Adrin Neatrour

Adrin Neatrour writes:The riddle of the Sphinx – Reflections on the most expensive Egyptian film ever.The Yacoubian Building – Marwan Hamad  Egypt 2007 – Nour el Sherif; Adel Eman; Hend Sabri
Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle 6 Jan 08
Ticket price:£4-00

The riddle of the Sphinx – Reflections on the most expensive Egyptian film ever.

The opening  title sequence with its grainy soft focus macro shots of the stone cladding of the Yacoubian building followed by a sequence (probably pasted in directly from the novel)in which a warmly toned voice explains the history of the building, intimate a film form that might  comprise of some particular characteristics: a closely observing camera, a sensibility that understands ambiguity and a film that engenders time as a dimension.    The Yacoubian Building(YB) is a overlong grossly inflated soap opera better suited to afternoon TV.

TB looks like a typical example of what happens when one from of expression –a novel  is interpreted in another form of expression – in this case a film.  What happens is that the film makers unable to find expressive equivalent filmic modes for novelistic internal dialogue and musing subjectivities reduce the adapted book to a series of externalised operatic melodramas. 

Featuring a large apartment block as the axis around which a multiplicity of plots revolve is of course a classic film genre that exploits a certain culture of congestion as a vehicle for generating a universe characterised by parallel and interconnected stories.  The interstitial areas of lobby, elevator and landing are the key promiscuous locations.  Films in this genre include Grand Hotel and Airport : both of which are  characterised by a dull mechanical mediocrity.  YB doesn’t break the mould.

Marwan Hamad makes no attempt to endow his film with any real sense of place or  time.   The Yacoubian building is an extraordinary piece of adaptive social engineering with its different levels of habitation.  The core of the apartment building is inhabited and used by a solid affluent middle class.  Coexisting above them in sublet tiny store rooms is a shanty town of the disinherited, living in conditions of high compression.  The YB seems unable to explore any of the intensities or  circuitries of this arrangement: the curious spacial juxtaposition is represented simply as a film image, a curiosity of time and place: something for us as sort of privileged  tourists,  to gaze upon.  The active force moulding and shaping the spacial elements in YB is the convention of the American soap opera.  Rooms exist  not to absorb or extrude but to admit and discharge.  Doors incessantly open and close, their only function being  to accelerate the action cuts.  Cairo and the Yacoubian building are used as picture ‘fill’ operating at the same level as a pub in a soap opera such as the Rovers Return in Coronation Street.    There is little sense made of the building itself or its apartments or the city in which it is located.  Cairo as a metropolis is used either to staged romantic affect as in the film’s final shot of the newly married couple walking at dawn down the middle of the street: or it is used as a series of bland establishment shots.  It never has a role as part of the film.    Hamad fails to allow the Yacoubian building or Cairo to make any claim on our imaginations.   

As the Yacoubian Building lacks any spacial dimension there is also a lacking in the perception of the passage of time. The characters never observe, nor are they observed:  they simple simply exist in perpetual action time for the sake of the story lines in which they are embroiled.  The dimension of time which YB’s opening sequence suggests is a defining force in play, is disregarded at once, Hamad happy with a token opening gesture.  The rest of the film is played out in the temporal anarchy the characterises most of the Hollywood action image output, a form increasingly mimicked and copied.  Time is subservient to action cuts.  There is no time stream in the film. Rather there is a stream of action.  Time becomes meaningless and impossible to reconstruct or understand.  Simply put: one thing leads to another. That’s all there is.  Chains of events are compressed or etiolated( more rarely) according to the demand for action.  Action shot through the lens of highly agitated cameras: craning swooping panning tracking hand held and angled, but never still.  The camera movement is effected not for reasons underlying the meaning of the shot or of the film but to disarm the viewer of any awareness of  subjective time.  The camera movement in constantly engaging the eye with a stream of events, disengages the viewer from the stream of time.   YB then, is a series plots and subplots that claim our attention not for what they represent but simply as  a mechanical series of events and how they end. 

There are claims that YB is a courageous film because it tackles taboo subjects in Egypt and the Arab world- taboo subjects such a homosexuality and terrorism.  I can’t really accept this point of view.  The homosexual subject, the newspaper journalist is a trite stereotype, represented in the script as a crude amoral exploiter of simple peasant men.  He is shown as having little personal morality, living a life dedicated to his own pleasures.  In what is the lowest point in the movie (and there are a few low ones notably in the becoming terrorist story) there is clumsy imbecilic flashback sequence involving the character which blames his parents for his homosexuality!   In the penultimate sequence he is murdered with expert dispatch by one of his pick-ups.  The event evokes no sense of loss within the film’s own conventions.   In that the moral stance of the film in relation to the homosexual character simply panders to the most prejudiced bands of attitude and opinion both in the Moslem and the Christian world YB  is not a film that tackles homosexuality in the media.  Just the opposite.  The plot line which describes  ‘becoming a terrorist’, is likewise reliant on an automotive mechanicality for its concatenation of events leading to outcome.  Just as having ‘bad parents’ makes a man homosexual: so being socially deprived and discriminated against leads to a boy becoming a ‘jihadi’.  Like the homosexuality theory it’s crass and untrue neither necessary nor sufficient but certainly uninteresting.

The disturbing aspect of YB is its total adoption of Hollywood forms to try and explain the historical social situation of Egypt. That Hamad thinks he can make his film work in this fashion is either testimony to his ambition (he wants demonstrate he can make feature films in Hollywood or Europe) or to his deluded state of mind.  The potpourri of characters and events strung together without reference to place or time, not only fails to speak of Egypt or Egyptians; it is an act of cultural colonialism allowing American forms to define the state of affairs in this Arab country.  As such YB, as the most expensive Egyptian feature film ever made, is not a pointer to the future but  part of the present problem.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Adrin Neatrour writes: Paul Schrader’s film compromises its own intention and ambitions. Schrader’s intention as I read it was to conduct an expressive exploration of the form taken by American power during the Bush administration. This intention would be actualised not through a script that directly probed the central machinations of power, but through an examination of the peripheral zones – the hangers on, the petty criminals the courtiers, courtesans and lackies – such as Carter Page. Instead of allowing Page’s hollowness to pursue its own dance its own logic to find his own lines of flight, Schrader’s script follows a sentimental humanising line of development to suggest the possibility of redemption for his protagonist.

The Walker Paul Schrader – USA /UK
2007 Woody Harrelson, Lauren Bacall Lily Tomlin, Kristin Thomas

Viewed: 6 Aug 07 Empire Cinema
Newcastle upon Tyne: Gala screening free ticket

Empty Centre

Woody Harrelson as Carter Page, is the
eponymous walker, the name given to a male consort who accompanies
high placed ‘society’ ladies to events or situations which their
husbands (if they have one) don’t want to attend. Page walks his
ladies round and round the social whirl. Schrader’s camera
(continually moving – tracking panning) registers an incessant
agitation but that does find a point of stillness in the scene in
Page’s bedroom, a sort of Egyptian tomb like space where he stores
and displays the tools of his trade: his clothes jewellery and male
sartorial appurtenances. This scene takes place early in the film.
It not only reinforces the perception of Washington as a necropolis,
but when Page divests himself of his wig, his manly mane is replaced
by stark baldness, a nakedness that points directly to the charade he
conducts. A hollowed out man in a dead hollowed out city. A man
without a centre in a town without a centre.

I think Paul Schrader’s film
compromises its own intention and ambitions.

Schrader’s intention as I read it was
to conduct an expressive exploration of the form taken by American
power during the Bush administration. This intention would be
actualised not through a script that directly probed the central
machinations of power, but through an examination of the peripheral
zones – the hangers on, the petty criminals the courtiers,
courtesans and lackies – such as Carter Page. Instead of allowing
Page’s hollowness to pursue its own dance its own logic to find his
own lines of flight, Schrader’s script follows a sentimental
humanising line of development to suggest the possibility of
redemption for his protagonist. This chosen line of development
involves a homosexual relationship which becomes increasingly
meaningful and central to the plotting in as much as it offers a
solution to Page’s problem of personal vacuity. A relationship in
which he can ‘find’ himself and confront his Oedipal demons. Of
course this is bullshit – redemption of a kind may have worked in
Taxi driver, but in The Walker it is unconvincing on its own dramatic
terms. At the point that Schrader picks him up, Carter Page is too
deeply excavated by the cancer of vanity empty desire and outward
presentation for the pat mechanism of a relationship to offer any
hope of a new start. Page is a citizen of a bloodless corrupted and
debilitated culture. To permit Page the easy relational route
through the script compromises the vision and undermines the force of
the film’s logic with no dramatic or filmic gain.

Basing the film on the periphery of
power was premised on the perception that from the point of view of
power the US at this moment is an empty centre. The empty centre of
the world. Power has abandoned Washington DC, leaving the town with
all the outward signs and indicators of power such as its
architecture the self importance of the minor players(courtiers) and
an enforcement system. But there is no substance. It is a city of
tombs memories and monuments where the living are long gone. It is a
city of the dead that is true to a Kafkaesque image of a power that
recedes eternally and becomes ever more remote except when suddenly
its close up and personal. Like the big corporation that suddenly
threatens you with a bill or the consequences of their pollution.
Remote and close. Washington has become like Japan under the
Shoganate where real power belonged to a war lord who concealed
himself behind a series of puppet institutions. Real power lay
concealed away from the vacuum of the empty centre.

The Walker works as an assemblage of
expressive settings and players Strips of action taken from the
social cultural business and criminal events that comprise life in
Washington DC. The mood of the film is caught in the opening shot:
a wallpaper shot. An endless circular pan across the wallpaper and
fittings of the card room in a grand classically apportioned house.
As the camera revolves we hear the chatter of the card players who
are eventually revealed as Carter and his ladies. The circular
nature of the shot evokes the idea of an eternal recurrence with the
wallpaper exerting a mesmerising effect (more interesting than the
dialogue which is held back) with its richly pattered geometric
surface suggesting entrapment and introducing the idea of prison or
tomb. Motifs that work its way through the Walker: entrapment; life
of the tomb, Rome in precipitous decline, the Egyptian worship of
the dead. Moods reinforced by Harrelson’s speech, remarkable not
for what he says, “I’m not a very interesting person, ” but
more for manner of his enunciation, the monotonal bass quality of his
deep Southern accent. Enunciation of death.

The shot also called up for me memory
of the opening shot of Resnais’ Last year in Marienbad. Except
Resnais’ shot tracks relentlessly forwards in its repetitions,
whereas Schraders shot rotates. And the two shots perhaps share
something of the same intention to establish a mood and lay out the
parameters of the films loci of concern. Among Resnais’ concerns
are the problem of memory with its invocation of differential
perception the perception of time in the otherness of the other.
Resnais has both his own discipline, and that of his scenarist Robbe
Grillet to ensure that he never allows plot line to sabotage the form
and content of his film. Clarity of intention and commitment to his
thesis of the nature of time and film never waver. Schrader allows
his film to be muddied by meaningless clutter of oedipal character
concerns and a weak plot line which weaken and attenuate the real
forces that the film initially sets in motion.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes:
Ten Canoes is an idyll – beautifully shot respectful treatment of the Australian aboriginal world. But ultimately it made me think of Walt Disney’s ‘Bambi’. Ten Canoes is set in a primeval forest world where man and nature are so closely intertwined that the natural and social systems vibrate sympathetically in close harmony. But it doesn’t have a ‘Bambi’ movement.
Ten Canoes – de Heer. Djiggir – 2006 Australia – Crusoe Kurddal; Jamie Gulpilil
Star and Shadow – 8-07-07 Ticket price £4-00

No ‘Bambi’ moment here…

Ten Canoes is an idyll – beautifully shot  respectful treatment of the Australian aboriginal world.   But ultimately it made me think of Walt Disney’s ‘Bambi’.  Ten Canoes is set in a primeval forest world where man and nature are so closely intertwined that the natural and social systems vibrate sympathetically in close harmony.   But it doesn’t have a ‘Bambi’ movement.

Where ten canoes ceases to resemble ‘Bambi‘ is that it lacks in the whole of its course a real moment that connects this virtual idyll to the actual encompassing world that threatens it with a specific set of other desires.  ‘Bambi’ which is also set in an idyll – a drawn animated world comprising a natural forest setting – has as its central feature groups of heavily anthropomorphised animals and insects whose function is to legitimise the Disney values of  family and America.  The great set piece in ‘Bambi’ is the sequence portraying the destruction of the environment by a natural force – fire – which destroys both habitat and individual animals who fail to escape in time.  But before this disaster ‘Bambi’ has one other real moment: a moment that sabotages the idyll;  a moment that briefly but completely undermines the whole Disney sugared world of American family values.

Hearing a sequence of loud short retorts (gunshots) Bambi’s mother calls him to her in alarm.  Nestling close together mother and son watch as in the distance a figure carrying a gun emerges out of the trees into a clearing. This distant image is all we see of the hunter. Bambi asks his mom, what creatures are these? And Mom answers ‘Man’.  Man enters the forest by right to hunt and kill without discrimination.  Man is the terrible reality invading and subjecting the forest to his will. Mom will eventually fall before the hunter’s gun but it is in that short moment  when the man appears – the white man –  from out of the trees that the Disney film rents the veil of illusion that covers the myth of  the expressed primal forest kingdom.  The idyll is revealed as a sham state: a escapist fantasy nurtured by idealists,  animation artists, dreamers and children.   After the ‘Bambi’ moment (even given the ‘off screen’ death of  mom shot by the men) the film returns straight back into the recreation of the self contained vacuum packed ideal forest world.

We know whatever the cartoon creators may represent to us that today the forests are not the kingdoms of old.  The contemporary forest is a satrap state, a political dependency that endures only at the willing connivance of man.  Its survival rests on the changing needs and desires of the state.  Because ‘Bambi’ allows itself a real creative moment where an actual state of affairs is revealed, we know that the last shot of Bambi as he takes his father’s place as a majestically pointed stag represents a perilous condition.  Man will want his horns and pursue hunt and run him down in order to kill him and acquire the antlers as their trophy by right. 

To a degree, ‘Bambi’ is informed by its own content that it is propagating a childish illusion.  There is no such ‘moment’ in Ten Canoes. Ten Canoes is a distillation that encases the viewer within a perfectly sealed hermetic image of the aboriginal world.  There is no referent in the movie to the encompassing political world that presses in on the originary domain. Today when we are sensitised to and aware of  the atrocities predations and betrayals that have been perpetrated on the aboriginal peoples of Australia in an attempt by the whites to deny and destroy them, this lack of external referents turned Ten Canoes into vacuous experience, something irrelevant to both aboriginals and the white world.  The unwillingness of Ten canoes to allude to the forces controlling the Australian forest and desert, make the film read like a children’s illustrated book,  a Disney cartoon –  a film about a remote far off people not the actual aboriginal men and women who have to come to terms within the compass of contemporary Australia.       

The directors of Ten Canoes, de Heer and Djiggir might contest that so deeply have the aboriginal people and their culture been derided and unvalued, regarded as something grotesquely primitive and worthless,  that their film had as its overriding  purpose the affirmation of these people, their society and their culture.  To restate the worth and dignity of the autochthonous culture in order to restore respect and balance after 150 years of genocide attrition and cultural defamation.  And it’s true that in its representation of the physicality of the people and their beliefs, in the acting, in its cinematography and in its story telling form, Ten Canoes treats the indigenous people with respect and observes their lives as interactions with both endogamous social forces and the natural environment. Ten Canoes expresses the sentiment that these are people who live their lives in tune with each other and the environment.  They have the wisdom to know that in this land this is the only way.   In the act of filming de Heer and Djiggir  using mainly wide and medium shots with long steadicam tracks and takes find a style that is in sympathy with the way they want to represent their subjects.  The music in the film the didgeridoo rattles and percussion is an exquisite extension of the natural sounds everywhere about, in the trees and swamps.  The structure of Ten Canoes that shifts in time between the story teller and the story he is telling, creates a simulacrum of aboriginal life as locked into a primordial reality where everything happens in one big reoccurring time. de Heer and Djiggir do justice in simulating this world as a place to be valued but at a cost.  The cost is that the production starts to look false; to resemble a cartoon film whose concern is with appearances, and  to reduce judgement to values that can be ascribed to outer forms,  rather than actual inner situations and states of affairs. 

One of Disney’s big hits of the ‘50s was a film called The Living Dessert.  In the Living Desert the lives of desert creatures were subjected to anthropomorphic interpretation so that their behaviour was simply reduced to the level of the cartoon  creatures.   The film was heavily loaded by the presence of an avuncular voice over.  A voice – never seen and existing on a different track and plane within the movie – which purported to understand and explain everything we saw.  Real elements in the natural history of the  animals were by and large omitted in favour of a sort of make believe recreation of their lives as creatures of Disney’s polico-semantic environment complete with humanised motivation ( “…here’s a cute little fellah {speaking of a racoon) what’s on his mind….?) The Living Desert showed that in the animal kingdom contrived shot and edited footage can be easily manipulated into signifiers of Disney values.  Although  the values are different  the same falsifying process seems to be at work in Ten Canoes.  Using a heavy interpretative voice over technique, throughout the film the aboriginal culture is reduced to an exemplifier of certain moral values.  The story teller appropriates all of the interpretative space in the film and speaks for everyone  It is done perhaps with good intentions but its effect is to substitute judgements for other expressive possibilities. .

Ten Canoes presents an autochthonous originary situation that is a hermetically sealed world in which the indigenous people are part of a primal kingdom.  This Aboriginal world,  some of whose inhabitants are played by actors, is represented as a model idealised world in which everything is more or less perfect.  The men are strong hunters, in the young there is respect for the elders and the traditions, the spiritual element of life is recognised and given due weight, the women are wives and behave as women should behave they do not transgress into the world of men, and ( as in the jungle book) the tribe behave and respect the law.  Everyone is satisfied with their place in the order of the cosmos. The film as an interpretive narrative is didactic, pointing up the necessary relationship between the world as a paradise and the social wisdom necessary to sustain it.  Unfortunately this model is a lie.  The behaviour of the people and the world sustained by this behaviour in Ten Canoes is a contrivance.  It is a mythologised state that owes everything to Walt Disney and the world of children’s illustrated bibles and nothing to life itself.  In an important sense Ten Canoes is  contrived and well intentioned lie that peddles a bowdlerised world without conflict, where wives all behave like women are supposed to, where the young do as their elders say and where there is no conflict.  It is of course a world without the encompassing discomfort of white civilisation.  It is the world of the lie just as Disney is the world of the lie.

Ten Canoes says little about the experienced conditions of life of the Aborigines.  It is happy to peddle a cleaned up sort of politically environmentally acceptable aboriginal face for white inspection.  As such it leaves us out of touch with the Aboriginal condition today, it leaves us out of touch with a people having to come to terms with their own experiences of degradation devaluation and near extermination. 
Perhaps these films makers and their collaborators have a bolder more difficult film within them but this is a film that is static and goes nowhere.  There is a line in the film when one of the men jokes about a stranger who has been found in their territory. This stranger covers his loins with a clothe. Why does he do this the men ask? Perhaps he has a small cock: “ – never trust a man with a small cock…” jokes one of the men.  This is a film that goes off half cock.
adrin neatrour   
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: Jack Gold’s Medusa Touch has a simple enough plot structure. The protagonist John Morlar is a man who believes that he is able to induce catastrophe by actively imagining the event. Like some modern theme parks, certain movies feel like psychic rehearsals for disasters and calamities yet to come. 
The Medusa Touch – Jack Gold  (UK 1978)  Richard Burton – Lee Remick  
Viewed – Star and Shadow Newcastle – ticket price £4-00

Crystal balling
Jack Gold’s Medusa Touch has a simple enough plot structure.  The protagonist John Morlar is a man who  believes that he is able to induce catastrophe by actively imagining the event.  His murder kicks off a police hunt thriller, headed curiously but entertainingly by a Parisian tec on loan from the Deuxieme Bureau. The action is relayed via flashbacks to a series of psychiatric sessions in which Morlar is being treated for his ‘delusions’ by the coolly costumed Lee Remick. 
 
Like some modern theme parks, certain movies feel like psychic rehearsals for disasters and calamities yet to come.  The Medusa Touch  disguised as a run of the mill thriller anticipates the development of forces already evident in the societal matrix predicting the evolution of their logical spiralling expanding trajectories.  In its connecting of individual alienation from and anger with the prevailing social body Jack Gold  draws forth a thread of understanding that in a sense prepares us for a present lived in atmospheres of fear and insecurity brought about by such ties.  The fictive material of the Medusa Touch  featuring  sabotage of commercial flights and nuclear power stations, and the collapse of  public buildings, prepares the way for its audience to develop  those psychic states necessary for life in the 21st century.    When the technical bases of our civilisation and culture are turned against us and used as the basis to harm and even destroy us a whole new range of predispositions emotions and attitudes are evoked in society.  The Medusa Touch reads as a film that is pre-sensitised to this necessity. 

What is interesting is that the underlying motivation of the main character John Morlar is moral.  Richard Burton morphs from his role as the angry Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (1958) into the role of John Morlar a middle aged man literally possessed by anger.  Although both performances may be unidimensional, it’s a broad banded dimension and Burton who nursed a clenched fist of fierce anger in his belly makes of his portrayal of anger a real felt thing.  Burton knows rage and how to locate it in his performance. Morlar’s anger is triggered sustained and vented as a coherent statement that indicts what he perceives as a corrupted culture.  Morlar’s response which is intentional but at the same time uncontrollable, is to punish us for our arrogance and smugness: to make us suffer for our overbearing pride and to destroy us should we not see the intolerable nature of our lives.   Wrapped as an individual aberration with the trappings of a paranormal explanation (the telekinetic talents of Ted Serios and Mme Kulagina feature prominently) the Medusa Touch describes a moral revolt against a sick culture.  It portrays an individual and enraged terrorism that has no political agenda, and unlike the hokum of Batman and his ilk or inflated gangster/redemption movies such as the Die Hard series, there is no issue of personal gain.  The issues for John Morlar  are simply a distilled righteous moral rage.  A moral rage of such amplified intensity that he is forced into acts of large scale and widespread destruction without compunction or concern or compassion for any victims. The Mantra:  all are responsible all are guilty all will suffer.

The Medusa Touch of course takes up borrows and develops from contemporary developing responses by individuals to what they saw as the West’s arrogance and deeply inlaid corruption.  The ‘70’s see the rebirth of individual terrorism that legitimises extreme actions in the name of morality.  Bader-Meinhof, the Red Army and  the Angry Brigade all had broad political beliefs and agendas, but the perception of their actions was that they claimed legitimacy and immunity from judgement by appeal to the corruption of society and their own moral purity.  The Medusa Touch understands the tendency of moral issues to push disempowered individuals into extreme purist positions.  It certainly anticipates individual careers taken by many who have espoused the beliefs of the Animal liberation movement and the extreme fundamentalist Christian and Islamist groups such as Al Quaida.  Such groups  premise their existence on the destruction of society or societal traits seen as unclean and pursue a kingdom of the saints, a holy city on earth.  Individuals are not contained within a tight political structure (viz Bolshevism or Nazism) but psychically sustained by an expressive belief system. Adherents are supported and encouraged to pursue the ‘movements’ aims and objectives using whatever means they possess and as they see fit.  To the pure all things are pure.  The cost in life and suffering is irrelevant to  John Morlar: it is the moral lesson that is central.

Although filmically the Medusa Touch is conventionally shot and paced the film does create some powerful tense atmospherics.  This ability to create strong theatrical tensions within film seems to be a constant feature of British film making from Powell and Lean through to productions such as the Medusa Touch.  The crafted merging of cinematography direction editing and acting seem to imply a deeply engrained response in British studios and traditions that was and independent of individual directors and producers and consistent over a considerable period of time.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: It looks like an angel to me…. The Lives of Others   F.H.von Donnersmarck   Germany 2006 127 mins: Martina Gedeck; Ulrich Muhe; Sebastian Kock
Viewed: Star and Shadow Newcastle, 16 May 2007; Ticket price – £4-00

Looks like an angel to me

I don’t like movies with angels.  Unless they’re in leathers and ride motorbikes angels seem to permit directors to indulge the most banal types of wish fulfilment.  The Lives of Others(LO) is simply a dressed up retro guardian angel movie which allows director Donnersmarck to indulge a gentle fantasy that owes little to Honnecker’s East Germany and almost everything to Hollywood.

Set in 1983 LO is a long sentimentalised journey that uses the DDR ( East Germany) as a sort of comfortable backdrop against which to deliver a long shaggy dog tale.  The East Germany Donnersmarck depicts in the film doesn’t exist as a place defined by a geography of tortured incongruities and contradictions.  There is nothing in the camera work or the structure of the film that denotes the state as an enforcement system.  Donnersmarck simply shoots his material as he might do a glossy American soap opera, as if the camera had nothing more that it could possibly add to the matter.  The result is that visually the DDR is abstracted unreal sort of place.  Like Dallas.  There is no message from the past or for the future for us in this show. The  vacuous cinematography is matched by the talking heads editing that characterises the film. Donnersmrck’s principle ( his background looks as if it is in advertising and TV drama) seems to be to keep the picture moving by hard cutting in all of the scenes.  The principle is that if you cut fast enough people won’t get bored with the picture (as it’s never in front of their eyes for more than 10 seconds) and secondly they will be distracted from the banality of the dialogue by editing which concentrates attention on emotive reading generated by the action cuts.  In LO Donnersmarck never allows the viewer to watch the interaction in “ two shots” : if he has two ro three people in dialogue, he immediatelycuts in to shot – reaction – shot , so forcing the viewer to take his shots through the sequences.

I think that the reason for the dead cinematography and the manic forced cutting is  that Donnersmarck has nothing to say.   Donnersmarck thinks he is telling a story.  In fact what is doing is force feeding us a plot line.  Story deepens and enhances character; plot diminishes and cheapens the players.  Story has organic ties to the material with which it engages in a complex circuitry.  Plot is simply a mechanical driver whose object is deliver the players from starting point to preordained finishing point.  In some ways it’s an ends and means distinction.  Plot is anally fixated on its ending. So, the means plot utilises: character, setting, dynamics and tensions all completely subserve the delivery of the final sequence.  LO is all plot and no substance.  Donnersmarck thinks that he is telling us a story with a moral: that good men and goodness will survive evil systems.  But in terms of the  plot driven nature of LO the film is  just machine whose function is to manipulate an outcome.  And the idea of the moral which rests upon the notion of choices cannot sit within a mechanical form.  The moral choice in this situation doesn’t exist; what happens in plot driven forms is the characters instead of  acting out scripts in which they have to make choices, get scripts that ask them to adopt particular roles.  And the roles of course conform to cliché. So we have: the whore addict, the Madonna, the Innocent the Warrior and the Angel.  

LO is an Angel story – specifically a guardian angel story.  It is a film with no sense of place, with no atmospheric presence.  It is simply an angelic variation on a love story with a vague slightly menacing corporate setting that is as much American paranoiac as East German Stasi.   Wiesler a senior Stasi agent organises the total surveillance of the regime pet intellectual, Dreyman.  But his fascination for Dreyman and his girlfriend leads him to take on the role of their protector rather than their persecutor.  Donnersmarck’s plot wants to guide us into thinking of Wiesler as a good man because he carries out his actions altruistically without thought of reward for himself expecting no recognition and willingly taking on risk.  But the plot doesn’t allow the audience any sense of Wiesler’s choices or his sense of  moral dilemma.  From his surveillance station above Dreyman’s flat which he shares with his girl Christa, watching the couple eat talk screw sleep work he adopts the role of  their guardian angel.  There is no message here just an advertising strap line – someone is watching over us.  This benignly bent surveillance becomes the device on which LO hangs the mechanism of the plot, which has little tension, and few twists of the screw that cause the characters any real issues of moral choice.  Christa for instance who as well as being Dreyman’s girl, is also fucking a party big shot, finally betrays him.  But betraying Dreyman  is not her moral choice proper.  It is a decision that is determined by her role: she is a drug addict.  When the state (because she throws over the big shot) threatens to choke her dope, she sings, so that the plot can then grind on to its fake twee moral ending.  But of course Christa’s “betrayal” is a cop out.  Never trust a junkie,  because what’s a junkie going to do to get her fix – anything.       

In LO,  Donnersmarck attempts to raise issues about the DDR, such a suicide, the  widespread networks of informants and intensive surveillance of intellectuals.  But these issues can’t really sit in a movie characterised by actors playing roles.  In the same way as some Hollywood movies adopt or try to promote issues, the feeling is that like baubles on a Christmas tree the issues are there to attract attention to the film rather than to generate more real responses.

It might be that cultures require a generation at least before they are able to look back attentively at the past.  But at this point Germany is looking to Hollywood rather than to its own traditions for understanding what it has experienced.
adrin neatrour   
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: Were an uninitiated observer – say a dude from planet Mars – watch a round of championship golf being played by two men on TV, would that observer understand that what he was watching was in fact a sporting contest? Golf on TV – what you see what you don’t

Were an uninitiated observer – say from the planet Mars –to watch a round of golf being played by two men at the Masters, would that observer understand that what he was watching was in fact a sporting contest?  To judge by the intoned whispered BBC commentary you might think that what was taking place was some kind of religious ceremony.

After watching some play at the Masters 07 on TV I thought a little about what I had observed.  Looking at the golf on TV with a naïve eye what seems to be happening is that small groups of men are walking round a large park.  Sometimes large crowds are watching them. The men are not in any particular hurry. They stroll over the ground never breaking out of a certain relaxed stride.  They are all smartly dressed in the sort of casual clothes you buy at a shopping mall.  Some of the men carry large bags full of clubs; the men who use the clubs walk unencumbered. They stop from time to time and take a golf club out of its bag and strike a small white ball lying on the ground.  They keep hitting their ball until they eventually get it into a little hole that has been drilled into a very smooth sward of grass.   At this point they collect the ball and begin the process all over again. 

Looked at from a certain point of view golf seems not so much a sport as rather a particular sort of statement endorsing a particular sort of life style: the suburban life style.  It comes across as a ritualised expression of suburban etiquette, a carefully played out enactment of how suburban people should interact with each other.
Sport(in the modern sense of the word) is something else.

Sport is an activity in which individuals engage in rule bound opposition and competition. What is striking about golf is that these characteristics are minimalised.  The players are not in head to head contest as in running or swimming events: the players do not square up to each other like gladiators such as wrestlers or tennis players or the team games such a football and cricket: the players do not contest for mastery of a bounded terrain – in the sense that they can manipulate the play area aggressively to the disadvantage of their opponent – as witness sports such as snooker or croquet.  Golf might be thought to resemble sports such as discuss or gymnastics where opponents neither contest shoulder to shoulder nor face to face.  But these sort of sports are characterised by taking place in a closely contained area, a pit, where all the contestants are bound together within a circle of competitive intensity.  These sports also a in general characterised by explosive action of short duration.  Golf shares few of these qualities.

In golf the action, the execution of a shot may be explosive (or not as the case may be – putting is a gentle touch stroke).  But the game is a series of events taking place over the duration of about three hours during which the men walk through 18 holes laid out in a park, which is a diligently maintained space that represents the triumph of land management – landscape – over nature.  The characteristic feature of the sport is that the contestants spend most of their time within the bounds of the game simply strolling engaging each other in occasional pleasantries and always behaving towards each other with the utmost decorum,

On the surface there are few signs that this is a contest – even at the top level of the professional game. The men walk from hole to hole: each plays his own game and tries to get his own ball home.  There is little sense of urgency or of competition. You might if you did not know better suppose that what you were watching was some sort of charming male ritual, perhaps connected with fertility or even the church…..

At this point we have to take account of the suburban housing estate.  In England and the US it is probably no accident that golf courses and the game itself developed and increased in popularity with the spread of suburbia.   In the typical well to do suburban estate the houses are ideally all detached, set back from the street and fronted by tidy manicured gardens whose characteristic feature is either a smooth sward of lawn or gravel, bordered with flower or herbaceous beds.  Where the houses face each other there is a broad road between them, or where, as in modern developments broad roads are too much a luxury even for the upper middle income brackets, the houses are set at angle to each other so that none directly overlooks another.  To the untrained uninitiated eye the houses all look somewhat similar.  The cars parked in the drives mostly look new and gleaming and if you catch the dwellers on their non work days they wear smart casual clothes purchased at the a local shopping mall.  You might think that was it. Groups of similar looking structures occupied by groups of similar looking people who are minding their owe business.   The estate design minimises sound spill between the units and sight lines between the houses do not facilitate easy visual monitoring between the units.  This isn’t a community in the traditional sense but community in its modern incarnation: a group of people brought together because they all share a defining trait in common: in this case the people are brought into community by their shared ability to buy into a neighbourhood that has a high price tag.  A community that has as a consequence of its elective nature, an innate sense of social status.

But these status conscious inhabitants are generally highly intra competitive.  Underneath the surface of the monochrome estate there are often intense rivalries  taking place between individual units for  claims to public acknowledgment of status within the community.  Competition in suburban communities tends to be understated – barely admitted to.  Victory does not go to those who flaunt conspicuous consumption or their wealth.  Victory goes to the understated display related to life style.  Ostentation and vulgar symbols of wealth earn fewer status points than having the right expensive but conservative car, holiday in the right places, send children to the right schools, belong to the right clubs.  Nothing announcers these signifiers as competition, but covertly (occasionally overtly) there is a competing ethos once you live there and understand what is going on.    

Seen in the context of the suburban life style I begin to understand golf as a sporting contest, understated in form but real in substance.  Golf is an extension of the suburban estate ethos, a  life style that has adopted golf as its preferred form of sporting expression.  From the outside of the estate you really see very little, what is happening is a closed off utterance.  You see a group of unexceptional large brick houses, you see two guys watering the lawn. On the golf course the competition is not face to face, there is no overt agonistic display. no triumphant rictus or fist, no verbal aggression.  It is closed utterance.  But competitive it is, as two men walk a golf course in each others affective company, interacting politely and each taking it turn to play their ball. Just as competition exists on the suburban estate across all sorts muted indicators that are  familiar and accessible to the urban anthropologist rather than to the sport’s fan. 

What we have on the estate is a situation in which competition is incorporated into the life style itself, unstated but always present to the extent that it is a constant frame of reference for the inhabitants who have deeply internalised the rules of their status competition. By extension there is a similar ethos in golf as the preferred form of recreation of suburbia. It embodies a form of competition that is not directly visible, being a product of a lifestyle that in itself is intensely competitive whilst at the same time taking pains to deny that there is any competition (We’re all very friendly here!)  In golf with its handicap system everyone should end up with more or less the same score; the real competition is mediated through a series of social and individuals testings which coalesce into pressure situations in which the individual has to demonstrate to his opponent that he can pass muster.  Golf is not so much won or lost as a match but as a test of character, a test of showing that you are a person of sufficient self control to be a worthy game playing inhabitant of suburbia.  It’s a pressure thing about control under pressure.

Even at the pro level golf is not a game played with a raw visceral self.  Its played with a mask.  Sports often reveal an undisguised and naked aspect or face of the individual.   Defeat and victory release strong emotive forces that tear the social mask away from the individual.  In golf the test seems to be whether one can keep the mask on all the time.  To walk from tee to tee from ball to ball from green to green as if nothing very much was happening.  To stroll across the park exchanging pleasantries and coded barbed comments without reacting to being in the game.  Golf mimics the rituals of the estates from which it recruits.  At the barb-b-q or Christmas party the overriding concern in interaction is with face.  To grin smile and nod and laugh at the right cues and to be prepared to defend one’s status with appropriate gesture or form of words should it be subtly threatened undermining of one’s status.  Golf like suburban life is played with a false self.  A self that is construct of status and the primacy of self image.  A round of golf like the company dinner party is ultimately a test of the robust nature of this false self, and the true object of the game as it has developed in its suburban ritual, even at the highest professional level, is to maintain this false self at a high level of operative efficiency.

This analysis shows golf to be a highly unusual sport in particular at the professional level where code of conduct is highly enforced (other sports of course have this – snooker for instance, but snooker players operate in a pit where the competition is direct and aggressively intended towards the opponent and where interaction with the opponent is not a necessary feature of the competition). The professional golfer are all very nice people who would be welcome as residents in any up market suburban housing enclave.  For the professionals the self of emotions fears and desires is reined in and kept under control. They play with the mask an idealised self constructed out of suburban norms and value systems and this self regimented in the etiquette of middle class niceties is what we see in professional competition on the golf course.
It is no surprise then to understand that the golf course is also a special type of recruiting environment, able to inform the examiners if the applicant is one of us – able to sustain appearances under pressure able to perform with a false constructed self.

At this point I haven’t mentioned that the TV coverage of the Masters, and indeed all golf coverage fully accords with the mores of the game.  The live from the course commentary delivered hushed tones in the reassuring rounded tones of middle England.  The voices are respectful of everyone: the players, the organisation, the spectators and comply fully with the etiquette of  the formal  dinner party.  The coverage and commentary are in relation to current TV and media norms in a sort of time warp, adopting a style and tone of reverence that are of an era when the media knew its place – as servants.  It is interesting that the anchor studio role of Gary Lineker was criticised in many quarters – in particular it is said by the Masters organisers who didn’t like his style.  Lineker’s attitude was in fact entirely traditional. His problem both in accent and tone was that he looks and sounds like that phenomenon known to all exclusive estates, an arrives who didn’t make the appropriate expressive moves and gestures to cover up his provenance.  His crime was the old fashioned social faux pas of not having the decency to cover up or at least make his origins (working class footballer) acceptable unobtrusive. 

As a final note on a point already alluded to, the golf course is a certain type of park.  It is a high maintenance environment (one that is increasingly perceived in arid regions as destructive of environment on account of its demand for copious quantities of water) that is certainly a reflection of the idealised suburban world which supports it.  It reflects a suburban view of nature: it has all the constituent parts of the natural world: shrubs, trees, plants, flowers and grasses(of which few people know the names).  But this swath of nature is benignly ordered trimmed strimmed and managed. It is a non threatening environment and is part of the order of things that exist for the enjoyment of life style. 
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

adrin neatrour writes: There are four characters in Ahluwalia’s movie. When we are introduced to them for the first time they are all lying down in sleep induced by exhaustion. As the movie progresses we can understand their sleep as an unconscious state in which as they lie prostrate, the succubus of desires slithers across their beds and penetrates their bodily orifices taking possession of their desires. Here are lie the deterritorialised servants of the great corporations.John and Jane – Ashim Ahluwalia – 2005 – India – Doc
Viewed Star and Shadow Newcastle – 23 May 07 – ticket price £4-00

Ahluwalia’s opening sequence is a series of freeform shots of Times Sq  NewYork. The camera pans and soars through the blazing lights of the consumerist iconographies that represent an architecture of possession. The basis of the structure that shapes John and Jane is the interplay between the people and the architectural forms that condition their interactions. 

Ahluwaria’s film is characterised by regular cuts to the exterior of the call centre which is a large contemporary glass clad building evincing the manifest quality of wealth generation.   At night the building glows like a seductive beacon.  Its triangulate form, its solidity of function its representational evocation contrast with the tired workers within it, with the fragile human lives whose belief systems occupy its psychic skin.   The interiors of this edifice comprises two architectural systems: real and virtual.  The real space is functional organised for corporate wealth generation and the direction of mind to this purpose:  the virtual architecture of computer defines role.   Inside the skin of the building there is a land of certainties vigour and action that has a timeless aspect. In contrast outside life is characterised by sleepness.  One of the workers is enraptured by America and as Ahluwahlia records his paean to the USA’s modernity we are shown an image of modern India,  an extraordinary track along a row of some twenty vast apartment blocks that appear to have been plucked from a belt development project of a large US city.  The character only sees the dreams he is not alive to what is happening here now in front of him.  

There are four characters in Ahluwalia’s movie.  When we are introduced to them for the first time they are all lying down in sleep induced by exhaustion.  As the movie progresses we can understand their sleep as an unconscious state in which as they lie prostrate, the succubus of desires slithers across their beds and penetrates their bodily orifices taking possession of their desires.  Here are lie the deterritorialised servants of the great corporations.

Indian weirdness – a documentary – but with the disturbing feel of a drama.  As I watched the four stories of the call centre workers unfold, something in its form kept me thinking that this was a scripted drama.  I found myself looking at the performances of the participants and wondering where they had found such consummate actors.  The acting in the documentary was superb: understated using physical nuance rather than hyperstated faciality and gesturation that is the norm in the west.  What I saw in the performances was the fact that the four participants were  in a critical sense full time actors and actresses.  These workers aren’t just employed to do a job, they are employed to adopt become and be remodelled Selves.  They are trained and coached to be what they are not.  The outer skin of their Indian-ness has fallen away and they have been taught how to become products of the dream, the dream of wealth and riches foretold that is the unwritten but promised nexus of the work contracts they have all signed.   In order to work for the US company that runs the call centre the workers are required to slough off the skin of their Indian culture and put on a new American identity to serve the ideology of the corporation and to enable the workers easy relaxed interface with John and Jane – the emblematic average Americans who are the customers served by the call centre.

It starts with your name.  The call centre workers discard their own names and their identities are fused with a new American name which the workers chose for themselves – Sanjit decides to be Dave, the woman chooses to be Rachel.  The new nomenclature accompanies an intensive course of Americanisation central to which is the identification of the American way, including Christianity as being a superior form of life. This process of indoctrination follows tried and tested methods (bonding to the company ideals by gradated reward systems, inculcation of the company’s banal mantras of success{“It’s not over till I win”}, the depoliticisation and destabilisation of individuals through concentration on a personal achievement and  success ethos with failure being the fault of individual attitude) that are documented both in descriptive and satirical literature (such as Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House).  The point of the process is so that the Indians workers in Mumbai can take up their stations in the call centre and sell products to the Americans on the other end of the line. The reason that they are always sleeping is that they do long 10 or 12 hour shifts and work to the American time zones.  

At one level this is neo-colonialism at its most invasive where the workers of Mumbai vie with each other to take on the identities of their oppressors and to distance themselves from their own society and culture and compete to adapt the ways and manners of a foreign and invasive economic force.  At another level this is a mutual embrace in as much as there are other processes at work and there are other questions  raised in John and Jane.  Is the call centre Corporation able to exploit an aspirational void at the heart of Indian culture?  The film does not actualise this issue, but Indian society is still dominated by caste, and there is no easy escape out of status assigned at and by birth.  And these call centre workers do not appear to be high caste Brahmins. They live out their hard working lives in high density work and urban environments.  They are educated but the caste system constrains their hopes and chances of social mobility and economic betterment in a society where new images of affluence and consumption increasingly penetrate the traditional psychic barriers.   Lower caste Hindus, the untouchables try to effect escape from the system by converting to Buddhism, Islam or Christianity.  The Indian call centre workers are converting out of the constricts of Hinduism to the unabashed ethos of American self improvement and consumerism.  The one worker in John and Jane who quits the call centre does so in order to pursue another route out of the Caste system – the entertainment industry –  as he takes up modern stage dancing.  It’s also interesting that the icon admired by one of the other call workers is Elvis.  Ahluwalia captures in effect a marriage of convenience an arranged contract that generates circuits of intensity that link and entangle the purposes of the call centre and the aspirations of those who work for it.  The corporation calls for submission of the will: the workers wish to be born again.   

We never see any actual images of the disembodied beings who occupy the space at the other end of the telephone line.  We only hear them.  Almost without exception they are the voices of old very tired people.  They are offered discounts, special deals, inducements etc by the young call centre workers of Mumbai.   As their voices carry through the telephone system onto the track it sounds as if it is the dead who are talking.  These Americans are the voices of zombies, living corpses who are being fed and kept alive by specially trained cadres of duped self hypnotised young people.  What is happening is that the dead are consuming the living.   These young opportunistic misguided men and women from India are living out a zombie movie in which they the unwitting are being fed to the undead.  As it moves through all the fantastic dark humorous interaction between the workers and their American customers,  John and Jane turns into a living horror movie.  The dream is in fact a nightmare. But the workers in John and Jane cannot either tell the difference or awaken.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk