Adrin Neatrour

Once upon a Lynch there was a film maker who worked off energy released from an insight that beneath smooth suburban lawns there was a rich primal schizoid earth which produced strangely deformed psyches. But Lynch seems to have progressively forgotten his starting point, the lawn itself, and developed little interest in examining the necessary conditions for the development of lawn culture.Inland Empire – David Lynch –  Fr – Pol –USA – 2006  Lorna Derne
Viewed Rotterdam Film Festival –  3rd Feb 2007

Like playing your collection of old records

When I told my friend Graeme Walker that I had just seen Lynch’s Inland Empire he looked at me and asked: was it like this? Graeme pumped out his cheeks and made some delicate squelching noises, produced some muted clicking sounds with his tongue and inblown squeekings with his mouth, before finally hardening his eyes turning to me and saying in a deliberate tone accentuating the second word by raising its pitch slightly: “ Who are you?”   I replied Inland Empire had been something like that but much longer (three hours) and not as entertaining.   In short Lynch has reached  the point to which many film makers come:  the cupboard is bare, they have nothing to express,  just empty form to fill.

Once upon a Lynch there was a film maker who worked off energy released from an insight that beneath smooth suburban lawns there was a rich primal schizoid earth which produced strangely deformed psyches.  But Lynch seems to have progressively forgotten his starting point, the lawn itself, and developed little interest in examining the necessary conditions for the development of  lawn culture.  His formal concerns have concentrated on simply providing visual fields for a set of psychically mutated characters to do their thing, to strut their stuff.  It becomes the American Weird genre, in which everything in the film is subordinated to a demonstration of weirdness.  The acting, the sets ( distorted perspective, labyrinthine channels) the cuts, the dialogue, the camera lens, the musical set pieces, each element of the film is designed to accentuate the weird.  The amplification circuit of the film not working to increase tension or suspense or awareness but simply to escalate the magnitude of the weird.
In this sense Inland Empire is typical of Weird movies which usually rely on a single device or motif  to drive a concatenation of events which are either weird in themselves or to which the characters have weird reactions.  In Inland Empire the driver is the idea that the actors are involved in a replaying of actuality(one of the opening shots of Inland Empire is of an old 78 rpm record being played on an old turn-table).  The structure of the film takes the form of an escalation of the weird events and responses leading to a final act of destruction followed by an unresolved penultimate sequence. The  weakness of Inland Empire is that its only referential logic is the dynamic of escalation demanded by the form of the film.  By three hours this has long run out of steam, with Lorna Derne bankrupt in the expressive department, the script dead and the camera work repetitious.

David Lynch has said that Inland Empire is a movie about time.  I think that it’s a film about space, with the action cuts used to by-pass time, shifting the action from space to space, not from time to time. Inland Empire is an edited film not a film that is composed in shot or frame. And most of the edits are action cuts designed to move on the action.  They don’t filmically suggest time – even if that is the director’s intent.  Just because there are impossible cuts in Inland Empire, in the sense that through an edit two non adjacent spaces are linked, in themselves these suggest space not time, in particular when there is no character through whom we can experience time.  We see Lorna Derne shift in space but we don’t get her take on the shift, we simply see an act of manipulation, the vacuity of a cut.

In a way Inward Empire is just a cop out.  Located and invested in a world where there are no consequences and no meanings, just a world that comprises of unending unrelated sequences of weirdness.  In a sense this is a tacit social comment on the satiated gorged material state of US culture, but this  is a social comment about the genre – the  Weird. There’s nothing in Inland Empire to suggest anything interesting such as broader social readings.

 In the final sequence of the film, David Lynch plays one of his favourite records Nina Simone’s Sinnerman.  As at the end of Kitano’s Zatoichi (I’m sure there are other examples but this is the most recent I could think of), Inland Empire ends with the caste and the director laying aside  the outer pretence of the movie and  partying.  It might be that Lynch’s intention for this ending was to suggest yet another layering of time, the Russian Doll effect (which is space rather than time anyway) For me the effect of the dance party was simply to underline the emptiness of the Lynch’s filmic conceit.   Nina Simone had more class and energy than anything glimpsed in Inland Empire, and her song way eclipses the film. 
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

We Are All Fine is a metaphysical black comedy which as a double take offers an oblique and penetrating look at contemporary Iran. We Are All Fine    Bizhan Mirbagheri  Iran 2005  Ahu Kheradmand;Mohson Moradi; Lehla Zarch
Viewed Rotterdam Film Festival 1 Feb 2007

Beware the empty centre

We Are All Fine is a metaphysical black comedy which as a double take offers an oblique and penetrating look at contemporary Iran. 

Mirbhagheri’s film begins with an event that comes close to being a proposition.  A family – an extended family of three generations – is visited by a stranger who says he is a friend of the eldest son who has left Iran to work abroad but has not been heard from in two years.  His message is that the son wants his family – mother father brother sister wife and child – to make a video letter to be sent back to him with the stranger.  The son wants to know how things are with them.

The visitor goes leaving behind him uncertainly, endless unanswered and unanswerable questions and, as proof of his authenticity, a nondescript recently taken photo of the son.  The family believe it’s their boy: the full length picture shows a man standing in front of a wire mesh fence wearing jeans trainers a light jacket. The location( as one member of the family observes) could be anywhere; in a sense the figure is also everyman. 

Borrowing a camcorder, the family decide to make the video for their son.   At this point the film starts to shift between two expressive modes: the film which documents the action and the video mode which records the feelings of the family trapped in their own expectations. The structural dynamic of the film stems from the alternation between the two systems of recording, between monologue and dialogue.   After considering and briefly trying to speak collectively the family take the decision that what they really want to do is to talk individually to their son so that unconstrained they can commune with him from their hearts.   At the point at which the video monologues are taken up the film enters a realm of communication that is religious in form: it’s like prayer, communication with the unseen.  The family, who continually try to revise edit wipe and redo their performances in attempts to find the right key or the ‘right’ tone offer their son:  accounts, justifications, confessions, brutal statements of unalloyed truth (“I am dieing” his father tells him).   They are speaking to the male who is the absent and empty centre of the house.  He is not there yet they have to speak to him and in this absence and emptiness he assumes a sort of god like abstraction.  He becomes an empty vessel for the outpouring of lamentation supplication and truth.  A man functioning and being as the form of God.  The absent male? Absent but omnipresent.

I think that We are All Fine(WAAF) is a finely tuned reflection of a certain internalised psychic state of affairs in Iran.  Of course the film has social context: the revolution and the Iraq war are strongly alluded to. But in WAAF nearly all the action takes place inside the home of the family.  There are some exterior shots:  the military academy, the garment shop where the sister works (where her male manager is fired by the female boss), but essentially this is an interior film and it is through the interiority (both in monologue and dialogue) that we know what is happening.  The father is old sick and dieing; the sister is keeping the family afloat by working; the mother keeps the hearth; the wife takes their daughter to the out of school drama club.   The woman and the old father all have their problems and get on with living and dieing.  The younger brother is a good natured soul; perhaps naïve but  he  understands why his brother has deserted the family, and admits that he too might do the same thing.  The actuality is that it is the women who are living sustaining life; for how long can they take the strain? The men dream and then plan the execution of some sort of flight either abroad or perhaps to another kind of place.   With elegance and simplicity Mirbhagheri suggests that the empty centre he describes is not just a feature of this family but is replicated through his country.  Without intimate knowledge of Iran I do not know if Mirbhagheri is representing something actual.   But certainly Mirbhagheri (and his script writer) is a filmmaker with vision who has looked at his society and seen somewhere at  its core the phenomenon of the absent centre that is transformed into a vessel for outpourings as a component of the social assemblage.  He has conceived a subtle and telling form for conveying his insight, for by removing the male presence he has freed himself to be able to deconstruct the fabric of Iranian society.   Looking to filmmakers in the West, in comparison we have a generation of filmmakers who lack the capacity to see and understand their own situations.  Some see symptoms (lots of films about problems) but not the conditions.  Filmmakers who struggle to make films about ideas and as such are incapable of making films that probe and deconstruct psychic assemblage of  schizoid Western societies and their values.     

Checking the film on the imdb to find the cast list I saw that (unsurprisingly) few people had seen the film. One person who had seen it commented on the bad acting.  In the West the acting profession has become part of the communications industry.  The consequences of this industrialisation of the art have in the course of 80 to 90 years completely taken over expectations of and demands made on actors.  In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller through Willie Lomax, points out that to sell the product you first of all have to sell yourself.  The emphasis on the actor adopting a heightened emotional individuality as the chosen expressive mode to the exclusion of other styles of performing, has led to actors and actresses ‘selling’ themselves for role and ‘pitching‘ themselves into roles, to the exclusion of other expressive styles drawn from folk or classical traditions of performance.   In particular over the last 30 years in the UK and USA the soap opera has become the dominant form of an industrialised output defining the demands made of actors and actresses.  This form has increasingly exerted influence in curtailing the acting profession’s repertoire of dramatic responses.  The soap opera which is not a arena of ideas relies on idiosyncratic roles (parts) that have  to be filled out emotively by the players. The industry needs a type of overdetermined emotive response from its actors  to fill out the vacuity and  the emotional similarities of the various switchback plot lines.  The actors are required to respond and react in particular with expressive faciality (many shots and even complete sequences are in full face close up).   The players gestural responses have become corrupted or delimited by: multiple but crude variations of the rictus the forehead and eye muscles and expressive use of arms and hands as if they were huge levers pumping out reactive cues. (Sales men and women are taught a similar gestural vocabulary).

In Iran there seems to be an acting tradition that isn’t distorted by the selling ethos.  Much of the action of WAAF is shot wide. and in its playing WAAF is understated and so shaped to allow to Mirgbhageri’s idea primacy.  It is the idea that unfolds and develops in the course of the film, rather than the characters.  Had it been played otherwise it would have been at the cost of the increasing urgency and power in the development of the film.    
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Viewed Rotterdam International Film Festival 3 Feb 2007
The background actuality of Teresa Villaverde’s film lies in the criminal racket of people smuggling and in particular the entrapment of young Eastern European girls into prostitution. Transe is not as a movie about issues or dramatised statement of the obvious levels of exploitation in this activity. Transe is film. Transe – Teresa Villaverde – 2006 126 mins Ana Morcira
Viewed Rotterdam International Film Festival 3 Feb 2007

Once upon a time…

Transe opens with the sound of the wind laid over the titles.  A wind that blows within and without through the film.

The background actuality of Teresa Villaverde’s film lies in the criminal racket of people smuggling and in particular the entrapment of young Eastern European girls into prostitution.  Transe is not as a movie about issues or dramatised statement of the obvious levels of exploitation in this activity. There’s no shortage of that material.  Transe is film.  Film as a sensualised experience grounded in life but owing nothing to expectations about the form that life might take.  Villaverde renders her material as a film experience using camera light voice and portrayal to create an optic and sound world built on the premise of fairytale. 
 
Towards the end of the brothel sequence in Transe Sonia (Ana Morcira) the protagonist sits on a chair in pick-up room.  She faces the camera looking back at but over and beyond the lens whilst a mirror ball (out of shot) reflects a recurring pattern across her.  The shot lasts perhaps 2 to 3 minutes. The flowing multifaceted pattern repeats itself across her face and on the wall behind her.  Sonia is rooted in an immobility of being.  The thing for me about this shot is that I can’t remember if it is mute or not. The power of the optical effect is both meditative and dynamic.  It suspends it animates  As it holds the viewer in its delicate tracery simultaneously it engenders a connection with Sonia’s wordless movement into retreat and defines the object status of her condition.  The shot (and there are others in the film) creates fusion of the objective and subjective: the objective and subjective points of view become one. We move from action into time.   We see the choice Ana makes: to take an internal line of flight that leads away from the world into which she has been trapped, into another world of ice and stillness where all you can hear is the wind.  Like the old Russian folk tales; except this is a tale of modern Europe.

Transe is a fairy tale in the classic mode of Anderson in that in his tellings. Anderson’s descriptive writing is strong but economic, the action moves simply forward, the actors have feelings in relation to their situations but not generally in relation to other people and the forces in play are clearly boldly delineated.  Villaverde’s fairytale is an amalgam of motifs: Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard, the Little Match Girl.  Villaverde’s story is a recasting of the fairytale in contemporary darkness.  Of course the material of the Fairytale often comes from dark recessive spaces of the collective mind and touches the reader with raw psychic fear before closure with some kind of redemption.  Transe is naked fairytale without the redemption coda.    Sonia in Transe is the little match girl reinvented in a malign godless universe.  When she has exhausted her own resources there is no God to pick her up shield and cradle her in his arms . From her sleep of death, the chamber of her flight, there will be no prince to wake Sonia with a kiss;  she must sleep forever.  From Bluebeard’s seventh room there is no escape – Sonia must join the dead wives.  Transe is not gender politics it is a psychic realisation of a loss of will.  No will to power life. 

Transe moves from flow to immobility. Before leaving St Petersburg for Europe (because she wants to be rich), Sonia smears her sleeping young son with her blood.  The movement of the camera as Sonia leaves Russia tracking down ice, rails and  river, has a primal menstrual quality.  The camera takes on a biological rhythm that mimics the slow steady quickening of the womb.   As her sexuality is stripped out of her, Villaverde moulds Sonia’s situation on film using twists of the pan and the immobility of the locked off camera.  The life flow ceases: as Sonia finds herself abandoned her biology shrinks back, she withdraws into an internal psychic space where nobody can find her.  In a catatonic drift all sensation is withdrawn and she drifts between sleep and barely extant consciousness.  A body in name only, a body without organs.

With Transe Teresa Villaverde has made a film that retains in its form the integrity of the ideas that energised it.  It‘s a film made as an exploration of a certain type of life unfolding in a particular situation. The events that are filmed are selected because they develop the notion of the central character’s actions and reactions to what is happening.  There is restraint and little overt violence on screen (though the violence and pornography of the situation is not in doubt) and as in the fairy tale it is the simplicity and directness of the telling that implicates the viewer in the film.  Villaverde’s faith in her form – the fairytale – contrasts strongly with Andrea Arnolds film Red Road. Also in the festival Red Road seems beset by compromises.  Again it has a fairytale mode, but the director seems to lose confidence and sells out her film to cinematic tricks and a banal plot line which ends up the dominant shaping force of the material.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Viewing Haensel’s film Sounds of the Sands,shot in and about Africa, triggered thoughts about my own experiences of having my picture taken; having my image captured, by my dad. Appropriation of image……Sounds of the Sands – Marion Haensel (Belgium) – 2006
Viewed Rotterdam Film Festival 1 Feb 07

Lie back think of dad…….

Viewing Haensel’s film Sounds of the Sands, triggered thoughts about my own experiences of having my picture taken; having my image captured, by my dad.
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There’s this thing about having your picture taken.  A lot depends on who’s behind the camera.  When I was a teenager one thing that really bugged me was dad pointing his camera at me.  The resentment I felt at being asked to do something I didn’t want to do –  to pose – was great, seemingly out of proportion to the situation.  Of course the paternal demand existed in a context: the context of an underlying bad relationship between me and my father.   I resisted what I saw as an attempt to make to do something I didn’t want to do.  Later I realised that what I was fighting was an appropriation of myself into his world of the false and the fake. My pic would be seamlessly inserted into his series of photographs and come to represent a line of memory perception.

Marion Haensel’s film points up a characteristic of films made by Europeans or Americans in or about Africa –  they are not in or about Africa.  The films are about  what Westerners would like Africa to be.  The motivational concern of Sounds of the Sands seems to be to depict Africa as an image.  An image of Africa is presented as if the actual product that Haensel had in mind was a stunning poster and/or the tasteful coffee table book.  Here is Africa as images snatched out of context deterritorialised and appropriated for the benefit of the gaze of the Western consumer.   

Sounds of the Sands(SoS) is no more than a parade of such images that flesh out exotic settings stripped bare of referents to both of time and place, leaving the viewer with a sanitised children’s story, a sort of Swiss Family Robinson fiction in which beautiful Africans die tastefully and without protest in the Sahara desert.

Image – African’s are beautiful, and beautiful filmicly connotes noble(CF Leni Riefenstahl pics of the Nuer).  But this notion of nobility also points to potential disaster: the idea of the noble savage is lethally disempowering.  Ever since the eighteenth century Enlightenment European thinkers have described and noted with philosophical approval African (and AmerIndian) superiority of spirit over the West.  This Western projection and has sown seeds of disaster for the Continent, in that the Western interests and agents that have raped the land and its people, have been aided and abetted by a projection of African response of which they have no fear:  a sort of beautiful metaphysical fatalism.   Whatever trials tribulations atrocities are ‘sent’ upon the African they respond with nobility and generosity of spirit.  So it is in SoS. The actors in this film are physically beautiful, they are well behaved, they are noble.  What is more(and it one of the SoS’s features that betray its white provenance) they speak perfect received French not some damn patois) The man the woman the child:  the camera caresses their faces in close-up even as they experience death without protest.  The film in its shot composition which mimics a biblical iconography projects this statement about Africa to the audience.  They will take whatever shit is thrown at them with fateful equanimity.  We can let whatever happens to these people happen.   The serenity of the people will see them through and they won’t blame or be angry with us.  No shit.

Of course the film, in its structure is a series of sequences without context.  No context means no focus for feelings, action or discourse.  Time and place are left vague and undefined, its set any place any time. It’s in Nowhere Africa.  If you’re an African farmer stuff happens. A drought drives the farmer teacher to make a decision to cross the Sahara with his wife family and live stock.  Except that he’s in a francophone African state we don’t know where he is or the reasons why there might be drought. It happens. And it happens that he thinks it best to cross the desert, which seems a difficult thing to attempt, though of course he is cheerful about it all. The lack of basic context: when – where – what – makes SoS seems entirely abstracted as an account.  An abstracted film about a part of the continent where we know there is turmoil and dislocation.  But we know there are causes for these things.

Not only is the specific situation of the film decontextualised, the family of whom it tells are unlike any African family.  African families are known to be multigenerational and cross generational.  But in SoS the African family represented is nuclear.  A family form that for Africa seems to me to be a complete misrepresentation of how the people live.  No explanation is provided as to why there are no older generation present from either of the two family braches.  The suspicion remains that Haensel has Europeanised nuclearised his family in the script to present a more familiar and easier image of Africa to Western audiences.  To sell the idea that they are just like us: mama papa cute kids.  Meat for Freaudians.  Everything is cut to suit the faked profile of the film – nothing real must be allowed to sully the desired image.  If an older generation had been present in the script it would have necessitated  the filming of some tough difficult sequences.  Sequences that would have been difficult even for noble savages to handle without losing their fateful serenity.  The old folks would either have been left behind to die of thirst; or if they’d gone on the walk through the desert they would have been the first to die of exhaustion and heat.  So much the better for the plot to restrict it to the sanitised nuclear family.

Bad things happen as the nuclear family and their stock cross the desert.  Bad men demand ransom, bad men want to fuck the women, want to take the boys away to train up as bad men.  Everything happens in vacuo, as if the only reason for the events was the dramatic, the ‘need’ of the film for incident.  So SoS scripts in a heavy macho dude in shades to make badass threats, point guns and generally play heavy.  The crossing of the desert is also something of a joke.  You might think that a film should pay attention to some of the detailed demands that this environment imposes on those who would travel across the barren dry interior.  But the African couple might as well be Bogart and Bacall for all they are seriously inconvenienced by the desert.  Even on its own terms SoS is profligately forgetful.  The man and his friend spend all their money buying a compass from a soldier.  Later when they split to go their ways we never know who took the compass; yet this tool is necessary for survival.

It is difficult after viewing to see SoS as anything other than a neo-colonial vehicle aimed at further undermining the stature of the African psyche for European audiences.  The final sequence in a way says it all.  What remains of the little nuclear family group(after mum and one boy have died and the other boy been taken by bandits) finally sink down in exhaustion, lose consciouness and await death.  But what happens?  They wake up to find themselves safe and sound in a refugee camp run by a French aid agency.  The whites have found them and carried them back to the tents.  The whites have saved the noble savages – as usual –  so that they can ride again.  They couldn’t do for themselves.  Get it.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Bahman Ghobadi is a filmmaker who is making films from within the people. He is not an outsider coming into a culture or a society and then making a movie about the people and their problems. Ghobady is of the Kurds. Half Moon is about them and him and it’s a simply shot road movie in which every sequence is informed by understanding of the Kurdish situation.  
Half Moon – Bahman Ghobadi (Iran 06) viewed Rotterdam Film festival 2 Feb 2007 
 

Where you get to depends on how you travel

Bahman Ghobadi is a filmmaker who is making films from within the people.  He is not an outsider coming into a culture or a society and then making a movie about the people and their problems.  Movies made by outsiders rarely amount to more than a series of superficial glosses impressions and images stitched together with themes derived from either character or issues (cf In this World – Winterbottom).  Films made by incomer directors usually say more about the director’s concerns than the society.  Ghobady is of the Kurds.  Half Moon is about them and him and it’s a simply shot road movie in which every sequence is informed by understanding of the Kurdish situation.  The shots in the film represent not just images and impressions but the complex matrix of the Kurdish people and their lives.  It is a film not so much about issues or problems but rather about music as a condition of a people.  

In Half Moon the bus carrying the musicians is a dynamic vehicle that opens up the relationship between a people and the historical and geographical vectors that contain and shape their destiny.  In the West the road movie usually engages with character and forced situational encounters that typically resolve through violence.  Perhaps this is because there is nowhere for us to go in the literal geographic sense; for us the psychic fulcrum of the journey tends to pivot on an inner vector such as identity quest.  In Half Moon the travelling musicians have no doubts about who are.  The questions posed by Ghobadi revolve about an overcoming, a refusal to permit the world to corrupt spirit.    

In Half Moon the old master musician charters a bus to take him and his sons from Iran to Iraq.  They undertake a journey from one country that does not exist. Iranian Kurdistan, to get to another country that does not exist, Iraqi Kurdistan, in order to participate in a large Kurdish music festival.  To make the journey they have to cross political religious cultural and social fault lines that deny the legitimacy of their people their journey and their music. 

The master musician has spent months ensuring that he has all the correct travel permits, passports that will be needed to negotiate the complex series of barriers that will impede their progress.  Ghobady’s film is a road movie that is actually on the road.  Its strength is that in order to progress, the musicians have to engage in a continuous discourse with the worlds through which they are travelling.  In effect Half Moon is a discourse: with landscape; with social fabric of life; with the religious; with the geopolitical divisions of the land.

The landscapes are overwhelming in the film, shimmering realities that suggest an absorption of individual subjectivities into their vastness. The land is a powerful presence: but it’s a presence not an image.  The landscapes are not beautiful celluloid backcloths against which a story unfolds.  They are, ‘in the story’, at the heart of the film’s discourse. Half Moon begins in the bright sun of Iranian Kurdistan and ends in the mountainous snow vistas of Turkey.  In this final sequence, what remains of the little group of musicians tries to pass over the snow covered heights of Turko-Iraqi border.  As the master musician ploughs through the snow we understand something about landscape: that it is of the earth and we are part of it.   The snow is a harsh environment and in its whiteness spreads across the visual field effacing all referents other than itself.  As it overpowers it becomes an embrace of death.  A death that is in the end accepted and even welcomed: a return to a primary union with the earth for which there is a longing and a belonging.  And this is neither sentimental nor romantic: it is simply the consequence of the spirit taking certain decisions in particular circumstances. The landscapes are, ‘in the story’, at the heart of the film’s discourse.  The landscapes are an evocation, a calling up of a history that is happening as the bus moves on its journey.  The landscapes are crisscrossed and marked out by invisible hidden lines that represent clan religious social and political boundaries and borders.  Each landscape has a menacing aspect and in their hidden folds they are guarded and policed by men with guns who enforce the integrity of these imaginary lines by force.

One motif running through the film is the search by the master musician for a female singer.  The female voice is the soul of his music and without it his music is incomplete.  The female singer whom he had arranged to sing with them is unable to accompany them because of events in the natural world – severe floods have disrupted the life in her village.  For the master the female and the male are conjoined when they come together to play and sing.  In the moment of playing and performing they are in complete communion.  But in the non Kurdish fundamentalist religious culture the female is absent: contained constrained and bound tightly about with the male injunction to be invisible.  The female is missing from public life; where she should be, there is simply a hole, a not being there.  The female in public is undermined in two ways.  Through public censor and opprobrium her self confidence is destroyed, and lacking self belief through she is unable to find her voice.  Should the female retain self belief and assert her right to sing in public she may be assailed from without by the sentinels of religious policing who suspicious of  public performance by women and intolerant of musical interaction between men and women, forcibly intervene to prevent such occurrences.   The reality of this culture is that woman are absent from many fields and Half Moon is a psychical discourse into the consequences of this suppression, not just for the musicians but for the culture. 

The bus follows an ever more demented and circuitous passage across Iran Turkey and Turkmenistan in its attempts to find a way across the forbidden borderlands.  As they crisscross the land they pass through the villages of the country, the musicians get off the bus for tea and to talk to the villagers.  And it becomes apparent that in this land the only people you see are old men.  Everyone you see is old and bent.  The women (young and old)are absent; and the young men are not there.  Some force has rounded them up like steers and taken them to another place.  The country is full of absence. Where there should be people they are not there.  The bus on its tortuous route runs into check points and road blocks all manned by young men.  It seems clear that all the young men have been appropriated by the state and given Kalashnikovs to intimidate and kill.  There is a process of brutalisation in play in which guns have replaced musical instruments in the stream of life.  The sounds in currency are the crack of the gun and the thud and ricochet of the bullet.

The integrity of  Ghobady and his musicians make this a film of the affirmation of spirit.  Half Moon is not vacuous feel good road movie; it is a film that affirms faith in spirit and vision . The music in the film is wonderful.  In itself it is a force that asserts its right to have a central place in the world.  It can meet oppression death meanness of spirit with a call to joy to which the organised forces of destruction have no means of resisting.  The political regimes will come and go, religious fanaticism will rise and fall.  Music like the land will persevere.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

No clowning about
He who gets slapped presents as a film about collusive victimhood, a subject area at the core of European and American political sensibilities. Authoritarian cultures and societies develop mechanisms through which scapegoat becomes a role voluntarily adapted by despised and excluded groups as a strategy for their survival.

He Who gets Slapped – Victor Sjostrom (aka Seastrom)  –  1924 – with piano accompaniment
Paulette Goddard Lon Chaney John Gilbert,
Seen Star and Shadow –  17 12 06 – ticket price £3-50

Retrocrit
It seems useful when the opportunity arises to appraise films long forgotten and submit them to a contemporary critique.  Its also interesting to speculate who might have been exposed to the thought forms and influences of films such as ‘He who gets Slapped’.   Did Sergei Eisenstein Fritz Lang Orson Welles  von Sternberg or Wilder see it?  Sjostrom often seen as the father of Swedish Cinema made many films including this one in Hollywood for MGM.

No clowning about
He who gets slapped presents as a film about collusive victimhood, a subject area at the core of European and American political sensibilities.  Authoritarian cultures and societies develop mechanisms through which scapegoat becomes a role voluntarily adapted by despised and excluded groups as a strategy for their survival.
  
The film is set in the world of the circus – which is represented as a transposed variation of bourgeois life.  It is a film about clowns with no clowns: a film about clowns that involves no clowning.  Sjostrom’s film is energised by his  vision of a world created out of spiralling vectors.  In some of the key shots everything moves with a dynamic of circular fluidity.  Sjostrom endows his film with a centrifugal force which governs the core aspects of its realisation: the script, the settings, the camera work and the special effects.  They’re all informed with the powerful movement principle of the film that sucks matter out of the centre to the periphery before guiding it back to the centre again.  This centrifugal action works both actually and morally creating a complex interplay of ideas and technical skill. 

This understanding of the world as a moral spiralling motion is most strongly realised in the beautiful special effect transition sequence which takes us from the world of the humiliated bourgeois professor to his reincarnation as clown.   Using mattes and in camera effects, the huge spinning globe to which the professor clings resolves magically and unexpectedly into a circus ring.  The effect is breathtaking as the professor sitting astride the giant globe is thrown to the edge of the world by the centrifugal forces in play.  For a moment he is threatened with being hurled off the face of the world into oblivion, only for the edged outline of the world to dissolve and transform into the perimeter blocks of the circus ring.  We are in the world of the circus:  a world whose rationale is circularity and non stop centrifugal motion. 

The film contains both ourselves and the performers in this circuitous motion.  None   more so than the ridiculed professor who has transformed himself into the eponymous clown called: He who gets Slapped (HWGS).  HWGS is clown reinvented as a sado/masochistic iconic scapegoat.   The clown figure invented for the circus spectators – the masses – who have come to laugh at the clown’s slapstick pain.  It is difficult to escape the notion that at the core of Sjostrom’s filming is a political/social idea: that the enjoyment of another’s pain is the basis of certain political psychic forms.  A political psyche characteristic of hierarchic societies which exploit sadistic humour to undermine and demean attempts by individuals seen as representatives of despised groups to challenge in any way the established order.   The use of poisoned  humour to humiliate is a key weapon favoured by societies based on suppression through stereotypes.  HWGS is famous and popular as a clown simply for his ability to be slapped hurt and abused as the circus geek.  HWGS takes his public humiliation with a smile and comes back for more:  more pain equates with more laughs.  In one shot, an extraordinary superimposition, a huge blazing lit up sign erected over the big  top, shows HWGS in neon getting whacked and bouncing back. Masochism has become an addictive and collusive survival technique raised to an art form in societies that are grounded in the abasement of t groups and individuals through corrective humiliation.

There is a powerful mechanicality in Sjostrom’s filming of  the circus scenes.  Like other social performers such as prostitutes, clowns however they feel, have to play out a utopian entertainment ethos to the spectator.    In the sequence where a crowd of 60 clowns erupts into the ring, the performers are filmed as if they were clockwork toy soldiers (vide Laurel and Hardy in Toyland) with a relentless and impassive automative intent to entertain.  The clowns with their white emaciated features have two faces: one turned to the public that represents the desire to entertain, the other turned in on itself.  
 
In a compelling way the film creates out of the circus a world that either seems to anticipate the concentration camps, or perhaps recalls the POW camps of the First World War.   There is something in the compressed collective experience suggested in some of the circus sequences that call up ominous portents.  The circus seems a place of confinement.  The shots in the changing room, where men turn themselves into white-faced clowns and in the arena where they have to play the clown, have the quality of punishment parks.   Sjoberg seems to understand the entertainment business as a very dark metaphor for a world in which you are made to be the hand maiden of your own psychic mutilation (vide Singing in the Rain the big production number “Make ‘em Laugh”):  for a world in which one day there will be whole races and peoples forced to act out their own roles – as victims.  A world of the future where Jews Palestinians Tibetans (perhaps in another sense Big Brother Wannabees) will be reduced simply to the status of He Who Gets Slapped and find themselves powerless to be anything other than victims who provide political entertainment for the hierarchies that define them. 

The clown facial make-up devised for HWGS anticipates this type of social development.  HWGS doesn’t make-up to look like a clown.  The design of his make up turns him into a mutant, a freak of nature who should have been strangled at birth.  The make up effect is extraordinarily powerful in its effect as a justifier for abuse, and a righteous excuse for the crude childish enjoyment of the spectators in his pain.   There are disturbing resonances again in the way that in the future the costume and appearance of the Jew, of the Palestinian and other minority groups will be exploited as a source of ridicule and contempt.

The film ends by having recourse to the natural world albeit from the periphery of the circus.  The circus lion effects the end of the sources of evil in the film.  Sjostrom seems to be saying that the powerless cannot by themselves resolve the problems of their exploitation and abuse.  Once a certain stage of descent into powerlessness is reached the only solution is to invoke or call in outside powers.    Sjostrom in his resolution of the problem, whilst it might not tally with the ethos of self assertion,  at least avoids the fake pat solutions more usual in Hollywood plots, in which the hero transformed by his negative experiences returns to the fray with the weapons and knowledge to defeat the power of evil.  Sjostrum  declines the fake romanticism of the returning hero and opts for an outside intervention from the natural world,  as the equaliser. 
adrin neatrour 
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Happy Days are Here Again
It’s hard to see why this film has been so heaped with praise, except that the Brit film reviewers have a proclivity to fete new Brit directors after one ‘successful’ feature. Much like their colleagues on the sports pages who billboard every new Caucasian pugilist as the next great white hope after their first winning fight. In contrast to many Brit first timers whose disaster prone cameras have been larded with Lott’s money, Paul Williams, as director/writer (auteur!) of London to Brighton shows a utilitarian competence in assembling his film. In truth London to Brighton is just another gangster movie, populated with the usual stereotyped heavies, replete with the usual violent gestes and looking to squeeze extra mileage out of the pursuit / chase plot by giving it a fashionable paedophilic nexus.London to Brighton – Paul Williams – UK 2006  – Lorraine Stanley; Johnny Harris   
Viewed  23 Dec 06 Tyneside Cinema at Gateshead Town Hall Ticket price £6-20

Happy Days are Here Again
It’s hard to see why this film has been so heaped with praise, except that the Brit film reviewers have a proclivity to fete new Brit directors after one ‘successful’  feature.  Much like their colleagues on the sports pages who billboard every new Caucasian pugilist as the next great white hope after their first winning fight.  In contrast to many Brit first timers whose disaster prone cameras have been larded with Lott’s money, Paul Williams, as director/writer (auteur!) of  London to Brighton shows a utilitarian competence in assembling his film.  In truth London to Brighton is just another gangster movie, populated with the usual stereotyped heavies, replete with the usual violent gestes and looking to squeeze extra mileage out of the pursuit / chase plot by giving it a fashionable paedophilic nexus.

In the action image movie locations replace worlds.  In London to Brighton the film opens with lots of handheld energy with lots of big close ups.  But this energy only compounds itself quantitatively repeating the same set of camera tricks – edgy camera, angled lenses, more close ups – for ever decreasing returns.  The film never suggests that it might effect a qualitative change in form and open up the possibility of entering rather than exploiting the idea of different worlds.  London to Brighton stays true to the limitations of genre and satisfies itself indulging in the ostentatious flaunting of backdrop.  The scene in which the little nasty heavy(Derek) gets called to account by the big nasty heavy(Stuart) is a case in point.  The meeting is arranged by a railway arch on  the wall of which is a huge amazing mural – a riot of colour movement and interplay of graffiti.   The setting is obviously carefully chosen by Williams, perhaps even commissioned(?) but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a vacuous thing devoid of function.  If anything it detracts from the action between the two heavies, and its existence in the film seems to be to fill out the emptiness of the plot. The use made of the graffiti in this sequence typifies the use of locations and settings.  The gangsters location, the prostitute locations, the Brighton locations, the interiors don’t exist as worlds they are simply backdrops to action sequences generated by the narrative: a certain act of violence has been committed to which there are certain consequences from which a woman and a girl child flee. 

If there are no externalities in the film neither are there internalities.  In London to Brighton there are no subjective or affective worlds, which for a film with a child at its centre begs the question as to why the film was conceived with a child as its central subject.  In London to Brighton the child, Joanne, comes across simply as a cipher, the  mechanical means of the realisation of the plot, an object for the director’s instructions.  As a child she does not exist in the film either as an affect or as a conscious entity. The Dardennes brother’s film Le Fils  has a child at its centre.  The boy in the film is minimally expressive but through the careful camera strategy of the directors, we are aware that he is the focus of a fixated and intense scrutiny by his carpentry instructor: a scrutiny that feeds back through the circuitry of the film’s connections an increasing intensifying affect.  In the same way that a photo of a dead child can come alive through the intensity of emotion lived through it, so the child in Le Fils becomes an increasingly charged affective image understood through the eye of an engaged adult.  There is no affective image in London to Brighton neither is there is the Point of View of the Child.  We never understand any of the events from the child’s angle or from within the world of the child.  In fact the role we see played out in London to Brighton is not that of a child but rather of an adult.  The child is allowed a few gestural actions and reactions that are supposed to sign her as a child.  But in reality the film can’t really cope with a child at its centre – its much too complex a notion for its simplistic approach – so Paul Williams elides the child into the adult for most of the film.  In fact the story didn’t really need a child at its centre.  To have written in a young woman as the victim in the script would have made no difference to the plot except it would have lacked the paedo shock effect.  And that exemplifies why London to Brighton is deficient as a film.  All the elements seem to have been assembled for their wow/shock factor.  The violence the child abuse  the locations, none of them mean anything except as shock ingredients to pad out and justify a trite villain drama.    

At the end, in the last couple of reels, the film runs on empty.  With no tricks to pull out of the bag, no real tensions in play, with repetition of effect the characteristic motif,  the energy dries up and Paul Williams is left  with nothing else to do, nowhere else to go other than through the motions of tieing up the loose ends.  At this point the film gets absurd but not in an interesting way, absurd on its own terms.   Trying against its own grain to go internal, Stuart the big heavy is dealt by the writers a self justifying monologue inserted into the film to account for and explain the twisted nature of his psyche.  In this piece of cod retro-rationalisation Stuart tells how after being caught smoking he was forced to eat a box of cigarettes by his father.  The monologue comes across as banal and fatuous as disconnected to the London to Brighton plot as its coda.  The coda sees Joanne  delivered to the bucolic setting of her Aunt’s house in Dorset .  The implication in the way it is filmed is that the happy days of  childhood will be her own.   

In both these sequences of justification London to Brighton exposes itself as a film that is lacking the belief of its own convictions as a contemporary exemplar of its genre.
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A deadly interest in film making
There has been a recent interest by Western film makers in looking at Europe’s psychic inheritance in relation to our responsibility for both colonialism and the effects of our retreat from direct colonial rule. The question can be posed as to whether this interest is anything more than superficial, using history as a hook on which to hang the plots of action movies, exploiting exotic backgrounds or notorious events for their dramatic impact. Haneka’s Hidden both in style and narrative form examines the consequences of the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1959. Politics is at the heart of Hidden which is located in Paris as is Le Peron’s more recent Ben Barka movie.I saw Ben Barka get Killed  – Serge Le Peron    Fr /Morrocco/ Sp 2005 Charles Berling 
Tyneside Cinema 5 11 06 ticket £6-20

 A deadly interest in film making
There has been a recent interest by Western film makers in looking at Europe’s psychic inheritance in relation to our responsibility for both colonialism and the effects of our  retreat from direct colonial rule.  The question can be posed as to whether this interest is anything more than superficial, using history as a hook on which to hang the plots of action movies,  exploiting exotic backgrounds or notorious events for their dramatic  impact.  Haneka’s Hidden both in style and narrative form examines the consequences of the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1959.   Politics is at the heart of Hidden which is located in Paris as is Le Peron’s more recent Ben Barka movie.

The opening sequence of le Peron’s film leads to the discovery of the narrator’s corpse lieing on the floor of a house whilst the police conduct a disinterested scene of crime routine.  A full on ‘60’s style jazz score accompanies the next sequence which is a fast paced montage of 50’s archive film political in content which features images of Mao Castro Khruschev and scenes of political protest.  I saw Ben Barka get Killed seems to be setting out its stall with a claim for political relevance, but this grainy montage footage represents the high water mark  of the films commitment to either history or politics.  As the montage moves from one political event to another, from Mao to Africa there are no explanations, no contexts: just images.   For younger watchers the pictures may well mean very little.  But the scratchy archival quality of the film clips and the situations that they record signifies protestation in general against the interests of the West.  The archive montage works as a sort of posturing of the films political pretensions, a sequence in a film that never develops into anything more than a piece of stylised political posing.   Like a haircut.

Ben Barka,  about whom the movie’s assassination plot revolves, is not explained in any meaningful way.  What did Ben Barka stand for?  What interests ranged against him?  The film is never clear on these basic underlying details.  Instead Ben Barka is simply represented as a good man.   Those who opposed him were bad men,.  Ben Barka is a man unsullied by the corruption of the powerful forces which oppose him.    Without adequate context Ben Barka slips away as a real person and becomes a summation of idealistic yearnings.   But as Ben Barka slides into myth, it is clear that the film is not about politics it is about attitudes, a stylistic gloss on the early sixties that uses a political disappearance to justify a gangster movie.   I saw Ben Barka get Killed (ISBBGK) is a mannered stylistic exercise whose use of politics is to provide a superficial retro glam background to what is a classy looking thiller….a thriller that works on its own terms. But apparently has an allegorical subtext.

Whilst ISBBGK doesn’t work as a film with political pretensions it does encode a moral allegory about the nature of film making.  In the plot, narrated by the dead main protagonist , the film producer, both he and his subject – Ben Barka – end up dead, both murdered by a notional film that is never made.  The film’s plot relates how a small time crook – with artistic friends – is set up as a patsy film producer in order to lure Ben Barka to Paris so that he can be murdered by his enemies.  Interestingly the structure of the plot, and its use of the idea of film as a lure,  opens up the field of ethical dimensions that underlie much documentary film making.  Ethical and moral considerations that rarely see light.  Many documentary films are the result of a  collusive relationship between the makers and their subjects.  The film makers want to make their films.  That’s what they do; they have agendas and commit resources to their projects.  They also desire to make films that arouse interest that have strong characters and outstanding characteristics.  To achieve their production criteria they endeavour to take as much control as possible over the material they shoot; so that only they the film makers can decide its final form.  Often this process leads to the film makers practicing a series of deceptions on their subjects.  Deceptions can be more or less malign or benign but their point is to enhance the film by maximising the power of the producer.  Subjects too have their own agendas.  If they have the resources either in wit and intelligence or power and wealth, they can sometimes succeed in making their story into the film’s story.  To accomplish this they also have to engage in the practice of deception, deception of the film makers.  But whichever way the balance of power lies in the movie, many documentary films are the product of tacit understandings, of the desires in play, between the two parties involved during the making of the film.  And of course these tacit understandings can return to haunt both parties.  In the case of the Ben Barka movie the tacit understandings lead to the deaths of both the protagonists.

As a metatextual statement, ISBBGK works much better a moral comment on the nature of film making than it does as a political statement.  This however does seem to be an oblique reading of the movie.  Perhaps if Le Peron had brought this aspect a little further to the fore, he might have made a clearer political statement within the stylistic parameters that he wished to work.  Film can be a deadly enterprise for all parties.
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Slide to porn
The contemporary Western action thriller is on a dead end trip with nowhere to go other than towards the pornography of violence and sex. It’s a clapped out genre trapped in a logical cul de sac of is own making. The genre has nothing to say; it has nothing to show other than a series of gestural posturing; it has nothing to reveal. All that is left to the genre at this stunted stage of its expressive cycle is the slide down the incline of images of sex and violence(in the end the two become culturally interchangeable and indistinguishable). These images obey the laws of decreasing returns. Consequently directors of productions of this type (like those of hardcore pornography) are locked into a struggle against the constant devaluation of shock value, and scriptwriters must work hard to devise and invent ever new variations and graphic representations of sex and pain. They say it’s what we want. The Last King of Scotland – Kevin MacDonald – USA/UK 2006: Forest Whitaker, James McAvoy
Viewed: Tyneside Cinema at Gateshead Town Hall; free Bafta Preview screening

Slide to porn
The contemporary Western action thriller is on a dead end trip with nowhere to go other than towards the pornography of violence and sex.  It’s a clapped out genre trapped in a logical cul de sac of is own making.  The genre has nothing to say; it has nothing to show other than a series of  gestural posturing; it has nothing to reveal.  All that is left to the genre at this stunted stage of its expressive cycle is the slide down the incline of images of sex and violence(in the end the two become culturally interchangeable and indistinguishable).  These images obey the laws of decreasing returns. Consequently directors of productions of this type (like those of hardcore pornography) are locked into a struggle against the constant devaluation of shock value, and scriptwriters must work hard to devise and invent ever new variations and graphic representations of sex and pain.  They say it’s what we want.   

LKS is a case in point. You can film against exotic locations, such as Uganda; you can set the action background against a period of historical notoriety such as Amin’s dictatorship; but ultimately LKS is on a journey whose only purpose is to initiate a slide down to the inevitable images intended to gratify a retinal lust for blood.  LKS from its first frame seems intent on drawing me towards  two images:  Kay Amin dead and naked on a slab legs spread wide so I can see the butchered meat that once was her  sex.  Idi Amin says to Nick: “ We found her clitoris halfway down her throat – you don’t expect that…” a piece of dialogue introduced just in case I don’t get it.  Second image – Nick (protagonist) – gets the meat hook treatment. In Big Close Up,  hooks are inserted into his flesh under his nipples(A Man Called Horse) and attached to rope so that he can be hoisted up and hung from a beam like a carcass.  LKS is revealed as film that is simply an exercise in the delivery of these sexual mutilations/titillations.  These are the points of the delivery, as banal and meaningless as they are central to the impoverished ethos of the film. With these two images Kevin MacDonald underscores the fact that his film has been nowhere and has nowhere to go.    

At the heart of LKS is the role of the camera and the performance of James McAvoy as Nick.  Forest Whitaker plays Idi Amin but this is acting as impersonation.  It is Nick whom the film asks us to watch through the camera instructions of the director, and this is the core of the film’s weakness.   All we do is that we watch Nick.  The camera watches and Nick reacts or doesn’t, depending on the situation.   James McAvoy is  simply an object seen through a lens.  The camera has no other vocabulary other than object fixation and as the film develops this poverty of camera is evidenced in shot repetition and decline in filmic tension as there are not sufficient camera and shooting vocabulary to build the type of meanings that create oppositions.  The film develops into a repetitive flatness of sound and image with none of the psychic foldings that give tension to life.  A film that has as potential theme the idea of an individual trapped through his own conceit in an increasingly terrifying amoral spiral of descent cannot work unless we see what Nick sees; we have to be able to see some events from his point of view in order to weigh his understanding of each act of moral equivilence .  We have to see the change that he sees in each step of his relationship with Amin.    The shooting style that comprises a series of action cuts in the end just delivers a sort of puppet show.

In response to this situation James McAvoy’s performance is in one sense clown like. Nick as a sort of clown in Idi’s circus – except the range of McAvoy’s clown is strictly limited.  McAvoy’s act is a sort of invariant gestural and facial response to all situations presented by the script.   It seems like another instance of actors being turned into simplistic foils of the director or the script using talent to bounce the action through.  When the actor is used as a reflective agent the usual demand on the actors is that they have a sort of default facial set.  Repressed menace, inscrutability and wide eyed innocence are common facial sets employed as monodimensional devices in film.  In LKS McAvoy adopts set features suggesting a sort of jocular Scottish innocence.  Although the ingenuous faciality undergoes a change in function as it moves from being an initial reaction to novelty of place to a frozen response to the gaze of Amin.  a means of controlling expressive leakage.    The limited range of McAvoy’s performance, the stunted vocabulary of the camera work deliver a film in which interest in any ideas quickly atrophies, tensions dies because there are no oppositions either structural or formal.  The audience are left with a film that slides to porn in the mechanistic working out of plot.

LKS is set in Africa but there is no feeling for Africa in the film either as a subjectivity or an objectivity.  Africa is simply a background for a circus, a comic book place filled out with the usual stereotyped characters and images.  There is no sense of otherness, just the presentation of an African dystopia more or less decontextualised from its colonial heritage.   The problem when a location is used simply a backdrop is that contrived situations and contrived characters reinforce negative perceptions and prejudices.  LKS joins a list of films that exploit their locations as a cheap means of both claiming a kind of contrived authenticity(LKS has the almost obligatory period news reel montage near the front of the film as a means of laying claim to political/ humanist concerns) and giving a real feel to the contrived action. However I think that film makers from the Western colonial countries that first exploited Africa for its raw materials and then carved it out into politically and ethnically convenient but disastrous sections of the map, should feel shame at returning there to continue another chapter of exploitation.      
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Twitching nets on desolation row = no mirrors

The film opens with dulled desaturated out of focus pictures beamed from the cctvs scattered around Glasgow into a control room where they are policed by Jackie. The world of surveillance that is established in the opening sequence doesn’t open up any ideas about multiple actualities or the nature of closed circuit realities: rather it closes down into one reality. In Red Road Andrea Arnold makes the monitor into a simple window, like the window of a house in a working class terrace behind which the wife spies on the street, unseen behind her twitching nets. It would have been more interesting if it had been more like a mirror……
Red Road – Andrea Arnold – UK 2006 – Kate Dickie,
Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre 13 11 06 Ticket price £6-20
 
Twitching nets on desolation row = no mirrors
The film opens with dulled desaturated out of focus pictures beamed from the cctvs scattered around Glasgow into a control room where they are policed by Jackie.    The world of surveillance that is established in the opening sequence doesn’t open up any ideas about multiple actualities or the nature of closed circuit realities: rather it closes down into one reality.  In Red Road Andrea Arnold makes the monitor into a  simple window, like the window of a house in a working class terrace behind which the wife spies on the street, unseen behind her twitching nets. It would have been more interesting if it had been more like a mirror…….
 
In Red Road the monitors are a blind, a device to conceal the fact that this is an old type of story dressed up in modern techno wear with a fashionable backdrop of gritty lumpen dereliction.  We can tell they that the TVs are not real monitors because their nature changes all the time: sometimes they deliver blurred indistinct images, sometimes they have the clarity of HDTV.   The quality of image provided by the monitors is a function of the needs of the plot.   The plot itself has a mechanical quality.  As it develops it’s as if the script writer had used one of those models of psychological adaptation used by people like grief counsellors mapping the course of recovery from the trauma of loss or grief: charting the states of mind experienced by victims as they move from the inability to accept their situaiton, through to seeking revenge, through to acceptance and finally through to compassion.  Such a model may be a useful guide to helping people with their grief or dieing as long as the model is understood simply as model.  When it informs the shape of a script it gives the production a mechanical format and a lack of tension, de-energising the actors who are all sent down a one way street that is to  lead from the beginning to the end of the story. 
 
The effect of mechanical plotting is particularly constricting for the cast who have nowhere to go except where they’re told, no avenues to explore except those the director approves.   For the actors the production turns into a game of pleasing(rather than challenging)the director with an appropriate performance note.  I think there is a notion about their roles shared by many Brit directors that draws heavily on the auteur idea.  There is a belief that the director is a sort of lone genius who has a vision that they struggle to get realised.   The film comes to be seen as the sort of brave act of creation by a single person.  In fact film is production by a collectivity.  Every single person in the production has contribution, including of course the cast.  The monopaced monochrome and monoexpressive performance of Kate Dickie belies the instructions of her director.  The relationship between Dickie and Arnold looks on screen as if it’s too cosy too collusive as if the objective of the film was to tell the prearranged predetermined story not to make active film. 
 
Red Road like many recent British films is desperate to claim an authenticity of place, a sort of legitimising carapace.  The characterising look is desolate urban scapes at the centre of which is the eponymous Red Road high rise on Glasgow’s peripheral belt.  But the use of the desolation settings is purely as backdrops, exploited for their production values.  Red Road never becomes a world in its own right either mythic or actual.  For a couple of sequences centred about the entry to the tower the film strains to overcome its realist stylistic frame: when Jackie enters the tower the tracking shots that comprise the sequence convey the atmosphere of a sort of fairy tale.  The tower becomes a scary den of Wolf or Troll (Red Riding Hood?) which the heroine has to penetrate in order to obtain the precious treasure.  The fairy tale aspect of the film in these sections is obviously an angle explored by the film, but it’s never developed and is dropped as quickly as it is taken up in favour of cod realism and the overdetermined nature of the narrative.      
 
The plot, built around a revenge motif never develops sustained tension between its parts.  This is not so much because it’s easy to guess the missing details that are laboriously patently and crudely withheld from the audience in order to try to give the story some narrative oppositions.  The lack of tension is related to the direction itself, the choice made to make a certain sort of realist production and the way in which the film has been composed out of its series of set ups and shots.  Arnold seems unable to sustain shots of any length that might have the energy to create their own temporal or spacial hold on the audience.  The film sometimes looks like it has been desperately rescued in the edit.  The cutting from shot to shot, the use of close up serves to direct the face of the audience to where the director believes we should be led.   But the banality of – shot – reaction –  shot – leaves the film bereft of edge and inventiveness. 
 
The plot itself is a vehicle crippled by inconstancies and implausibility’s.  Some of these highlight the discrepant elements in the film, the mythic subsumed by the realist,that conspire to work against each other.  For instance when Jackie emerges from one visit to  the high rise she goes to catch her bus back home.  As she climbs aboard to pay the driver she realises that she has lost her purse.  She fumbles in bag and pockets and realising she hasn’t the money to pay for her ticket asks to be carried for free.  At this point the film loses its plot.   The loss of her purse is glossed over by Jackie, who reacts to the event by ignoring its significance.  A purse isn’t just any personal appurtenance. It is the most deeply personal, containing the core of identity being and sexuality.  When you return from  the troll’s den and discover that you’ve left your purse behind this is an event that changes everything that puts something within you at risk. To dismiss the loss as an unfortunate accident is  a sign that in service to the demands and machinations of the script, you have left your film behind.  And perhaps your soul.   The only function of the incident is to set up later sequences in the film.
 
Red Road feels like a film that is constantly falling between stools, wanting to have everything all ways.  It wants to be a little bit mythic in its story but it mostly wants to be realist.  A sort of mixture of Cocteau and Ken Loach.  It wants its heroine finally to be a good woman and do the right thing; it wants its villain to be ultimately a good man.  Everyone in the end is good and does the right thing.   Red Road ends up like bland TV programme trying to please everyone.  Somewhere withinin the genesis of the film  is a strong idea seeking expression that is never realised.
adrin neatrour  –  adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk