Adrin Neatrour

God’s Own Country Francis Lee (UK 2017) Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu

viewed Tyneside Cinema 5 Sept
2017; ticket £9.75

pot noodle country

Francis Lee has taken a couple of leaves
(and then some) out of the present day lexicon of film making cliches.

As in Park’s 2016 movie the
Handmaiden, so God’s Own Country is
bulked out with extended longueurs of body flesh shots. As in Park’s movie so in Lee’s the long sex
act sequences have little purpose other than permitting the camera and editor
to help the producer fulfill their durational contracts. Without use of critical intelligence cinema
reduces sex to a banality, a series of fabrications: faked gestures, faked grunts and whimpers, a carnality played
out to the camera as it creeps and crawls round the body and body parts, driven
at best by the illusion that the shots are transgressive, (which they are not)
and at worst by a plea for audience indulgence.

Lee’s film is also chocka full of
dreaded landscape cliches. These are much
loved by filmmakers such as Terrance Mallick and his myriad imitators who
evince the specious belief that landscape in itself means something. That by cutting to landscape you can invoke
for the audience a range of existential emotions that express the unsayable. This is of course a wonderful solution for
the feckless and lazy film maker who can order the camera to be pointed at a lone
tree on the moor, a cloud closed sky or a rough sea and hope they get away with
the suggestion of some deeper meaning. Time was when film makers filmed trains
entering tunnels at high speed as a metaphore for penetrative sex. (only Woody
Allan can get away with this type of thing)
Employing ‘scape shots have the same level of originality and the same misguided
opportunism; and also at this point only a Woody allen can get away with it.

Viewing God’s Own Country despite all
its sheep shots, the general level of the acting resembles a group of misplaced
thespians stuck out in a field and asked to improvise. Inevitable that the most
actors can achieve in such situations is a groping after stereotypes. Lee’s simulation of cold comfort farm, his
simulation of the stroke afflicted farmer,
his simulation of sex, never rise above the level of the mundane
mis-representation.

The script is wooden occassionally
and hilariously giving the the poor Gheorghe lines such as: “In my country spring is so beautiful.” There are other lines from the other actors
that match this level of banality. Perhaps because the actors are so insecure
in their Yorkie dialect, they often swallow mutter mangle their lines
incomprehensivly. It doeon’t matter: they
have nothing to say.

I
suppose that God’s Own Country is supposed to be a tale of the redemptive power
of gender identity honesty. The coming out and embracing your self’s sexuality. The trouble is that Lee’s film is simplistic
and smug and dull. God’s own Country is
to sex and relationships what Pot
Noddles are to food. And besides pissing
shots and sheeps backsides shots, there
are a lot of pot needles in this movie.
Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Detroit Kathryn
Bigelow (USA 2017) John Boyega,
Will Poulter,
Algee Smith.

viewed: Cineworld Newcastle 29 Aug 2017; ticket £4.00

White man’s games

Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Detroit’ is a movie whose background/narrative is built about the 1967 Detroit riots. Her movie starts with an intertitle text that gives a brief grounding resume about the situation, in the 1960’s, of Afro-Americans in Northern states of the USA. The text tells of the large migration of Southern Blacks to the North that took place before and after the First World War. They left the South to escape poverty discrimination and segregation, and to take up work in the rapidly expanding industrial and manufacturing economy of the Northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit. White unease with this migration caused a steady movement of white population to the suburbs and zonally segregated housing. The text concludes that with the rise in racial tension, ‘Change’ was ‘inevitable’.

What the text doesn’t quite say, but the movie to some extent does show, is that in the North Afro-Americans encountered a phantom segregation phantom discrimination that mirrored their previous experience in the South. But this phantom discrimination was unlike that in the South. In the North discrimination was/is never openly admitted or acknowledged. It’s the North’s dirty little secret, made most visible in policing: the use of City Police Departments to make sure the Black populations were kept in line by intimidation, that Blacks knew their place and were brutally reminded of their worth.

Bigelow’s Detroit sets out its stall with a text, albeit with a rather woolly socio-cultural statement, but one that at least gives the film an initial context. But after this opening, Bigelow’s movie becomes progressively decontextualized becoming a sequential series of genres, locating race problems within the realm of the move type. Detroit changes its concern and its focus as it slips out of the context of race into the comfort zone of familiar Hollywood audience fodder: the spectacle, the horror movie, the oppositional court room drama.

Bigelow’s camera structures her film from the conventional privileged theatrical mode, allowing her story to be told only through conventional narrative and editing means. But the pain of racial discrimination, in particular in relation to Afro- Americans, is something felt from a point of view, a point of view of those experiencing it. Bigelow’s scenario never allows her camera to take on point of view of the subjects, it simply trudges around capturing the action.

After the opening text the second section of the movie places the camera in the midst of the Detroit riots. The camera moves around to cover different areas of the riot action introducing both the white psychopathic local guardsman Krauss as he murders a black man by shooting him in the back, and to the members the Dynamics as their gig is cancelled because of the riots and they hole up in the Algiers hotel. The Detroit riots, sparked by a late night police raid on a Black party, are characterised by confusion and chaos. With the introduction of the riots, Bigelow in the manner of her filming moves off the focus on race, to shift the visual into the familiar Hollywood zone of spectacle. Even with Krauss’ murder at the heart of the riot section, the emphasis is on action covered from multiple locations, not on meaning.

The third section of the movie is set in the Algiers hotel and is a dramatization of notorious events that occurred in this location at the time of the riots.

A group of Guardsmen force entry into the Algiers Hotel where they believe a sniper may have taken shots at them. At this point Bigelow shifts her film firmly into the category of genre. ‘Detroit’ now turns into a certain class of horror movie. Whilst Bigelow and her script writer Mark Boal, may say that race (and sex black men with white women) is still the primary element in the incident, my feeling is that the mechanics of the theatre of cruelty take over and dominate the film at this point. The psychopathic Guardsman, Krauss uses his position of temporary but total power and domination to psychologically torture abuse physically assault and finally kill those in his power. Krauss is driven more by his own gratification than any other motivation. For Krauss race legitimates his actions but probably does not drive them. He might behave in a similar way to his wife. Movies in which a psychopath plays cruel games with people under his control a old Hollywood territory, familiar from gangster films and parodied by Tarantino.

The third section of the movie, in a court room setting with the alleged perpetrators of the Algiers Hotel murders on trial, is mechanical in the manner in which it is scripted and shot. A rerun of a thousand familiar filmed renderings of the Court Room drama. It reminds the viewer of Perry Mason, Man Called Ironside or perhaps more appositely Inherit the Wind or to Kill a Mocking Bird. In relation to these latter works Detroit lacks their intellectual focus and intensity. ‘Detroit’ as it switches to Court setting, simply remains in game genre mode. One in which we see the familiar site of lawyers bludgeoning witnesses, biased judges favouring one parties objections and the eventual outcome of innocence for the whites. Again Bigelow and Boal might say that race is the focus of the way in which this section is shot. But without point of view, shot simply as an oppositional court room drama it is the structural elements of the theatre that dominate, not the dilemma of race.

‘Detroit’ I think offers nothing to understanding of the playing out of race issues in the USA. Without being able to offer some sort of point of view, either of black or of white, the issue of race is reduced to simplistic cinematic formulae. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

City of Ghosts
Matthew Heineman (USA; 2017)

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 26 July 2017; ticket:£9.45

yes but who are the ghosts?

Heineman’s film is about the group of Raqaa citizens who after IS steamed into Raqqa set themselves to oppose the invaders and called themselves: Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently.

The IS slaughter in Raqqa is silent because IS carried through a policy of cutting off Raqqa from the outside world so that no word, or at least a few words as possible about what was happening there could reach the ears of the world.

City of Ghosts gives a coherent background to the IS entry and take over of the city. We are shown the initial protests and riots against Assad’s regimen, leading to a revolution and uprising against that corrupt regime that successfully expelled it from the city. Cue picture: the triumphant entry of IS into Raqqa and the institution of the IS regime, heralded by their ideological proclamations that it marked the beginnings of a new era in the history of the world: the age of the second caliphate.

This we see. What we don’t see is what happened in that interval of time between the expulsion of Assad and the entrance of IS. It is not addressed. It is glossed over. But there are some questions that might be raised. Did eminent or influential factions inside Raqqa invite the IS investment of the town? Or did IS just turn up and walk in, more or less unannounced? Did anyone in Raqqa understand the implications of IS investment of their city? These are ghost questions and they haunt Heienman’s movie as much as any ghosts that he intends to reference in his title.

We see, though perhaps a little incoherently, the consequences of IS cleansing and purifying Raqqa with the execution of those judged to either have resisted IS or not to have met the new standards of respect and behaviour now required in a city privileged to be the capital of final perfect expression of Islam.

Witnessing the turn of events, the occupation of Raqqa by a homicidal regime using systematic intimidation and summary execution to maintain their rule, a small group of mostly young politically naïve men become active resisters. Trained up in journalistic techniques by Naji, one of their number (later assasinated in Turkey by IS), they call themselves: Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS). Their objective was to tell the world what was happening in the city; and also using graffiti posters small zines let the occupying killers know that there is opposition.

It seems at first their opposition was although dangerous, relatively easy and reasonably successful. They were able to carry through many of their objectives. Of course to be caught would entail an inevitable sentence of torture and death by beheading. But as IS’s occupation tightened their resistance and getting the stories out of Raqqa became more difficult. Most of the original band as they were unmasked managed to escape. RBSS split into two groups: émigrés and internees, the latter a highly clandestine group probably organised either in very small cells or even as individuals. The émigrés, mostly based in Turkey and Germany were tasked with publicising the situation inside Raqqa to the media and on the web. The inside story of Raqqa was provided with ever greater difficulty by the small group of informants left behind in the city.

The émigrés are subject to severe personal pressures: depression and stress. Moving from safe house to house across Europe they face the daily threat of assassination by Isis. But also they have to live with their own absence from the city, the cumulative death of friends and family, both from IS and allied air strikes. They also have to deal with their own feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Both the actual (the threats by IS to kill them) and psychological difficulties the group face are recorded by Heineman. Their bravery, their resourcefulness, their resolve their determination all documented in Heineman’s film. And their courage is honoured.

The problem with City of Ghosts is that it has an empty centre. We see at the beginning of the film, the uprising against the Assad regime. We understand something about these initial forces set in play, even though as I intimated above there are unasked questions about IS ‘s take over of Raqqa. But from the moment that IS take over Raqqa, we understand very little. The movie is suddenly decontextualized , full of ghost entities.

We have the provocation of IS’s legitimation of murder and summary execution and the consequent determination by a small group to fight IS by proclamation of the truth about what was going on. But Heineman is unable to address the issue of IS themselves. The thread of the movie’s aetiology is exclusively tied to the indistinct film of the porn of the IS summary executions. Pertinent questions are not even addressed: who constituted IS, who were they, what were they doing, and how successful were they in carrying through their various social educational administrative programmes?

It seems strange that in Heineman’s film there is no indication of who IS were? From where were the fighters, judges, bureaucrats of Isis drawn? Were they mostly known citizens of Raqqa who were happy to buy their privileged survival with quisling service to the warped practice and tenets of IS? Were they foreigners, either from other parts of the Syria, or from wider areas? Did IS feel like gangsters who had taken over town? Or were there there perceptively different strata among IS? What were the impressions of IS by the people with whom they came into contact? Were some simple psychopaths and crazies, were some obviously devout Muslims, did any one see signs that some IS people might not embrace all of the brutality of the regime? What was the role of women? Did the city start to feel riddled with IS informers?

It seems amazing that a film originating in the heart of IS territory, its proclaimed capital, does not in any manner touch on something about the nature composition and organisation of the regime that oppressed them. Or is the truth too close to home? Are the real ghosts the collaborators?

What form did life in Raqqa take on after IS took over? Was there rationing, did IS requisition most food for themselves? Schools, medical services, shops, transport…how did they change through the occupation?

Heineman’s film in the end lacks any ambition to place his brave subjects in the context of IS in Raqqa. According to the Heineman’s logic in the film, RBSS organise their resistance about those terrible indistinct clips of people being executed in the Raqqa main square. But again the movie is unable or unwilling to give us information about these ghosts. One of them, a cousin of one of the RBSS group seems to be a victim, but as for the rest those seen in clips and those unseen, we are given no information. They are become objects.

Of course indiscriminate murder is a sufficient reason to oppose. But the feeling from Heineman is that these terrible mundane images of execution are enough to justify his film. The film can be legitimised about these images and the action of RBSS sufficiently explained. My feeling is is that Heineman’s failure to at least probe more deeply his respondents experience of IS in Raqqa, has as its consequence that it is IS that are the real ghosts of his movie.

And of course it is traumatically ironic that as the film is released Raqqa is being pulverised from land and air by the allies. Raqqa’s citizens are dieing in their hundreds under American and Russian bombs and Syrian Arms ordinance. They are still silent. A people with no voice, a people who are simply images for the 24 hour news channels. Objects as they are pulled out of rubble or lie in blood soaked field hospital cots waiting for a doctor. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

It Comes at Night Trey Edward Shults (USA 2017) Joel Egerton, Christopher Abbot, Carment Ejogo. Viewed Cineworld Newcastle 17 July 2017; ticket: £4.00

If you go into the woods…

Funnily enough the brutal front on barrage of cinema adverts before the movie,( representing forces of the known) felt like a preparation for Shults’ assault by forces of the unknown: the bank ad (Nat West) mobile phones, cars (VW and mini) all targeted right at the guts, contaminated me with desire and loathing before first frame of picture.

Shults’ movie ‘It Comes at Night’ in its very title suggests classic horror genre. ‘It’ and ‘Night’ reference a script and scenario in which there is a certain design aesthetic at work. A design in which, as Tom Stoppard writes, events play themselves out to a certain logical conclusion: namely one in which finally the point is reached where all who are marked out for death, die. And of course in this case that means: everyone. Every one of them dies.

It Comes at Night reminded me in its look and feel, in some respects, of the Blair Witch Project: but less clever in conception. Blair Witch also had the same tragic design and also used something of the same repetitive visual tropes as when the camera, from point of view of one of the characters, stares into the unyielding density of primal forest: we can see nothing but perceive only threat. The act of looking in itself yields an amplification of fear of the unseen and unknown. Something must be out there.

But whereas Blair Witch was about psychic resources that centre on sexual archetypes relating to the female anima, Shults’ film is an American Gothic experience. The opening shot a very big close up of ‘Dad’s’ face, hollowed out and yellowed in best tradition of Poe’s cadaver’s, is vivid and present presaging a film that is an immersive experience with a contmeporary psychic resonance. Where Blair Witch is cerebral in its affect, It Comes at Night is a goth installation that situates the viewer within the film.

The movie centres about the psychological state of paranoia. The state of exaggerated and uncontrollable fear that increasingly defines the USA of today. The USA as a polarised society where the imagined becomes real, where fear lurks at the perimeter of the sight lines. Where the best sight line is down the barrel of a gun.

It Comes at Night posits a world characterised by lethal pandemic. For survivors all aspects of the outside world are suspect or infectious: potentially lethal. The plot, such as it is, is minimal, a device for permitting a range of atmospheric effects and events to further absorb the viewer into the screen. The family ‘holed up’ in the house, somewhat implausibly (but it is a movie so that’s OK) invite another family to share their safe space. Exploiting a number of devices including classic ambiguous sequences (modern movies abound with these), shot and edited so as to resist viewer ability to frame them as either ‘real’ or ‘dream’, the two families, though starting with good intentions, lose trust in each other and become a source of anxiety, creating the very situation which they hoped to avoid.

Shot in high key and with low to ‘no’ lighting, It Comes at Night falls back on traditional horror technique to works its affects. The film’s effect and substance are structured out of camera movement and sound track. The camera continually tracking down and round dark corridors, through dense forest, panning across black space, focusing on the key anxiety object that is the access door with its lever handle. Each setting or event drummed out with scary electronic music and sudden stings from the sound track. “ You can’t trust anyone but family” intones the in-house ‘Daddy’.

With its stilted dialogue adding little to the series of visual and sound clichés that make up the film, It Comes at Night is a movie for the late night players and seems to have played well to a certain audience. This is interesting. Shults offers little in the way of originality or tension, but his film is a studied reminder of the psychic bleakness of an age dominated by a set of deranged tarot cards. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Baby Driver Edgar
Wright (2017; UK) Ansel Elgort; Kevin
Spacey.

Viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle 4 July 2017; ticket: £4.00

Mirror mirror on the wall who’s the fairest one of all…?

There is a certain type of film which in conception, script and scenario is made as a act of narcissistic homage to its audience. I think that Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver conforms to this type. The culture of ‘image’ demands outer representation of self. Life is now lived out as acts of personal projection as witnessed in: TV reality and quiz shows, music vids and the anger and sadness individuals (in the West at least) manifest in the 24/7 news shows in interviews as victim. Unless a situation is ‘imaged’ we don’t get it. Life has become the continuous performance of an acted out personal theatre.

Unfortunately this isn’t a personal everyday theatre of the absurd. It is theatre of banality that uses an outer conformed image to impress meaning into the everyday. Anger sadness and loss have to be accompanied by the appropriate exaggerated gestures mimicking the expressive range of stereotypes seen on film and TV. Enjoyment too; laughter and having fun have to be staged to produce for others the confirming image of what is happening. But in terms of today, most of all the prized image is the ‘cool’ projection, an enigmatic admix of presentation style control and detached involvement and knowingness. How cool the show. The way we run, walk, interact with others all have to display something for the other to see as ‘cool’.

And Baby is cool. He embodies in all his actions ‘the cool one’. All that Baby does embodies in enactment his cool image, endorsing for the audience the primacy of an acted out being in the world.

Live by image die by image.

As spectacle Baby Driver is a retread of video games like grand auto theft (but with much much better graphics) transposed as movie: got the chase got the music. The playing out of the automobile fetish as an extension of the adolescent male control fantasy, the psychic interlude between mom and destiny.

In some ways the spectacular in Baby Driver is not so much about Baby’s driving prowess or the rendering of his multiple manoeuvres involving impossible stunts close calls and near misses. Rather it is about the detached nature of Baby’s driving in which it as if he is not so much driving as writing poetry with the automobile. Perhaps not poetry but something close to poetry like mathematical equations, using his vehicle to create and sketch out a geometry crazy vectors. Baby is an artist using pure line. How cool is that! Wright’s action sequences have abstraction at their core. The parabolas and dazzling lines of Euclidean geometry are demonstrated by Baby as on road theorems. These sequences are more cerebral than visceral. An ultimate statement of ‘the cool’.

Wright’s replication of the game ethos precludes the creation of tension as to how the action will be experienced. Tension is not cool. Both Electronic Games and Baby Driver are deintensified productions because in a game if you crash you start again: there is a built in inconsequentiality. The object of playing is mastery of the game. A mastery best served by detachment. Wright in his movie engenders this same feel. As we view on the screen Baby’s play out of dazzling mechanics and scintillating patterns of the vectors and force lines, the problem posed for the movie is that of repetition. How do you top out each action sequence. Once patterns replicate and repeat, the wow factor pay off from each stunt for each new equation, declines rapidly, becoming a long flat tail of repetition. Of course most SFX action movies are tested out by this problem. Without a script idea, they fail.

Wright has set Baby Driver at the end of the cassette tape and beginning of the iPod era. The paradigm shift from analogue to digital. The analogue age was a time when there were still objects at which you could point. Such as money. It may now be impossible to set a bank heist centred script in the digital realm of today. Banks don’t have money, shops don’t have money, theft’s now virtual and viral.

The period setting aside, Baby Driver is interesting for what it says as a reflection of salient aspects of this digital age. Those stylised elements and features that characterise the new century’s modes and settings. One aspect that stands out in Baby Driver is the expression of deterritorialised individuality. Baby is an orphan. He is scripted as having a guardian whom he now in turn looks after. But Baby is essentially alone and he has had to carve out his own identity from the opportunities presented to him by culture and society. In this sense he resembles a super hero, or perhaps a new generation of AI super computers. He is like a product of extra social forces. His identity is not drawn from community or family or from a traditional repository of collective skills. Like a super hero or a computer, he simply materialises. Baby is suddenly there on the streets of the city with a set of fully developed talents with which to prove himself. It’s a statement of very contemporary fantasy.

Once the dream was to win the pools or to pull off the robbery of the century. The fall of chance or opportunity releasing you from the drudge of work. The fantasy now is to never have to experience work: no delayed gratification. Rather the dream now is that your own innate individuality is sufficient to itself in the world. All that is needed is for your individuality to be discovered by a TV reality show or on on line platform such a YouTube. To take or make the chance to show your talent to explode into the public consciousness and enter the door of life. Your individuality is your talent. The mirror, or the mirror like movie that is Baby Driver, reflects the image of you as an individual at the centre of the universe; just need your moment of opportunity and we can all be like ‘Baby’. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Der Mude Tod ( Destiny) Fritz Lang (1921; Germany; script by FL and Thea von
Harbou) Lil Dagover; Bernhard Goetze

viewed 11 June 2017 Tyneside Cinema; ticket:
£9.75

depth of tread

There is a shot in der Mude Tod that
concentrates into one image the psychic forces that Lang’s movie puts into play:
the shot of the Wall. The devils’s Wall. The
Wall is shot straight on from 90 degrees.
It rises above and beyond all who stand beneath it a presence that
overwhelms those who come within its ambit. The Wall is a cosmic abstraction
that divides the known from the unknown, a wall found only in the dream.

The Wall is of course an archetype, one in a movie that is contrived only out of archetypal forms and presences. Der Mude Tod is a visitation from the landscape of myth and fairy tale. The Wall has been built by Death to mark off his world from the world of the living and the man at the crossroads represents the other enduring archetypal image about which the film revolves. Death played by Bernard Goetze, whose extraordinary representation of the grim reaper calls to mind Ben Ekerot’s as Death in Bergman’s Seventh Seal, both dark personifications of the eternal riddle. Both haunting and unforgettable. Seeing Lang’s film was a strong reminder that the silent movie era worked strongly with archetypes to create characters and narratives. Both Hollywood and German silent cinema contrived narratives out of types: the lover, the liar, the warrior, the seeker, the hero, the beloved, the tramp, the lost, the wanderer. Silent movie scripts fashioned their material out of the stuff of dreams and myth. The characters in one dynamic sense were free, they were free from history and individuation. But unfree in another sense in that they were bound the more tightly to their form and constrained by fateful outcomes. In ‘silent movie’ scripts people tended to be found in ‘situations’ and then use their immediate resources to work their way out. Resources might be within them or outside of themselves, like allies that as in fairy tales might come in unexpected guise. Unlike modern scripts archetypal characters are not contrived from personal histories or subjectivities that lay claim to them and to their development. The compliance to archetypal form by fictitious characters, although delimiting in some respects, in a critical manner allows character to develop through lines of flight, intensifications and testings, rather than the playing out and development of the will of individuals. The idea of the primacy of the individual’s will in determining their lives is the ideological key stone of most late 20th century and all 21st century dramatic output, in particular cinema. The scripted imperatives are to realise your dreams, to buy what you need and to discover your individuation to attain your goals. Film today has little time for archetypes whose defining quality is their inability to be anything other than they are. And yet the archetype is a powerful and suggestive idea. Whereas it does not use subjective intention and individuation as a determining agency it brings into play the development of other psychic possibilities endemic to human experience. We are all types. The roles we play as part of the being of a type exert a strong hold over our psyche. Being a mother being a father have fateful consequences for our being in the world. They are in themselves a guide to responding to life. In life and in drama: the seeker, the lover, the warrior, the loser, the orphan as represented by a person can be put to the test to the point of destruction, yet still be shaped and held together by the psychic force of the archetype that they embody. This is evident in the scripting in der Mude Tod, of the female half of the loving couple. This female type calls on exclusively feminine traits to pursue her objective: her re-union with her male half. She is a feminine heroine who calls on the claims of love, faithfulness and steadfastness and the power of love projected to try to win back her male half from Death’s kingdom. The female in her is brave bold and conquers her fear, drawing on feminine qualities. Unlike most of today’s contemporary women leads, Lang’s heroine is not a transposed man, she is a woman and she works towards her goal by an process of intensification of her female qualities, not by denying them or abandoning them for male characteristics.

Lang’s Der Mude Tod (MT) is a strong visual reminder of what film could look like before the digital hegemony. The film’s images look as if they etched into screen rather than overlaid. Most of todays films have the look of a flat plane. Even where they are shot and exhibited in 3D, the 3D effect simply resembles a series of multiple planes. But Lang’s movie like a Durer woodcut, draws us in beyond the surface into spacial and psychological depth. The faces, the archetypal figures pressed into the celluloid, the extraordinary architecture, like the etchings from fairy tale collections, Mude Tod is visually burnt into tonal layers that create unfathomable depth suggesting immanent but unseen powers.

With its Gothic visual style knitted tightly to the other main expressive elements, archetypal characters, its representation of the face and body and its architecture, Lang produces a film that with its force of unity resembles the conviction of any of the Grimm’s’ fairy tales. Indeed Mude Tod in its subtitle references itself as a German folk tale. Lang’s film like the fairy tale, is a film of darkness but in this darkness we come to understand more deeply the defining qualities of the human realm. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Wonder Woman Patty
Jenkins (USA 2017) Gal Gadot, Chris Pine

viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle 6 June 2017; ticket £4.00

tweet from Trumpland

At last a super hero film that is the perfect allegorical representation of our times. In directing Wonder Woman, Patty Jenkins has produced a mythical scenario that is faithful to President Trump’s condition and situation. A situation of isolation from any influences other than his family of Gods and Goddesses; a condition of paranoia to hold the world at bay. In Wonder Woman the tweets lies and blandishments of Mr President underlie the movie’s script endowing it with deep superficiality, with a post truth/ post modernist sentiment and tweets, disguised as dialogue, with new age mantras: believe! love! etc!

Like most recent Hollywood movies Jenkins and her script writers are beholden to the polemics of fake female empowerment. This is an easy lazy speciously righteous position to take as it means that the only thinking that has to be done is, is a flip, turning the women into men; rather than having to figure out what other defining characteristics might constitute strong female qualities. The Hollywood solution is that the empowerment of women’s natures is best expressed by them emulating and surpassing men in the outer expression of sexual power. This equates neatly with the Trump position as regards women. Looking at the women with whom Trump surrounds himself, Ivanka, Melania, Kellyanne they all have that touch of Wonder woman in their expressive genes. Like the models found in Vogue and Vanity Fair, they comprise a legion of woman defined by images of a warrior sexuality, as they threaten to break forth out of the pages of fashion glossies into the heat of battle. A new era of female soldiery dressed to kill confident of victory against whatever forces they might meet: men, cellulose, other women, unruly hair.

Mythically Trump of course has Zeus like qualities. From his tower eyrie high he presides over the earthlings, figuring out their comings and goings. Alone at the top of Olympus, he’s a God increasingly isolated and reliant on Wonder Woman, Ivanka to represent him to the world beyond, to fight off the forces of evil by which he imagines himself surrounded. Go forth Wonder Woman and save the world for America, go forth Ivanka and make America great again. And so they go forth into the world.

Judging by the plot and to some extent the visual look of the film Jenkins has spent some time looking at the work of Tarantino. In particular Inglorious Basterds must have caught her attention. Tarantino’s commercially successful post modernist tryst married film to an assemblage of fake history coined out of second world war material.

Inglorious Basterds is Tarantino’s affirmation that the world, and all it contains, should be subsumed to the movie. Cinema should no longer respond to the needs of the world; rather the world must respond to the needs of cinema. The needs of Tarantino’s cinema are not moral or ethical, but simply the production of spectacle. In the name of cinema, history is reduced to fashionable tropes of style and attitude, and ideas to the expressive mode of the comic book.

Inglorious Basters in fact demonstrates how quickly spectacle spills over into parody, and, how quickly parody is divested of meaning. Voided of meaning, Inglorious Basters has no content, it becomes an emptied space located in spectacle. But in an era characterised by the creation of the Trump mythology ( the God of the Deal) the social and political objective is to strip discourse of notions of validity and truth. To use tweets and postings as psychopumps evacuating the oxygen of fact and truth from social exchange. The result is to create a situation of informational entropy in which every piece of information is equal to any other. A sort of law of universal equivalence. The practice of Trump’s White House is to destroy notions of accuracy validity and truth by drowning them in an overload of indifference and hostility.

This process of overwhelming truth with alternative facts of course fits with Jenkins’ script which is based on alt truth in relation to the known facts of the first world war. In selecting Ludendorff as one of her main villains, Jenkins had to undertake in clear cognizance, a significant distortion of history. She had to trash the facts. But Jenkins, whether consciously or not, has absorbed the tutelage of Donald Trump, and in sympathy with his ethos of alt facts, Jenkins sabotages fact for the sake of spectacle. Jenkins could have chosen to substitute for Ludendorff a fictional character who resembled him. But she chose to go with the lie. Perhaps not so much for reasons of Box Office, but more perhaps because like Trump, the lie is amongst other things, a mechanism for flaunting her power. The power of the lie over truth represents the truth content of this movie. In that Jenkins takes on the power of the lie as the core to her narrative, in a sense she also becomes the architypal shadow of her eponymous hero, the dark side of the superwoman. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Other Side of Hope
(Toivon
tuolla puolen) Aki
Kaurismaki (Finland 2016) Sherman Haji;
Sakari Kuosmanen

viewed Tyneside Cinema 29 May 2017; ticket £9.75

thin material

Even though Aki Kaurismaki’s film may by the end be something of a flat line, there is ‘hope’ in the fact that this film has been produced. The Other Side of Hope (OSH) comes as a relief from the corporate money return vehicles that dominate the ‘plexes at the moment. Kaurismaki’s has written a script that starts with a perception and which he has shot without the dominance of image, thereby allowing idea to carry the scenario.

The problem is that OSH is characterised by a lacking of some inner development and consequently its creative development tapers of, and its spirit dims..

The other side of hope is exactly what Kaurismaki concerns himself with. A state of existence which has nothing to do with plot and everything to do with seeing of a reality. Kaurismaki focuses on a psychic portrayal of Finnish society and by extension other cultures into which asylum seekers migrate and then have to locate and identify themselves. The distant shore for the seekers of refuge and hope suddenly becomes actual. The seekers of hope find themselves in intimate intercourse with another society and have to confront and understand these forces to which they have exposed themselves. Forces both of inertia and reaction.

How do societies like Finland engage with the process of recognising the new psychic realities represented by refugees to whom they are suddenly conjoined? Kaurismaki uses his camera to answer. His camera observes, objectively as tool of observation, recording the various responses of the Finish to the appearance of Khalid. There is no point of view, there is no subjectivity, no off-voice interlocutor. The interaction is played straight, using only dialogue and camera. Ultimately it is this rigidity of playing out the forces in the scenario, that traps Kaurismaki’s film in a cycle of diminishing returns.

As if to provide the audience with some traction on the idea of another perception, Kaurismaki has given OSH a production look of Finland, that is analogous to a setting in the 1960’s /’70’s . The colour tones, most of the sets, the costumes and props, the music, all have that period flavour. The main Finnish characters all look over 50 and present as being comfortable in Kaurismaki’s retro world.

By contrast the migrants are young and are the products of the world today.

We see the people of yesterday meet the people of today.

The film exploits on two intertwined themes that never develop or deviate from type. The representation of Finnish society is scripted as a one trick pony, an invariant joke that runs through the whole film. Fins are seen as pedantic, lugubrious laborious and trapped in the past. Fins come in two basic types: well meaning or reactionary. Kaurismaki’s playing out of these stereotypes is monopaced and repetitive, initially amusing but after an invariant hour, uninteresting. It seemed a shame that within the realm Kaurismaki had created, he was unable to create and release another kind of interpolation that would energise the production from a different perspective. The other dynamic in play in the script is not very original. It comprises Kaurismaki’s take on Ken Loach’s ‘Daniel Blake’. In similar fashion to Daniel Blake, Khalid is put through the grinder of the bureaucratic mill and rejected, and also targeted by a vicious group of reactionary down and outs: the losers of Finnish society. This element of interaction between Khalid and Finland is mechanically portrayed predictable and uninteresting. OSH ‘s formulaic scripting in this respect deprives the movie of any tension. In itself lack of tension would be OK were there other compensating insights or interpolations to energise the material. But there are not By credit roller Kaurismaki seems happy to have dropped the curtain on an ambiguous ending that protects him having to make a commitment.

Kaurismaki may say he has made the film he intended. With its long musical interludes featuring old Finnish dudes reliving the glory days of their youth, OSH depicts a country locked into the past unable to relate the new realities of the 21st century’s scenario. But as the film with its monolithic structure becomes stuck in modes of repetition, if feels as if Kaurismaki, like his native culture has been unable to make the transition. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Green Room Jeremy
Saulnier (USA 2015) Anton Yelchin

Imogen Poots, Patrick Steward, Brownie and Grimm

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 28 May 2016; ticket: £8.75

empty room

Like the frozen yoghurt and the noodle business, the industrial film thrives on playing out endless variations of the same plot. Green Room is no more than a video game movie in which a posh English actress with the gun and box cutter is allowed (scripted) to win.

Saulnier’s Green Room works out with the format of teenage entrapment by forces of evil – bogie men. The bogie men in the cupboard decked out as proto white supremicists, but basically just plain old bogie men in the cupboard. Saulnier’s movie lacks any idiosyncratic or cultish distinction: Chainsaw massacre it is not. Green Room lacks the imaginative stylisation and deep black comedic rituals of the cult slaughter movie.

It also lacks even the social cultural themes of the movie such Carpenter’s Escape from New York or Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace. The latter film which although violently formulaic and lurching into parody, nevertheless in its title and in its expressive characterisation calls up the dark forces worming through the flesh of United States of America, psychically legitimising the corruption od violence in the name of an enraged ‘id’. Cooper’s film crudely but effectively pre-empts the politics of Donald Trump, both as parody and as expression of the infantilised rage that defines contemporary politics. In ‘Out of the Furnace’ Woody Harrelson’s performance as Harlan is the film’s psychopathic core. In the film’s opening sequence, set in a drive-in movie theatre, Harrelson maps out the film’s territory, as he defines and demonstrates his visceral understanding of human relations. In comparison, Patrick Steward’s playing of Green Room’s villain, Darcy, is something of a pussy cat. Darcy is motivated more by the banality of money than any deeper gloomier psychic intolerance. Harrelson and Steward both do the ‘hard eye’ thing, but Harrelson does it to the greater effect.

Set against the idea of a situation in which a touring punk band gets slammed up in a venue for seeing something they didn’t ought to have seen, Saulnier as director/writer simply spins together some punk dialogue, some bad-ass backwoodsmen, guns machetes, couple of adorable bull terriers called Brownie and Grimm, and like a pot-pourri cocktale shakes them all about. The result is a movie without an idea or even the notion of an idea, a feeble attempt to pitch the forces of good and evil against each other. It is a structure without a concept that ends up as a mechanised combinational tryst that is not a movie but a video game. .

Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

High and Low (Heaven and Hell) Akira Kurosawa (Japan 1963) Toshiro Mifune Viewed Tyneside Cinema 20th May 2017; ticket £9.75

An ethical question with a metaphysical structure and a judgement coda

Kurosawa’s High and Low is a transposed Samurai genre movie. In a similar manner to Kurosawa’s Samurai movies a core ethical question is posed to its protagonists. As in the Seven Samurai, Kurosawa informs High and Low with a metaphysical structure that encodes the response to the question.

The use of structure as metaphysical device was more common when scripting and building scenario were the heart of filmmaking. Clouzot’s ‘Wages of Fear’ comes to mind as a movie shaped by a governing metaphysic. In today’s film making, script and scenario are subservient to image and stylistic considerations, and the dominant influences shaping the form of productions are the advert and the installation. Today the idea of a filmic structure shaped by metaphysics or ethics is alien as it means ‘idea’ has to be directive; a discipline of soul alien to the accustomed indulgence of either filmmaker or audience.

High and Low is a continuation of Kurosawa’s filmic dialogue with Japan and the the problem that her identity and culture faced in the 50’s and 60’s caught in the strain of the opposing pull of American defined modernism, and the push of its own traditional identity.

Kurosawa’s understanding of his country was mediated by the belief that the disaster of twentieth century Japanese expansion, with all its terrible consequences for Asia and Japan, was caused by its rigid military and political hierarchy. Kurosawa’s vision of Japan was located in the wisdom of its people as collectivities, and the claims collective could make upon the individual. I suppose the American idea, the Thatcherite notion is that the individual owes nothing to the social body outside of the immediate claims made by the family. The American Way’s values the rights of individuals above those of communities. Not so Kurosawa’s Japan.

The critical juncture in High and Low comes when Gondo realises that it is not his son who has been kidnapped, but his chauffeur’s boy. At this point the kidnapper does not drop his ransom but demands Gondo pay the money anyway. Gondo wrestles with his soul as to what he should do. The decision is his. Does Gondo play for himself alone and refuse to pay; or does he choose to affirm that he is a part of a greater whole? Gondo’s decision affirms the collective, the Samurai spirit of Japan as he elects to pay out the full ransom for the son of his chauffeur.

As Gondo choses the path of self denial the structure of the film blossoms like a flower. The first hour of the film has been set in the lounge of Gondo’s house on the hill. His American style residence that acts as a vulgar beacon for conspicuous consumption. The lounge interior is large open plan space, monotextural, painted in muted tones furnished with American armchairs and sofas. Plush. A space alien to Japan.

As soon as Gondo decides to play for the collective the movie leaves the dead Western interior and opens out into Japan. High and Low which has been imprisoned and contained within walls that to the soul are like a prison, explodes into the Japanese psyche. A metaphysical shift.

As the movie opens out, Japan and her people are revealed. A series of cameos shows the working people of Tokyo; and the police are seen as an organic body, like social insects working, together to find the criminal. Unlike American cop movies there are no stars, no stand out cops, only work to be done by the multiple body of agents.

The kidnapper when he is eventually caught seems less motivated by the gain than by resentment at the symbolic nature of Gondo’s house: its flaunting of a life style. There is an element here in which as Kurosawa’s movie reaches its climax, it becomes a judgement machine not a chart of an ethical field. It is valid for Kurosawa to believe in and to point to Japanese culture as having the potential to redeem past mistakes and to provide a new basis for democratic stability. It is less valid for him to blame all negative aspects of contemporary Japanese culture on American corruption.

The unravelling of High and Low’s plot involves the introduction of heroine as a corrupting influence on Japanese people. Kurosawa’s makes it clear that hard drugs and their use by young people are an imported American evil. His depiction of drug dens and drug use rivals the ridiculous public health screeners made by Hollywood in the 1950’s. Kurosawa undermines his stature as a film maker by resorting to the same hackneyed inaccurate depictions. By 1963 Kurosawa surely had to understand that Japan could not return to her isolationist past. Japan was part of the modern world, an all it implied: automobile production, consumer products, technology such as that used by the police. For all that Kurosawa believed in the resilience of her culture, Japan could not avoid ALL the forces of individuation alienation and anomie that are the handmaidens of high Capitalist economies.

Drug taking was a problem endemic to developing conditions in Japanese society. Kurosawa might finish his movie by scripting Gondo to leave the large American style shoe company he worked for as an executive, and set up his own small company making quality Japanese shoes. But Kurosawa as a film maker seems to have turned his back on the actual forces shaping Japanese life: the evolution of large home based multi-national corporations. And all the consequences that such development entailed. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk