Adrin Neatrour

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

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

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

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

Targets – Peter Bogdanovich – USA 1967Targets – Peter Bogdanovich – USA 1967
Side cinema 21 March 2004
 
Seeing Targets at the Side Cinema last Sunday made me want to visit Peter Bogdanovich and talk to him.  It was made at a critical time and place: America in hightail engagement in the Vietnam War; the assassinations of JFK and MLK.  Targets comes out of a society where after 35 years of the talkies and Hollywood global dominance, 15 years drip feed TV, the psycho-reality of the movie has invaded everyday streamed consciousness so that Americans (they first but quickly joined by the rest of the world) are starting to see and interpret actuality through the disjointed and distorting nature of the filmed image.  And also at this point our society is about to incorporate the computer and its programme into psychic functioning.
The critical moment in Targets defining both the film and its concerns is when the killer types out a note written to himself which reads something like: ”It is now 11:40 in the morning.  My wife is about to get up and when she comes  over to give me a kiss I will shoot her and then I will shoot my other……then it will all happen.”   In this typewritten note killer is writing his own software, programming his mind to carry through a series of actions almost as if he were a prototype video game.   Targets at this level is a philosophical investigation into the nature of killing.   Belying the apparent visceral nature of its subject matter it is cerebral film looking at the controlling aspects of mind.  What Bogdanovich locates at the centre of his film is the idea of programming; the idea of individuals overcome by multiple circuitries of intensifying stimuli – the movies -TV – the suburbs- the family – constructing a simple override programme that resolves his situation with maximum economy.  Targets is a film, a cerebral investigative examination of the idea of self programming.  In the past evil may have inhabited us, taken possession of us or manipulated our actions and thoughts.  Today we do it ourselves: we write our own programmes.   Interestingly, Targets close film contemporary is Kubrick’s 2001 which also has a central preoccupation with computers and programming but is a very different take on the issue.
In form Targets has a neo-realist feel.   We see it from the killer’s point of view. The settings are nondescript: drawn from anywhere any place-ville: the suburban house, the hotel, the gas storage tank.  There is no architecture of set, in fact the reverse.  The final setting of the drive-in movie lot is a deconstructed exhibition space, emptied of everything except essence – the huge screen.  The film is restrained in its use of expressive resources: the roles are played out neutrally by the actors with little emotive gesturing, the script pared back, the scenes mostly shot wide or medium in long takes with spare use of the close up.  This stark economy strips the film back to its working parts allowing clear uncluttered sighting of the critical intersection point that is the target of the film –  the programming soft ware that develops from  the meeting of the proliferating promiscuous and incestuous gun culture – with –  the absorption of  individuals into the movie scripts,
In the gun store two old codgers (Mutt n Jeff) sell lethal hardware, guns as if they were  ball hammers, and bullets like they were nails.  The reality of the gun is not so much that it’s a tool for killing (it does do that) but rather it’s a cool tool to engender radical change of scene.  At a point where for whatever uninteresting reason an individual feels hemmed in, terminally bored, angry, trapped etc.  There is recourse to the scenario mapped out by the movies. Pick up the gun, aim and shoot; everything is changed.  It’s a machine for radically altering everything.  And as you squeeze the trigger, no matter who you hit: the foreigner, the wife or passing stranger you are the one in control. You come to power with power. In an atomising society: each is alone.  In the movie there is only individual destiny. To close his loop Bogdanavich calls on his protagonist (brilliantly played by Tim O’Kelly) to shoot and kill the audience from within the cinema screen itself.  This is Bogdanovich saying directly without metaphor, analogy, or any sort of circumlocution, pointing to what is in the movie screen and saying – killer.  The killer is literally in the screen; who is not seen because our senses are overwhelmed by the sensual experience of watching. These images upon which we gaze, line us up in their sights and one by one corrupt us and pick us off.  Just like the sniper shoots the audience in the cars watching The Terror. Interwoven with the snipers story is the Boris Karloff story.  This is told as the story of the old movie star who is tired with his film image, bored with the repetition and cliché of film and so determines to retire. Before retiring he agrees to attend a screening of his film The Terror at the drive -in and meet the fans.  Karloff looks into the nature of the film image and perceives that it is empty and vacuous and that it has sucked the life out of him. It is Karloff’s tired form that clinches the denouement.
Bogdanovitch takes his film to its logical conclusion.  This is not a film about killing people it is a film about programming and how image works in the programme.  The ending called down upon Tim O’Kelly is to be defeated by multiplicity of imagery.  Emerging from within the screen he is overwhelmed by the merged images in his head of the real and virtual Boris Karloff. Confused by the moving images that he can’t reconcile he is reduced to a catatonic immobile state.  His destiny a little like the sort of psychosis induced experimentally in laboratory rats when exposed to conflicting stimuli.  They break down we break down he breaks.
Stylistically Targets feels like a B sci-fi movie of the ‘50s and 60s. These films often used the subterfuge of a fantastical script device to record the underlying paranoia in US society.  The in-part politically induced social fear of invasive alien forces and the in-part culturally bound fear of living on and feeding on land that had been stolen from its rightful users.  Targets does away with any pretext that the alien forces might be anywhere else but in the here and now.  The force at work is the programming manufactured distributed and retailed in the USA and exported world wide.
Adrin Neatrour 26 March 2004

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

Score Hanns Eisler

Hertha Thiele as Anni

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

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

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

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

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

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