Adrin Neatrour

Zatoichi – Takashi Kitano – Japan 2003 Zatoichi – Takashi Kitano – Japan 2003
Takashi’s film starts where it should have finished with Takashi remembering that what film does best is movement: shifting consciousness across many levels of perception through movement.
Zatoichi closes with an unabashed rhythmic celebration of the film itself. A hip hop Hollywood dance routine that’s full of life and movement as the caste insinuate themselves into the choreography and we see everyone, the good the bad and the ugly, let rip in the music. In comparison the rest of the film is static. As actor/director Zatoichi is Takashi’s homage to Kabuki – Japanese popular theatre in which stock characters wearing heavy make-up and mask mix theatrical overstatement with rude farce and melodrama. Kabuki tells traditional stories told in a specific theatrical tradition and mode – different to but not dissimilar from pantomime. Film homage always risks dieing on its feet. Something to do with film and formal respect being a potentially ponderous combination. And in Zatoichi the Kabuki theatric form isn’t really shifted or structurally unravelled. There is immobility at the centre of the movie. The framing of the action, the shot-reaction shot sequences, the tracks and cranes are all heavy handed. The camera is not looking for anything. Its dead. the boundaries and interstitial zones marking potential areas of development and concern are unexplored. Except.

Except for some brief almost glossed over sequences in Zatoichi where the camera looks at peasants as they work the fields and then prepare for what looks like some sort of fertility festival(large life sized corn dollies in evidence). In these truncated moments we glimpse the possibility of a film energised by rhythms and tempos of the earth. But these trail off to become no more than cinematic gesture.
In Zatoichi what we have is a deadened outer theatrical form which gives us the retinal layered theatric experience of watching: actors playing yakuza gangsters in kimonos and dressing gowns(fancy dress) – some of them engagingly bald – hacking each other to death at regular interludes to gratify the needs of a revenge driven back story. It’s regurgitated reimported spaghetti Western with a catch all fake set which in long shot (except for the bridge which is quintessentially Japanese) suggests the plywood back lots of Hollywood Western.
If it wasn’t for the detail that this was Takashi’s film I would let it pass as not my kind of movie. But coming out of a director who has demonstrated flare sensibility and insight into the potential of filmic forms, Zatoichi needed further thought.
Even on its own terms the oppositions that it set in place are not interesting in themselves. The blind man who ‘sees’ everything is not interesting as it deprives him of his nature de-natures him. And the boy who chooses to be a geisha and the old gang boss who poses as a pot boy(usual suspect) are simply formal requisites of the narrative, purely mechanical theatric devices and treated as such.
Although Takashi as the blind warrior masseur has a winsome charm of a smile and the camera likes him and his haircut(well so it should) the character is caught in a major dilemma. Unlike – Clint Eastwood films for instance – Zatoichi can’t do eyes, because the character is blind. As the film fails to locate any affective replacement for the eye, the film’s protagonist mechanically dissolves as the film progresses – interest in him dissipates. And the idea of playing the blind man by having his eyes closed doesn’t work: the theatrical ‘play’ inherent in this idea allows does not compensate for its lack of filmic conceit.
Coming out of the film left me with the thought that Takashi needs to improve his massage technique. The massage he gives to the woman in the film was as unconvincing as his ability to massage the life out of costumes.
Zatoichi will probably make the money but leaves me wondering if this was the driving reason behind the film. adrin neatrour – 21 March 2004.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie – John Cassavetes USA – 1976 – Ben Gazzara

Viewed Side Cinema 27 November 2005 Ticket price £3-50
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie – John Cassavetes USA – 1976 – Ben Gazzara
Viewed Side Cinema 27 November 2005  Ticket price £3-50
 
From the death of a salesman to the killing of a chinese bookie it’s all a blur….
America’s trip to the theatre of the absurd.
 
John Cassavetes(JC) did not make films because he was paid to do it.  He wasn’t  making films with that sort of arrangement.  The reverse is true – he paid to make his films even if they cost him everything and he had no illusions about the likelihood of them ever making money.  His films represent a pure form of output rare in cinema and he is amongst a small group of film makers each of whose films answer to a specific intent.  Each film that is made by JC has its point.
 
The killing of a Chinese bookie is an extraordinary film in which JC has a complete grasp of  his chosen genre and filmic form and a certainty as to how to subvert the conventions that he has adapted as his expressive vehicle.
 
The genre that JC chooses (fronted with a stunning performance by Ben Gazzara as Cosmo Vitelli) is the gangster movie.  Certainly after Coppola has had done with it the gangster genre in US cinema  becomes a little more than parody, a mechanical exercise in visual cliché and violence allowing lazy directors to lay claim to all sorts of spurious meaning in their output.
 
JC plays the gangster genre as a spoof to undermine itself.  But JC moves beyond this re-active impulse to make use of the genre and the material it releases as a means of pointing straight at the soft underbelly of the American dream. From the Nixon presidency onwards America was transforming itself into the theatre of the absurd, a grotesque Ubuesque spectacle.  And who now gazing on the spectacle of the US led invasion of Iraq would not acknowledge that JC as a seer saw it right?  JC film maker of the absurd has moved from Salesman Willie Lomax to Night Club owner Cosmo Vitelli, from the pathos of the Salesman to the bathos of Cosmo.  Where once the American dream was to sell dreams now the American dream is to consume the dream.  The Dream becomes a Dream of dreaming and we are lost in the Dream and the Dream loses us. 
 
 In the world of the ‘absurd’ from the players point of view nothing is unusual or wrong.  Everything seems quite natural and as it should be.  In the world of the absurd the players accept the rules and connections of absurdity as a given condition – they are not aware of any other possible world.  Even in the trapped world Arthur Miller creates for Willie Lomax his salesman has some level of self-insight some degree of awareness; Cosmo Vitelli the night club owner(the night club is always called ‘the joint’; ‘I’m the owner of this joint’ – sic) has nothing neither insight nor self awareness.  Cosmo lives the blur.  He lives out a fantasies from the world of movies and popular song which he projects onto his club.  He lives out the disconnections of his existence as if they were connected. Ultimately it doesn’t matter because so does everyone else: the US has become a culture of the absurd without real connection between cause and effect; the connections are all projections of the banality of wish fulfillment.
 
The heart, the very core of the film is the night club with its floor show.  The film revolves around the fantasy of this modern expression of Utopia.  An interior world of the night dedicated to escape – and for your delight and delectation a show with beautiful girls and an ugly performing MC (Hollywood Fosse recipe)   In the central sequence of the night club,  the floor show  Mr Sophistication, the MC performs a version of  ‘I can’t give you anything but love…’ whilst the showgirls dance against the backcloth of an exotic location and posture like string puppets and flash titty.  The floor show is terrible.  Its unbelievably very bad.  Not just tatty or just tacky but lousy. Its a poorly performed and executed. It is a mechanically contrived hand-me-down facsimile of whatever it is it’s supposed to be modeled on.(Caberet?)  As is, in fact, the actual reality in this type of  ‘joint’.   Cassavetes doesn’t give it the Hollywood pazazz make-over.   And in the film nobody notices: neither Cosmo, nor the performers not the audience.  The show girls dress and pose with the conventional outward trappings of an accessible sexuality.  The high cut of the costumes and linear demarcation of the tights and boots draws the gaze of the eye to their cunts and tits and with the eye in thrall to the conventions of available sex, audience projection does the rest.  The reality is:  Mr Sophistication is dead: the girls are dead and asexual: it’s a floor show for zombies by zombies.  Cosmo’s dream is that he believes he has created something that gives something a glimpse of happiness to people’s lives.  The reality is he gives the audience death, and of course he gives the Chinese Bookie death.  It is all he has to give.  The floor show bleeds over life in the same way as Cosmo’s wound bleeds over his white shirt.
 
In the last long sequence of the film(before the final shot where Cosmo exits the club to stand out in the street) we see and hear Mr Sophistication sing what  becomes the films leitmotif  ‘I can’t give you anything but love baby…’ The way it is sung and delivered and filmed the song feels more like, ‘I can’t give you anything but death baby…’ The audience love it.  The floor show is central to the movie because it highlights the confusion between reality fantasy and filmic projection that is becoming essential to understanding America.  A country that has lost the ability to distinguish life and death.     
 
Emotionally from his guts JC believed in the close up – in the big close up.  The face for instance: that the face is the affect per excellence through which every thing can be expressed – not specifically about individuals but about their milieu and their culture.  Faces for JC are not interesting if they are only an individualised melodramatic affect: to be interesting faces for JC have to move into the realm of cultural currency or universalism.
 
In Chinese Bookie although the close up of the face or faces is still an important as part of the filmic language, the close up shot of face loses the explosive intensity it accumulates in earlier films.  The filmic articulation of the absurd is interaction of the blur with the long shot.  The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a blur. A big close up of the blur.   The film is shot – not every shot of course – as a blur of reality.   Characteristic shots are pans across the midriffs of the club performers, shots into the lights, shots out of focus.  Life as a blur.  Cassavetes fills his frames – particularly the club sequences as an inert gaseous blur: the frames possess none of the latent explosive volatility of Faces or Shadows.  But out of the gaseous core of the movie, out of the blurred hazy atmosphere of the joint, comes a  hallucinogenic clarity, life as a dream. Even the Chinese Bookie as he looks directly at Cosmo at the moment before he is shot looks as he thinks what is happening is unreal.
 
In The killing of the Chinese Bookie the series of sequences that comprise the Cosmo’s quest to kill the bookie, have a dream like quality – perhaps it is a dream of sorts. The instructions he is given by the gangsters are absurd, as if ripped from a demented fairy tale. Item: Cosmo abandons his stalled car in the middle of a freeway, then turns back remembering something. He walks across back across the busy murderous freeway to the car in order to leave the bonnet up and open which the conventional manner of marking a vehicle as broken down.  Image:  The car now sits in the outer lane of the freeway with its bonnet up cars hurtling past it narrowly avoiding collision with it at the last moment.  But all is well.  Its bonnet is up.  Cosmo is in a dream world.  Whilst waiting for the cab that he has ordered to drive him to the house of the Chinese Bookie, he calls his club to find out how the floor show is going.  The problem is that the barman who he calls who has worked at the club for 9 years has never noticed there is a floor show in the club.  Cosmo finds the conversation strange. It is his hallucination.
 
With the Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Cassavetes combines form structure and content to describe the USA.  JC creates an enclosed world comprising of interior space.  Exteriors have become either passage ways to different structures or parking lots mere adjuncts to buildings.  Interior spaces define the horizon and contours of this world, spaces that are essentially plastic and like the night club can be molded  or reformulated to fit any current fantasy.  The natural world, the world of the American range have been forgotten.  The exterior world has receded: once on the sound track we hear a news bulletin about Israel’s foreign secretary tinkling in the background like something that must have been imagined.
adrin neatrour 30 November 2005
adrinuk@ yahoo.co,uk

Shock Corridor – Written Dir Prod Sam Fuller 1963 –

Peter Breck, Constance Towers.
Viewed on 16mm print at Side Cinema, Newcastle June 6 2004 by Adrin NeatrourShock Corridor – Written Dir Prod Sam Fuller 1963 –
Peter Breck, Constance Towers.
Viewed on 16mm print at Side Cinema, Newcastle June 6 2004 by Adrin Neatrour
The overt story here is that a newspaper reporter – Peter Breck – goes undercover into a mental hospital to find out who murdered man called Sloan who had been a patient in the hospital. The purpose of the reporter’s quest is to win ‘the Prize’. In Shock Corridor the Prize is not ‘an apple from the tree of life’ or ‘water from the well of youth’, but ‘the Pullizter’ America’s most prestigious award for outstanding investigative jounalism. The story from its opening fake psychiatric session, in which Breck is being coached by a psychiatrist friend to play the part of an incestuou s brother who is fixated at an early age on his sister’s ‘braids ‘ (Goldilocks), has a distorted mythic/fairy tale like structure – the architypal quest. Donning the mantel of insanity the reporter has to pass into and through the rings of hell in order that he may return to claim his Prize. The trophy he covets is public acclaim and recognition of himself as hero. Breck is a loner in the Hollywood tradition of the individual driven to achieve his goal but caste by Fuller into the quasi mythic realm of fairytale the story is given a psychic twist that jolts it into dimension that undermines its Hollywood format. The film is a journey into the madness of America, a Dantesque descent. A film in which America is a lunatic asylum in which the victims of communist witch hunts, race and the military industrial interests are opponents of social mechanisms that conspire to destroy their minds. However its most powerful visual component is the specific use made of superimpositions of the ‘Beatrice image’ in the form of Cathy, Breck’s girl friend who poses as his sister. As Breck lies on his hospital cot at night his demon conjures the presence of Cathy beside him and the sequences are burnt through with a radioactive element of incestuous eroticism. The pretext for Breck’s forced hospitalisation is the claim by his girlfriend Cathy that she is his sister and that he has incestuous designs on her. Cathy -the sister/ girl friend stripper, madonna/ whore role is played out with high octane carnal charge by Constance Towers. In Breck’s dreams she appears in superimposition hot and close to his body. Her image in these sequences is suspended in space and time and like x-rays burn into Brecks consciousness brazenly flaunting the sexual contradictions of a culture that has two dominant female roles – virgin and slut. A culture which not only expects women to perform both parts in the appropriate setting, but which in the filmic world of the American male imagination has no other roles for women. Certainly Fuller’s depiction of Breck’s splitting male ego, is as a schizoid response to these inherent contradictions, the double bind Breck experiences in trying to contain these two polar ideas within the persona of Cathy. The end result of the process for Breck is violence and catatonia – total emotive investment (confusion of you/me) followed by complete emotional withdrawal(total immobility). Fuller in his powerful use of erogenous superimposition points directly to the decontextualised nature of the female and the price paid for this process. As Breck moves through the rings of hell he encounters America as machine that destroys its finest minds at the point where they experience the contradictions which like fault lines lie just beneath the surface of this society. The inherent tensions between phantom recognition of equality and engrained racial oppression, between the coercive military imperative to build an empire of death and the individual conscience, between state certainty of its invincablility and individual confusion. These inherent and multiplying oppositions between the ideal and the actual create chasms of insanity into which those unable to internally resolve the flow of contradictions, disappear. The most brilliant sequence depicting this process is the ‘race riot’. In this section the hospitalised young black civil rights champion takes on the mask of a Klu Klux Klan leader and incites the inmates into a lynching mob against the only other black patient. Introducing this sequence are a number of archive/ documentary shots of what I think was a New Guinea village. The figures in this sequence are dressed in their extraordinary constumes and as a presage of what is to come act as prefatory images to the lynching sequence giving context to situations in which peoples are both broken up in and by space and time and exist eternally through time in memory. People who have lost everything can still remember what they once were. Even shards of reliquary documentary footage have this power. Breck’s descent into the circles of madness is motivated solely by the prospect of attaining his pure self ordained intrumental ends. A fairy tale architype terminally distorted by Hollywood scripting: the enthronement of the individual success. Breck is fixated on finding out who murdered Sloan – who Sloan was matters not; all that is important to Breck is the instrument of his death. Breck’s fixation on his own personal desire to get the Prize, leads him to purely exploitative relationships with his respondents. The inmates only exist to supply him with the leads that he needs to take him to Sloan who takes him to ‘the Prize’. Overwhelmed by his desire he cannot hear their voices. He is deaf to their real story told in their real voice as his cynically manoeuvres and manipulates the patients to get the information that he needs. Uninterested in what they tell him he leaves them who desperately need voice, without voice. Finally having squeezed them for facts he abandons them ever more deeply embedded in their schizoid states than when he first encounters them. Betrayed. For Breck the final sum of the totality of contradictions and betrayals experienced within the insane asylum is the loss of his own voice. He who uncoupled the stories of the voices that spoke to him from what he wanted to hear (in the tradition of poetic justice) pays physically with the price of his own voice. The detachment of the means of expression from the actuality experienced conducts Breck into a state of muteness. As the doctor of charge of the hospital says: “ It’s tragic: he’s the first Pullitzer Prize winner who’s a schizophrenic mute.” At the heart of the film lies a deluge of truly Biblical proportion as Breck hallucinates that the asylum has been overwhelmed by the realm of water: a realm that at once cleanses and is a reminder not to forget. The section is fine piece of film, it succeeds in having the intensity of eschatological prophecy, it feels like the end of the world. The sequence is suberbly shot and crafted using post production superimposition of lightening to direct Olympian bells and bolts intimately and directly at the crazed Breck. The use of supereimposition of lightening with an erotically charged personal intensity mirrors the earlier images of Cathy, in fact they are like the return of the female furies, conjured by Breck, who after driving him insane with their body now return in the form of pure electrical presence to turn his body to immobile stone. This Flood in total seems to be part of the deeper circuity of the film that channels the film into phases of forgetting and remembering, remembering and forgetting, forgetting to remember and remembering to forget. The characters forget and remember what has happened to them, they forget and remember who and what they are. Shock Corridor seems to have as the primal charge coursing through its circuitry the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence. All this remembering and forgetting all these cosmic reminders are the destiny of the damned forever to repeat the experience of history. Shock Corridor is framed within its opening and closing shots. The film opens with a caption on which is written a quote from Euripides: “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” The film closes with a caption on which is written a quote from Euripides: “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” Adrin Neatrour June2004

Kuhle Wampe – 1932 Germany directed Slaten Dudow script by B. Brecht.

Score Hanns Eisler

Hertha Thiele as Anni

Side Cinema – 1 2 04 Kuhle Wampe – 1932 Germany directed Slaten Dudow script by B. Brecht.
Score Hanns Eisler
Hertha Thiele as Anni
Side Cinema – 1 2 04
The last shot of the film remained with me long after the lights came up. And I mean the end of the film, not of the polemic drama. Because Kuhle Wampe was a film with two creative impulses pushing through it. Although Brecht and Dudow achieve congress as collaborators, you can see which of them is in the driving seat at any point of the film, in which dialogue and image work in counterpoint.
So to return to the ending ……..there is long and played out but amusing piece of theatre that takes place on the U-train in which the riders react to a news item read out by one of the passengers about the thousands of tons of coffee that has been destroyed in Brazil. On the train common man and woman react with the intellectual tools at their disposal – common sense, bigotry, bewilderment and the arithmetic of poverty. Also on the train, the young communists, returning from their week-end jamboree, are savvy to the algebraic formulae of world commodity markets. They understand and can explain that scarcity is a product of the market.
This cleverly penned scene with small groups of passengers talking arguing swopping insights about coffee is fundamentally theatrical in composition and orchestration. Conceptually its built up like a piece of music, a cannon or a fugue: no one individual dominates and the different sub groups build on and repeat with variations their points of view and ideas. There is some emotional input from the bigot, but emotion does not disrupt the balance of the section which works filmically because of its formal musical construction. We experience repeat sequence of characters to whom we return with variation. It is a successful piece of filmed theatre: the innate humour and intelligence of the writing shine out(as it does in the rest of the film) but the scene would sit equally well performed on stage.
The culmination of the sequence arrives when the question is asked: how things are ever going to change? (the question is no different today). The sequence cuts to a high key shot of Annie – the female protagonist(with a haircut that is pure Bauhaus) – who answers direct to camera with the polemic line: It will change because we will not accept it the way it is. The line immediately feels like the end of the drama – the dynamic switch to a full face close up, the line enunciating a concluding idea.
It is the end of Brechts drama. But it is not the end of the film. Slaten Dudow has the final sequence, the last image. From the close up of Anni, the film cuts to a subterranean tunnel, part of the U-Bahn. A long wide mouthed structure funnelling through shadows into darkness. From the camera side crowds file past into the tunnel: perhaps people who have just got off the train – old young well dressed poorly dressed, everyman all life, all Germany filing into the darkness.
All though the film, being on the hind side of history where all has been told, I am acutely conscious of the date and time, 1932, and the implications this has for how I see this film. Kuhle Wampe, a camp for the unemployed and dispossessed a benign proleptic image of the Nazi concentration camp. Such imagery of dispossession was perhaps familiar and vaguely comforting to Germans. But no where in the film is there any reference to the political situation in Germany. No reference that on the streets of Berlin extraordinary events are taking place. The Nazis, the Stromtroopers don’t exist. Perhaps it raised issues that were uncomfortable. Both Nazis and Communists made similar use of propaganda, youth organisations and rhetoric of the oppression and certainly the long sequences in the movie portraying the Communist Youth Organisation, the club, the sports rally and jamborie, had a frozen mechanical quality, which if different in detail from the organised Nazi youth activities, seem parallel in spirit. Neither the Hitler Jugend, the Hitler Band, nor Hitler and the Nazis appear or are or alluded to. Except in the last and final shot which silently wordlessly directs us towards this future which is endlessly streaming out of this present as the people get off the train.
The shot depicts people, perhaps the people who have just got off the U-bahn coming into shot from behind camera and moving past it to go down into a large wide dark tunnel. The shot is held for some considerable period. It is a shot in itself. It is not part of a sequence. A shot in and for itself that in concluding the film references it without specific sign. The people advance endlessly press forwards into the shadow (of the future). In ending his film in this way Dudow uses image to suggest fears emotions feelings for which Brecht lacked words. Perhaps Dudow, an outsider, a Bulgarian recently come Germany after studying in the USSR, knew that his film had to end not with the challenge of socialist polemic but on the vista of the uncertain. I don’t know how contemporary audiences understood this ending, but many in Germany were wired into the foreboding zeitgeist. The end of the film both presages the descent into darkness and death that came with the Third Reich. But also, in another key, this shot anticipates the development of post holocaust cinema with its abstracted locations its dislocation of time and its awareness of perception.

Last Days – Gus Van Sant – USA 2004: Michael Pitt

Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre 20 Sept 05; Ticket – £6-00Last Days – Gus Van Sant – USA 2004:  Michael Pitt
Viewed Tyneside Film Theatre 20 Sept 05; Ticket – £6-00
 
Do what thou wilt
 
In his last two films GVS has turned to myth as structural device.  In  both Elephant and Last Days there is no doubt as to what will happen.  It is mythically certain.  The point is our relation to and understanding of what we have experienced.
 
In these two films GVS is not only employing a mythic structure but also taking up the central mythic theme of death and reworking it in the context of America as a necropolis, the  new world of the dead.  In GVS’ vision of America it is not only people who die whether they be superstar deities or ordinary folk.   Something essential is dying:  the idea of America.  The America whose people are free to pursue happiness through the satiation of desire.   America the last Titan, as an autophage, consuming her own constitution in  which happiness is an object rather than a state of being.
 
Elephant and Last Days, are both observational in form.  GVS’ camera takes a definitive role in relation to the action on screen, present yet detached, playing the part of quasi historical observer like a Pliny the Younger witnessing the eruption of Mt Versuvius.  What we see is not explosion but implosion of a culture that has become a death centred.   Both films are characterised by camera tracks that have the stylised movement of an Egyptian funerary procession.  GVS uses these long tracks to follow the paths of the doomed young Americans.  In their pacing and deliberation the camera movement is like a remodeling of the tomb paintings and friezes in the Valley of the Kings, where the Egyptian golden ones, bearing their treasure, process towards their deaths.  Last Days  and Elephant are ‘descending’ films in style and intent.  They are constructed as long going downs into the earth.  Going downs that are orderly and controlled without melodrama or fake emotion,  going downs as a cultural observation.
 
GVS has centred his last two films around specific structures located in specific milieu.  We know ancient Egypt though its surviving monumental structures.  America too is observed through the portals of its architecture.  In as much as the structures of ancient Egypt, the Pyramids,  Karnak, the tombs of the Pharaohs directly communicate their obsession with the dead so GVS mediates the idea of the death of America through its contemporary vernacular architecture.
 
In ‘Elephant’ the victims have a sacrificial quality as if they were sleep walkers in some Nietschean parable where a mad man crashes into the school and cries out: “America is dead! America is dead!”  No one hears.  They are all walking towards oblivion.   The students don’t understand that the society whose culture they are assimilating died years ago. No one notices.  No questions are asked.  They continue as if nothing has happened.  Nothing can save them from being claimed by the forces unleashed.  In some respects they are like the faithful trusting slaves and retainers whose throats were slit before being entombed with their ancient kings and queens.  
 
GVS’ setting for ‘Elephant’ is the school, a building that has a sepulchral quality.  Set in a vast headstone suburb the school is white and bony, a structure that encloses its inhabitants and sends them on long mazy journeys.   Like  a catacomb it is a sealed enclosed world, a perfect medium for the unremarked entry of avenging angels.   The house in Last Days where the singer songwriter Blake(a character dedicated by GVS to the memory of Kurt Cobain) resides, is in itself a sepulchral peeling decaying edifice, harbouring an outhouse in the familiar shape of a Victorian mausoleum. 
 
Last Days is centred on this big house in the woods. As the desert is the setting for the Pyramids so the woods are the setting for the big house.  The natural world and the man made world exist as counter attractions for the human soul which becomes a virtual extension of the meaning embedded in these outer forms.  The woods are part of the natural world and in entering them personal history becomes insignificant, only the body is important.  In the woods there is the abrogation of individual destiny.  To go into the house is to accept individual destiny, a destiny that is bound to culture and history. 
 
The house in up state New York, which is the setting for Last Days, resembles one of those stone piles that are found everywhere in Scotland.  Comprising many rooms the houses are labyrinthine, riddled with stairwells and passages. Mostly they were built by wealthy industrial magnates to serve a lifestyle and culture now gone.  As with the monuments of Egypt, you can feel in these houses a permanently frozen way of life: the presence of the dead. Appropriately these buildings are usually very cold a phenomenon often mentioned by contemporary visitors to these houses in their hay day.  In Last Days although the house is cold there are no fires in any of the grates.  The only fire in Last Days is the bonfire Blake lights in the woods when it gets dark.
 
During the film I kept getting images of Alistair Crowley who owned one these Scottish piles called Baleskine situated by the edge of Loch Ness.  Crowley is part of the drifting subterranean current of American / Californian thought forms.  Crowley bought Baleskine in order to exploit its remote situation to further his ‘magik’,  magik that revolved about the idea of the Great Invocations and calling up of the spirit world in particular the Egyptian spirit of Horus.  His house like those Egyptian tombs with their multiple chambers became part of the world of the dead.
 
Crowley an interesting but bloated egotist was consumed by desires above all to be the greatest ‘ master mage’ of his generation.  But Crowley by his own account nearly had his brains and sanity blasted away as a result of an invocation ritual that went out of his control.  He was totally overwhelmed by what he had summoned and his inability to halt the process.  He wandered about for days in shock at what he had called up into his presence. 
 
There is something similar in the dazed existence of Blake.  Blake has called up something which overwhelms him:  the terrible forces latent in the idea of America.  Its as if GVS is suggesting that the desires that fed Blake’s ego and  drove him to his destiny as a rock stargod once satiated, assumed form of a terrifying  and manifest presence that tore his mind apart.  Unlike Crowley, Blake does not have the strength to take on these forces and physically survive.  Most people don’t  resist these types of demonic forces.   They permit the dark powers possession of their souls whilst indulging the delusion born of their pride that there will be no price to pay.   But the price to be paid for desire fulfilled is the human soul. And, ‘Do what thou wilt’,  was the motto of Crowley.
 
Last Days is an examination of the flip side of Faustian myth. What happens to the soul  unable to make the pact which is the everyday business of successful Americans?  Its premise is that a society dedicated to the pursuit of individual desire at any cost creates a culture of death and destruction to protect itself.  The obverse is that those who refuse or are unable to make this pact with the forces of success are either declared insane or driven to self annihilation.  This is the state of affairs in America.
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
28 Sept 2005

The Silence between two Thoughts – Babak Payami – Iran – 2003

The Other Cinema – London 12 June 04
The Silence between two Thoughts  – Babak  Payami – Iran – 2003
The Other Cinema – London 12 June 04
In Iran they imprison filmmakers for making films and censure and ban their films.  The mullahs confiscated the negative of Babak Payami’s film but he pieced it together from scraps and virtual slithers garnered from one light colour rushes tape and captured fragments.(I remember when the US abandoned their Iranian embassy in 1979 after the Islamic revolution the CIA station shredded all its secret files and the revolutionary guards spent 5 years reconstituting these shards of intelligence back to their complete and revealing substantial form)  Payami’s restored film in a battered and desaturated print shimmers through the projector an assertion of life over death,  voice over silence. 
Two thoughts – they can only be life and death.  The village has been overwhelmed by a regime, a curse of death which advances as a polyevaporative force sucking out the moisture from life,  leaching the water from the earth.  The camera becomes one with the relentless creep of this spreading dryness tracking and panning with the process of desiccation.
The village has been duped or tricked in to accepting the religious authority of a prophet called Hadji.  The belief system postpones the execution of a virgin so that she may first be deflowered and with hymen broken caste down to hell. The executioner, the film’s protagonist stays his hand.  “But where is it written ?” he asks of Hadji.   There is no answer. Only silence. Perhaps it is written in the sand.  The executioner becomes silence.  His brain is dried out by the aridity of a theology that can equates hymeneal blood with the blood that is death.   “…where is it written?   There is no reply.  He is turned to stone.  Like the crumbling walls and cracking surfaces. Dry and silenced.  Tongue tied.  No answer to the riddle of the virgin. Tongue tied.   He has no words to say no. He has no lines of escape.  When theological or ideological babble sequester the working of mind silence is the price that is paid.  In the dryness of the silence  death comes and leads the way forward through the half light into darkness.  The riddle of the virgin is necessary.    
As the film moves over the psychotic landscape from face to wall to earth the dryness lays over the village like a spell in a fairy tale.   Like the impenetrable vegetative growth that surrounds Sleeping Beauty.  The impenetrable babble of dried out theology covers everything.  This is a film of dust.  As with Marx and with fairy tales situations change because of they are unable to contain the forces of their own inherent contradictions.  It is possible to awake from the dream.  The numinous quality of water and women force open our eyes.  In their wild dance at the end of their pilgrimage the village women release a sweated energy which smashes the circuitry of dryness and takes possession of the film.  In the sequence after the dance of the women there is the moment of water.  A moment of magic which breaks the spell of dryness.  We awake from the spell.  The young virgin prisoner stands in front of a fathomless dark container of crystal clear water.  At this point only an action can destroy the silence not words.   Her hands break the surface of the water immersing completely combining with the fluid.  At once the curse is banished the weight lifted.  Too late for those trapped in silence.   Afterwards it is not possible to know if anything has changed, we cannot see that far but dryness has experienced the power of water to germinate and purify.  Adrin Neatrour 21 June 04

Lost In Translation – USA 2003 Written and Directed Sofia CoppolaA little way into Lost in Translation (LIT) as Bill Murray was going through his paces, he reminded me of an old news item I’d seen in the early ‘90’s. An item actually so long ago I can no longer remember if it was real or if I dreamt it. Whatever – in this memory George Bush senior is visiting China and is shown round a high tech factory. In wide shot, we see a picture of him as he enters a room full of Chinese technicians. As his Chinese hosts gesture and explain what’s happening, Bush peers out anxiously at the scene. In the close-up that follows the master shot we see his face clearly and that it divides into two expressive halves. In the lower section his lips are bared back into a rictus, a forced smile which suggests an attempt at the sort of expressive control demanded by convention and protocol, to show that he is engaged and interested in what he is looking at. But in the upper section of his face his eyes have this look of a threatened incomprehension. He doesn’t get what’s happening, he doesn’t understand all these funny little fellahs agitating around his knees. Or, perhaps old George was thinking of the ordeal that lies ahead in the evening to come. The 39 course Chinese banquet where he will have to ingest matter that possesses few of the qualities that Americans normally associate with food. Food that can choke you.
As with George Bush so with Bill Murray, LIT is a litmus paper from Hollywood marking the psychic chemistry underlying the basis of US foreign policy. Aggressive incomprehension. OK some people need no introduction or reminder of this psychic reality but it is worth pausing to think about the nature of the writer director of LIT, Sofia(wisdom-sic)Coppola. As evidenced here her work is representative of the experience and ambitions of a totally assimilated ‘second generation’ American. Her father’s films drew on his innate cultural experience and still had a residual italianate character. Daddy’s films, Hollywood in form, were invested with and exploited Italian American cultural experience. By the time we get to Sofia, this world hjas slipped off the map. Even in its superficial trappings, it is abandoned territory. With Sofia the new sensibility is of the shopping mall and the hotel room. Her film, and as writer director of LIT it is her film, gazes upon a world which she can shoot, she can buy sell and possess momentarily but which otherwise interests her very little.
At heart LIT is a travelogue tricked out with a couple of running gags. Gags such as – hey! Japan is weird – and we keep having this bunch of stuff happen – like its really funny you know – the thing is the japs – how d’ya know what’s going on – in their heads – you know. The second gag revolves round the portals of communication from home: like – like Bill – keeps getting these calls and fax right up his ass – stuff from his wife – like he can’t relate to it – in this weird Tokyo shit just doesn’t make any sense.
Intentioned or not the film depicts the brutal banality underlying US relations with other cultures. Minds brainwashed by suburban monogamy and homogeneity the American psyche is unable to comprehend the other. Unless strangeness is artfully arranged( Like flowers -hey the Japs are into that stuff) to accommodate their gaze the American feels trapped in a menacing and threatening environment. The response of LIT to ‘this other’ is at two levels.
At the level at which the film itself was conceived, the script written and developed, shot and edited – the response of LIT in structure and form is to target the Japs and the Jap culture as the butt of the joke. Deterritorialised within the vehicular language of Hollywood film scripting, the Japanese and their culture are characatured and ridiculed as being rigid frantic and utterly bizarre like Monte Python TV. The internal response contained within the film is that the two characters Bill and Scarlet(I’m sticking with their real names) being sensitive souls, in the face of this otherness, retreat to the sanctity and sanity of the hotel/asylum. They hide in the ensuite bedrooms and the American bar where they find comfort amidst the familiar and reassuring trappings of American corporate culture – a cultural milieu in which I suspect Sofia also finds comfort in times of stress.
In this comfort zone you can watch goofy Jap TV to confirm how right you are to be where you are. In the hotel room, Scarlet and Bill find each other and in each others company address some of life’s problems. Strange to note that as we watched Bill (or was it Scarlet?) channel hop the TV a scene from La Dolce Vita appears on channel and we see Anita Eckberg and a cat on screen. So Sofia has been to the video store or maybe raided Dad’s video collection to check out Italian neo-realism. Is this some sort of acknowledgement of LIT’s pedigree, a nod to the masters – a statement of her ambition?
Then I wondered if she had also checked out French new wave. A disconcerting thought occurred to me as I pondered other potential intellectual markers. I wondered if somewhere in the conceptual bowels of Lost In Translation there lurked Sofia’s attempt at an homage to Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour? A frisson of anticipation took hold of me when Scarlet got on a train to leave Tokyo during a travelogue section of the film. I wondered where she was going. Is she going to Hiroshima? So she and Bill can talk about important things back in the hotel room? To my relief Sofia wisely avoided sending her protagonist to Hiroshima. Sofia settled for sending her to the safety of Kyoto where Scarlet indulges some harmless Temple watching and spies a coffee-table wedding of a beautiful Japanese couple.
Actually Scarlet’s character even in terms of the films limited ambition to aim no higher than Bill’s amusingly receding hairline, is mildly disappointing. As a recently graduated philosophy student she is not allowed mention of a philosopher and confines herself to bobo questions to Bill relating to the great unknown – the American suburban marriage and its progress through time to the arrival of kids.
In sum LIT is a terrible movie but a dark parable. I don’t think anything is lost in translation its all there if you need any more dark Hollywood parables.
Adrin Neatrour Jan 2004

9 Songs – Michael Winterbottom – 2004 – UK – Keiran O’Brien – Margot Stilley

Tyneside Film Theatre 2 April 2005 – price £5-959 Songs – Michael Winterbottom – 2004 – UK – Keiran O’Brien – Margot Stilley
Tyneside Film Theatre 2 April 2005 – price £5-95
 
Performance as Dick-tat
 
During the opening sequence of 9 Songs a small plane flies over the icescape of  Antarctica – or what Keiran O’Brien in voice over claims is Antartica.  As the shadow of the plane travels across the ice Keiran O’Brien (KOB) says that: he will always remember her smell the texture the feel of her skin.  That’s what he says.   But a question raised by the film is who is KOB? Is he KOB himself or a character in a film?  Depending on the reply will he always remember the her smell and the feel of her skin; or will he actually remember the whir of the camera and Michael W and cameraman’s faces squeezed towards him as he fucks Margot Stilley(MS) or she fucks him.
 
9 Songs takes its form its from the intercutting of three sections:   9 Songs performed at the Brixton Academy(where KOB and MS meet each other): short sequences from ‘the Antarctic which permit KOB voiced geophilosophic musings on the nature world and of permanence of memory; and scenes from the relationship between MS and KOB.  The performances of bands such as Franz Ferdinand and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are not immediately problematic.  The depicted relationship of KOB and MS(which Winterbottom contrives as a chronological story voiced by the male, with a beginning a middle and an end) raises some issues.  This section is defined and expressed on film, mainly but not entirely, by scenes of supposedly unsimulated hard-on fucking and licking.  This is the heart of the film.  The performances of KOB and MS touch on issues central not just to the film but also to a critical socio-cultural movement away from the rigid lines that define the performed and actual – a line that Performance artists have always explored – but which the acting profession struggles to maintain. 
 
 Is there or is there not a line separating the frame of acting from the frame of the real? Have the times blown apart and away the distinctions between performance and actual so that the expressive plastic arts are celebrated on the plateau of the now.  For in these times there is only: now and then; in and out.  What will KOB and MS remember and take away from the experience – anything or nothing:  the memories of each others smells and intensities – apologies to each other – satisfaction at a job well done, the film in the can – resentments at Winterbottom?
 
The sex scenes were graphically and somatically real.  Perhaps prosthesis was used occasionally in the filming; but we are ‘told’ (and that’s important; though do film publicists never lie…?) the sex was for real and mostly it looked dripping and tumescent body parts –  sex organs which are connected to our strongest drives, emotions and increasingly self image. Or perhaps not?  Everyone’s different, actors and actresses no less anyone else.  Actors spend much time and expenditure of energy in faking emotionally charged drives and states: fear, remorse, sorrow, dispair, anger etc.   Actors train to develop an expressive range of  facial and bodily responses for displaying through simulation and mimicry these arousal’s.  Actors also develop skills for enacting (faking) physical acts – dying – being wounded – being tortured – panicking – and sex.  Psychic involvement with character allows the actor to explore the parameters and ranges of responses –  while always retaining expressive control needed for direction.  Actors sometimes seem to utilise a form of mild self hypnosis that allows complete identification with the part whilst in character, but enables this state to be shaken off quite quickly when role is dropped, set left and cues of everyday life re-introduced.  (most players move in and out of role with relative ease, but failure to master this knack can cause personal and career problems).  Why in this film did Winterbottom  demand that his actors perform actual sex, rather than ask them to fake simulate and act out the action?  This could have been done, but it would have been a different film with a different point. 
 
The point about ‘acting’ is(was?) not to engage in real physical acts because real acts may have real physical consequences.  The traditional trick is to make the emotional experience  real  because engagement with feelings is through psychological mechanisms and triggers( as well as the whole mis-en-scene) Actions involving potentially fateful engagement with others are traditionally all simulations: fights – injuries – murders – slaps – full kissing – sex.  You do have a physical theater of the body based on dance, gymnastics, acts and feats of strength stamina and endurance.  But in the case of physical theatre there is the absolute injunction to take care – of yourself and the other.  The ethos of acting has been to fake action using mime skilled simulation use of prostheses and careful rehersal etc.  It is based on a notion that if there was a real engagement of the body, if the slap to the face was real, if the cut and blood drawn were real, the line would be crossed and actors would no longer be having to deal with a fabricated scenario but an event with real consequences for them and acting relationships; the cost would also be unpredictable loss of expressive control which the contriving machine – the camera or theatre was attempting to impose. 
 
The trends in public entertainment have mostly been to move away from the traditional  boundary  lines of acting on stage or the film set.  The movement is towards creating new machines where manipulation and exploitation of the real, of the visceral can be presented as entertainment with actual consequences.   Reality TV as a sort of Roman circus where there is expectation that participants will experience ‘real stress’ ‘real pain’ not the acted out faked stuff in a bottle of theatrical make up.  The line mapping the border between the real and faked is blurred and crossed.  Participants are subjected to both psychological and physical stress in a manner in which the authenticity of  reaction is ensured.   
 
The blurring between doing and being has long been the working assumption of both the pornography industry and the sado masochistic industry.  Both these expressive industries(including snuff movies) have progressively edged into mainstream media in the form of girly mags like Cosmopolitan and the Male laddish press.   Sex in the porntrade is not performance art – the players in pornographic films simply put in their days at the office, projecting  themselves into doing sex. Most of these performers stake little claim to thespian status: their cocks tits and orifaces are the business and the stars of the system are supposed know how to look after themselves physically and psychologically. (Though exploitation is rife and the industry has serious casualties).  The sex performers whether on stage screen or behind the curtains of the brothel may use mechanisms of distance and deterritorialisation from their working bodies.  These are shizoid psychic shifts of conscousness(sometimes anaesthetizing) that in themselves do not involve acting skills .
 
In some respects the acting profession has also incorporated trends from these marginal zones.  This blurring – merging  – this lack of discontinuities – between being and doing.  Actors are increasingly pressured (by society? By producers and directors?) to become their roles.  It’s what we come to expect.  An actress works as a waitress to prepare herself for a role, which in itself is more important than scenario or text.  But it’s not just an issue acquiring a mind set or gestural vocabulary: there are also demands that the body must be prepared.  Christian Bale to become the Mechanic(“ Total Film”) undertakes a three month ordeal of starvation to reduce weight and find the character.   The body becomes the central spectacle for our gaze.  We are back to the circus where the spectacle is at the centre of the arena.  Discontinuities.  What special preparations,  exercises did KOB and MS undertake to ready themselves for 9 Songs?
 
 This is what 9 Songs points to.  The inexorable movement in entertainment towards the exploitation of the actual.  Perhaps its corollary is inexorable movement in the other direction in film, towards the exploitation of the virtual, in that digital technologies are taking over huge swathes of the action images to the extent that it may soon be possible for films to star digital actors and actresses.  How interesting to see digital beings fuck?   9 Songs asks an ethical question at the core of the of the socioentertainment culture about whether distinctions between the forms of the faked and the real have any meaning for us.  And in this 9 Songs is a moral statement.  We are moving into an ethos where the issue is that for many audiences  the real has an overwhelming authenticity of effect.  And the image industry exists to fulfill the expectations of its audiences.  All those engaging in it will have to adapt to this transformation, that we are moving into a culture of discontinuities in which acted sequences will be replaced by the real with real consequences for the performers. How long before an actor(agreeing freely in his contract) agrees to be shot and killed as part of a sequence in a movie.  It’ll be real though it  won’t look any different from the faked. But we will be told its real.   This is the song that 9 Songs sings.
 
The film also calls attention to another interesting aspect of sociocultural experience and that is the nature of performance itself.  In 9 Songs music is performed; sex is performed; (a Voice Over snow is performed but this is an acted faked sequence; or is it?).  The music gigs and the sex have the same attributes in that they are real and presented as such.  But what is the connection between real performance and feeling?   There is no necessary connection: on tour, bands perform their songs every night and from their performance ellicit strong emotional reactions from audience(just like Hitler).  But the bands don’t actually have to feel anything.  In performance they can connect with their gestures and actions, they can surf the power unleashed and the reaction to the power unleashed.  As they actually make the music they perform it out but they don’t have to feel anything – even though the audience does.  Similarly with sex as performance.  Sex may be performed with great prowess, drawing on a knowledge and confidence both in your own body and in other bodies, but as sex  becomes performance so link to feeling becomes another discontinuity.  Cultures based on actual performance tend to deterritorialise emotional feeling.  Did KOB and MS have feelings when they fucked, or like porntrade stars did they adopt strategies of self alienation or whatever?  Having no access to states of mind obviously these sort of questions cannot be answered.  But at the end of 9 Songs the feeling that came through for me was one of emotional deadness and flatness(matching the male voice over – and why did Micheal W chose the male party to tell the story?)  Emotional deadness is a possible price for the uncoupling of action and feeling a process that is also part of the machine of mainstream culture production.
 
Adrin Neatrour  5 April 2005
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A History of Violence – David Cronenberg USA 2005 – Viggo MortensenA History of Violence – David Cronenberg  USA 2005 – Viggo Mortensen
 
Empty form
I think that David Cronenberg’s (DC) movie demonstrates – QED – the bankruptcy of the mainstream forms of Hollywood film making.  A History of Violence is built around a  back story that has been used many times before. It’s the story of the man -Tom – with the past – when he was called Joe – which comes back to haunt him. The film proceeds to fill out the machinations of the plot line with a series of graphically violent encounters as the protagonist Tom struggles to square his present reality with Joe, himself of yesteryear.  It’s not that either the idea or the story do not have interesting possibilities.  Rather it’s the way the film is structured round a series of violent set pieces that reduces the movie to the level of yet another parody.    A History of Violence is tricked out with a stylistic hyper real look with regular measured doses of sex and violence and has made box office.  But it is evidential testimony for the proposition that film based on narrative action image is now running on empty and that any attempt to make such films that do anything other than pander to the debased currency of entertainment is either the result of dishonesty or self deception.
 
The film is built up on a skeletal framework of five epically composed episodes of extreme violence connected by the narrative of the suburban man whose past is provoked into finding him.  This key idea is a Jackle and Hyde schizo story in reverse, with suburbia as a  drug induced state of catatonia,  that is only relieved by engaging in acts of violence.  Violence is the antidote that overcomes censorious inertia.   Violence is a suppressed mode of behaviour that stems from a state of mind characteristic of earlier consciousness.  America realised as a prepubescent repressive culture.
 
To highlight the shizo awakening DC employs his usual hyer-real stylised mis-en-scene.  The film looks like its shot on HD with separation of foreground and backgrounds suggesting dis-association.  This effect is reinforced by the set construction and of wide angle lens all working effect sense of distortion and proportion.  Complementing the settings the action adopts a highly stylised and graphically expressed representations of violence.   But for violence to work in this situation at any level beyond that of fantasy entertainment, the violence has to have some moral basis that grounds it within the fabric of the film.  But moral basis there is not.
 
In the violence DC renders in all the usual vivid heightened details such as: a knife driven right through a hand, a neck crushed under the heel of a shoe so that the jugular blood shoots out, brains slurping out of a shot blasted skull.  The overall effect is parody but even on its own terms within the movie the parody does not maintain a consistent moral line.  This is evidenced in the first sequence of the film which shows the aftermath of  the violent murderous robbery of a small motel by psychopathic killers.  Before the leaving the scene of the crime one of the hoods is surprised by a little girl.  The hood and the girl look at each other: we see the hood takes his gun aim and fire it from point blank range at the little girl. Cut.  We do not see the little girl. Unlike the other scenes of violence we do not see what the bullet from this gun does to her body: DC cuts and switches the action.  DC might say that he is working with a convention in which only ‘the badies’ get hurt.  But in which case why have the little girl in the script?  It is a moral failing that defines and typifies the film.  Graphic violence is central to A History of Violence: it is the very premise of its structure.   Throughout the film our retinas gaze on images of blood   mangled flesh and crumpled bodies.  Yet the most ‘shocking’ violence in the film is omitted.  DC pulls away from it.  He suddenly becomes reticent and shy as if he cannot allow himself to admit the full force of his own filmic logic.  The scene is suppressed; perhaps even unshot.  DC in making A History of Violence is caught up in the schizo contradictions of the culture as much as his subjects.  Lacking any moral stature the film becomes just another exercise in style another vacuous violent exploitation flic.   Empty parody without substance without life.  A film for the dead like the zombie gangsters that inhabit its frames, but collapsed and without meaning.
 
The last shots of the Stall family having diner together is perhaps the low point of the film. This sequence, in which wife and son know the truth about Tom/Joe is shot without dialogue.  We see the whole family eating around the table and cut to a series of close ups in which the faces reflect a sort of gross disturbance.   DC seems to say that the horror of the knowing of truth has permeated their bodies their spirit, and results in the affect of this realisation  streaming out of their sensory expressive organs.  The visual effect acheived by DC is as if the actors are pissing with their faces, or about to be sick.  As a coda it is at least in tune with the rest of the film: an overblown stylised affectation.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Hidden (Cache) Michael Haneke – France – 2005: Daniel Auteil; Juliette Binoche

Viewed 12 Feb 2006: Tyneside Cinema: Ticket price £6-00
Hidden (Cache)  Michael Haneke  – France – 2005:  Daniel Auteil; Juliette Binoche
Viewed 12 Feb 2006: Tyneside Cinema: Ticket price £6-00
 
It’s all in the frame……
Michael Haneka’s film is a forensic investigation beneath the skin of bourgeois life, a surgical incision into the hidden inner body that is history.   The thesis of the film is simple: the life of a wealthy bourgeois couple, Pierre and Anne, both working in the media, is disturbed after a nondescript video showing surveillance of their apartment, is anonymously sent to them. As the archetypal successful couple, Juliet Binoche and Daniel Auteil sleepwalk through a series of locations and situations in which events finally focus   attention back to the 1960’s and the personal consequences of the massacre of hundreds of Algerians by the riot police in Paris, during a peaceful demonstration for Algerian independence.
 
In effect, ‘Hidden’ is a mirror in which past present and future  become lucidly clear.  Haneka makes a pun out of  ‘time’  by using  the nature of video to fuse the past and the present. As the successful couple watch images of the past(surveillance of their flat)  colonise their present, they experience a growing sense of disconcertment and powerlessness. They feel increasing insecurity with the arrival of each tape whose implication one of them Pierre gradually understands.  The intrusion of the videos into their life, into the sanctuary of their home, is immediately perceived as an implied subjective menace.  It smashes their immunity from the middle class time machine in particular in relation to the future of their 12 year old son whose failure to return home from school one day unleashes venomous effects of their middle class insecurity.  But it is the idea of the bourgeois immunity from the effects of time which Haneke lovingly builds into the expressive features of his film – the camera placement and movement, the framing and the sets and settings. In its structure ‘Hidden’ becomes a metaphysical statement in which the ideas of luminance, mirror imaging and eternal recurrence are intrinsic to the action.
 
This is a film of interiors, interior states of mind and the interiors of buildings that are both reflections and  projections of those states of mind.  The interior of Pierre and Anne’s apartment is an envelope that contains them and their world.   The rooms – with the exception of the bedroom have a theatrical quality.  It’s space that yearns to be filled by gesture and ritual.  The kitchen, the TV area, the dining area, all assemblages of a taste spectrum, have a quality similar to that of church interiors.   Untouched by time these spaces yearn to be filled with the timeless ritual of bourgeois good manners and those outward markers of bourgeois identity, success and positive self presentation.  The TV area is wonderfully realised with a wide screen monitor set into the gargantuan book case(sic).  The visual effect is that of a baroque altar piece, with the TV taking the place of the tabernacle.  The TV is a portal through which the outside world is filtered in.  The outside world, which exists as a sort of permanently breaking present, is also a construct of power in which Pierre, as a TV celebrity, is complicit.   But this TV, this item of baroquerie, has its normal substantive function subverted by the tape sent to Pierre and Anne.  This tape is raw footage. It’s an unfiltered communication in which nothing in particular happens but in which the exterior of their apartment is depicted as if under surveillance in a mirror.  In present time Pierre and Anne watch the exterior of their apartment as it was in the past when some one was watching them.   Past and present conflate at the altar but the couple have no ritual for dealing with this situation.  They can only bring to it their angst and the state of mind bordering on panic that is the mark of the insecurity of those who are used to living in immunity from the consequences of time.  Fear. Pierre and Ana’s apartment is a reflection of the immunity that is the greatest of the privileges of the bourgeoisie.    The kitchen, the dining table, the study area, the TV altar are assemblages born of  a religious-like belief that time can be tamed by the knowledge of how to organise space and objects.  When this fails the theatre of time collapses and the naked impulses of aggressive and violent control are revealed beneath the surface.  The bedroom is the exception to the way in which space is depicted in ‘Hidden’.  The bedroom is dark in this bourgeois household, a place of sleep and sex.  It’s a  backstage area where the actors can leave the theatre of life and step out of their costumes and roles.  They can be themselves if there is any self to be.  In the encompassing darkness of the bedroom Pierre dissolves into a puddle of moral turpitude before the questioning of his wife about the death of Majid.  In the penultimate shot in the gloom of the bedroom he undresses and his body is without any covering.  It is a shock to see this man without clothes.  All through the film he has been covered less by his elegant casual clothes than by his denial of time. Then suddenly he is before us: naked.  For a moment no longer possessing the conceit of  individuality now an archetypal sinner seeking the forgetful embrace of sleep.  Pierre’s flesh  liquefies as he melts between the bed sheets seeking the narcotic of oblivion.    Seeking the escape from time. Like all of us.
 
Haneke’s camera watches his actors.  ‘Hidden’ is mainly filmed with long shots and simple camera movements.  Mostly the camera is still: there is movement through frame and where there is camera movement it is typically a pan(though there are some tracks).  The still distant camera and the simple pans, which build the story out of action in the shot, demand that the viewers become an audience.  If this were a Hollywood film, the shooting would be all tricksy weird angled shots(meaningless but visually arresting) tracking shots, point of view shots: all the usual camera stunts to heighten and intensify visual tension as a psychological state so the film would take on the character of the thriller.  But ‘Hidden’ is about watching and the audience are the watchers.  Their emotions are not wildly manipulated at every opportunity, pulled every which way in the course of the film: for the most part they are simply given the wide picture and allowed to construct out of the events the story that they see.   The simplicity of the framing also allows Haneke to work the film as an objective mirror and insinuate the idea and structure of time, past present and future, as it permeates the film, the sets, the TV, the video, the dream.  Time as expressed in ‘Hidden’ becomes an objectivity that the viewers can apprehend – not a subjectivity, the mere function of a state of mind or a point of view.
 
The framing of ‘Hidden’ is also critical to its expressive intent.   The luminance, the source and direction of  light in the framing of the shots in Hidden, layer into the film a metaphysical dimension.  The scenes comprise a mixture of artificial and natural light, but  for those scenes in which there is a natural source of light, it always feels that when Pierre in shot that he is occluding the light.  When Pierre is present he blocks the light.  He prevents the inflow of light, the streaming intensity of grace illuminating the point that he occupies.  In Bresson’s films characters are in light.  Pierre is a reagent turning light to darkness.  A black hole.   And in order that we may see this the more clearly, the framing of ‘Hidden’ is kept very clear and clean.  The shots are composed within uncluttered clean frame lines,  giving the film a mirror like quality and telling the viewer that one thing you see if you look in the mirror is yourself.  Unless you are tricksy and angle the plane of the glass away from yourself
 
The ‘hidden’ of the film’s title points to what lies beyond the mist of forgetfulness that shrouds the legacy of wealth that determines our way of life in the West.  The amoral haze, in particular in relation to the West’s colonial past, that defines our life styles, our personal relations, our structures of work and play, our architecture, our homes. This is a film about us.
 
The strength of Haneke’s film is that it is never polemic.  Theme is negotiated through the personal, through strips of action in which the connections between the forces that mould our responses and the way in which we react to events in our life are sketched out and finally connected to the direct issue of personal honesty.  As Majid’s son says to Pierre after Majid has committed suicide in Pierre’s presence, its about being able to look at yourself in the mirror with good conscience.  But Pierre doesn’t look in the mirror.  He chooses unconsciousness: takes a couple of pills.  When he wakes up it will probably be too late for him to remember.    But there are others who will not forget, even if they do forgive.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk