Adrin Neatrour

Down by Law – Jim Jarmusch – USA 1986 – John Lurie, Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni

Viewed: Side Cinema, 19 June 2005 – ticket price £3-00Down by Law – Jim Jarmusch – USA 1986 – John Lurie, Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni
Viewed: Side Cinema, 19 June 2005 – ticket price £3-00
 
Retrocrit
 
Haircuts at dawn
Down by Law opens with a series of floating tracking shots of a series of facades shot upwards from a acute low angle.  Filmed as if from a Venetian gondola the buildings glide through the lens the camera as a particularly flat perception of the world.  Slum tenements, industrial units, middle class lawn-girt spruce white detached houses, roccocco mid town 19th century blocks with ornate caste iron balconies, no man’s land all slip by and out of sight as we listen to a latino Creole fusion of complex cross rhythms laid over the picture.
 
 In this opening Jarmusch assembles the American South as a world of facades.  Like an opera set on a proscenium stage it is a land populated by two dimensional stick figures, a world defined only by its surface.  In Down by Law surface is all there is in the world and the narrative is but a  device a for movement across this surface.  In this it shares some characteristic features with opera where plot is also a simple device, a narrative welded together out of non sequiturs and improbable coincidence that serves to cue a series of emotional states driven by the music.   Whereas Opera uses music as an intensifier of the emotional affects and responses, in Down by Law, Jarmusch uses film as a deintensifier of emotive and affective states.  A world in which in a similar manner to opera the narrative line is essentially overblown and  episodically implausible; different to opera in that there is no associational emotive linkage.  Down by Law works through an integral disassociation of emotion from image   What matters here is what you see and hear in the now. In Down by Law there is no back story, there is no front story, there is no story: there is only what you see at and on the surface.  This is a world of flowing disassocation.
 
Moving into the first act of his opera bouffe, Jarmusch utilises a high key American gothic style of lighting.  The point here is not to use this lighting rig as an intensifier of whatever – character, emotion, plot line.  The lighting serves to amplify dissonance between the lighting frame and what we actually fills frame – in particular the characters.  As the sequence of scenes setting up Jack and Zak unfold,  it is evident that Jarmusch is not interested in any sort of Hollywood acting style – method, deep characterisation or anything like this.  The acting style is a put on.  In a film comprising layers rather than the illusion of filmic unity, the acting is another detached layer in the film, a spoofed  playing that goes through the motions of action and reaction only in so far as they are surface bound.  Its an act – not acting. 
 
As with the Marx Brothers or Jean Harlow hair style undercuts and underlies the affect of the performance.  The performance is always now. In Down by Law it is the haircuts that are the central gestural pivot of the act.  Not faciality; not body language.  The hair in the film is all thick black greased up stuff devoid of certain line or form, that falls about the head and moves according to its own rights.  It is the New York punk style de rigeur of the early ‘80’s.  Its deterritorialised shift to New Orleans not only heightens the alien quality of the 3 stooges but it is the edge to their occupation of space and their dialogues(brilliant written) which layer into the space impermanence vulnerability  dissonance and anarchy.  It all happens beneath the hair line.  Wherever that is.
 
The delimiting surfaces are intrinsic to the look and style of Down by Law.  The wall, whether of gaol home or fantasy accentuates the idea of containment within a two dimensional world.  The idea that what we living here is a two dimensional culture that has the illusion of depth that is created by an accumulation of layerings.  The walls are covered with graffitti – cumulations of words images calculations which build up deeply patterned milieus.  There is one moment of formation of the set surround that points to core of the film and its relationship to the spirit of America.  Roberto in the prison cell, picks up a pencil which Zac has been using to mark off the days spent in custody.  He goes to a wall of the cell draws the outline of a window frame complete with cross pieces.  It is a blank window endowed with the complete quality of intense opacity.  Looking at nothing.  It is an idea.  Its complete functional uselessness suggests the joke of there being nothing to see except what is on the surface. Later in the narrative after the 3 stooges escape and find the fairy tale cottage, they are eating a meal in the house.  Behind them as they eat is the same window: blank empty smiling looking out to nothing.  From gaol to home from containment to freedom, its all the same view.  There’s nowhere to go.
Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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

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

Abu Ghraib all in the Mind’s Eye – an American movie on release everywhereAdrin Neatrour, 7 June 04
Abu Ghraib all in the Mind’s Eye – an American movie on release everywhere.
Events at Abu Ghraib are represented by the US President as being anomalous out of the ordinary events – caused by a few bad people. The form taken by the abuse – photographed and videoed sexual torture, reveals deeper evolving processes endemic not only in US culture but also that of the UK.
Each culture will bring its own particular twisted psychic development to the perpetuation of atrocity. Atrocity is something that is prone to happen in war. Either because the combatants are stripped of normal restraints by the shock terror and degrading aspects of combat; or in territorial disputes the intensity of desire to intimidate conquer and occupy acts as a justifying disinhibitor; or war in its outcomes offers opportunities to those who win to take control and power of life and death over those delivered into their hands. In this latter instance war corresponds to situations in prisons labour camps or any sort of closed physically bound institution in which a powerful few exercise total power over those in their charge, and where the detained are dependent on cultural rather than legal protective mechanisms.
The form of abusive sexual humiliation and torture to which the Iraqi prisoners are/were subjected obviously is/was sanctioned by US high command – General Sanchez was aware of and approved the treatment of the Abu Ghraib inmates. And in the same way that the SS generals could give genocidal and murderous commands to their troops with the knowledge that the men were socially and culturally primed to execute the orders, so with like confidence American command could order and approve a prisoner regime that centred on the genitals of their prisoners. The pornographic admixture of sexual physical torture humiliation and degradation is now endemic to the mainstream American culture, accompanied by its validifying process, the objectification of the subjective through use of imagery in the form of video or photos.
Susan Sontag thinks that the pictorial has come to the fore because it rests on the use of images as repositories for memory: she says that major events ‘lay down tracks ‘ governing how important events are remembered, ‘The memory museum is now a visual one.’ I believe that the culturally engrained use of photo video and sound image effects a deeper part of the way in which we experience the world than memory alone. I think that replicated images effect the nature of our consciousness as we engage with the world. The use of replicated picture and sound imagery is central to how we experience the living of our lives: consciousness.
We are born into an immersion of manufactured images comprising both picture and sound, mostly idealised and continuously assimilated as part of our being. As we develop, a significant part of consciousness which determines and directs our psychic functioning is absorbed from this world of projections – sound and image – and our behaviour comes to mimic these forms. We start to live the movies we project in our heads. We experience the world as a projection of our internalised idealised sounds and images. And when we make our own mechanical or digital replications of the sound and visual images – video photographs sound tapes such as staged dialogues – an important part of their purpose is to be external validifiers of the inner experience. To give objectivity to the subjectivity.
The past 100 years or so have seen the USA increasingly subjected to a cosmic storm of moving image particles that penetrated first through the shield of public consciousness and then with the arrival of TV and video through the defences of the private domain. In a shifting deracinated melting pot culture, this total imagery, comprising from the 1930’s onwards moving picture and fluid sound, was increasingly taken up as a model for individual actions defining: pose – verbal cues – and attitude – all attributes relating to the individual’s identity. A central aspect of the movie video and music action imagery, that is critical to the provision of a psychic identity, is that everything in mechanically produced forms has a script: everything has a beginning middle end.
The notion quickly develops that if you, in your outer expression of subjectivity take on the outer symbolic signifiers assimilated from the moving image (sound and/or picture) experience, then your internal scripting can run the desired course. You can live the film that you shoot in your head. Desires material, desires carnal are the drivers of the internalised moving image life in a culture increasingly defined by desire. And what is it we most desire: control over destiny, the script. With the invasion of desires film was no longer restricted to something seen on a screen or monitor. We live with movies we project in our minds; complete scripted sequences with music and sound in which each individual is an actor/director. In those societies defined by the inflation of infinite multiplications of image, our consciousness seems to draw on two track perception: one track is switched to the movie channel where we live the script of our desires; the other track deals with actuality in which we have to live through the real with all its difficulties and frustrations.
Of course the movie channel’s ambition is to realise the movie completely. And using selective perception of the actual and intensified projection of desire, the conscious mind can experience the feeling of achieving the scripted outcome. Some groups are in particular structural positions to make real the movie: individuals with social power who can impose their movie on underlings; and socially isolated individuals. Both US society in particular and British society are defined in this respect by the relative social isolation of individuals. People who are alone or in small nuclear groupings are not subject to collective forms of psychic correction and containment of internalised movie fantasies.
The problem remains for consciousness that it is often aware that there is a lack of tangibility in its perceptions. At this point the culture has provided cheap and readily available forms of technology that allow easy mechanical replication of ‘experience’ to all. The digital camera and video are everywhere available to give objectivity to the subjectivity so that consciousness in its various psychic operations has objective tangible proof that the script works. Film and video, cheap digital images allow everyone access to proving that the movie is going OK and that it is going according to the script. Of course the images objectively captured have to cover short strips of action or truncated sequences evidencing simple gratifications; longer scripts involving more subtle play are difficult. The realm of sex is perfect for photography and video. It’s a contained bounded realm, an activity that can be treated as discrete to power and gratification, and the pay offs-hard-ons, ejaculations, grunts and groans, simple role play/acting involving parameters of dominance/subjection and allied posturing – are easily captured objective proof on tape disc or film, of the individuals power to realise the objects of their desire. They objectify that we’re having fun in our movie.
In the USA the sex/pornography industry is vast and in the fertile soil of American psychic needs has spread everywhere interpenetrating consciousness and legitimising and fixating carnal and sexual desire in all its forms. The question is why simple sex scripts should have taken such a dominant defining part of American consciousness. The prime social experience for many Americans seems to be powerlessness and isolation. Characterising features of social and economic experience are large corporations and small nuclear groups. Within the large corporation most people exist to sustain the projections of the bosses and managers; and the nuclear family grouping is too small to sustain a power/ status system as witness the interdependence of men and women and the separation of the generations.
There are strong forces at work, particularly in the USA but also in the UK promoting the heightened social isolation of individuals whilst at the same time projecting sound movie images celebrating individual power and control. But Hollywood projects mythical realms – Middle Earths, Normandy Beaches, Hogwarts. The porn industry advertises a real achievable realm that you can get your hands on and hard on and in which you can be king or queen for a day. A realm where the individual can play out the movie without interruption. In a society defined by social isolation carnal sex becomes an issue of power; power over the flesh, both of the self and others, and as such drifts naturally towards the domains of sadism masochism and torture. Sex mutates into a discrete power gratification zone. A zone which takes us straight to the action(sic) at Abu Ghraib. A familiar movie to the American participants who want to have fun and objectify their roles in so doing. © Adrin Neatrour

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

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

Shadows – John Cassavetes -USA 1958 Ben Carruthers Lelia Goldoni Hugh Hurd

Viewed Side Cinema: 13 November 2005 – dvd – ticket price £3-50Shadows – John Cassavetes -USA 1958  Ben Carruthers  Lelia Goldoni Hugh Hurd
Viewed Side Cinema: 13 November 2005 – dvd – ticket price £3-50
 
Retro-crit
 
Like a bomb going off…..
 
The first hit is the most intense.  Shadows is Cassavetes’ first film and its like he’s mainlining on some potent essence.   Shadows is the rush of the real through the veins of consciousness.   He’s the poet who captures the crazed and phased world of New York.  As visionary he knows that the shadows that bleed through his lens are a true imprint of the times as they enfold him.
 
Like a bomb because this film is shot by compressing as tightly as possible the highly volatile elements of New York in the 1950’s.  This city-society was the crucible of the modern.  The beat ethos was redrawing the psychic map breaking down the defining social stratifications of sex class race and age.   Poetry art music film drugs suddenly become central to the parameters of the self as the new consumer driven communication industries took shape.  But in a crucial sense these industries hadn’t yet taken on a defining shape.  So Shadows begins at the beginning, a time when everything seems young, possible and full of liberating potential.  To the wail and burr of the jazz sax new personality types develop – the cool – the detached – the emotionally distanced –  sexes races developing attitude to survive the new processes of  radical individuation.  And Cassavetes sees all this.  And probes for the veins with the needle of his movie.    
 
Shadows like a bomb, a hit, because the film is shot almost entirely in close up to capture the generation of these New Yorkers.  Very few long shots, the opening club scene, a couple of street scenes, the sculpture garden, the rest is up close: very big close-ups of the faces of his characters. Cassavetes packs these faces and piles them into his frames.  One face two faces three faces four faces five faces squeezed togather as unstable gassious particles, compressed explosive charges that will detonate at the slightest provocation.
 
Cassavetes understands that it is through the faces of his actors, his living exemplars of the City that the fault lines and the vulnerabilities as well as th energy of this world will be seen.   The film can only be the film it is as a living laboritory because the actors played roles close to themselves – self projections – and within these roles found many of their own lines.  Within the encompassing embrace of Cassavetes, this is a film founded on individuation and all the acting has this quality.
 
The individuality of American society had been given a new edge by the beat ethos.  At an overt level there is a measure of solidarity shared values and attitudes in relation to the embracing of the hip and the rejection of the square.  But there is also a heightened competitive assertiveness in  a neo-Hobbsian war of all against all.  The rictus and the laugh define most of the close-up interaction.  The characters josh kid and joke with one another.  But subjected to the harsh light of Cassavetes’ lens the aggression underlying most of the relationships is laid bare.  Behind the smile and the bared teeth of the laugh lie the snarl and the growl.   And to formally express this reality Cassavetes makes radical use of framed space.    Loading his faces into frame, Cassavetes understands that this world is a milieu where personal space and body distance as segregation devices have been abolished.  Everyone sits very close in this world.  Cassavetes shoots in cabs in booths in compartments and packed club settings – all spaces designed to compress without discrimination.  And as he squeezes his people together he uses space as an intensity amplifier.  Denied physical space his characters spar and fight for psychic space, for that momentary instant at the top of the pile.  A continuous writhing heap characterised by the outward expression of conviviality and humour but underwritten by aggression that at any point may explode into violence.  And it does.  Brief unimportant interludes that permit regroupings.
 
Shadows is world – the hip world.  No story but incidents with individuals and groups working their way back and forth through the frame defining and redefining the action.
 
And why Shadows?  Impossible not to think of the idea of Plato’s cave.  Cassavetes making a point. Having his joke.  Shadows.  In the Platonic cave the prisoners sit in front of the fire and watch the shadows made on the wall by objects behind them. It is the only reality they know; they have no notion of the real world; they are deceived by shadows.  One of the prisoners escapes, and in the light of the sun sees the real things, but returning to the cave to enlighten the rest cannot convince them of the truth.  Cassavetes carries warning: however much the hip world thought it was being true to itself, alive on the beat the life, creating new being and new words, people were fooling themselves if they thought they could so easily escape the shadow of American culture and history.
Adrin Neatrour 25 Nov 05
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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.

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

I Vitelloni (1953) / Amacord (1973) – Fellini double bill

Viewed Curzon Mayfair 17 07 05 Ticket price -£5- 00
I Vitelloni (1953) / Amacord (1973) – Fellini double bill
Viewed Curzon Mayfair  17 07 05  Ticket price -£5- 00
 
There is an tendency to see films through the telescopic concept of the auteur principle understanding film through the singularity of the director’s voice.  Certainly it is valid to look at a director’s output and try to discern their underlying film attributes and themes as they develop over the course of a career:  style – formal concerns – structure – subject and content.    Viewing two examples of Fellini’s output, one relatively early and the other relatively late was for me also a strong reminder that filmic output is often collaborative  work and that for some directors there are essential collaborations in their careers that determine the force of their attraction.  Collaborative partnerships can be with producers, writers, cameramen, editors and actors.  From a viewing Fellini’s films recently I think that Fellini’s owes his reputation as a director to Guilietta Masina the actress whom he married and who was the clown star of most of the work central to his reputation.
 
With I Vitelloni Fellini shows that he is a director endowed with a fluid musicality in his composition, in his use of his tracks and pans and his ability to orchestrate space and spectacle. But these achievements in their visual aesthetic qualities, divert attention away from the fact that I Vitelloni feels like a film, visuals excepted, without a strong core either in focal concern or subject matter.  Autobiographical in inspiration, I Vitelloni sentimentalises provincial Italy of the early’50s.   The 5 young men, whom the film follows in their contextual world of the out of season sea side town, all feel too old too formed.  This is not an absolute age connected observation.  The characters feel like they are already formed beings so the film can never deliver a sense of the process of forming or of change.  The rebellion of the characters, such as it is,  is circumscribed by the preformed boundaries of the originary world of the film – physical metaphysical and social.  The revolt by the characters is a sham.  A sham which is beautifully captured as spectacle by Fellini.  But is a sham with which he seems happy to conspire, a pretend reaction to what is a phantom world with which he is ultimately content.  Interesting to compare I Vitelloni with Antonioni’s Il Grido.  Shot in a provincial canal side setting, it is a film set in the fog of post war Italian society where all certainties are now blurred and society and social relations are torn apart with no obvious ways in which to repair the rents. A strong forceful work showing the forces of disintegration at work in post war Italy.
 
In its focal concerns, its originery world and main subjects (but not in visual style) Fellini’s I Vitelloni resembles something of the output of Ealing Studios in the 1940’s and ‘50’s.  In particular those which were based on the concept of a world:  Whiskey Galore, the Titfield Thunderbolt, Passport to Pimlico.  All products of an unashamed sentimental vein of filmmaking, all constrained in their capacity to make social connections by the hermetically sealed nature of their context.  Films locked into sealed worlds with scripts tricked out with fake social and character tensions – enjoyable as sacred social relics(charm)and for the strong social character acting but weak in ideas and filmic impact.
 
 Fellini’s I Vitelloni has visual style and charm but nothing to say.  But this at least in relation to Amacord makes it watchable movie.  Amacord is unwatchable in the sense that by this stage in his career Fellini is only interested in indulging his craving for creating and filming spectacle; as if spectacle alone were the necessary and sufficient effect to justify a film.  Like fireworks they are spectacular to view two or three times a year; to view them every night – unless you are the pyrotechnican – is tedious.  Amacord delivers a firework display every 15 minutes.  In fact the opening 20 minutes presents as full of promise: this opening suggests the idea of  a visual examination of fascism through use of spectacle.  An idea which held me in thrall until the repetitive motif’s of the made up faces, the red dresses, the uniforms, the fires and the fireworks revealed that to realise such an idea was beyond Fellini’s powers.  Without a collaborator such a Giulietta Masina to work with, Fellini becomes increasingly trapped in his own self referential world, entrapped in a barren circularity.  Doomed to recreate vacuous fluid works in the opera bouffe manner.
 
When I Vitelloni and Amacord are compared to films that he made with Guilietta Masina the critical difference seems to be the ability of  these works to connect the formal visual style and the subjects of the films to the wider referential world of contemporary Italy.  Something happens to Fellini’s films when Guilietta is involved.  The films are linked into a wider field of concern and they possess vitality, allowing Guilietta clown to escape out of the confines of the originary context and connect with social processes.  Il Bidoni, La Strada, La Notti de Cabera all have a clown entity in the form of Masina but as such an entity she transposes her clown nature, without sentimentality, onto a wider social canvass.  From La Strada -1953 – to Juliet of the Spirits -1965 – this seems to be the period when Masina was in most of Fellini’s films.  As collaborator and Fellini’s wife it is her spirit as the ultimate clown that fills out these films not with mindless indulgence but with a sure understanding of how the character and dilemma of the clown could be tuned to focal connections with society.  The clown cannot exist in vacuo.  The clown – she who is always in the shit – has to exist in a world of wider references or she quickly uses up all her material a series of gestures that yield increasingly diminishing returns.  
 
That film is often a collaborative undertaking is seldom recognised.  Both Lean and Eisenstein have acknowledged the role played by Young and Tisse as their respective cinematographers.  Sydow  Bjornstrand and Anderson seem to be involved in Bergman’s films far beyond their calling as actors.  As wife and partner to Fellini, Guilietta Masina’s influence on the films in which she was involved during this period have the effect of raising Fellini’s work out of the mediocrity of his self indulgence to a level of significant filmic achievement where ideas, visual concerns and style, attention and subject matter combine in complex interplay.
 
I don’t know if Masina’s influence on Fellini,  her consummate acting abilities and strength of personality worked to inspire him to move beyond the boundaries of his natural egotistical concerns, or whether there was collaboration between them at the level of ideas and/or in the composition of the scenario.  I do think that the Masina effect is an effect that can be seen in the films in which she and Fellini worked togather, and the consequences of her lack of presence are evident in the ordinary output of his early period and the dire product of his later films.
adrin neatrour     
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
 8 September 05