photo tableaux.  Sinclair’s novel is not stylistically gothic.  Rather it is informal and conversational in form and politically didactic in content.  Anderson’s solution to the transposition of the written to the filmic is to make of the film a series walk through photo installations, a set of tableaux as beloved of nineteenth century artists or current practitioners such as Bill Viola

So TWBB opens with the silver mine installation (birth)  and proceeds through a series of linked set-ups, the business meeting (sharp practice),  buying the farm to exploit the mineral wealth below its surface (underhand mendacity); the oil well blow out (the demonstration of the forces of nature), the dismissal of the son (rejection), the murder of the false brother (Cain and Abel), the humiliation of Daniel at the Temple by Eli (shame and humiliation) and the final tableau, Daniel’s slaying of the Preacher Eli ( Death: revenge on God and his two faced priests on earth)  The tableaux are spread over time, each temporal sequence introduced with the date in Gothic.

It is the camera work that indicates that what we are watching has been conceived as a photo installation. The film is characterised by a large number of long tracking shots that take us through each of the tableaux. I wondered at first what the tracks were accomplishing: they didn’t seem to have an obvious purpose either moral or instrumental. In fact the tracking shots in TWBB are a simulated replication of the effect the audience would get if they were walking through a photo installation.  The film is simply an installation in film form. The big production value centrepiece of TWBB the Biblical column of fire caused by the oil blow out reminded me of one of Viola’s walk through installations that featured a  cascade of water.  The hyperrealisation of natural phenomena, overdetermines response of the viewer to create awe (Fear and Awe) without engaging the question of meaning.  Anderson has adapted Oil! as a walk through installation.    TWBB has been made to fill out the gaze of the audience as it moves through the film.  TWBB is filmed to be cool  and to satisfy  all consuming but ephemeral vapid ambulatory curiosity.  It has not been written and shot for audience engagement with either context issues or emotions.  

To complete the installation effect, two other characteristics of the film production  are fully articulated.  The sound design concept is central to the walk through experience.  From the opening establishment shot of mountains accompanied by a crescending siren effect TWBB is only rarely (for instance when cutting to the deaf  mute point of view) without a sound accompaniment that fills out and points to the angle of the gaze; and meaning that the gaze should construe.  The score literally presses down and in and onto the film. With the its surround technology the sound is an active physical presence that preempts audience reaction to the visual stimuli.  By turns it is  ominous, the biosuggestive,  cosmic and of course weird.   The object of the sound concept is the colonisation of the viewers understanding, or at least the denial to mind of coherent response to the offered stimuli. Like the adverts on TV the sound track to TWBB is an enforcer; it is not a deepener of insight or reflection.

In similar manner, the mis-en-scene,  sets and costumes. are designed to fill out the gaze’s field of vision with confirmations of authenticity.   Attention to detail, another aspect of photo installation work, ensures all the detailing of the sets has a hyper real perfection so that nothing interferes with the smoothen path of the spectator’s trail through the film.  Anderson’s objective is total immersion in the encounters with the installations mediated by the richness of the interiors and costumes of the turn of the nineteenth century.  TWBB is populated by a series of players whose screen persona is characterised by a sort of Biblical patina invested with fake mythological persona.  DDL looked at times like a gremlin sorcerer out of the Lord of the Rings.  

The fragmented temporal structure serves Anderson’s purposes by being coherently inchoate.  TWBB time fragments intrerconnect but not in a way that compels specific readings; rather in such a way that the individual viewer can construct there own understandings as to what has happened.   Anderson\s replacement of Sinclair’s out front Marxism with back door Freudianism results in subjectivities determining meaning.  The viewer instead of  looking at the failure of organised labour in the US, instead can muse on the meaning the death of Eli in the bowling alley or the deafness of HW. In Anderson’s recourse to ever more heavy handed symbolism, an increasing vacuity and emptiness characterises the film.  By the final credits I had a feeling that I had been watching a shell of a movie in which  the core of the drama was missing: as indeed was the case.  I left the cinema saying to myself, not Oil! but So What!
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: He could not tie his shoe laces. I think this is an old story. A twisted post modern retelling of the return of Odysseus with Nietschean and Freudian shifts of consciousness. An eternal recurrence where the returning male is never able to get it together to tie his shoes; he is unable to enter the world of total self absorption demanded by shoelaces because he is sucked into the black hole created by the filmic projection of Nikolaides, a dark orifice comprising of two voracious all consuming women.
Singapore Sling    Nikos Nikolaides – 1990 – Gce/Fr –  B&W  Meredyth Herold; Panos Thanassoulis; Michele Valley

Original title: O anthropos pou agapise ena ptoma (The man who turned into a corpse)

He could not tie his shoe laces

When Odysseus returned from Troy he had no problem tying his boot straps, not so Singapore Sling the eponymous protagonist of the film.  And that’s a big difference.  Singapore Sling’s original Greek title. ‘the man who turned into a corpse’ points to a film of deeper resonance with key issues of Greek and Western culture than is commonly credited.  Normally Singapore Sling is dismissed as a sleazy exercise in bondage and SM.  However framed up as a pastiche of a Hollywood Film Noir (cf The Big Sleep) I think this is an old story, a twisted post modern retelling of the return of Odysseus with Nietschean and Freudian shifts of consciousness.   An eternal recurrence where the returning male is never able to get it together to tie his shoes; he is unable to enter the world of total self absorption demanded by shoelaces because he is sucked into the black hole created by the filmic projection of Nikolaides, a dark orifice comprising of  two voracious all consuming women.

Singapore Sling (SS) is a complete world of sensory satiation.  Complete with cod voice over and moody groovy jazz from the record player, the film is styled as a pastiche of Black and White Hollywood ‘40’s film noir.  High key lighting silhouetted faces scarred by shadow and make-up; foregrounds of furling wrapping enveloping female costumes; backgrounds of textured material from lace to heavy brocades, shadows of swaying fronds and deep dark architectural recesses;  exteriors sodden with unending deluge of water and menacing vegetative matter; soundtrack dinning with wind torrential rain and thunder and music from another era.  This is a world.

It is a world of singular density, of unrelenting fluidal compression. where the three characters play out rituals of bodily and carnal hyperstimulation.  In the which mouth and vulvavagina transform into mutant conduits of sensation, become  perversed body parts that wantonly engage in flux and reflux, reception and issuance.   The compressive quality of the mis-en-scene is a setting within which the mouth and the vulvavagina are explored and exposed as locations for a mutating female investment of sex and death.  An exploration that is perhaps all that is left after the failure of the male phallic imposition.  

It is as if Odysseus comes back to Ithica and doesn’t find Penelope surrounded by suitors.  It’s just too late for that the world has become too twisted . Too late for the male prick.  The modern take is that Odysseus has no son;  he has a daughter and  Odysseus finds Penelope encoiled physically and mentally with her  young female progeny.  The bed Odysseus has built is a puzzle not because it is a bed of love but because it is now a bed of torture and death.  In strange but different ways the women have taken on hybrid and new relationships with their bodies in which the penis has only the most marginal psychic reality.   The changed relationship involves flux and reflux.  The penis can only discharge.  It has only a one way relationship with the world.  The mouth and vulvavagina can both gorge and disgorge thus establishing a symmetrical relationship with the world of matter, a taking and a giving back. 
This reciprocating relationship to the the world appears to the male as a perversion: the vulvavagina should be the receptacle of semen; and the mouth the receptacle for the food prepared by the bigmother. 

Nikolaides has two tableaux that are central to his design.  The bed and the table.    Both are established in closed dense oppressive locations in which space is squeezed out of existence by the dense texture of matter.  The table is an extraordinary setting, because filmed in black and white, the prepared mountainous piles of food have mass and tactility but no other defining signs of fitness to eat.  The result is the creation of a banquet of repulsion in which difficult to define matter is alternatively gorged into the mouth and promptly disgorged out of the mouth.  Ingestion and vomit.   The heightened makeup of the actresses and their extraordinary haute couture gowns offset the grossness of the visceral oral sequence, which however posits a recharged and renegotiated relationship to the food with which we feed ourselves.  In a culture of surplus a new relationship is developed on a giving back by the oriface.  

The bed is the other location, the second main tableau on which Nikolaides designs are insinuated.  The bed cannot be looked at separately from the role of the male and female bodies in SS.  In SS the male penis is never seen.  The man, braces and all, keeps on his trousers. He is never undressed.  When the women rape him, to use his penis. kneeling on top of him, grinding towards their orgasm, it is as if they haven’t inserted his penis but rather the idea of his penis.  Their acts of  sex are self sufficient.  The vulvavagina sucks in and spits out; it is self sufficient.  The penis has become irrelevant.  Odysseus has nothing further to accomplish in the world than to self castrate.  The bed is no longer for fertility.  In the new world to which the recurrent Odysseus returns the bed is the locum for torture castration and masturbation.  The bed is a dense world of post phallic possibilities.   The vulvavagina draped in luxuriant garments and sheer fabrics set amidst deep linens, strapped up in a chastity belt, explores the intensities of a post penile world. 

The acting style that defines the action in SS is highly physical at least from the two female leads.   The male lead, despite the denouement, is largely passive. The performances elicited from his players by Nikolaides’ works in terms of a demanding a sort of over investment in the role which allows the viewers to critically detach rather than invest in the action. This distance allows the film, at critical junctures, to take on a spoof element and to be occasionally very funny.  The underlying seriousness of the theme and the physical commitment of the film to the body, prevents SS from simple degeneration into parody or Woody Allan territory where everything is played for laughs.  In SS nothing is played simply for laughs.   

Some people will find SS very disturbing without however quite being able to say why.   They will perhaps point to the bondage or sequences of torture (cod) or where the vulvavagina is explicitly used as a mouth and perhaps claim the film is simply cynically exploitative of its material.   However I think Nikolaides has made an extraordinary film, using film to do what film does: to create a world in which the meaning of the situations and events can be absorbed through the filmic elements.  SS is superbly shot composed in the main of though long unflinching takes, mostly medium and medium close shots, that impel us to look at what is happening and invite our collusion or opposition.   Nikolaides post Odyssean statement is a radical physical film about the terminal failure of the male based cultural forms that have dominated written history.  He knows that if Odysseus returns now he has no other choice than self castration and the slaughter of Penelope in order to prevent her spinning and twisting her own threaded path out of the nightmare.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Adrin Neatrour writes: Retro crit: cinema of obsessive desire, this is a film of pure expressive form that uses camera sets props and costumes to create a world characterised by the dark obsessive marriage of sex and death. With his ability to create mood ideas associations and drama through purely filmic means, Powell equals Visconti at his best. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – Powell and Pressburger (UK 1943)  Roger Liversey; Deborah Kerr

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle  Ticket Price £4-00

Retro crit:  cinema of obsessive desire
The apparent central concern (the one about which most commentators on the movie talk) of Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (LDCB) is the demise of the old fashioned world of the professional soldier’s code of honour and decency. This notion is probably a comforting mythic recasting of history and as a recurrent film theme it’s better handled by Renoir in La Grande Illusion than by Powell and Pressburger.  However probing past its narrative form which is interestingly structured as a series of fragments, but actually weak in its cohesion, this is a film of pure expressive form that uses camera sets props and costumes to create a world characterised by the dark obsessive marriage of sex and death. With his ability to create mood ideas associations and drama through purely filmic means, Powell equals Visconti at his best.   

The three lead female roles – Edith Barbara and Angela are all played by Deborah Kerr whose face and features in all her manifestations become the obsessive object of desire for protagonist Clive Wynne-Candy, career army officer. 

 As in Peeping Tom, Powell’s camera and his mis en scene work to engage the  audience’s collusion in the process of sexual fixation. The camera seeks out the innocent female object with keen eye of the bird of prey for its quarry drawing the subjectivity of the viewer into the shot.  The tracking of the camera into Deborah Kerr brings her affective innocence into the dominion of our gaze where we scrutinize her performance for signs of vulnerability. As indeed does Candy.   In LDCB, Deborah Kerr remains one pace outside of the male world, enclosed in her own bubble of femininity.  Later in Peeping Tom, Powell will create circuits of intensity in which the female through violence and murder will be  transposed as an object of the lens into the male ambit of dominion.  Nevertheless in LDCB there is one scene exploiting Deborah Kerr’s image in her Barbara incarnation that is as extreme as any in Peeping Tom where she is subjected to the most shocking of deterritorialisations and reconfigured as pure victim, the forcible transportation of the female into the male domain.   The militiant culture that offers to the female death as the final solution.   

The opening shot of Deborah Kerr sees her as ‘Edith incarnation’ in Berlin 1902.  She is seated opposite Candy as the camera tracks in on the two shot.  Both parties are talking in matter of fact manner; she giving him information about a certain German officer and Candy seeking elucidation on various points.  The setting is neutral as is the positioning of Edith and Candy.  But we cannot hear anything that is being said because their conversation is overshadowed by Edith’s hat.  She is wearing a white bonnet  in the middle of which pinned out like a specimen prepared for anatomical dissection, is a black raven.   A dead very black raven.  Is this woman a witch or sorcerer?   That  LDCB is shot in Technicolor accentuates the startling explicit image of a woman wearing a dead bird.   It is difficult to follow the thread of Edith and Candy’s talk because we are fixated upon this extraordinary appurtenance completely circumscribes our perception of Edith and  colours the way in which we view and understand the rest of the film.    It is seizure by the animal, an act of bewitchment by the female; a movement into myth and fairy tale. The moment with the hat is the moment where everything in the film changes.  From this point the film is endowed with  a psychic resonance of the realm of  the sorcerer.

The defining moment in the relationship between Barbara and Candy takes place after her death.  Death the moment of appropriation. Candy takes Krettschmar-Schuldorff (more about the political aspect of  KS and his marriage to Edith later) into his den and inner sanctum  The room is his trophy room and Powell has carefully documented throughout the film that Candy shoots big game and has the heads mounted and brought home.  On the  main structural wall the animals he has shot seem to be alive   in their nobility as they protrude intrude and swell out into the room: lion, tiger, rhino, elephant. It seems to be part of his purpose in life to kill beautiful creatures.  Over the fireplace plumb in the middle of this assemblage of death hangs the portrait of Barbara, the dead wife.  The shot leaves the viewer speechless.   Like the totemic bird on the hat, the dead woman’s portrait in the trophy room completely short circuits the faculties.  You can neither see nor hear what is happening in the room,  only physically absorb the shot.  As it is viewed and its implications register, the viewers again are trapped as collusive agents.  Through its deep field of vision the shot becomes a  pure time event for the audience who cannot escape the flood of associations triggered both by the internal dynamics of the film and the external points of reference from their own lives.  There is no escape from what we are seeing and the ironic position of the audience is heightened by the fact that  Candy seems totally unaware of the meaning of his actions, which oblivion compounds our complicity.  The film renews its energy as a dark elliptical fairytale carved out of time that moves from the dead raven on the hat to the dead woman on the wall.

(Unfortunately the projector broke down 15/20 minutes form the end of the film so I DID NOT SEE THE END.  I don’t know if there is a similar shot/scene involving the image of Angela.) 

The camera work is central to the structure of the film and the way in which Powell defines time in the world of LDCB.  The camera movement is integral to the context of the sets and the Technicolor medium both of which create a detached high intensity world.  The sets have a phantasmagorical quality.  In particular the Turkish Bath set and the German military gymnasium both of which are settings the cue key camera movements that define the concept of time in LDCB. 

The Turkish bath sets are built as pure Hollywood sybaritic fantasy.  The textures are soft and coloured by alluring pinks and blues.   The  set’s structure comprises cubicles built around a long central pool which seems to breathe steam and a heady cocktail of vapours.  From  the first,  the pool has a magnetic faerie allure. It is into this water that Candy falls during his confrontation with the young upstart when the pool is revealed to be the fountain of eternal life.  It is indeed comprised of magical qualities that restore youth to all who take its waters. As Candy falls in the pool camera tracks him as he swims along under the water simultaneously transforming space into time. It is the old grizzled rotund 60 year old Candy who enters the top of the pool;  the figure who emerges at the other end is the young officer of 40 years earlier who has just returned from South Africa and is on his way to Berlin.  In one moment the scene is set for a fairy tale in which time is the essential element.

The camera movement in the military gymnasium is an equally powerful statement..  It is the setting for the dual between Candy and KS.  The gym has an  otherworldly quality in its coloration and spacial dimensions.  Moulded out of a light blue wash it suggests the idea of infinite space.  The dual sequence is simply constructed in long and medium shots with the focus on the necessary brisk pace of the preliminary ritual.  As the two opponents take guard and prepare to ‘attaque’ there is suddenly a great sweeping camera movement swinging the lens vertically up high into the ceiling for an overhead shot that pauses for a moment to take in the two tiny figures below still on guard in infinite space before resuming its headlong flight out of the gym finally coming to a stop hovering high in the sky over the roof of the building which twinkles in the darkness of the early winter morn.  The perspective is cosmic and the movement suggests  a switch into cosmic perspective and faerie time. in which anything is possible including time splitting up into different dimensions.  What happens?   The opponents become brothers and there is a reordering of  life as Edith chooses to marry KS.   But in a sense there is a fusion suggested.  In the same way as Deborah Kerr is the fusion of three woman,  so Candy and KS become fused as one split identity operating in different dimensions.   

When critics summarise or talk about LDCB they usually mention that the film was nearly banned by Churchill because of the sympathetic portrayal of the main German character, KS.  In fact these critics miss the point.( let alone the idea that Candy and KS become fused bidimensional identities)  True, the script treats KS as a discrete individual and not as a raving German military stereotype. So Pressberger makes the uncomfortable political point that many Germans including ex-army officers, did oppose Hitler. But the film is much much more radical than this.  It is this deeper radical element buried at the heart of the film that prompted the authorities to want to ban it.  After their dual it is KS who marries Edith and they have two sons.  In his last conversation with Candy,  KS reveals that although he and Edith opposed Nazism and Hitler their sons had become fanatical fervent Nazis.  At this time in 1942 in Britain, this was a  bombshell idea to place in a film script.  The implication was that the Germans weren’t Nazi because of their German-ness. The Germans became Nazi through the social and political matrix of forces unleashed in their country. Pressburger was telling his British audience that being English or even half English offered no immunity from this disease.  No amount of English ‘decency’ (and Edith, on the surface at least,  is a very decent woman) could necessarily protect either us or the Germans from the political sicknesses of the age.  At a time when British propaganda was belting out the message of the intrinsic good qualities of Englishness, Pressberger and Powell’s refusal to submit to biocultural comforting British propaganda in a film intended for popular consumption must have been viewed as treacherous and unpatriotic.

LDCB is a fairy tale implanted into the psycho-sexual war zone.  It has an overt message that seems to be saying something about the nature of war and the British character. Implanted under the skin the tegument of the film is a covert film, abetted by stunning use of décor and creative camera work, which drives deep into the dark sexual recesses of the warrior sees into the military ethos which gives birth to the death machine.  LDCB is not what it seems to be. Even if you don’t get it, its wake leaves behind a wash of psychic disturbance.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: Film as text message
Stop-Loss – Kimberley Pierce – USA 2008  – Ryan Phillippe  Channing Tatum  Abbie Cornish
Viewed: The Empire Cinema – Newcastle upon Tyne
 Ticket: £6-80

Film as text message

Kimberley Pierce is a filmmaker who’s lost her way and ended up tied to Hollywood’s apron strings.  Her first film directed in 1999 Boys Don’t Cry, exploiting the fine edge of Hilary Swank acting presence, showed that she had the skill and understanding to fashion an intense world out of the contradictions of contemporary blue collar culture.   Stop-Loss (S-L) creates nothing resembling a world and with MTV as the main credited production company, it evidences as a film the combined depth of the text message and an MTV promo.

‘Stop-Loss’ is the clause in the contract American soldiers sign when they enlist. It’s a clause which gives the US armed forces the right to compel military personnel to extend their service beyond the time for which they originally signed.  During war it’s a means of ensuring good soldiers have to undertake further tours of duty – even against their will.  Pierce believes in particular in relation to the Iraq and Afghan wars, that this one sided clause is a heinous affront and denial of rights. Her film is made is response to her feelings about this issue.  The problem is that film (or for that matter the novel or poetry) is generally not employed to its most powerful or persuasive effect when it is reduced to being a vehicle for an issue; when used as a mere vehicle, a simple conduit for a message.  And Kimberley Pierce has one main message here and that is that the Stop-Loss clause is a violation of fairness and justice.

The message is delivered amidst the emotively acted machinations of a conventional soap drama.  Buddies fall in and fall out with each other against a background concern that connects the vicious experience of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to the final price paid in damage to the bodies and  minds of the young working class men who do the fighting.   

But there are a large number of films that equate the  waging of war with a destructive effect on individual character personality and psychic equilibrium.  The strongest of these films relate the experience and shock of the soldier to the political and socially structured responses that are endemic in the culture.   S-L fails to achieve this connection not because the constituent elements are absent, the set piece of the public  returning home parade/jamboree is a case in point; but  the style of the filming never allows for these socio cultural elements to be observed.  Altman’s Nashville is powerful because the public aspect of the political element is never overtly interpreted but presented to the viewer as something to observe. IN S-L. the scenario, the camera and editing are always busy interpreting what is happening, and underscoring the visuals with emotionally charged music.  Much of S-L is filmed through close-up shots of the faces of the players which lends the film a reactive soap opera feel: emotions and emoting responses displace understanding as the film’s focus point.  The face replaces the body, surface replaces depth of field.

In depriving the viewer of observational means to see into characters Pierce resorts to ‘devices’ that are intent on making us understand what the characters are experiencing. The use flashbacks is inelegantly crude: Brandon – protagonist – sitting on the dive board stares into the Motel pool and sees his buddy in the depths.  The flashback seems to be used to try and construct meaning in the film where the film script in itself is unable to.  Likewise to express the meaning of damaged young men Pierce and her fellow scenarist Mark Richard   resort to the device of contrived incident mostly in the form of violent outbursts by the characters.  Again it is a crude method of making the point but one that is not necessarily effective in engaging the viewer in understanding. Perhaps because mindless violence is now the currency of most mainstream movies.

Finally I was interested to see that the cinematographer on S-L was Chris Menges. This film and veteran cinematographer of Killing Fields, the Mission, and Dirty Pretty Things would have been handy to have had on board  for the shooting of the ambush fire fight sequence.  It seems like a typical Hollywood match: the veteran cinemat and the tyro director(KP has only directed two films); but was Menges Pierce’s choice or the studios? I am certain that Menges is a model of discrete advice but his presence as key production presence raises the question to what extent the look of the film, which is sort of his department, dictated the delivery of the film.  It raises the general point that overall ( the need for marketing short hand) the director probably gets more than their share of public credit in a product that is very often a team effort.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk 
Stop-Loss – Kimberley Pierce – USA 2008  – Ryan Phillippe  Channing Tatum  Abbie Cornish
Viewed: The Empire Cinema – Newcastle upon Tyne
 Ticket: £6-80

Film as text message

Kimberley Pierce is a filmmaker who’s lost her way and ended up tied to Hollywood’s apron strings.  Her first film directed in 1999 Boys Don’t Cry, exploiting the fine edge of Hilary Swank acting presence, showed that she had the skill and understanding to fashion an intense world out of the contradictions of contemporary blue collar culture.   Stop-Loss (S-L) creates nothing resembling a world and with MTV as the main credited production company, it evidences as a film the combined depth of the text message and an MTV promo.

‘Stop-Loss’ is the clause in the contract American soldiers sign when they enlist. It’s a clause which gives the US armed forces the right to compel military personnel to extend their service beyond the time for which they originally signed.  During war it’s a means of ensuring good soldiers have to undertake further tours of duty – even against their will.  Pierce believes in particular in relation to the Iraq and Afghan wars, that this one sided clause is a heinous affront and denial of rights. Her film is made is response to her feelings about this issue.  The problem is that film (or for that matter the novel or poetry) is generally not employed to its most powerful or persuasive effect when it is reduced to being a vehicle for an issue; when used as a mere vehicle, a simple conduit for a message.  And Kimberley Pierce has one main message here and that is that the Stop-Loss clause is a violation of fairness and justice.

The message is delivered amidst the emotively acted machinations of a conventional soap drama.  Buddies fall in and fall out with each other against a background concern that connects the vicious experience of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to the final price paid in damage to the bodies and  minds of the young working class men who do the fighting.   

But there are a large number of films that equate the  waging of war with a destructive effect on individual character personality and psychic equilibrium.  The strongest of these films relate the experience and shock of the soldier to the political and socially structured responses that are endemic in the culture.   S-L fails to achieve this connection not because the constituent elements are absent, the set piece of the public  returning home parade/jamboree is a case in point; but  the style of the filming never allows for these socio cultural elements to be observed.  Altman’s Nashville is powerful because the public aspect of the political element is never overtly interpreted but presented to the viewer as something to observe. IN S-L. the scenario, the camera and editing are always busy interpreting what is happening, and underscoring the visuals with emotionally charged music.  Much of S-L is filmed through close-up shots of the faces of the players which lends the film a reactive soap opera feel: emotions and emoting responses displace understanding as the film’s focus point.  The face replaces the body, surface replaces depth of field.

In depriving the viewer of observational means to see into characters Pierce resorts to ‘devices’ that are intent on making us understand what the characters are experiencing. The use flashbacks is inelegantly crude: Brandon – protagonist – sitting on the dive board stares into the Motel pool and sees his buddy in the depths.  The flashback seems to be used to try and construct meaning in the film where the film script in itself is unable to.  Likewise to express the meaning of damaged young men Pierce and her fellow scenarist Mark Richard   resort to the device of contrived incident mostly in the form of violent outbursts by the characters.  Again it is a crude method of making the point but one that is not necessarily effective in engaging the viewer in understanding. Perhaps because mindless violence is now the currency of most mainstream movies.

Finally I was interested to see that the cinematographer on S-L was Chris Menges. This film and veteran cinematographer of Killing Fields, the Mission, and Dirty Pretty Things would have been handy to have had on board  for the shooting of the ambush fire fight sequence.  It seems like a typical Hollywood match: the veteran cinemat and the tyro director(KP has only directed two films); but was Menges Pierce’s choice or the studios? I am certain that Menges is a model of discrete advice but his presence as key production presence raises the question to what extent the look of the film, which is sort of his department, dictated the delivery of the film.  It raises the general point that overall ( the need for marketing short hand) the director probably gets more than their share of public credit in a product that is very often a team effort.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Adrin Neatrour writes:Here comes the bogyman
No Country for Old Men – Joel and Ethan Coen   USA 2007   Tommy Lee Jones Javier Bardem  Woody Harrelson   Kelly Macdonald
Viewed at Tyneside Cinema 14 April 08  ticket £6-50

Here comes the bogyman

The opening shots of No Country for Old Men (NCOM): dawn over Southern Texas the harsh lands captured in the light of the spinning sun.  The sequence seems to augur a presence in the film of  primal cosmological and topographical forces that shape the men’s lives.  But this sequence is no more than a coat hanger, a series of pretty pictures, a frame on which to hang a concatenation of the mindless violent events that make up the scenario.

The Coen’s trademark is to depict down home good ol’ boys in situations of extremis. The message is that in the rural heartlands of the USA the twisted threads of violence that make up the warp and woof of the American cultural matrix are have taken endemic root.  Looking in from on the outside, the rural areas of the USA might appear to be an unchanging scape of clapboard houses and trailers governed by grizzled folksy can do and know how.  This is façade, and behind the façade of the shingle and the rockwall is a society in disintegration.  The moral to NCOM might be that mythically at least the hoodlum used to take on the Police Department and lose (even if it was at the cost to the Department of abrogating the moral code of society); today the hoodlum takes on the Police Department and wins. 

However on rereading the above I feel immediately as if I am reading into NCOM a meaning that is not justified by what I saw: though some of these elements are present in NCOM, their presence is cursory and gestural.  The sunrise, the folksy wise voice over delivered by ‘sheriff’ Tommy Lee Jones, the trailer parks and motels, the conversations about drugs and immigrants all function as plausible filler to NCOM ‘s variant on the formulaic chase/stalk movie, a genre that has become knotted into its own conventions from French Connection onwards.   

NCOM’s psychopathic stalker killer Anton is a mutant beast with ‘haircut’: a cross between one of the family members in the Texas Chain Saw or Evil Dead or the Terminator android, and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry.  Anton is a machine:  programmed to kill, unstoppable, targeted like a homing missile, and with a Jackal like intelligence.  The only human feature possessed by the Anton machine is a morbid curiosity.  NCOM then is a simple exercise in unleashing the machine in pursuit of its quarry, and scripting in the usual sequences of violence, chase and collateral damage, covering the resultant potage with a garnish of folksy observations.

This is a mechanical movie that once the initial premise is established carries few surprises. The dynamic of the plot is a drugs deal gone badly wrong. Subsequently a small time shit kicker makes off with the loot and the machine is dispatched to retrieve the dosh.    The trouble with having a machine as the prime focus of a film is that everything else is reduced to mechanicality.  There is no intelligence, there are no ideas no thoughts just a mechanised reckoning bracketed by a few one line cracks.

The way the film is shot and edited reflects the simplicity and crudity of the scenario.  I don’t think there is an interesting shot in the film, either in camera or in the editing.  (There is one stupid cut to a group of Mexican street musicians when Woody Harrelson regains consciousness in Mexico)  In the main the Coens’ camera seems to have been placed to move from action to action, and the editing follows the shooting script with a series of action cuts.  Few scenes are allowed to develop in their own time – one exception is the garrotting at the front of the movie which is done in more or less one take – mostly time is violated by the editing and by the plot line itself in which it is not possible to make any sense of time other than by reference to the demands of the plot.   Mostly the film moves through camera and Avid/final cut pro ministration with an increasingly predictable rhythm, mechanical modular filming making that works against the tensions and oppositions that the Coen’s try to set in play.

A number of people have commented on the mumbly delivery of lines in NCOM.  After viewing the film I think this mode of delivery is a conceit, a desperate means to claim for the film a down real authenticity.  The fact NCOM needs to stake out such a claim places it in the same category those adverts that appropriate authentic looking signs, linguistic visual or audio, to try and sell their products.

 It was interesting to see two films in the same week that had at their core, concern with violence.  Whereas Funny Games (Michael Haneka)  is structured as a machine (like the apparatus in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony) and uses cinematic frame and time based theatrical devices to explore and make manifest the presence of violence in American society; the Coen’s are unable to do little more than make yet another film that exploits violence and substitutes a psychotic robot for a machine to carry the plot line to its conclusion.

The Coen’s may suggest that NCOM is a parody, an inverted filmic comment on films like the Dirty Harry series. My response is that these films with their big pricks with big guns, with their mordant one liners “Make my Day”, their action ethos in camera and editing, already occupy that space which we call parody.
You cannot parody that which is already a parody, for at that point the candle gives no light.   
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes:Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle the theatre is not possible:…it is through our skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds. (Antoine Artaud) “It was just for fun!” Testimony of Private First Class Lynddie England at her trial for her part in the murder torture and abuse committed by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib.
Funny Games US – Michael Haneka – 2007 – USA/Fr/UK/ Ger/It  Naomi Watts; Tim Roth; Michael Pitt; Brady Corbit; Devon Gearhart.

Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle the theatre is not possible:…it is through our skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.  (Antoine Artaud)        “It was just for fun!” Testimony of Private First Class Lynddie England at her trial for her part in the murder torture and abuse committed by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib. 

In his films Haneka is taking up and inventing an expressive filmic form of  the metaphysics of theatre articulated by Artaud, ideas about theatre that Artaud  developed through his concept of the Theatre of Cruelty.  By cruelty Artaud was pointing to the need for a violent physical determination to shatter the false reality, which he says, lies like a shroud over the arrogant perceptions of Western civilisation. Haneka’s work, like Karl Dreyer’s, is a form of filmic theatre.  In both Haneka and Dreyer the frame is used like a stage and the core of the film is conceived as a series of long takes. With Funny Games US (FGUS), as in Hidden and Dreyer’s Ordet, the cumulative expressive effect of the filming is achieved through the use of long takes, with the camera either still or manipulated with artfully choreographed movement ( or a mixture of the two as in the scene in the master sitting room after the murder of George jun.).  The effect created is of a metaphysics of space with a moral purpose.  FGUS is a fusion of  Artaud’s concept of Theatre of Cruelty with a specifically filmic expression of space.   (Interestingly there is a strong connection between Dreyer and Artaud in that Artaud played a lead role in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc -1929)

Know them by their space.
In this defining of his films through compositional theatricality Haneka resembles Dreyer in allowing space through frame to speak for itself; to interpose itself as a metaphysical element in the film that has temporal value allowing passage of time to invest the image.  In Dreyer’s films space is represented as austere and economically pared, reflecting both Danish culture and his own transcendent concerns.  In Haneka’s FGUS the spacial metaphysics of American culture is represented as a plane of immanence replete with matter: matter to be used and consumed at will.  In FGUS we have no other information about the victims other than the spaces in which we see them, and what we absorb or glean from this information.  We see their car: big comfortable and filled with Classical Music.  We see the exterior of their house: gated isolated and with many outbuildings; we see their dog: big.  We see the interior of their house: big rooms filled with matter and their possessions, none of which – aside from those in the kitchen – is any way productive but rather intended for consumption or used in the pursuit of consumption.

So familiar are we to this organised orgy of material matter filling the world that we hardly notice it.  We give it not a second thought.   Haneka has: it defines us as surely as our genes.  In FGUS this suffusion not only fills the visual field to overflowing but it also invests the fields that we cannot see.  The youth asks for eggs.   We cannot see eggs. The eggs are in a carton; the carton is in the fridge, the fridge is in the kitchen.  Ann goes to get the eggs, which are in the carton.  The carton is full of eggs: 12 of them (all to be broken but no omelette).  The egg carton is in the fridge, a huge cavernous multishelved space ( even so small by American standards) which is stuffed full of food: meat milk cheeses spreads mayonnaise.  The fridge is in the kitchen which in its turn is crammed with gadgets utensils and appliances.  And all this suffusion of matter seems to us in the West an entirely normal situation.  Are we not Lords of the Universe.  It is in the kitchen that the first of Haneka’s long master takes occurs:  the visit of Peter to the house to ask for ‘eggs’.  Haneka’s kitchen take is a long choreography of movement and incident, boxes and fridges opening and closing, pirouettes spins turns approaches of bodies in space and time; etiquette and dialogue.  In defining the resources of the two parties, in creating a sense of immanent unspoken unperceived threat, this take is the moment in the film that defines with total clarity what is taking place in the space and what will happen. 

For all their claims to ownership of the space, the family are defined more by occupation of the space without real claim on it.  They are sort of interlopers.  They possess great wealth of material matter with apparent aplomb and certitude but without any awareness of what it is that they have.  It is an incorporeal claim on the space. Ultimately without substance and made the more vulnerable by the physical isolation and aloneness built into the defensive culture of which they are part. ( The neighbours have to visit one another by boat)  Their dilemma is that they see none of this.  They walk blindly in life seeing nothing.  In the old John Ford films the settlers at least understood their situation and used the gun to kill perceived threats.  The victims, Ann and George lack the psychic insights to understand what is happening.  They are deficient in these resources. 

The interlopers Peter and Paul (sic) are revealed through the film as possessing the space, not owners, even temporarily because they do not desire to own anything materially. Rather they desire to have use of it. Their resources consist not just of surprise and ambush by which they attain control over the family.  Their resources comprise the fact that they are machines.  Machine designed to move into materially suffused space and take control; machines calibrated to occupy consume and use without responsibility or ownership.  Peter and Paul – machines designed and finally honed by the parent culture to kill.  The raison d’etre of their existence: machines that  kill.  Machines manufactured by a culture that is based on killing to acquire what it wants to possess.  Murder the native Americans for land; murder Iraqis for oil.  In FGUS murder outs and turns on itself. 

Murder and execution as moral theatre is an established imperial tradition.  From the execution troughs of the Achaemenian Persian kings and the crucifixion of Jesus, through to the execution of Damien and the death tortures of  SAVAC the Shahs secret police, cruelty as public spectacle with a didactic coded moral message is the debased means by which imperium seeks to exercise and demonstrate the reach of its force  directly onto the body.  As the officer comments to the explorer when demonstrating the apparatus in Kafka’s the Penal Settlement: “Guilt is never to be doubted.”  In the degenerate system of justice in the Settlement, not only was guilt never to be doubted but the guilty offender was never aware that he had been charged tried and sentenced to death.  It was the task of the apparatus to inform him, an elaborate machine that would execute him by penetrating his body with needles and piercing him through the body with the name of his crime.  During the course of his execution on the machine, the victim slowly comes to understand, corporeally the nature of the crime for which he is dieing.  The theatre of cruelty. 

Peter and Paul resemble in some respects Kafka’s apparatus.  Both are products of a specific culture and both in the particular form they take undermine sabotage and subvert that original culture.  Peter and Paul like Hitler are machines; assemblages and constructs of a particular culture at a particular time.  Powerless in a culture of diffuse but class segmented lines of power they internalise power’s attitudes gestures and semantic glosses as an internalised cognitive circuitry.  Empowered by mastery of culturally empowering interactive skills they proceed to use these to for their own ends.  The polite submissive tones of Middle Class America, the conventions of incorporiality, of class considerations are married to a bastard child whose language is detachment and hedonism, whose state of mind is boredom and whose life is driven by the ambition of the dream of  turning of fantasy into reality. For fantasy to become reality what is needed is power.  Peter and Paul not being military personnel at Abu Ghraib, take power into their own hands.   They are the children of their age. They are the children of Ann and George.  They are a murderous machine that kills for thrills.   They are incubi, the demonic offspring of the culture that turns on its progenitor and bores back into the flesh of their dreams turning life into nightmare. Peter and Paul are to American culture what Hitler was to German culture.  Perhaps that’s why Haneke made this film twice.  Once in Germany.  Once in the USA.  When Empires abuse power they produce the monsters that consume them.

In FGUS Haneka also subverts the Hollywood/ neo European action image film conventions.   By complete inversion of the conventional narrative dynamic opposing good and evil he uncovers their terrible moral vacuity.  They are based on simple power relationships not on any intrinsic values. In FGUS Haneka is looking to all those Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry films, vigilante vehicles that correspond to an apologia for the American way of Life, and demonstrating their shallowness and shabbiness.  Peter and Paul deconstruct the relationship between hero and villain showing it to be simply a matter of manipulation and linguistic styles allowed to the different players.  This is most powerfully demonstrated with a scene replayed twice: first when Ann succeeds to getting hold of the shot gun and killing Peter. Paul’s response to this is to pick up the remote, wind back the scene and have it replayed so that he stops Ann’s action before she grabs the gun.  As in vigilante movies, so in FGUS it is important that we know what is going to happen.  In Dirty Harry films we are onside because we know that Dirty Harry will win out and decency be saved even if decency itself is therein totally compromised. In FGUS we know that the family are doomed. They have been committed to a death machine from which there is no escape within the conventions of this movie. The shift in perspective tilts the viewer ambiguously towards the locus of power.  Peter and Paul are accorded all the privileges of the successful protagonist.  In this case not  an archly defining voice over; but direct to camera comments by Paul validating his role and actions in the movie: a movie which he points out is for our entertainment: thus enlisting us as colluding agents. Peter and Paul have all the controlling one liners that define what is happening and what is to happen. There is no Clint saying to the hood: “Make my day!”. Rather we have Paul  telling Ann that killing her and her husband straight away would be to forget the entertainment value. And to the husband’s plea as to why they are doing this Paul responds: “Why not!” All the weapons of psychic power and control rest with the murderous forces and the cumulative effect of this distribution of power is to lay bare the fact that Hollywood conventions of Good and Evil are no more than simple arrangements of forces of power in play – not moral fables.
adrin neatrour  –  adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes:The Jan open screening was remarkable for the broad range of material screened and the extent to which the viewings were testimony to a state of affairs in which film rages across the landscape as a force that that is alive and vibrant.Eyes Wide Open –  Jan open screening at the Star and Shadow featuring Filmmakers:
Craig Wilson; Mat Fleming; Brian ? ; Conor Lawless; Brighid Mulley. Irit Batsry; Tina Gharavi; Bill Ormond; David Aspinal, the Koreshi Brothers; Adrin Neatour; Unknown German Film Maker(UGFM)

Seen at Star and Shadow Cinema 24 Jan 08.   Cost of entry – free for contributing film makers; non contributors: £4 and £3

Seeing’s believing

The Jan open screening was remarkable for the broad range of material screened and the extent to which the viewings were testimony to a state of affairs in which film rages across the landscape as a force that that is alive and vibrant.

The films viewed ranged in type from the tactile explorings of Brigid Mulley’s Fibres, the visual humour of  Brian ?’s level crossing gates to  Adrin Neatrour’s  political statement, Echolalia.  There was also material from other times so to speak, or at least from the ‘80s including the agitprop of Bill Ormond piece, a film in grand style about a grass roots movement in Newcastle opposing the extension into a public park  of the city’s football stadium;  Craig Wilson’s architypal punk video, Dead Boards,.  In the homage section there were two films: Tina Gharavi’s Two Lighthouses remembering the poetry of Julia Darling and Irit Batsry’s  1989 video of Joanna Peled’s remarkable performance of the 4th sentence of Joyce’s Molly Bloom soliloquy .  Most of the films screened were about film as a type of seeing: the filmmakers made use of film as an expressive form choosing to use possibility of film because it was the only medium which could tell what they saw – using the verb ‘to see’ in its wide  sense to embrace perception understanding and ordering of reality as well as the pure visual faculty.  

Conor Lawless’ Midio Vampyros Lesbos uses acquired footage which he modifies through his own software.  In his film the picture and sound were run through a programme so that the individual notes in the Bach fugue triggered a picture in the looped footage of the same durational value as the note.  On viewing the film engendered a mild disoriented state.   I struggled to piece together what was happening.  It was a pure film field in which mind experienced a certain sort of assault on its processing capabilities. But there was no other intention other than effect.  As such it was like a media film lab experiment and the subject/partipant  knowing the intention of the film was pure effect, could open up to  the stream of images and sound allowing the effect to permeate and infiltrate consciouness.  Nothing was being sold; there were no arrows of desire.  And Conor’s film was a trip. A pure optical sound experience that took all those firing neurons in your head and momentarily tripped and scattered them in different configurations.

The last film exhibited was shot and projected on super 8 and made by in the early 80’s by an unnamed german film maker (UGFM)working in France.  The scale of  buildings used to say something about their importance and also focused attention on their specific function: church and mosque. law courts and legislative builidings,  palaces theatres and cinemas.   The contemporary built environment is characterised by a giantism whose only rationalisation is the economics of intense land use. We struggle still, even given our familiarity with these spaces to cope with these  forms of modern architectural expression.   Modern urban projects create environments to which we don’t know how to react, spaces which we  don’t know how to describe and in which we still don’t know how to move our bodies,  Spaces which dwarf us and render us temporarily mute and paralysed.  We can’t easily possess these spaces.  They tend to take possession of us.  Graffiti and film are two modes of confronting(there are others) what is happening: graffiti  by claiming ownership of place,  film through its ability to be a force for understanding what is happening.  In film we can move through them with or without a shopping trolley with or without trying to mutiliate them.  As Deleuze notes they are not so much narratives as pure optical / sound  settings.  That is how we can approach them with our minds and bodies. 

The UGFM’s film is not in itself original but the film realises a particular vision of this world of concrete steel and cardboard.  Many of the settings and cityscapes captured have become familiar through contemporary film  content:  the  Autoroutes,  the vast housing projects, the rebuilt concrete town centres with their ramps and walkways, the shopping malls.  These images are easily usable as visual clichés, but the fact that they can utilised as lazy short hand images or cheaply won metaphors is no barrier to their incorporation in forms other than the cliché: as poetry or as building blocks or sets of statements.  Their use by the mind and the eye of the UGFM to reach into reality with a primal urge to make an utterance: in this case an  utterance in filmic form that exploits the melding soft dyes of colour super 8 to express something that only film could express with this intensity of realisation. The manner in which the human form is both absorbed alienated entrapped and bewitched and set to abrupt cosmic scale in these modern built environments.   The UGFM;s film perhaps not in itself original in the choice of its component parts, but it is an intense self validating response to contemporary settings and situations.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes:A film made out of the ordinary everyday elements of the social matrix: a drunk, an old man in his ‘70’s, a second rate journalist. A film uses these elements to initiate a process that engages with the historical myth pertaining to what happened in Romania on 22nd Dec 1989.12:08 East of Bucharest – Cornelieu Poromboiu Romania 2006 – Mircea Andreiescu- Theodor Corban – Ion Supdaiu
Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle UK 13 Jan 2008. Ticket price £4-00

In Bucharest the snow quickly turns to black slush

A film made out of the ordinary everyday elements of the social matrix: a drunk, an old man in his ‘70’s, a second rate journalist.  A film uses these elements to initiate a process that engages with the historical myth pertaining to what happened in Romania on 22nd Dec 1989.

Poromboiu’s East of Bucharest (EB) provides us with a continuous strip of action, over the period of a day, comprising the preparations for and the enactment of a TV chat show.  The stream of action allows the actors no escape from envelopment in time: the day unfolds, shot mainly in wide, and the film in the first section cuts between different situations but without montage per se, without cuts within and between actions.  Poromboiu does not use editing techniques as his source of tension in EB,  i.e. juxtaposition of shots to create energised action image links between images.  EB is not a film of ‘image’.  Poromboiu as director works to devalue image as a source of filmic information in EB and to enhance the meaning of time.

Every aspect of the film from its desaturated low contrast colourisation its ‘found’ framing and shot composition work against the primacy of  the image in the production of EB.  What is central to EB as a formic process, is that it is a film taking place within and through time.  The endemic tensions within EB emanate from forces released and worked through by the film, both in picture and in sound, that are generated by the propositional question: was there  or was there not, a revolution here in our small Romanian town?  And it is, as this proposition is examined in the ‘real time’ filming of the chat show that the tension is expressed, released and compressed within the dialogue.  The tension comes from within the process, which is humorous but relentless in its discipline and leaves us with a final picture of Mr Manescu one of the two participants in the chat show with his head totally bowed down, bent at the end of the process in which he has valiantly participated.  But we also know that this Mr Manescu from the incidents of the day that have informed us about him.  Mr Manescu is no stranger to humiliation, it is one of the ways in which he copes with life. He will recover and continue as if nothing has happened.  So one way there is no humiliation as an event there is only the continuing process of Mr Manescu’s life. There is no image of humiliation rather an embraced ritual, a recurring process repeated endlessly.  There was no revolution. Simply a man with a bent head. This is not what the picture says. 

Looking across the current filmscape it is unusual in my experience to view a film that does not engage in the explicit exploitation of  visual images.  Most European films are in thrall to a specific visual culture reliant on the excitement of visual stimulae and on retinal pornography.   A culture whose touchstone is the advertising industry which comprises of the worlds: of enflamed desires of iconic brands and of associative psychic linkage to self image/identity.  An industry that is founded on the manipulation and twisting of  human needs (that it describes as freedom of choice for the consumer).  An industry that has developed slick marketing machine to deliver the products which feed the artificially created needs.  And at the centre of this business is the image.  

Many of us have passed formative years experiencing a  Pavlovian conditioning through our exposure to our visual commercial culture.  We have been conditioned 
like the great man’s dogs to slobber at the chops when presented with the right stimuli.  An image is worth a thousand words. A smiling woman with white teeth and blond hair holds up a pack of Kellogg’s cornflakes. We desire to possess what that image represents, But the logic it also works in a sort of reverse sense.  We  see an emotive image – perhaps of suffering, a child in the final stages of malnutrition – which triggers another set of emotive judgemental reactions related to our internalised self image.  The problem is that image when wrenched out of context and detached from processes becomes open to manipulations and desires.  Image in Western culture over determines reactive relaxes at the expense of understanding processes through time. 

Poromboiu has understood this as a problem.  His response is not to have one set of images replace another, but rather to make a film in which time is the principle agent forming the structure of the film.   Everything in the film points to time. It’s in the title. It’s set on the day of the anniversary of the ‘revolution’.  The question in relation to the revolution is defined strictly in terms of time, which of course a joke, and the film takes place through real time experience of the chat show.   

In EB Poromboiu seems to suggest that the Romanian revolution belongs in that category of events that may be called trance. The image is of the revolution that took place in the squares of Romania but the temporal stream opposes this image. The revolution took place in a trance. The violent events in Timisoura started a process that was broadcast by the media to the people  who were entranced by the images that were relayed to them.  They understood that with the sudden downfall of Ceausescu that a revolution had taken place.  But they were in trance and very little had actually happened outside of the image of the dictator and his wife being executed.  The image was of crowds gathering in squares and calling for the overthrow of the regime.  But it was mostly an image a comforting illusion based on the simple device of reversing cause and effect.   There was no revolution so of course when the crowds dispersed and went home little had changed.  Without Nicholas and Elena in fact the same people continued in power using similar but slightly modified methods.  The people, by and large absent from the revolution came out of the trance and continued with their lives much as before. 
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk