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

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

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

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

Themroc -Claude Faraldo – Michel Piccoli, Beatrice Romand – France 1972

Viewed: 16mm print; Side Cinema Newcastle, 14 November 2004

Ticket £3-00Themroc -Claude Faraldo – Michel Piccoli, Beatrice Romand – France 1972
Viewed: 16mm print; Side Cinema Newcastle, 14 November 2004
Ticket £3-00
 
Send on the Clowns
Its like Claude Faraldo has taken one horrified look at what’s going on in the world about him, and in time honoured tradition stuck two fingers in his mouth and sent out a shrill piercing sliding whistle summoning  Michel Piccoli wearing full clown costume into the arena to save the day for the audience.
 
When in the course of a show in the big top disaster strikes the sexy trapeze artist off her bar, if the lions maul their virile tamer, if the big top catches fire or the four horsemen deal out death across the skies, the circus tradition is to send on the clowns.  It’s an old ploy.  Not just a divertissement but the realisation that the clown has something to give to the audience – clown -ness – that might guide them through a dire state of affairs.  Clown-mode a state of mind where reality does not comprise of events to which you re-act.  Rather reality is perceived as a flow of events with which you interact for the purpose of play.  Clown-mode shows that with some situations playing with the energy is best means of the survival with awareness.  At Armageddon in clown mode you will stay alert: in clown mode there is no blame, no personal responsibility for what is, no imperative to understand only the recourse to play.  To play now.  To play with and by pointing up all the forces in play by giving total attention to being.  Play which involves the total exploration by all the senses of each passing moment attracted by clown consciousness.  There is no intentionality in clown mode only existing at and for the moment.        
 
From the opening sequence with its tacky title cards during which the only recognisable word in the whole film is pronounced – we hear the guttural emuncative enunciation “Themroc” (where does this word come from, does anyone know.  It feels like the name of some cartoon character) we are at the circus where Piccoli clown takes over the show indifferently hostile to the increasingly exasperated and frustrated machinations of the ringmaster, the force of order, to control his behaviour.  Picolli clown’s behavour can’t be controlled because this is the last show.  This is all that remains to do.   In the last act of the last house when everyone has turned into robots that pretend nothing is happening, who are unaware that we are sitting on the self destruct button,  Piccoli clown puts on his red nose paints his face white and gets on with the business of  clown.  The naughty id- child in the man’s body with instinctive responses to the stimuli of the dying world – in particular those responses that are erectile. 
 
Themroc is from camera to performance, becoming clown. In Themroc, Faraldo explores a line of retreat from the horror of the broken machine world and the self important gibberish of machine speak (Themroc should be required viewing for Radio 4 presenters).  It is an actual film of exploration in itself.  Everything in Themroc is on the screen: there is nothing hidden either content structure or form.
 
To see in Themroc anything other than what is on the screen is to miss the point.   What Themroc is not, is,  it is not a metaphor.  Not a metaphor for anarchy or any political system state or philosophy.  It is clown simple.  It has no metaphoric content or meaning whatsoever, noting symbolic nothing allegorical.   The becoming clown in Themroc is actual process of following a line of escape – visceral sensual indulging cruel and always extreme.  This is clown.  Putting on the red nose is real (try it) response to the world.  Being clown is creating a new world of immanent desires immediately gratified.  Piccoli clown is an escape but an escape that in itself leads nowhere.   All Piccoli clown can do is to indicate to other people that there is a way out of experiencing the world as an automaton.  It is a way out that doesn’t lead anywhere but is alert.  Sometimes that’s all there is.
 
The rule of the clown is that like the animal he does not speak.  Like the animal the clown points directly and acts immediately on (not reacts) stimulus.  Piccoli clown completes the implied logic of Harpo clown.  Where Harpo clown chases the sexy women Piccoli clown dives straight into their crotches and makes them laugh with  his tongue; where Harpo clown closes his jaw round someone’s limb to bite then, Piccoli clown goes the whole hog into cannibalism eating the pompous self conceited bullying representatives of authority the policeman.  Where Harpo reformulates and recastes the world by use of outrageous objects produced by delving into the voluminous wrap of his coat which envelopes him like a tent, Piccoli redefines the world according to clown rules by engaging in a primal act of architecture and remodeling his bolt hole.  In an infectious orgy of destruction he smashes out the exterior walls of the apartment,  rips out fittings and hurls away the furniture making a cave like platform from which Picolli clown can survey the world and wave to it. 
 
And the camera loves Piccoli clown. The camera is his friend.  It loves his face because the face of clown says everything there is to be said about clown.  Beautifully mute poison words don’t fall form the lips of the clown .  Clown doesn’t use his face to lie  to deceive or mislead like those cheap actors. Clown is impeccable. You love the face of the clown for exactly what it is: truth without dissemblance;  state of mind without ulterior motive.   The face of the clown moves with him and sees and hears the world as he does.  And the camera follows the face of the clown seeing and hearing the world as he does – experiencing world as clown consciousness. 
 
Piccoli’s face and Faraldo’s camera move together turning the world upside down, exhilarated by acts of petty destruction and  happy together in the rubble dust and smoke.  I don’t think you could make such a film today, with camera and actor so complicity at the edge of vertical surfaces.  Yet it is the complicit relationship of this bond that takes the film in clown mode experience, something rare in cinema.  
 
Themroc is the last movie made in clown- mode.  After 30 years it feels time for another film to put on the red nose and white make and explore the line of escape of the clown.
Adrin Neatrour 15 11 04
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Return – Andrei Zvyagintsev Russia 2003

Tyneside Cinema – 10th July 2004The Return – Andrei Zvyagintsev  Russia 2003
Tyneside Cinema – 10th July 2004
The Return starts as an apparent vehicle for a mythic narrative – perhaps something like the story of Abraham and Isaac – but hesitates before settling on a narrative style that draws its inspiration from the Hollywood genre relating to dysfunctional one parent families. Russian mythic cinema pales into the American suburban vision.  But whilst it is Hollywood that seems to determine the style and look of the film,  mythic thematic undertow still pulls at the historical sinews the Return pointing up  Zvyagintsev’s entrapment in an irreconcilable opposition  between the film ethos of Russia and made in the USA.  The director ultimately abandons his film as an impossibility and resorts to completing it in the form of a  travelogue with a soap opera story bolted on.   Finally the Return is consumed in the banalities released by its own contradiction: there is nothing in the film to think about and nothing in the film to look at.  You wait for it to pass in your time.
The film is witness to a sell out by Russian cinema to the stylistic cannons of Hollywood.  It’s a sell out that doesn’t go to plan as the film ends up feeling like a British lottery funded movie.  A feature of the typical Hollywood product is the characters in the scenario are without significant contextual grounding(and in this Hollywood is true to the American context of immigration – the idea of starting a new life).   Instead of context we have ‘situation’. Situation replaces context: this works for Hollywood’s American consumer society where the characters in any given situation come linked to assemblies and circuits of signifiers(often commercial products; language forms; typecast blue and white collar types {the detective, the single high powered business woman} and discourses{age, gender, back story}) This interplay of signifiers culled from visual retinal and audio cues enables the audience to place the characters  in any given Hollywood film in a relevant psychic setting.  The signifiers feed readability into the situation.
In the Return there is a single mum who has two boys and who looks after them with the help of her mother.  They live something like a middle class lifestyle – not comfortable by American standards  –  but the kids do possess things like fishing rods and reels.  In a Hollywood film we could read this(perhaps as an essentially good battling suburban mum).  But the Return’s setting, somewhere in Russia( opening Armenian music).  In modeling himself on an opening  typical of Hollywood genres Zvyagintsev feeds us a situation without context but also without the sort of signifiers Hollywood uses to ground the action.  The audience struggle to place or locate any of his characters who thereby are doomed, not in any mythic manner, but artistically never to engage us at any but the most superficial level – the machination of plot.
If the film is supposed to be set in the domain of myth then I think it fails lamentably though there are the ingredients set in place to make me believe that this might have been the intention of the original scenario.  The film opens with water.  The idea of water.  It moves then to a tower that rises high over the sea with the gang of boys hurling themselves from its height, calling up a sacrificial image, Inca step pyramids etc.  The film moves quickly to its liminal event, sudden almost like Pasolini,  the return of the father.  An entrance that  has a mythic resonance as the father demands that his two sons come away with him.  The breath of Abraham or even Laius.  But it is not to be.  The mythic subtext does not sustain itself.  It switches and focuses on becoming a cutesy contemporary children’s film, with the rebellion of one of the sons occupying the central holding space of the scenario.  The film switches from myth to faciality with the rebellious son’s face taking the camera’s prime attention:  His grimaces, his sulks, his defiance.  Caught up in the demands of a scenario centering on the children’s demands The Return has no where to go and lapses into a travelogue with soap opera plot and dialogue, to the accompaniment of mega doses of rain which is nothing more than rain. By the time we arrive at the climax of the film which centres on another huge tower built in the middle of a small island somewhere in Russia, any resonance of its early mythic symbolism is totally absent.
Part of what diminishes the film is its camera work which follows the Hollywood pattern of being agitated and dedicated to movement for its own sake for fear that unless the camera moves the audience will suffer restlessness.  There are examples of long sequences where the focus is pulled during shots to resolve the one who is speaking.  The focus pulling in the film serves no purpose other than the literal function of focusing on he who speaks.  A kind of passe literalism.   The camera tracks to no clear purpose other than to show it can go round corners.  The purpose of the camera work other than to demonstrate that the film maker can set up a track is never clear.  Early in the film the two brothers race each other back from the sea tower to their house – in fact its a chase that turns into a race back to mother.  Now obviously great planning went into this long sequence which contains a lot of fast moving tracks. But the sequence doesn’t work to move the audience any deeper into the film.  It just seems like a Hollywood set piece.  The race in and for itself its own justification – a situation within a situation, a piece of film slipping into another piece of film.  It probably inhibits any chance of the film developing mythically: the overactive camera work works against the establishment of mythic development, at least in the way Zvyganitsev shoots it.  But perhaps this wasn’t his intention.
Perhaps his intention was to make a Hollywood calling card with a recognisable American theme of the estranged and vanished pop returning back to take his sons on a camping trip and to show them the things they will never have been able to learn off their mother and her mother.  In this case the focus pulls, the twitching tracking camera that can’t stay still are all his way of showing Hollywood that he speaks their language.  He also knows that the film must look good so that for the most part exteriors should be shot as if the film were a travelogue, and there should be plenty of rain.  Not for metaphysical reasons but for plot development, to keep the picture moving and to show that you can handle rain machines even Russian ones. As we are talking Hollywood not myth its the plot which will have to have a twist. Not character.  And where there are children and adults together, it’s Hollywood’s  rule(occasionally flaunted) that the kids win no matter what.  The kids should be cute and perspicacious seeing through the world of the adult – in particular if he is a man.  The man on the other hand should have no realistic understanding of kids, be mostly concerned with getting the kids to see or do things his way, and when all else fails in communication  resort to violence threreby revealing his character.  And so on and so forth.
The dialogue in The Return follows the Hollywood approved pattern of grumpy dad, smart kids.  So perhaps  Zvyagintsev is marking his card.  The trouble is that the Russian actors who all look OK, in particular Mum of whom we see little but who has a Jocasta quality, don’t seem comfortable with their words.   The way pop and his younger son deliver their lines it felt to me that there was a gap between the delivery of the lines and the accompanying expressive faciality.  Even though I don’t understand Russian there was an alternating current driving the acting that swung from a stilted quality which then overcompensated by swinging through the pendulum to an overblown melodramatic delivery.  Certainly not the stuff dreams are made of.
A last note.  The cast was overpopulated.  There was no reason for having two sons in the script; it crowded the stage and added nothing to the dimensionality of the father son relationship.  The two sons simply functioned as one but in a manner that was much less interesting than if there had been just one juvenile psyche to answer the alternating push and pull of compliance and rebellion.  Splitting the roles instead of unifying them deprived the film of its dynamic.  The energy was dissipated and ultimately the film was unable to sustain interest in a three sided relationship that never had any possibility of resolution between its discrete parts.

The Fog of War – Errol Morris 2003 USA

Seen Tyneside Cinema Newcastle UKThe Fog of War – Errol Morris 2003 USA
Seen Tyneside Cinema Newcastle UK
I think that the Fog of Film is a good alternative title for this movie.  Film technically becomes fogged if exposed to light before going through the gate of the camera; artistically film gets fogged when the marketing intentions of the film makers delimits or distorts the light they can throw on the subject. 
At the core of this film there is a deeply ingrained dishonesty, in which the film’s structure and presentation confer a protective halo over the person of  Robert McNamara (US secretary of Defense 1961-67).   Whatever ‘mistakes’  McNamara admits to on camera such as the US declaration of war on North Vietnam and the subsequent carpet bombing of Vietnamese civilian populations, the film as vehicle transposes and elides these acts and omissions into mistakes, understandable mistakes rather than the consequence of deeper malaise in an empire out of control.  The interview of McNamara’s with its artsy framing, tasteful background, continuous jump cuts, slick computer graphics and archive footage represents the triumph of style over substance.
The USA as a deeply conservative and conformist consumer society has developed a culture that validates and evaluates reality through appraisal of image.  The concerns of the makers of visual products  are often to control and validate outer expressive gestures tokens and  signs at the cost of disregarding inner meaning.  This predominant concern with image and style at the expense of a concern to seek out the truth is particularly disturbing in documentary film about such a key figure in the development of US foreign policy.  But it is perhaps an inevitable concomitant of the featurisation of documentary films which now  pitch in the market of the large corporations to attract investment, either at the production or distribution end of the process.   The fog of film.
In Errol Morris’ film some of McNamara’s insights about what was happening in Vietnam have salience for the American Empire’s contemporary foreign policy, but he doesn’t talk about the internal driving mechanism of policy – long term industry and military perspective.  He doesn’t want to, and he’s a man who only talks about what he wants to, on his terms.  Like a written or unwritten contract.  But the result is that the overwhelming impression left of McNamara, is of McNamara as image.   The old senator, the Avatar who has achieved wisdom, the survivor who has a message for us from the past.   This image however is communicated not just through the form of the film  – the intercut interview – the settings – the cutting – but through its structure. The Fog of War is structured as “Ten Lessons and an Epilogue”  which leads the viewer of the film towards a quasi pedagogique reading with strong religious overtones.  This structure gives to McNamara an aura of the wise one and induces an inclination towards reverence, an inclination reinforced by the soundtrack.   
It was the Philip Glass score that alerted me to the nature of this film as a marketing device selling Robert McNamara rather than an instrument trying to seek truth.  Glass’ piece is a very classy  contemporary score, restrained almost to a fault, mixing interesting percussive effects with moody modal sequenciations.  Like the music accompanying certain kinds of adverts it is designed to make the selling proposition easy to swallow. The music evens out the film providing a consistent emotional tonality to  the  roller coaster ride of events punctuated by assassination wars deaths and bombings.   The music works to unify the film in the same way that McNamara’s life is unified by his implicit claim to have attained wisdom as a reward for surviving.   The selling proposition in Fog of War is that this is a classy piece of film making about a classy subject matter, Robert McNamara one of the erstwhile rulers of the planet.  Meet the Avatar.  Once he was a cold murderous Secretary of State for defense in love with mass bombing as a solution as long as was efficient; the bombs sent by his hand were responsible for mass destruction and killing mainly of Vietnamese but others as well.  Now he is still cold but old and wise.  Old and wise.
The pedagogique structure of the film, with its use of  twee title cards informs us that he has attained the wisdom of age and has ten lessons and (of course) an epilogue to impart.  Most of this wisdom amounts to no more than the specious knowledge contained in self help books sold at supermarkets checkouts – ten steps to enlightenment.  McNamara’s wisdom amounts to turkey truisms dressed up in the fancy dress of the statesman:  Truisms such as: never say never; you can’t believe all you see…etc.  Morris might well reply that his objective was to reveal the vacuity and empty nature of McNamara’s wisdom by allowing the viewer to see and judge.  But the structure of the film,. its score, its lesson structure, its artsy framing of McNamara with classy light paneled background,  all these conspire to frame McNamara as a glossy image for reassuring consumption.  Like a reassuring public service announcement for the benefits of growing old.
In relation to this last point and the idea that perhaps Errol Morris was really giving us the viewers the material we needed to make up our minds,  I began to worry about all those little jump cuts in the master interviews.  They are the sort of cuts, the ones we take for granted these days where continuity is no longer an induced state of mind but an illusion.  In TV documentaries the  situation is that if the guy under interview hums haws stops or digresses whatever, they cut out whatever they don’t like to keep the pace up, to rock and roll with the meat of the story.  To cover obvious jumps in continuity, filmed interviews used to employ a device called the ‘cut away’ in order to literally cut away from the subject to another image, such as the interviewer nodding, and then cut back to the subject.  This presents the illusion of a continuous stream of sense.   Few film makers now bother with this laborious device, they just jump the cut; what we see is a funny little dissolve or a blip in the picture.  Given that this convention is accepted, the effect is the same: to make the subject(in this case McNamara) appear fluid and controlled in intelligence: more fluent and focused than people in general are able to speak… erm…ummmm….long silence(prompt).  All the little hesitations, all those signs of the fallibility of age, lapses of memory, all losing of the thread of thought, the meaningless digressions, are in effect censored.   The point is that there were a lot of these jump cuts. I don’t know what or how much lies on the cutting room floor; I can only hazard a guess based on the observation that at times in the interview there were scarce 10 seconds passed without the characteristic little blip of the jump cut.  The end result of this approach is McNamara is rendered by the Fog of War as an image:  cut out all the crap and you’re left with the image of McNamara as a fallible but articulate old man who has attained wisdom in his old age.   The trouble with such a filmic approach is that it starts to say less and less about the subject – McNamara in this case – than it does about the conceit of the film maker.
Robert McNamara tells how before accepting the post of Secretary for Defense he insisted to Robert Kennedy that he write his own contract.  I can’t imagine that he insisted on a similar contract arrangement with Errol Morris.  But perhaps he didn’t need to; because it was evident that Morris was going to make a high gloss film based on marketing led production values.  Given the evident nature of the intended film, whatever the form of final product Robert McNamara knew that Robert McNamara’s image could only be enhanced as the subject of such a product.   Adrin Neatrour 8 July 04

A State of Mind – Daniel Gordon – UK 2004 – 94 mins

Viewed : International Documentary Film Festival – Amsterdam – November 2004

BBC/ARTE/WNET commission. Coming to a BBC channel – probably 4 – soon.A State of Mind  – Daniel Gordon – UK 2004 – 94 mins
Viewed : International Documentary Film Festival – Amsterdam – November 2004
BBC/ARTE/WNET commission. Coming to a BBC channel – probably 4 – soon.
 
Ends justifying means – an old story.  As far as I know this doc has only had limited screenings at film festivals.  As a BBC commission it’ll be showing on TV soon and  I hope anyone reading this crit will watch A State of Mind  check it out and let me know what they think.
 
In the course of A State of Mind, the director who’s also the voice over commentator tells us not once, but twice, that the filmmakers negotiated with the North Korean authorities privileged access to film in North Korea without controls or censorship over what they might shoot.  To say it twice was certainly not accidental. What was it he was wanting to tell us?  Whatever it was my attention was drawn not to the implied ‘freedom’ of the film makers but to the restrictions and limitations endemic in shooting in a totalitarian state and how the film production company might respond to these restrictions and limitations. 
 
In a totalitarian situation – whether it be a state like N Korea or a large multinational corporation – the  very notion of ‘privileged access’ is problematic.  Why can’t you have access without privilege?  Privilege is the concomitant of one party’s control and the power to dispense favour.  By definition unprivileged access is not permitted.  Of  what  are the mighty ones who grant the privilege, frightened?   Something that you might see; something you might hear?  And suppose that there are things which  ‘they’ are determined to conceal and that they don’t want you to see?   How can you as filmmaker with privileged access know whether what you see and film is ‘real’ or in some way staged for your benefit?  The resources and control of a totalitarian state are certainly capable of complex stagings. 
 
Further if you film under conditions of privileged access, the implication is that this access has been traded for a relationship of trust with the party ceding this privilege.  This very relationship of trust between the parties implies a certain kind of contract, often in the form of unspoken understandings about limits.   In return for privilege the filming party often tacitly agrees not only to a degree of self censorship but also to refrain from asking certain types of awkward questions.  In this case where the production company, VeryMuchSo Productions boasts a long term relationship with the regime and has plans to make a further documentary in North Korea I feel it of relevance to examine carefully the way A State of Mind has been made and to ask whether the film is characterised by an ingenuous collusion  as a state of mind rather than the spirit of free enquiry.
 
The film is based on the instrumental premise that in following the progress of two young girl gymnasts through their training and selection programme leading up to the North Korean gymnastic mass games(the high point of the totalitarian leader worship bullshit), our understanding of this closed society demonised by the West, may be extended or even deepened.  Further by experiencing through the mediation of film ordinary North Koreans living their ordinary lives we will also perceive something about the truth of human nature and universal values.  Daniel Gordon seems to say: you see North Koreans are no different from us! They may say be prone to mouthing off  propaganda and stuff about America but in fact human nature is the same everywhere and everywhere lots of young girls love gymnastics and dedicate themselves to its practice with the support of their families.   These are folk living under a rather peculiar organised system of indoctrination – but just folks!
 
This is the message I received.  But I need neither Walt Disney nor Gordon to inform me about human nature.   In fact the issues in relation to people in North Korea or in Stalin’s USSR or Hitler’s Reich have nothing to do with the universal characteristics of human nature but with what is going on in this society that controls and contains people who  look and act as if everything were normal?  What is the nature and construct of these normal appearances?  And what’s going on under the surface?  What’s the crack – do people tell Great Perpetual Leader jokes?  Do people know its all bullshit?   Under what strains do North Korean people live out their lives?   In the situation in which A State of Mind was produced, universal truths are no more than decontextualised platitudes, the resort to which is a ploy to disguise the fact that a film made under ‘privileged access’ in  these conditions can only be either dishonest or banal or both.  Either which way A State of Mind is a film that whilst pandering to the North Korean State by refusing to pose any questions about society,  risks betraying its people.  .  
 
The choice of  two young girls as drivers of the film narrative conforms with the compromised ambitions of this production.  The idea is that in following the lithe flowing tumbling innocent  bodies of these girl child gymnasts, a crack will open up in the monolithic wall of North Korean society which will allow us to peek in to see and meet the people.  We are used to seeing young dedicated girl/woman child gymnasts.  They are part of the TV furniture,  moral tales of success through dedication.  We have seen Olgas and Nadias,  Dianes and Debbies going through their asexualised prenuptial Olympic routines on floor asymmetric bars vault and beam.  We know them and we are also aware, because we have been told, of the abusive forces that sometimes lurk behind these bodies in flux.  The spectre of mummydaddycoach in the various guises; twisted authority figures colonising young feminine bodies and minds in order to develop the necessary athletical synthesised  bodies.   It seems strange that Gordon should chose a practice involving a fascism of the body to lead us through the concentric circles of state totalitarianism.  
 
A State of Mind would not be the first film to exploit young athletic bodies as a front for a totalitarian regime.  It was the stock in trade device of German and Soviet documentary makers in the ‘30s.  Leni Riefenstahl’s Olypische Spiele is the key example.  I am not suggesting either that Gordon has her caliber as a director or shares any of her propagandist intentions – probably he simply wants to sell TV programmes.  But whilst aware of these differences in motivation between the two, nevertheless some overlap in form and structure suggests itself.  There is something about the flow of young bodies in agonistic display, in the fluidity of athletic intention and achievement that overwhelms and inundates context.  That these perfectly balanced muscular yet frail  frames filmed from tracks angles and unlikely rigs, images edited (with music often) to heighten aesthetic effect and deepen emotional affect, sweep away context and setting.  In a way there is no time in these films only space that extends through an all encompassing present.  Berlin 1936 is simply the collective spacial experience of bodies – most of whom happen to be German.  The context of what the German state has become is rendered irrelevant by the imagery which seamlessly excludes the black star of the games Jesse Owen because of his blackness.  This sort of effect works through A State of Mind – it is all place and no time.    This is particularly evident in A State of Mind’s opening sequence which establishes the visual style of the film which is to look ‘good’  and beautifully shot.  This opening sequence sets out its stall as having 35mm Hollywood production values with all that that connotes.  In the opening sequence the picture fades up to a high key spot in a totally dark space to reveal in the cross fading spots the two young gymnasts dressed in leotards,  as individually and then together they appear and disappear performing items of their routine. The edited cross fades between the two performers continue as they move nearer the camera.  From the start A State of Mind is invested with the pure aesthetics of space.   
 
Time and its ponderable considerations are as absent here as they are in the average travelogue.  
 
If in some way Gordon thinks that he is parodying Riefenstahl, then I think the problem is that you can’t parody Riefenstahl.  In Riefenstahl’s films where the fake distorted and dishonest is raised up to high heroic kitsch status, she is already a parody of herself.    
 
A State of Mind presents as a glossy travelogue of a forbidden country fronted by cute gymnasts, perfect euro-fodder.  But still there are things that bother me, and it’s all the in between bits(and there are quite a lot of them) where we see the home life of the two girl gymnasts.  How to evaluate these sequences in the context that they are shot behind the closed walls of North Korea?
 
In the West the limits of fabrication(leaving out the often dubious nature of re-constructed events – with dialogue!) are in some ways defined ( as some producers for C4 have found out)by the openness of Western society and the fact that participants involved in filming any fabrication or faked sequences may spill the beans, revealing for example, that what purported to be a gang bang or fight, was an event staged for camera.  At this point the disclosure that something framed as ‘real’ has been staged, castes any documentary as morally suspect and discredited. No such openness exists in North Korea.
 
Aside from these exterior discreditings, audiences can generally, but not always,  within the flow of imagery  purporting to be a documentary film( and at IDFA about 50% of the films purporting to be docs were composed primarily of reconstructed material – but that is another story) perceive or identify some traits events or items through which they can authenticate different aspects of a strip of action.  Audiences by continuous reading of audio and visual cues can gauge respondents behavior and evaluate their replies to questioning.
 
In A State of Mind in order to know what is going on and whether to trust what we are shown, we are very much in the hands of the director and the translators.    We don’t speak the language: we can’t read  North Korean culture so we don’t have a language of gestures for looks glances stutters verbal glitches uncomfortable pauses and  body.  The problem is how do we evaluate what we are shown; even at the level of basic structural narrative components, how can we know that the things we view are true?  Can we trust the judgment of the film makers that what they filmed were real strips of life?  But  perhaps all those family sequences are faked, perhaps the individuals purporting to be mummies daddies and grannies are actors…….suppose it’s all staged?  Certainly many visitors to Stalin’s Russia came away with the impression that what they had seen was a real when they were witness to carefully staged pieces of theatre.  The resources of the totalitarian state which has the ability to bring large numbers of discontinuous effects into play mean that the staged events can often be convincingly presented as real.
 
There is an interesting parallel here with people who want to investigate paranormal phenomena.  Scientists, like film makers, look at what they see.  Perhaps for this reason they have often shown themselves to be easy to fool into believing in performed paranormal effects. Magicians when looking at the same phenomena are not  so much interested in what they see; rather they are interested in what they don’t see – underlying structures utilized for the practice of deceit.   Film makers can be easy to fool because they often want to see what they are looking at: looking and seeing are conflated.  In the film the girls are real gymnasts, but we have no way of knowing who they are – perhaps those claiming to be their families are in fact acting out these roles so that the state is controlling the staging of all events. (acting normal, appearing to be normal when acting familiar roles is simple and something most people are capable of doing)
 
My suspicions about how to frame what I was looking at started when I watched the sequences of the families eating: I wondered about the good food that was going into their mouths. We know North Korea has had severe food shortages(this is admitted in the film) but was the food the people were eating provided as imagery for the Western camera, special food provided as part of the staging of normal appearances?  And the apartments where the families lived with their carpets and wood wall panels?  Were these normal every day appurtenances or part of a set for the camera to film?  
 
The fact that the families in their homes looked so real on film draws attention to the latent problems in looking for signs of authentication.  Those features of a situation which we may judge most difficult to fake are precisely the ones which those seeking to deceive will take the greatest pains to faithfully replicate. Although many may think the above points are far fetched, a totalitarian system such as North Korea has the means and the perhaps the motivation to carry through such devices.  And film makers should be aware that in closed systems either capitalist or communist nothing is necessarily what it seems. 
 
I was left unconvinced by A State of Mind that from the point of view of veracity, that it is a worthwhile project to shoot in North Korea in the way exemplified by this film.  Privileged access is really just a smoke screen through which you peer into the mirrors of distorted reality with no way of knowing what is going on. 
Adrin Neatrour    8th Jan 05
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Peeping Tom – Michael Powell – UK 1960 – Karl Bohm – Anna Massey – Moira Shearer

Viewed: Curzon Soho – 6 12 04 – Ticket price £6 double bill with Blow Up.Peeping Tom – Michael Powell – UK 1960 – Karl Bohm – Anna Massey – Moira Shearer
 
Viewed: Curzon Soho – 6 12 04 – Ticket price £6 double bill with Blow Up.
 
Contemporary reviewers saw Peeping Tom as a sordid very unpleasant film.  A nasty story about a killer (Mark) with a penchant for skewering prostitutes.  Even the fact that the part of Mark was played by Karl Bohm, a German, thereby lending the protagonist the persona of a stereotypical proto-Nazi, did nothing to redeem the film for the critics. (Interesting to conjecture if the reason for casting Karl Bohm, who is very good, was prompted by anticipation of criticism of the film on moral grounds, and the casting was an attempt to partially deflect this by not having a Brit play the part of a driven upper middle class killer.  Or was there some other reason such as none of the eligible Brit actors of the day wanted the part.  If the latter it is a good example of perceived moral contagion, the way in which an actor avoids playing a role because of fear that attributes of that role might be assigned either to his real life or his acting career in general).
 
In fact, seen now, the story line is a flimsy vehicle, extreme in form but lacking in any substance simply a pretext for a film project.  The project is a spatial exercise looking at the limits of what we can understand from what we apprehend, a red and sometimes wry satirical meditation the meaning and nature of truth.
 
Claims are made sometimes by film makers (and others) that the object of the process of filming/recording is get to, to apprehend the truth of the subject, to penetrate a subject so deeply that the nature of its truth is revealed: that camera and recording technologies in accessing the spontaneous can split people open so that their inner psychic functioning can be seen.  That we somehow have access to others’ states of mind.   Similar such claims were made by the Inquisition – that their techniques of interrogation and torture opened up the very mysteries of the errant soul so that the-truth-for-the-heretic could be clearly exposed by the Inquisitors.  Delusion. All delusion avers Powell here.
 
Mark, using a killing apparatus, the sharpened spiked leg of a tripod with 16mm running camera attached, impales his female victims through the jugular in order to understand the exact nature of  fear which he records and will be able read in the expression on their faces at the instant of their cognizance of their own death.  Mark is never satisfied with the results of his filming as each time  ‘the moment of truth’ always seems to elude him and evade his apprehension (unlike for example the officer in charge of the killing apparatus in the Penal Colony who feels the elation of his subjects) .  At the core of Peeping Tom is the idea of using technologies of reproduction – film and tape – as intensifiers of experiential situations, as intensifiers of moments of truth.  What Powell shows in Peeping Tom (which is ultimately a metaphysical parody) is that these various technologies alienate us from direct connection with our own experiences; that technologies of mechanical reproduction do not lead into zones where truth is immanent.   In relation to ‘an other’ these technologies in reaffirming victim-nature,  the other’s victimness is multiplied as they become objects of desire whose destiny is to be the mechanically re-lived retrieved projected fantasy of the perpetrator. Mechanical systems of image reproduction whether of picture or sound take us further into our own projections and distance us from others.   Here, there is no ‘truth’ in or of, sex, fear, death, loneliness etc. except the truth of our own desires. This is Peeping Tom, the retinal image, the eye, the big close up of the eye the opening shot of the film.  The only character in the film (Helen’s mother) who can ‘see’ things that can be known is blind and has no retinal images to project.    
 
Peeping Tom ravishes the eye, abuses the retina of the viewer to the point where the film’s narrative form is submerged underneath a sea of highly visual detail.  It is a submarinal liquid experience, a film of undulating surface, of dense closely patterned planes, of red that wash through the film in the detail of its sets, costumes and lighting.  The red lights of the dark room, the red lights and costumes of the prostitutes, the deep red decor of Marks flat and the red hair of the principle actresses.  The film has a fluid restless deadly quality which dissolves both the story line and the cod psychology of the back story into a vacuous irrelevant gaseous matter. 
 
Peeping Tom also describes the full arc of the worlds invested by Powell, perhaps it represents the last world he discovered.  Many of Powell’s films were about worlds – superficially both real and make believe worlds.  Real world in The Edge of the World – his first film as director about the abandonment of St Kilda – about the end of a world, the vibrant sociable world of a remote island; Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus  are about displaced worlds that are real (in some sense) but fantastical.  Red Shoes creates the meeting point of a real world and an unreal domain, artificial in the sense that it is construed by the demands of performance.  In Red Shoes the two worlds, both narrow and self contained in their concerns, coexist driven by compulsion.  Each though only exists for the other and there are no outside frames of reference, two worlds mutually inclusive are locked together in a contrapuntal tension, like the dancer and her shoes.
 
In Peeping Tom it seems that Michael Powell had come at last a place where the world has finally closed down behind the eye.  In Peeping Tom, except for the vision of the blind woman there is no other world other than Mark’s movie of fear.  Everything is subsumed into this – which is why the mis en scene works as it does – like a watery grave – everything is part of Marks’s movie which is made in isolation from the rest of the world.  Mark is alone with his projections which are leading him straight down the road of his own death with no escape possible (not even Anna Massey dressed in colour coded blue outfits) In Peeping Tom,  Powell seems to have come to the end of a certain logic inherent in film making in which it is necessary to understand that all images threaten to slide towards or degrade into acts of solipsism.
 
Adrin Neatrour  7 12 04
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk